Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:57:54 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:57:54] S0: Yeah. Yeah. [00:57:54] S1: I love that this is the example of an amazing product. That's a really cool thing- [00:57:58] S0: Yeah, and it's all software. It's all software. [00:58:00] S1: Yeah. Something along these lines, as people hear you talk, clearly you are an amazing storyteller and in your book, you often come back to the power of storytelling, the value of storytelling for product builders. I guess one is just: why is that so important, do you think? And two, is what's one tip you could give people to get better at storytelling?
00:58:19 · Tony Fadell
[00:58:19] S0: Storytelling, that's how we've passed information down or got people to commit to doing something. Stories are so who we are. We go to the movies for stories. We have books, we have all this stuff. And it's just so essential to who we are because we like to be taken on a journey. And hopefully when you're buying a product or licensing one or whatever it is, you're subscribing, you're taken on a journey that meets your expectations or is better than what the expectations were set, it's outsized that. And so Dave Chappelle is, when it comes to comedy and storytelling, the way he weaves it, he can weave a story for 20 minutes to get to the punchline and you're just in it, right? I just love his comedy as opposed to the punchline guys who are just, or excuse me, the short ones. It's something in our nature, human nature. We were told stories when we were a kid, we read the same or watched the same movies 100 times when we were kids. There's something about being taken on that journey that we love, and people love to be educated that way. Right. Your best college professors, high school teachers, whatever, they taught you why you should love certain math or certain physics or whatever and took you on a journey of why it mattered and then you're like, "Oh, now I get it." You can learn all the basics of how to do something, but that doesn't really tie it into something that's meaningful. And so when you tie it to something that's human, right, that's when it becomes and accessible for humans and it's relatable, that's when it goes and it can be for anything. And that's when great marketing, great sales happens. And great story telling through the product design, that's even better, right? Because it wasn't just perfuming this pig and you put some on this bad product and you say, "Oh yeah, try it. Oh, yeah." And you're like, "Oh, and then it doesn't meet the expectations." But when it sings from the depths of the product, like you were bringing up with the Nest Protect, the smoke detector and stuff. When we had all that and that you could feel the love and care, that's when people go, "Oh, I love this and I want more from that brand, or from that company, or that team." That's what they want. And so to get better at it, I've learned it because I watched my dad, he was in sales, right?
01:00:49 · Tony Fadell
So I watched how he would sell Levi's and I would watch and he would be like, and he wasn't always selling to sell. Sometimes he was convincing them not to buy something because that wasn't the best product they had. "Buy this one instead. And actually go to my competitor down the street," because he was building a relationship in storytelling because these people loved what it was. So it sometimes is not just setting expectations and telling a story, but it's also saying, "Hey, maybe I'm not for you." And that's truth. That's also truth. And so like Steve always said, "The best marketing just tells the truth." Now might put nice words around it, nice creative and everything, but it's telling the truth. And so when I watched Steve prepare for, and like I said, when we did the two and a half years with the iPhone, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. He didn't give it to marketing. He knew what that thing was and what those key features were like we talked about and micromanage those features because he knew those were the things the world's going to take notice to. And he would refine the story and then tell other people who were unwashed by it, like friends who were really smart and say, "I'm going to give you the pitch and give you the pitch." And he would refine, refine, refine. And so when you saw him come on stage, it was just because he had done it 100,000 times or at least 10,000 times, right? And he knew it like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, it just came off. And so I watched and I learned from that and that's what we did for like the Nest Learning Thermostat. That's what we did for each of those things. It was just that same storytelling over and over, why does it matter? Why does it matter? And because too many times when we're technology led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. And the why is where the storytelling is because you want to take a journey of why it matters to you. If you're talking about the what, you're just talking to another geek. Love geeks, no problem. I'm one of them. And we can relate on that level, but general, most people who are not in the technology world, they want a story and they want something that touches them in some way.
01:03:14 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:14] S1: One lesson I'm hearing from what you just described is telling the story over and over and over and refining it over time is where the best stuff comes from, not just here, I just came up with this and it's going to be amazing.
01:03:25 · Tony Fadell
[01:03:25] S0: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And telling it to other people to see if it resonates. I remember the number of times I told the Nest story before Nest came out because I was like, "This is crazy, this thermostat thing." I'm like, "Okay, let me set up the virus of doubt, which was, do you know how much you spend on your energy bill every year for your heating and cooling? Don't you hate your thing?" Now, there's another way to look at the storytelling and this is, and I put this in the book. Oh, no, I didn't put this in the book. We all have seen infomercials, right? Those ones that drag on for a half an hour, an hour at late night TV on some random, on every channel now, right, and they just sit there and they tell you the story from all the different directions. They give you the virus of doubt. They're like, "Oh, here's this cheese grater. And you know when you have this bad cheese grater here and your knuckles bleed," and whatever and it's hard to clean. And they over exaggerate everything. And they show you all the pain points of it and then they show how wonderful, easy it is to use in this whatever they're selling and then it's easy to buy, and then it's easy to return, and it's overly dramatic. And we all know it's like wrestling, it's all an act and whatever. There's probably no realness there, but it is storytelling in a way. And not that you should do that because they over-hype the expectations, but look at the techniques that are used, the psychological techniques, the emotional techniques to get there and then dial it back and go, "Okay, I'm going to do that but with truth." And that's when things start to go pop, pop, pop, pop, or at least that's what I've seen. And so I always use that as another metric. And it's not just telling the story over and over, it's what story you are telling. And so I try to think of that as well, but not obviously clowny and cheesy and everything else, but it is a caricature of doing good marketing.
01:05:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[01:05:26] S1: I feel like this is a really interesting lens into the press release first or working backwards idea, is create the infomercial first and just go extreme. [01:05:35] S0: Sure, you could. [01:05:35] S1: Oh my God. I just kept up with a whole new- [01:05:36] S0: Know what you don't want to do for sure. [01:05:39] S1: But it's like a cool lens to go really far and then kind of pull back the best parts and make it honest. I think we just came up with a really good idea here. I want to come back to the iPhone. So I think it- [01:05:39] S0: Okay. [01:05:51] S1: Came out 20 years ago almost at this point, right? It launched 27, 2007. Something like that. [01:05:51] S0: Yeah, 2007. [01:05:57] S1: So what's crazy is people are still trying to build the next iPhone, especially with AI. Everyone's just like, "We've had this thing forever. What the hell? Why has nothing changed?" I'm curious, I imagine people ask you this question. I'm curious just what you think the next iPhone may look like with AI. What's the device that you think emerges over time? Do you have vision?