Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…You can, totally. And if you can use tokens that are relevant, so, "Neobrutalist, minimalist, newspaper-like, vintage, make it look like a telegram." You can try and reach for things that maybe would not naturally come to mind and you'll be surprised about how well it can transfer those ideas into reality. Incredible. Too easy. Maybe to close out our conversation, we'll see where this topic goes. I had this tweet that I loved, that I super resonate with, "The secrets of product quality is blood, sweat, and tears." I completely agree. I think that's why I think my newsletter's been successful. I spend so much time on every newsletter post, more than I think anyone spends on a newsletter post, like 10, 20, 30 hours. And that's why I think it works. Is there anything more behind that tweet, anything you've learned in just the importance of working hard, I guess to great, great stuff? Yeah, I mentioned exposure hours is a good example of like, "Look, it can be painful. It can be painful to see your baby break in front of everyone and noticing all the ... " The other thing is that a great product is made up of a thousand little details and so you're never really done. There's a humility that comes from the process also of why the best product builders will say nine nos for every yes. Because when you say yes, it's like adopting a puppy. A feature is like adopting a puppy. It grows into a beast that you have to take care of, and it's very demanding and loving. But also it's a lot, and poops everywhere. So you have to have a creative restraint. And while you also have to have a give, you have to withhold, sometimes with the respect of the real world complexity that emerges. A little thing that I kind of obsess about. I'll give kudos to the Midjourney team. I really love how Midjourney works on mobile web. I don't know if they have an app yet, like a native app, but their mobile website is phenomenal. And to get it to be that good, by the way, it's possible. It's actually possible to make great things on mobile web. But it needs that sense of love, and restraint, and obsession, and testing a lot, and using your own products a lot. Dogfooding is a great mechanism, obviously. So we use the heck out of Vercel and v0 to make Vercel and v0, and hopefully that helps us do better. But there is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in the process.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.