Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…We can talk about the very early days of uberPOOL, and the first launch, if you will in San Francisco. So, carpooling product, multiple riders in a Mercedes car. And we had this idea that it would be effective for commuters, this was very, very early days. And so part of the launch was, okay, we're going to beta it with just some popular commuting corridors with specific companies or maybe the marina to Google or whatever and try and match people according to what their companies and that's how we'll drive liquidity. And we very quickly realized that back to what the kernel of truth is here is liquidity is the only thing that matters. And there just wasn't enough. There was never going to be enough to do this company based thing. That wasn't the strategy that was going towards from us. And so the reason I don't know if it's a full failure is maybe this is true all failures, you learn from it, you pivot and you go on to the next thing. And obviously we did that and then spent a lot of our time and effort trying to say, okay, what are the bounds of liquidity and driving liquidity that we can do to understand what the most important or what the limits of the product are. So as an example, we launched and maybe people in San Francisco. Remember this $5 anywhere in San Francisco, we work for promotion, which is obviously a great deal, obviously costs a lot of money, but the whole idea here is like, oh, okay, if liquidity is what really matters, if we were to juice that and really drive liquidity, how high can our metrics get? And then we can go chase more sustainable ways to do that. But it was a interesting fail case from launching and learning to say, hey, this initial strategy just isn't going to work, we got to go. And any part of it was a hedging strategy where with a small audience and there'll be a beta population, it's like, well, this one you just got to go. I think a lesson there is also don't overthink it, don't try to get too cute. Just like we're trying to make a perfect beta test versus realizing, okay, we just need a lot more people in it. Also, your $5 promotion made me think of the early promotions of the ice cream and the bunnies delivery and all that stuff. Yeah. That was by the way, a example of fully distributed, the benefit of having those early Petri dishes. Someone a local marketing manager like, Hey, this would be fun. Yeah, that would be really fun. The platform can support it. And those promotions were fantastic. And it started out, I can't remember if the first one was ice cream or puppies, I think it was ice cream. But yeah, branched into all sorts of stuff. Boats, ice cream, puppies, kittens, I think, and all credit goes to local ideas of inspiration just being focused on trying to grow within.…

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