Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:27:37 · Elena Verna
I also think that there's a lot of patterns you start to notice as you start tearing down all of these companies. You're like, Oh, these elements are always the same. That means all of these companies are arriving to these things and they seem to be winning elements and you can take those elements and put them into your product, but you can never skip the ideation, the design, the user research, the customer interview, the experimentation step. And you should always balance it with actually innovating yourself in your product. Because copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocracy because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else. Leader is by default, is somebody that is able to separate themselves from the pack in something else. And if you are trying to just be, I don't know who is ever trying to be like the mediocre middle of the pack, but maybe it's a good starting point, but never the end goal. The only other thing that I'll say before I'll stop talking is benchmarks. Benchmarks are also very dangerous here to use because benchmarks are usually done on all of the competition and all of the softwares out there. And the way people define numbers is so different from company to company. Like, even if you look at something as simple as signups. Okay, how many signups should you be on average getting? Or like your conversion from prospecting visitor to a signup, or from a signup to activated user. It so depends on how do you define prospect visitor? Some companies define it as old traffic. Some define it as new traffic. Some of them define it on the new IP address, new persistent ID, how Google Analytics defines it, how Amplitude defines it. So, all of these definitions are so different. So, taking also any benchmark that is derived from competition and saying this is where we should be is also so dangerous because it might not even be applicable depending on how you defined the metric. And one of the things that all of those benchmarks benchmarking data fails is like to actually look at specific definitions. And that's not to say that benchmarks are not extremely valuable data point in your decision making, because it's an input that you should leverage to say what it could be possible, but to just blindly take it and set it is just a sure way to fail any of your initiatives and efforts.
00:30:04 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:30:04] S1: You're telling me that there's no shortcuts. [00:30:08] S0: I wish there were. I mean, I've been doing this for over fifteen years. If there were any shortcuts, I'd be all over them. There are patterns and there are frameworks, but there's no shortcuts. [00:30:20] S1: So people hearing this, they're like, okay. Don't copy the competition. Use it for inspiration. It's a little hard to know exactly the line between those two. Is there an example that you can think of where you took really interesting inspiration from someone and it worked for a company you're working with? Or you copied someone and it's just like, oh, that failed. That was a bad idea.
00:30:40 · Elena Verna
[00:30:40] S0: I use competition to understand the general framework of how people collect some information or resolve certain steps. So, for example, sharing model. So many products like, Hey, can you share this with somebody? Well, you can go and spend so much time of like figuring out how it should look, or you can go to Slack, you can go to Figma, you can go to Miro, you can go to Notion, like, okay, Google, and like, how are they doing sharing model? You can look at all of that and say, okay, here's the all common elements that all of them have. Here's the pieces that I think will apply to my product. Here's things that do not, and here's what I can derive from it. I use it as an input into ideation, but I never use it as a destination for the result, if that makes sense. Because it's very helpful to not start from scratch. The empty start problem is real, and competition is a wonderful way to not have that and to have input into it, but never to just say, Oh, we can skip the design cycle, off we go. Or just like slap our collars on it. If it works for them, it's going to work for us. So I have extensive Miro boards with everybody's onboarding flows, with everybody's pricing pages, their sharing model, their invite colleagues models that I reference all the time. But there have never been the exact thing that I would use for any company as opposed to say, Hey, I think this is a great starting point for you. Here are the things that I think will work very well for your company and for your product. And take these elements, the rest you need to go and do themselves. So at least that way there is a starting point. And this is why I also started doing a lot more of like my own almost prototypes, like skeletons of here's the elements that you should do in these flows. Like I have one for pricing page, I have one for homepage, but you need to put in your own umph into it in order for it to actually work.
00:32:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:32:38] S1: What made me realize this back in the day was thinking... At Airbnb especially, thinking about people looking at our flow and being like, this is... They've got it all figured out. We're just gonna copy what they've done because they're so thoughtful and have tested everything. And knowing how that has not happened and how so much of this was guesswork and we hate so much of it, just thinking about people trying to copy this, thinking we know what we're doing, it's like, what are you guys even thinking? [00:33:02] S0: Oh my god. I actually had that happen to me at Dropbox not so long ago. Somebody reached out and they're like, oh, I'm like... It was like some page in activation flow. They're like, oh, I love this page. This is so cool. I I love what you've done here. Like, I'm gonna go take it to my company. I'm like, I I I went... We haven't touched it in ten years. Like, this this page is, like, only visible for, like, small cohort of people. Like, please don't do it. Like, please don't copy it. Like, it performs like shit. I know it's out there, but it's not meant to be out there. Nobody, like, thoughtfully put it out there. So, like, that's definitely a huge a huge failure point that you can run into. [00:33:42] S1: Right. If it's like a fancy company, you assume they're just so smart and diligent about every little pixel and decision. [00:33:48] S0: Woah. If people only knew of how much craziness is happening in those big companies and how much chaos there is. [00:33:56] S1: Oh, man. That's a whole other podcast episode.
00:33:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:33:56] S1: Oh, man. That's a whole other podcast episode. [00:33:58] S0: Whole other podcast. Yes. [00:34:00] S1: Okay. Number five.
00:34:02 · Elena Verna
[00:34:02] S0: Okay. I have this one. It's a little bit meta, but I see it happening all the time. We love to think that our problems are unique. Like, I'm working in this company and like we have this growth problem and we need to go and figure out the solution from the grounds up. Maybe this is like a little bit related to the competition point, but I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but your problem is not unique. I am 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many, many places. And you trying to reengineer solution is time lost to market and has a huge opportunity cost. So my biggest thing that I try to get people is like, don't Don't think that you have unique problems. You don't. I know we love to. Like, it would be fun to have something unique to learn. But with so many startups, with so many people in our industry, in your industry, whichever industry that is, your problem has been solved by somebody, or at least that there's a lot of failures on the problem that you should be learning from. And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, do not start from scratch, ever. Do not start from scratch. It's like the worst thing that you can do because you're going to waste so many cycles on trying to do something that probably has already been solved. So, which means like, how do you approach this as a result? Well, you can look at competition and how they're solving the problem. That's one input, for sure. You should go find people that have solved this problem because there are people there and people love to talk about what they do. So, take advantage of that human psychology and go find those people and just ask them, How did you do it? What did you do? What happened? Obviously, not all the time everybody's going to respond, but we have LinkedIn, we have X. Go out there, find the people that you think or ask around in your network of who you think might have similar solutions and just go talk to people. It would be an incredible shortcut. Like if you're talking about an actual hack, that is a hack to get to an optimal solution. And then the last thing that I would also say is that solving any one problem uniquely is extremely inefficient. We are evolving so fast in our market. You need to be able to patternize your solutions.