Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…You. It's part of why I need 25 in B2C. And don't get me wrong, if I can convince 25 people in there, I may have a marketing product and a charismatic marketing products. If that's all I needed to do was a good message and charisma to get people on it. The good benefits of this is that you can tackle risk very early because you can involve many other parts of your organization, marketing, sales, legal, finance. People often ask me how do I come up with the marketing spiel or the description? I'm like, "I don't make that up." If I ask Lenny, "What do you feel about this product?" And he says, "Well, it's cool and it's very sleek and very nice." The marketing department will say, "We don't like those terms. We want to call it comprehensive." And when you go out to sell your product, people are going to be disappointed because the expectations are created by what's on the box. I only market exactly what customers tell me. I have never been surprised about what customers will say when I release a product because in this technique I already get their feedback. And so I'm going to put exactly what Lenny said on the box. "Hey, this product's cool and sleek and easy to use." I've only launched a product that says super fast but difficult to read because the technology team said there was no way to change the font on something and it was just going to be difficult to read. And you know what everybody did when they got the product? "Oh my goodness, it is super [inaudible 00:31:39]. All right, it is also difficult to read." It matched their expectations in some ways. So what I do here is I learn how to sell the product with this technique, I learn how to market the product because I have real people, that we're not making assumptions. What's the best way to market this? How much Lenny? How would you find this? Does this language resonate with you? Does this properly describe the menu? See? So that's kind of what you're doing when you use a technique like this. It feels heavy to people, but that's kind of part of the practice of it. If you do this a whole lot, you get really comfortable at involving, you're working with your customers to solve it. But for me, the fact that you will not have a product failure because you have a natural pivot out, meaning if I can't find 25 people that love steak, why in the world am I building a steakhouse? So if you don't find enough people that love this problem and are willing to help you, just be like, this is not a problem worth solving. But more importantly, you really start to get... is the fastest part to product market fit, the clearest definition for me because I know when my product is ready, when I've dotted those I's and crossed those T's, in that way. I think your point there, recruiting is itself a huge signal, is really important. Can you find people that have this problem and care enough about this problem that they're going to talk to you and spend time exploring this thing that doesn't exist yet. I think that's super interesting. And then I think another key part of this is it's one solution that solves many people's problems. And it can't be a bunch of different things for a bunch of different people. That's right, that's right. If one person says, "I don't want this," wants this, another person wants this, you don't do it. That's how you know you do the minimum. All 25 have to want the same thing. If one person's out, you just don't do it at all. And the reason that's powerful is because if I come to you and I say, "Hey, it's missing this feature." I say, "Well yeah, 25 people that look like you that are very happy without it." You see? That's how if you think about what you do in a review, you see the five stars and you instantly like, "Oh, that's good enough." But if you have a question, what do you do, you cannot double click on the review to read. And that's how people get convinced. There's this social influence of like, "Well, Lenny's cool, he likes the steakhouse. I should like it. He's fine with this not being there so I should be fine with it." So your references are super powerful in more than any company, in influencing consumers on what they should choose or not choose.…

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