Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:37:28 · Tony Fadell
And so what you want to do is make sure you understand the gestation of your customer and where they are and where they are in the thing. I also updated the crossing the chasm graphic in the book saying how we go about this in your product developments. Because you really have to think about who your target user set is and your target marketing based on the version of product you're in and how you're going to get those higher and higher volumes. And it really means about speaking the context. So maybe when you first ship, you can speak to those early adopters and you can put it in enough words that they're going to convert. But then the second version of the product, you're getting these later adopters. And you've got to speak in their language. And the third set of adopters who are really laggards, you've got to really speak to them and go through that and it could be totally different. And so this was a very interesting story that it was so emblazoned in my mind. Back in 2001, '2, '3, still when Apple had no presence outside of the US, Apple was really, it was selling in the US, some Canada, and some in Japan, but that was it and that was the max. So we were selling iPods into those areas. And so we had the early adapter, and then we had some other language. And then by the third, fourth version of iPod, we had some really refined language for those late adopters. So then we said, "We're going to go back and get a push into Europe." Because iPod hadn't taken off in Europe, so we're going to push iPod into Europe. And so we're on, I think the fourth generation or something like that. And so what did we do in Europe? We ran the same marketing as we were doing in the US in Europe. And the thing is it didn't resonate with the early adopters. It didn't resonate with the later adopters because we didn't have the same messages. We were going for a different set of people and we're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sales aren't working. We got to change the marketing. We got to meet those Europeans where they're at, because they're slower to adopt technology. Versus it starts with the coast and goes inward in the US.
00:39:53 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
And so we're like, "Oh, we got to change things up." And so sometimes it's when you get to new areas, you have to rethink your marketing for that area and remember to meet them where they're at and where if it doesn't have an installed base for word of mouth, you're going to have to get that word of mouth started to work with those people to get that going. Now it's different with all software products and all these things and many products can go global right away, but marketing, you still got to tell a story. So it just reminds me that even though we've maybe compressed the time for some pieces of the adoption puzzle, because we can distribute faster, doesn't mean the awareness can get accelerated. And that we can get people to intelligently understand with this product faster if we just say the words of somebody who might have known about the product for three years. [00:40:53] S1: I got to ask about maybe the most famous, I don't know, tagline of all time when a product was launched, "1,000 songs in your pocket." [00:41:01] S0: Songs in your pocket. [00:41:02] S1: Is there a story behind that?
00:41:02 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:41:02] S1: Is there a story behind that? [00:41:03] S0: Back in the day at Apple, and maybe it's changed now, but back in the Steve days, there was the different functions of Apple. And because they were all lean because the company was only 4,000, 5,000 people and it was already doing Macs and everything, each function was very, very functional. And so the marketing didn't get into the engineering and the design folks. It was separate. Steve was the hub and he was in each of them putting them together, like I said, the opinion-based decision maker. And so when we heard the tagline for the first time, I was like, "That's genius." Now, how long that happened, what was the behind the scenes? We were just a tiny team. We were getting this done in 10 months. So everybody was just running for it. Versus iPhone, which was we had discussions of it, should we call it the iPod phone or should we call it the iPhone because Cisco had the iPhone back in the day, and there was copyright issues and trademark issues. So we were into that because it was also a two and a half year development, and we were in [inaudible 00:42:20]. And it was betting the farm and we were going to cannibalize iPod. So there was a lot more discussions, but in those early days of 1,000 songs, it was everybody running in literally it was really five to six months everything got done. Because we really started it in April and it shipped in end of October.
00:41:03 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:41:03] S0: Back in the day at Apple, and maybe it's changed now, but back in the Steve days, there was the different functions of Apple. And because they were all lean because the company was only 4,000, 5,000 people and it was already doing Macs and everything, each function was very, very functional. And so the marketing didn't get into the engineering and the design folks. It was separate. Steve was the hub and he was in each of them putting them together, like I said, the opinion-based decision maker. And so when we heard the tagline for the first time, I was like, "That's genius." Now, how long that happened, what was the behind the scenes? We were just a tiny team. We were getting this done in 10 months. So everybody was just running for it. Versus iPhone, which was we had discussions of it, should we call it the iPod phone or should we call it the iPhone because Cisco had the iPhone back in the day, and there was copyright issues and trademark issues. So we were into that because it was also a two and a half year development, and we were in [inaudible 00:42:20]. And it was betting the farm and we were going to cannibalize iPod. So there was a lot more discussions, but in those early days of 1,000 songs, it was everybody running in literally it was really five to six months everything got done. Because we really started it in April and it shipped in end of October. [00:42:40] S1: So I think one of the core takeaways from what you shared here is even if you may have the perfect product, the marketing may be the gap that if something isn't working, it may-
00:42:40 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:42:40] S1: So I think one of the core takeaways from what you shared here is even if you may have the perfect product, the marketing may be the gap that if something isn't working, it may- [00:42:51] S0: Absolutely. And the thing is, I think we're starting to see that, the cracks of it might be more than cracks now, with OpenAI. What is it? It's like, oh, it's your answer machine, whatever you're like, "Well, what does it do for me? And now I got to keep paying you. It was fun as the demo, but what am I using it for every day? And, oh, Claude, it does Claude code and it does code." And then what happens OpenAI is like, oh, "We have Codex now. But then they were Sora, and they were this and they were that. We're going to do sex chat." What are you? And so it's like, "Oh yeah, you're the great first Netscape. Everyone went out and bought Netscape Explorer or whatever it was called, Netscape Navigator. [00:43:36] S1: Navigator.
00:43:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:43:36] S1: Navigator. [00:43:37] S0: And then all of a sudden it evaporated like, "Well, what do I use the net for? I got the tool to get onto it, but what do I use it for daily." And it had to develop. And so OpenAI is now shifting like, "Oh, we got to get product teams and we got to start about product marketing." So to me, it's marketing. But if you are already thinking about the marketing, you're already going to start thinking about the product. And that's the thing is when you're just thinking about the product, and it was really just a technology demo that went viral. And they're like, "Oh yeah." And they still keep winning on that. They never put product in until it was too late. And now Anthropic's where they are and valued more and higher revenue and all that other stuff. So even if it's a software only product, yes, there's lots of hardware and servers and all the other stuff. You need to think holistically and you need to think about the entire customer journey, the marketing, the sales pieces, the distribution pieces, the product definition piece, the messaging, the target markets, early on. You can't leave it till later and and then back calculate it. And that's why I say you should really make the press release before you more or less start the project. [00:44:53] S1: Yeah. There's a whole chapter on that. Amazon's also very famous for that, this whole book on Working Backwards that goes really deep on this approach.