Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:11:22 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
But if you know that your superpower is in more structure and more definition and really high specialty of things, because in the AI companies, they're all fairly small. So you'll have to generalize quite a bit and have a lot of ownership, all of areas that you usually maybe not have ownership over, then you shouldn't join it because AI companies will evolve to be more stable too. So it's just a matter of time on where you can join. So I would just urge people to look at their superpowers and the type of environments that really speak to them so they can feel happy because this can lead to burnout for wrong type of personalities very quickly. [01:12:00] S0: Yeah. My sense is if you want work life balance, don't join one of these companies because that's just not the way they work.
01:12:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:12:00] S0: Yeah. My sense is if you want work life balance, don't join one of these companies because that's just not the way they work. [01:12:06] S1: I don't know if I'd go that far. Mean, I have family. I have two kids. I feel like I have a very good work life balance, but I put in boundaries for myself. Like I know when I need time off I need because I know when my brain starts to overheat, so to speak. But I also know that work is my hobby and it's my passion. And I will. This is the best work of my life that I'm doing right now. There's no other place that I'd rather be than to be here. So I think that you just need to be more careful about setting your own boundaries that you know you need. But I mean, let's face it. I don't think anybody has work life balance regardless of a company that they work at, even at Google or Microsoft or any of the others, think everybody's freaking out and running as fast as they can. It's just they're running it in different structures. [01:12:57] S0: I'm really glad you said that and corrected me there, that it is possible to work at a company, one of, if not the fastest growing company in history, and actually have work life balance to get sleep, to spend time with your kids and family.