Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:02:56 · Jason Cohen, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:02:56] S1: What I would say is the rules are true everywhere because they're based in the mechanics of finance in the business. You're right that in the consumer segment or small business segment for that matter, they tend not to grow. So that doesn't mean the NRR question is invalid. It means, dang, we can't think of anything. That's okay. Then you go onto the next question because you can't think of anything, but it would be more strategic if we could. And are we trying hard enough? As a consumer, I do not want to spend more with AT&T, but they're also not giving me any more value. But there are other products as a consumer, like Amazon, where they do. So you're right, but it would be as a product manager, it would be 10 times more valuable for you to think of something like that than to move on to other things, et cetera, or there's other ways, like other products. We didn't talk about it and it's okay because of course each one of these, you could go on forever, right? But another way is a second product. A second product sold to the same segments that you're in so that your existing customers can buy it. Well, I don't know why that wouldn't work in consumer. It certainly works in consumer in apparel. [01:04:09] S0: I think about AG1, which has all these new... I'm doing their sleep supplement, and there it goes. They're just like, "Here's a new thing you can buy."
01:04:15 · Jason Cohen
[01:04:15] S1: Yeah. So is it harder? Yeah, of course, of course. All of these are easier, harder in different segments and ways. Of course, of course. I'm not trying to say otherwise. But I would say the mechanics of how the finances work is the same. You're just saying, " I don't have this lever to pull." And then I would say, "Okay, well then you need different levers." One that we didn't talk about is one way to offset the cancellations is existing customers grow, but another way is if existing customers bring in new customers. So they didn't grow, but they brought their friend. Now, this is absolutely something that happens in consumer, but it's also an answer to this thing where cancellations grow exponentially, because existing customers bring in new does triple if you have more existing customers. Aha. So this is stuff like refer a friend and all this kind of stuff. Again, some of this is obvious. We don't need to enumerate that. So those things are good. And so in consumer, you might say, "Oh, it's easier to try to get someone to invite a friend with a coupon and blah, blah, blah, blah, than it is to try to get them to grow," but in B2B, that may not be true. I don't get a mid-size company to refer. That doesn't make sense. So once again, this question of how do we have the existing base help us grow is still correct in consumer, but its manifestation could be very different. Of course, I agree with that. But I mean, how could we not say... I mean, of course, things like word of mouth and invite a friend, of course that's enormous with consumer, and this is one of the reasons why.
01:05:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jason Cohen
[01:05:44] S0: I just love picturing the people listening to this, especially product folks, founders. I imagine many of them are just sitting here taking all these notes of how to help grow their product because we've positioned this conversation as how to deal with stalled growth, but it's actually just as useful, how do I grow more? [01:06:02] S1: Oh, for sure. Right, right, right. [01:06:03] S0: Which is awesome. [01:06:04] S1: It clearly is more growth. It's just maybe a little more evocative, because if growth is good, yeah, sure, you want to grow more, but it's not the problem. If growth is really good, the problem is generally operationally scaling to meet the growth, and so you're focused on that. It's when growth slows, you're like, "Whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait. We have to focus on growth now, must," as opposed to, "Of course it's always nice." So yeah. [01:06:28] S0: Yeah. And I was thinking as we were talking about consumer NRR, if you look at Duolingo, they've done a great job here. There's so many ways you can pay them more for all these little advances, get all these gems, change the color of your app to something fancy. [01:06:41] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [01:06:42] S0: Okay. So there's more. Let's keep going. [01:06:44] S1: More? Okay. [01:06:44] S0: So we've done three. There's more. [01:06:46] S1: We've done three. [01:06:46] S0: More you can do. [01:06:47] S1: So okay. Logo churn. [01:06:51] S0: Pricing. [01:06:51] S1: Pricing. [01:06:52] S0: NRR.
01:06:54 · Jason Cohen
[01:06:54] S1: NRR. And then maybe it's stalled, so this is really a stalled question. Maybe your acquisition channels, your marketing channels are saturated. We're done. I mean, what we tend to do is flog the people doing AdWords, flog the SEO people, get more searches. It's possible that this is it. Maybe this is it in some sort of physical law. There literally isn't anything else, or maybe just this is how good we can be. This is it. But there really are limits. There's different words for it. Inventory is sort of the old word, like with magazine ads. Inventory was the word, but there's just this amount. There is only so many searches in your area, and you can only appear once in the search results for a given keyword. So there is this limit of what you can get. Even if you're in the number one position for everything or other things that are not even practical, there's still a limit. And there's some kind of practical limit that's below that we don't really know, but maybe we're there or maybe we're close. And worse, channels tend to decline over time. So I think people talk about S-curves. " Oh, I didn't figure out this market. Then I figured it out. We unlocked it. Now we're getting a hundred leads per month through Facebook," or whatever. But then it kind of taps out and then we go into this optimization mode, "Can we eke out another blah, blah, blah, blah?", which is right. It all is right. And you call that an S-curve because it's shaped like that, but that's not what happens. What happens is it starts with an S-curve and then it starts sagging. Its butt starts sagging down. So I wrote an article about this called the elephant curve, which is what I named it, because it's like this trunk, but then it's this butt. And there's different reasons why this happens, but if you talk to any marketer, they'll all tell you, "Oh my God, let me tell you this story." They all have stories about it because yeah, this is what happens. There's different reasons. First of all, the audience gets saturated because there's all these little marketing isms, and I don't know if they're true or not. I don't think any of it has any data that actually proves it, but whatever. If words start with the same letter, that's better. I don't think anyone's ever proved that's true, but marketers seem to think so. Okay.
01:09:03 · Jason Cohen
Well, one of the things is someone has to see it seven times before they act. Okay. All right, well, maybe they saw it seven times already, so they don't want it or they saw it 20 times. So initially you hit people who hadn't seen it yet, but now you have. And especially with magazine ads, as I used to do before there was no such thing, that's exactly what would happen. You'd have this nice surge and then like, "Well, we've seen it before." So you still get a little trick. You still get some because it was just that moment they needed to see it again. Okay. But a lot of people have already seen it and they don't want it, or the channel is declining and they'll never tell you. When I did magazine ads, every year they would tell you what their circulation is. Every year it would go up and then the magazine would go out of business. Conferences are the same way. "Attendance is great. Attendance is great. Oh, wait, we're out of business because we couldn't get enough people to come. What? They said it was great." But more quietly, AdWords, Facebook ads, even SEO searches, this does happen all over the place. Affiliates, it can happen. And now with AI, I don't even know. It's disrupting everything. We've all heard stories going all different directions. I think the answer is, "I don't know." Shrug is the answer. And what will it be like in two years? Another shrug. But the point being, they're not all going to be growing a lot. That's not one of the futures that AI will bring us. So it has this sag. That's just a very long way of maybe trying to prove this point, but it's yet another reason why you can't just rely on marketing forever because you try to stack things, but there's not an infinite number of marketing channels you could advertise in that your customers are actually going to, and they sag. Oh no, it's even harder to keep up. So it's kind of like the secret in reinforcing my very first point here with this, but here, are they all saturated? Because we could flog marketing all we want. It's not going to work. So maybe growth is slowing because all our channels are saturated, possibly even sagging, but even if not, okay, not growing, and so we can't just flog the marketing department. It's going to take something else. The obvious thing is get more channels, but again, maybe there aren't any.
01:11:14 · Jason Cohen
So again, there's many possible things to do, but this is this critical thing to notice, because I guess I would put it this way. Do you know right now which channels are saturated and which aren't? If the answer is no, I'm like, well, okay, maybe that's... because the answer is all. It needs to change how you think. Just adding one little feature and then hoping we can flog AdWords is not going to work. Even if the feature's great, not going to work. So there's different things that could work, but that's not one of them, and yet that's probably what we're doing. "Let's add another feature and marketing can flog it," is often the answer. But if you're in this state, that isn't the answer. So this is why you could say it's obvious to say this or that, but are you acting like this is true? Often we don't. Okay. So there are many things to do. Again, we don't have to enumerate all of them or something. It's just simply the right question to ask. But for example, some people are like, "We've done direct. Maybe we should try things like SEO and social and these other indirects or vice versa. We're really good at SEO, but we've never taken out ads." Often if you've done ads and they're optimized, you know what content might be good to write stuff for SEO, and maybe even vice versa, maybe. So it's a good idea and sometimes it works, but here I have no data, I only have my feeling here. And actually, you probably have a lot more visibility into this, but my experience is a product that sold really well direct actually doesn't do well in things like social and SEO and vice versa. If you're getting a lot of traffic through SEO, adding ads often costs a lot and doesn't really move the needle. You can tell me, is that... because I don't have data to support that theory.