Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's right. And there's always nice thing about it is it's in some ways, it does feel like you're starting fresh because you do need to start with the customer again and what's their problem. But in a lot of ways, you can carry over a lot of the same knowledge. At that point you know what's working well. Amplitude for example, does have a ton of knowledge around what some of the best ways artists set up reports. There's a lot of things that they have the momentum going, like where do you choose that momentum and how do you put that and curate that in front of users and make sure that they're getting the right things. There's a ton of momentum already there. It's just a little bit about harnessing it and understanding like, yeah, where are the gaps because there are going to be gaps. But anchoring in a customer problem as I think the way that you start any new product, any new thing that you're releasing, should always think about the customer and the pain point. So no different than when you're doing PLG for the first time or cracking into it. You need to be thinking again, starting again with the problem, the problems they have, the psyche that they have coming to your space so that you can build something that is going to effectively make them feel like, "Oh you can solve my problem, you get me." And show them how your product's going to do that. Final question, and this is around developers. You worked at Twilio, obviously Twilio sold developers. I think Rapid where you work right before Amplitude also sold developers. Selling to developers feels like such a hot space right now. There's so many startups that are just building developer tools, such a huge market. Used to be not. Used to be like there's not a market in developers. They're not going to spend money, there's not enough of them. And now it is a big popular spot. And so I'm curious, what have you learned about building a startup and a product that sells to developers? I imagine a lot of founders building search tools would be really curious. The first is that developers are just a very different audience from any others. I've seen so many people who have come in strong on growth really well or product really well with other audiences and like, "Oh, I'm going to take all those learnings, I'll pivot into serving developers." And as it being a very steep climb because developers are so different. And let me give you a couple just fun facts that make them really different. And some of these have some interesting stories. One is developers, almost two, one, do not look at your marketing website at all. They go straight to your signup flow. So what that means is all that beautiful context that you're setting and the product aid pricing, all that stuff, very often they're skipping all of it context free and going straight to your signup. And so anytime you make an assumption like, "Oh, well, they probably know this coming in to signup." Or like, "Well, we don't need to include, that's on the marketing website." None of that's going to apply to this group of people. They're there. The analogy I have for this group is they're the IKEA buyers who when IKEA package comes, they're not opening up the instruction manual and reading in and then starting to go through, they're in there tearing open the bags and starting to pull the pieces together and trying to build it. They'll come up for context and steps and such when they get stuck if they're motivated. So that's one thing. And then another one is just the aversion to talking to sales. And I think hearing that, some they're like, "Oh yeah, well, I hate sales too." When I'm sent out and get bombarded by sales, that's the worst. I totally get that. But developers are on this whole other level. There was a fang company sign up for Twilio, built a POC, launched to production, all this, and operated in that space for months without engaging once with sales. I was trying to reach them and I ended up being the one that talked to them first because they reached out to support because there was something about their delivery that was off ,there missing a feature and they did not want to talk to sales. They ended up talking to me when I was in product marketing. And that was my first exposure of like, these people not want to talk to sales. And then there's another one where a giant retail company where the engineering team signed up with their personal e-mail addresses so they wouldn't get bombarded by sales. It was only later that we found out. Anyway. But the thing that's most important, these are fun facts, but the thing that I would say is the most important, the thing to leave with listeners here is what makes them so different? Why? What's the deal here? And it stems from their charter and their responsibility.…

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