Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:32:34 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:32:34] S0: So here it's... The CEO clearly is an important variable in this, them. In this case, Anton just tweeting, here's what's going on in Lovable, here's how fast it's growing, here's something We we've had the CEO of Gamma on recently, Grant, and he's exactly the same thing, just sharing a bunch of lessons, journey building in public, a big part of the growth lever. And your point here is, okay, so it's the CEO, but then it's also how do you get your customers to share things on socials, and then there's a paid influencer sort of component.
00:33:01 · Elena Verna
[00:33:01] S1: Yes. The customer is difficult one. That's a word-of-mouth loop that you need to stand up. The only way to create a word-of-mouth loop is just to blow their socks off when they actually experience your product. We have a really almost unfair advantage because our product is called Lovable. So by default, we're trying to create an absolute lovable experiences. Like, that is a mentality internally. If it's not lovable, we're not going to ship it. So and the best way to fix a bug at Lovable is to say this is not lovable, like when everybody just like jumps on it to fix it right there and then. Sprints, no sprints. It doesn't matter. It's getting fixed right now. So from that perspective, we kind of have that culture already embedded as part of our brand and it's part of our name, which helps us a lot. But that's the point is that you feel that brand through every interaction. I talk to my designer all the time. How can we add more love marks into the product? How can we prioritize more unique interactions? The little elements that make up that that feeling of this product is speaking to me. It's like it feels something like that is unique. It has personality behind it. So we put all of the brand work actually into our product. When you think about Lovable, think about a brand, but we don't have a brand marketing team yet. So, it's all just through product interactions and some of those building in public moments of the people behind those product interactions. That is our strategy. And then there's influencer marketing. Interestingly enough, influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social. So yeah, we do some paid social as well and it's working decently. It's quite expensive from payback period. We're still optimizing it. As I said, we're pretty early on in all of these channels. But influencer marketing is something that has worked from the beginning. A Lovable and reason behind it is that influencer marketing, especially on the socials, it gives you an opportunity to have a little video and interaction. And Lovable is all about seeing like, oh, my gosh, this is what I can do and this is possible. So that drives people to go and try it themselves. So that's why social works very well for us, because it's not really a written value proposition. Like, nobody knows what byte coding is.