Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I think he wrote the article Do Things That Don't Scale as a learning.... The learning there was the Airbnb founders doing the trips to New York and learning about how to build Airbnb, which is a very counterintuitive idea, which is when you have to spend the most amount of time with your customers. I think Airbnb is sort of one of the best stories inside YC of doing this well. This also reminds me, I've been talking to a bunch of founders recently. I asked them, "How many customers have you talked to help figure out this idea?" So just the other day it was 150 financial CROs that they talked to before they actually started raising this round. Another company, actually two Airbnb guys that started, they actually ran ads I think on LinkedIn to find specific people to talk to and that specific role. And they talked to probably at least 100, maybe 200. So there's a strong correlation there. Gustaf Alströmer Yeah, I think that's the volumes that people don't expect. They think they might have to talk to five, but I think you have to talk to 25 to 50. That means you have to reach out to a lot more to be able to get to people that are potentially early adopters. Those ones you talk to are also the ones that become your customers. So you are already doing most of the sales by just doing this work anyway.…

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