Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:25:58 · Jason Cohen
[01:25:58] S1: It can also help you avoid doing unnatural things that you actually regret to grow. So if growth at all costs is just the thing, there's probably ways you could, "Grow the newsletter," that you would just say, "I just wouldn't be proud of that. And the newsletter's doing so well, that I don't need to do that." And so again, maybe that's a softer version because growth hasn't actually stopped, but okay, it's a softer version of, "I certainly don't agree with growth." You might say, "I certainly don't agree with growth at all costs. I want to grow as much as possible within the things that I'm proud of. If we grew fast, but the content was crappy, I'm just not willing to do that. It's not the point." And so it helps set up these boundaries of like, "Wait a minute, not if ... " And early on, we may not have that flexibility. You could argue that you should have those values early on because that's who you are, and that's what you're doing, and people respond. So I could argue you should have that all along, but I could also argue that at the beginning you're just trying to do something where you don't die, you're starting to blog, you're probably copying other people's style. You probably don't have that much unique things to say. So there's a lot of ... That's okay. You're just trying to get going. It's okay. 20 years later, if you have no style, and no voice of your own, and nothing new to say, that's probably not good, but to get going, sure. So sometimes we have this thing where we get going with maybe looser ... I don't want to say values. I'm not saying that's unethical, but looser bar or a pride that we have in our own work, and we tighten it up as we're able, as we can afford to, you might even say. So good, but then that becomes a nice filter here of like, "What is it in a greater sense I'm trying to do here, I'm willing to do here?" So if you're not growing, you're dying fair, but that has to come with these limits. And the more successful you are, the more you can be serious about those limits.
01:27:43 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:27:43] S0: I think an important element of this is also the product you're currently working on, maybe it's okay for it just to not grow. This is a good opportunity to do something else, have this thing maybe running on the side, maybe sunset it at some point, but it's a good opportunity to be like, "Okay, wait, what else is out there?" We had a recent podcast conversation with Matt MacInnis, CPO at Rippling, and there's some really good advice he shared on just when to quit, when to quit your startup, just like, "If it's like four or five years in and it's just not clicking, maybe it's time to move on." And even though people do succeed years in, most likely it's not going to be you.
01:28:16 · Jason Cohen, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:28:16] S1: I have a book almost out now that's on pre-order about topics like what we've been talking. The next book I want to write is on this topic of how do I make these decisions of uncertainty? Like, "Maybe it is time to quit. Maybe I should move to a different city. Maybe I should marry this person. Maybe I should launch this company. Maybe I should use this strategy where you want to use probability and expected value. It's unlikely that ... " But the truth is we don't know what the probability is. We don't know what the probability curves look like. We actually can't use expected value. And anyway, even if you could have expected value, I am a human being. This is my life and I either sell the company or I don't. And so all this stuff about probability, and like, " That doesn't apply to me. I need other ways of sorting this out." So I guess I would just say briefly, probability is not going to work for these decisions. So that doesn't say what is right, but it's not that, which is nice, because you could put those tools down. "I'll do some market research to see if I should sell my company." Nope. That's not where the answers are. [01:29:26] S0: More questions than answers on that one. [01:29:28] S1: Yeah. [01:29:29] S0: Speaking of the book, let's give you a chance to share what you're working on, and when this is coming out, and where folks can find it.
01:29:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jason Cohen
[01:29:29] S0: Speaking of the book, let's give you a chance to share what you're working on, and when this is coming out, and where folks can find it. [01:29:36] S1: Sure. So the book is called Hidden Multipliers, and you can pre-order it at hiddenmultipliers.com. Or I guess if this is out long enough, it'll be order it, I guess, depending on when you're listening to this. And it's a lot of stuff like we were talking about today, these questions of, it's called multipliers because the idea is little things that you can do or little decisions you can make that have a huge impact like moving the cancellation rate from five to 4%. It sounds small, has a huge thing, onboarding as opposed to later, huge thing. So those are some examples, but the book is of course full of different kinds of topics, but all of this idea of this stuff that has such a big impact on things like revenue or profit. And either, just as you said earlier, either maybe you have never thought of it that way, so you weren't thinking about it right. Or yeah, you've heard that, you say, "I know." But your actions don't reflect it. And so if we go deep enough with examples and specific things to do, then you can actually act on that supposed knowledge and realize those multipliers. [01:30:40] S0: And just to remind people that you're all hiddenmultipliers.com. [01:30:44] S1: Yeah. [01:30:45] S0: And there's an S at the end, Hidden Multipliers. [01:30:48] S1: Right. There's more than one. [01:30:49] S0: There's many. It's more than one. [01:30:51] S1: Yeah.
01:30:51 · Jason Cohen, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:30:51] S1: Yeah. [01:30:52] S0: Jason, I had other things I wanted to talk about, but I feel like this episode's actually going to be stronger if we just focus on the thing that we've been talking about, which is unstalling growth. So if we do that, is there anything else you want to mention or leave listeners with before we get to a couple corners and then the lightning round? [01:31:13] S1: I think if you tried to find a common thread throughout all this stuff about growth, it comes back to the customer getting value. And I know we already talked about that, but I think if there could be one thing where it would help solve kind of all of it, it would be that they really are getting value. Your product actually promises the right thing, and then it actually delivers on that thing, and the customers can onboard so that they can do the thing, and the customers know, they realize that they're getting the thing, and you're measuring the thing, so you know it's increasing. That is probably, if I was an LLM, I'd probably say, "That's the common thread." There's many ways that manifests, of course, but if that's your North Star is how are we actually creating value in the way the customer values it in their language, in their way, and their way of understanding it, I wouldn't say all the pieces magically fit into place, but certainly isn't that the root thing that is going to make all this stuff work? Then there will be a good way to do pricing. [01:32:15] S0: Yeah.
01:32:15 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jason Cohen
[01:32:15] S0: Yeah. [01:32:16] S1: They will stay as long as possible. And these things will probably be right, if that. So this idea of creating value for the customer and then figuring out how to split with them is probably the root idea. And of course, I hesitate because platitudes like that are actually not actionable, not very actionable. Like, "All right, well, I'll move on with my day." And that's why Twitter's not so useful. But given that we've gone into so much detail, perhaps that's a nice way of summarizing it. [01:32:39] S0: I think that's such an important point. I think what's also interesting is some of your advice is the value, you may be picking the wrong customer, the wrong market, you may be positioning it wrong. So the value may be there, you're just trying to convince the wrong people about it. [01:32:54] S1: Yeah. There's so many ways to get it wrong because like we said, all these things have to be right. And you just said another one, which is, and you have to say in a way that when this person hits the homepage, they know it. It's true, but do they know that? It's just so many things have to go right. [01:33:11] S0: What a tough job we've got over here, just solving people's problems. Come on. Okay. [01:33:15] S1: Well, at least we're growing. [01:33:18] S0: So now we will be after this conversation. Okay. So I'm going to take us to a recurring corner, a recurring segment on the podcast that I call AI Corner. What's one way that you have discovered using AI in your work or in your life that might be helpful for folks to hear?