Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:24:07 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:24:07] S1: I I love that because I... That's the core product functionality at this point. And before, people would spend more time building deeper features or deeper use cases or trying to improve some platform functionality. And now the core team, they're obsessed about that first experience because that is core product. [00:24:29] S0: Another lever that I've noticed, especially with Lovable, and I'm seeing it more and more in social media, is just founders telling you what's going on. I think this connects really deeply with the new features. Launching new features, say Anton, is just like, hey, check out this cool new thing, check out our growth numbers. Is that a big growth lever too?
00:24:45 · Elena Verna
[00:24:45] S1: Yeah. So one of our biggest strategy is building in public. Building in public, and it's coupled with employee socials, founder led socials for sure. This is difficult for larger companies, but when you're smaller and you still have a little bit more narrative control with everybody on your team, plus you have so much more trust within your organization of where people are going to say the right things because they understand what actually has happened. That ability to just really quickly deliver the message to the market becomes really important. Now we still do the big launches. So we still have everything tiered into tier three, two, one. Like tier ones are going to happen as like big moments that we're going to really rally as a company behind. And it's going to be something that is meant to step function, change our product market fit. And we're to do a bunch of activities behind it. But at the same time, what's really important to us is to maintain noise in the market. And that noise in the market happens by us shipping every day, every other day, multiple times per day and just talking about it constantly. Interestingly enough, it actually works as fantastic resurrection strategy because people are like, Oh, there's more things here. I need to go check it out. It also works as great re engagement strategy. So instead of sending newsletters to say like, here's the market trends or here's the user stories, people are literally logging into their social to see like, okay, what has Lovable shipped now? It's like, is the change? So it's interesting to them to see because from the time that they voice their opinion on what needs to happen to actual delivery is so short, so they feel heard. And they are heard because that's how we prioritize all of the things that we're shipping. But it's interesting because I've never been in a company that tries to maintain so much just shipping velocity to maintain certain amount of noise that it feels like the product is alive. It's changing every single week. And then there's like these big amplifications, turbo boosts, so to speak, in the race car model that then go out and they fundamentally create a step function change in that product market fit as a whole. And that is a retention strategy I can get behind any day and all day. I only hope that we can maintain it as we continue scaling.
00:27:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:27:06] S0: Sounds stressful. This reminds me I had Gaurav. He's the CEO of Miro. He used to be called Captions, which is a really successful AI video company startup, and they have a policy of you ship a marketable feature every week. [00:27:22] S1: Mhmm. [00:27:22] S0: That's how their company operates. And it's the same thing. It's just ship things you can talk about. [00:27:27] S1: Velocity of shipping is our number one core value in development team. So we do anything and everything to just keep it going up, up, up and into the right. And by the way, this also means that everybody has a little bit of marketer within them. We have very lean product organization. We actually lean on our engineers to do a lot of product work. We call them product engineers. And they have to go and they have to announce the thing that they've shipped. It doesn't just funnel through marketing. So there is a lot of autonomy, a lot of agency that needs to happen with this type of velocity, because marketing team otherwise you have to have an enormous marketing team to staff that. So it has to come with some roles and responsibilities redefinition on the team as well. [00:28:13] S0: Let's talk about marketing. That's something else you've written about is just marketing is changing in a big way, their role in growth. How does marketing play a role in all of this?
00:28:13 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:28:13] S0: Let's talk about marketing. That's something else you've written about is just marketing is changing in a big way, their role in growth. How does marketing play a role in all of this? [00:28:20] S1: On one side, marketing channels are changing. On the other side, marketing's involvement into everything that product does is changing. And then number three, I think even marketing organizations in terms of where they hire the most are changing as a result as well. So I'll talk about second one first, just because we just talked about shipping and that is, yeah, you still have your product marketers, you still have your channel managers, but they focus more on the big things and the narratives, Although it's difficult because the narrative even changes all the time as these functionalities come through. Usually you can come up with a positioning and messaging and you can have it for years and create all of the campaigns around it. Now you have it for three months and then the product changes. So, cycles here are really short and for smaller changes because cycles are so short, they spend so much time actually focusing on it as they should. Some of these smaller changes just cannot be supported by marketing. You have to delegate it to your product and engineering team to do their own marketing because otherwise, again, you're going to have to have enormous marketing team in order to support it all. But at the same time, channels in which marketing right now works, I think are changing quite [00:29:31] S0: a bit.
00:29:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:29:31] S0: a bit. [00:29:32] S1: And not enough people, I feel like, are freaking out and talking about it as opposed to like moving just in the same direction over and over again. And the changes that I'm seeing is that it has been very clear to me that when you're talking about organic strategy, if you're marketing organic strategy, if you asked me that five years ago, I would have said that's SEO. It's search engine optimization, go on Google. That's your organic marketing strategy. If you ask me what's the organic marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social, which is what is my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn? What is my creator economy doing? In influencer marketing and across all of the social platforms? That is my organic, which is balance kind of paid, to be fair. But when I think about organic, there is still a lot of that word-of-mouth. What are my users posting on social? What are they talking about it? What are they what are they sharing? Which is like a mind shift because I've been always, especially in B2B, so focused on search. And now I feel like it's been completely pushed even further into consumerization territory and it has become all about social no matter how B2B you are, because that's where eyeballs are at. [00:30:44] S0: That is fascinating. And so when you talk about socials, what are you finding is most helpful? Is it TwitterX? Is it LinkedIn? Is it YouTube, TikTok, Instagram?
00:30:52 · Elena Verna
[00:30:52] S1: For founder socials, our employee socials, X and LinkedIn are fantastic sources, especially for b two b, because that's where all of the b two b people are at. But you cannot just have ChatGPT write your copy and post it. You need to show personality. There needs to be humanity that it goes through it. And it's not natural for everybody and it feels very awkward sometimes to start. But it's important to people to see who's building the company because there's so much competition now on functionality so they can rally behind a team. So they want to have a team that they want to win. And for that, you need to be vulnerable. You need to be authentic, obviously, but you just need to be yourself. So that corporate scrubbing has to completely fall off, which is obviously going to pull in as the company scales. But at least at the beginning, that is a chance to stand out. And then your customers posting about you. So that word-of-mouth of really creating a product that creates something for customers that is worth talking about. It gives them stories that they want to share, that feels empowering to them to tell to others like they're unlocking a secret, like they feel proud of what they have created, which what we focus a lot on Lovable on to have that feeling of, Oh my gosh, I have superpowers now and I can't wait to tell others. I cannot wait to show others what is happening. So on both of those sides, to me, that is very much organic. If you're in a consumer, then Instagram, TikTok are very much a go as well.