Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:02:51 · Elena Verna
[01:02:51] S1: functionality available. So that piece is I've never been in a company where the fundamental capabilities are still changing so rapidly. And that's the product part. So the product can leap to the new expectations. But let's not talk about the market part as well. Consumer expectations have never changed this fast before. What we expected to chat GPT to be able to do an answer and how we wanted it to talk to us eight months ago versus now is night and day. And like the deep thinking mode and how how how deeply you can go into answering questions and what is capable of being building on top of it. So consumer perception has never changed this fast too. It's this unprecedented time of a consumer's all stand like in a month saying, oh, it's not doing this yet. Like, I'm bouncing before. Again, consumer perceptions would be years to take. It's actually technology would sometimes be able to already address it, but consumer perception has not been changed yet. So it would take a long time. So we're like in this really weird part where both product and market is shifting so rapidly that every three months, I feel like we have to recapture our product market fit. And not just recapture on the same technology and with same customers. It's both of those pieces of the equation change every three months. And it's terrifying in a way. It's also very confusing in a way because we're $200,000,000 company and we're not solely focused on marketing and sales because we still have to recapture our product market fit. And you know that the team that finds your product market fit is very different than the team that usually scales your company. Yet we have to find the team that is capable of doing both on ongoing basis. Now, I think every AI company is on this product market fit treadmill. Hopefully that treadmill speed slows down. If not, I think we're going to come up with like crazy things of what this LLM and AI will be able to do if it's going to continue at this cusp. But it's a weird place to be in because every three months we have to throttle on our scaling efforts and just reinvent and then scale again. But it's like short blitz of growth, not these long year long commitments.
01:05:07 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:05:07] S0: What makes this very real is just this week, apparently, OpenAI had this whole Code Red moment where even though OpenAI, by far, the leading AI assistant over almost a billion, I think, monthly active users, like, basically synonymous with AI around the world, With Gemini three launching, their market share just started to dip really quickly. I think they lost, like, six something percent in, a week. And so even OpenAI, like ChatGPT, the original, the one that everyone uses constantly is is is in danger. [01:05:40] S1: It's like nobody's nobody's future is bulletproof yet. And ten years ago, if you asked me if a $200,000,000 company was at risk in losing product market fit in the next three months, it's experiencing 10% month over month growth, I would have said you're crazy. And now that's the reality that we live in. And I I don't know. I... It's fascinating to world and what a time to be alive. [01:06:04] S0: What a time to be alive. And very stressful, but the prize at the end is massive. That's the, you know, that's why this is worth doing. Not just, you know, monetarily, but just the impact it's gonna have on the world, the way we people build and ship [01:06:16] S1: and live. Exactly. The ceiling of what is possible has been raised so massively that we haven't even became too closest to even see it, I believe. So I think that that's the exciting part of it.
01:06:16 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:06:16] S1: and live. Exactly. The ceiling of what is possible has been raised so massively that we haven't even became too closest to even see it, I believe. So I think that that's the exciting part of it. [01:06:29] S0: The way I've seen you write about this product market fit challenge is the traditional approaches. You have these like core users that are using it, happy with it, and then you expand to the adjacent users and expand to the next. And you're basically just trying to recapture that same core constantly and don't even have time to go adjacent.
01:06:44 · Elena Verna
[01:06:44] S1: Yeah. I... Bangaly wrote a really wonderful article. It was many years ago at this point on adjacent user theory and that your product market fit expansion, when you're in the growth stages, the biggest opportunity for you to go after is this what he called adjacent user, which are just outside of your core user. They have somewhat similar needs, but maybe they're in different geo, maybe they have slightly different use case, slightly different needs. And your biggest way to continue growing your product market fit without having to go to next horizon is to capture those, that next group of users. The interesting piece here of how I relate to it, we still have the core users. And by the way, those core users are mostly pioneers right now that are excited by the capabilities. Then there's latent majority that is filled with adjacent users. And the issue right now, which I'm actually quite worried about us like as a category, is that we're constantly focusing on recapturing the pioneers. We don't have time to go after adjacent users. And I'm worried of whether there's going to be a gap in the space where we actually going to alienate the latent majority because we're so hyper focused on just staying top of mind and top of capabilities on the pioneers. But I don't know the right answer here because without the pioneers, they'll like you need pioneers for a latent majority to follow. But if you take pioneers and you take them too far into capabilities, will latent majority never be able to catch up? Maybe this is a fruitless concern, but it's just like something that I think about because at this stage we should be working on adjacent users. I would argue maybe OpenAI definitely started hard to do that with many people they have on their platform, but not most of the other AI companies.
01:08:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:08:31] S0: I completely see what you're thinking there. Like a brand could just become known as that's just for like startups and prototyping and it's not for serious work. [01:08:38] S1: Yeah. Or it's like it's for just like it's for techies. It's like protect people. It's like it never actually enters the people outside of our little bubble that we live in. [01:08:50] S0: We kind of touched on this a little bit of just like working in A. I, working on companies, challenging, stressful, a lot of work. What's your advice for folks that are thinking about should I join a Lovable, should I join a Cursor, should I just go work at Google, you know, not not not to throw them under the bus or anything, but just... Although Google, very, very successful AI now, maybe less AI focused company.
01:09:13 · Elena Verna
[01:09:13] S1: I really believe that there's different... You need to understand what's the environment that is right for you. Just please understand that AI companies are very hectic at the moment. They're very unstable by definition of that product market fit treadmill about that distribution of how they're actually distributed to the market really changing about how product is even being developed in the first place. So if you are very comfortable in being in that messy middle and really comfortable of converting chaos into clarity for you and those around you, then yeah, AI company is a wonderful place for you to really absorb new skill sets right now. Because even before joining Lovable, when I kept seeing AI, I'm like, my gosh, like, I'm so tired of seeing AI everywhere. Is it really changing the world? Like, is it really changing the way people work? And when I was I was at Dropbox before and, yeah, we would use AI here and there and I would use ChatGPT. I've never used AI there the way I use AI at Lovable and the things that I'm capable of accomplishing at Lovable. And I don't know if I've ever would have made that leap so fast unless I joined Lovable. If I would have just read or listened about it, it's just different compared to be surrounded by people where it's expectation. It's not like a nice to have or something that somebody is asking you to do. This is just how you get things done. And you have to think about everything of like, what can I do here versus where do I add value versus like in the traditional sense of work is like I start with my own value and then I augmented with A? I. And here, like the mindset has completely shifted. Now, I don't think A. I. Is replacing everybody's job. So like, please don't like don't look at it as a as as that cliche saying. I actually often call AI is like average intelligence that helps me get the platform up. And then I add my human thinking and my human creativity on top of it to get it to the next level. But at least I can get this base level done with AI really freaking quickly. So from that perspective, I think if you want to leapfrog on what it means to be AI native employee and how to use all of these AI tools, you should go to AI company.