Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…It's mind-boggling. You run out of humans. Yeah, it's really hard. If you can retain people incredibly well, meaning those people just never churn, yeah, you've got a great business, but look at the effort the companies that have done that are doing to do that. Spotify doesn't make profit. Netflix, Amazon just spend so much money to try to do that. How replicable is that for a startup? I'd rather say like, "Let's try and get some network effects involved here. Let's get our customer acquisition cost to zero. Let's think about other ways to monetize because this alone feels like [inaudible 01:11:07]." This is also why a lot of these companies pivot to B2B. They realize they're not going to get anywhere with B2C. The other lesson I took away ... Because I interviewed a lot of these early B2C subscription app founders and employees, and I think about companies like Grammarly, Duolingo, Noom. Forget. There are a few more. One of the other trends across them all is they're all very efficient and very small for a long time because they needed time to figure out how to make anything work and then just continue to stay small and super scrappy. I think that's a great point. It was an interesting case study between Calm and Headspace. Because Calm remained like 10 people forever.…

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