Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…Going back to your question about Chris too, I think Chris and Hamish and Jay, the founders I think really start from a place of principle in a lot of ways. Why are we even doing this thing? It's not just to help writers make money. It's not just to unlock these cool things. It starts with an opinion for how the internet should work, where people should be in control over their destiny to a much greater extent than has ever really been the case over at least the last 10, 15 years, where all of a sudden, everyone just started spending all of their time in a handful of these public squares that were powered by ads. When you think about what that means for Substack right now, that that means writers are in control over being able to deliver their best work on their terms to their audience, make money directly from their subscribers, and also that readers should be in control over their experience. When you show up to Substack.com, that experience should be something that you have a much greater degree of agency over or if you download the app than if you maybe opened up TikTok or something. I think where that leads you down from a prioritization standpoint is often starting from, okay, if we could do something in a bunch of different ways, is there a way that provides more control to the writer or more control over the experience that the reader has to them? Is there a way that provides much less control? All things equal, do the one that holds constant this principle of control. We could talk about a few other examples like this, but I think from a prioritization standpoint and from a strategic standpoint, Substack is a pretty principled company, and I think it's been really fun and interesting to get to work in an environment like this and also see how it actually can work. You are excited about recommendations, the recommendations feature, and we can talk about that in more detail. I think that's a good example where there's certainly a way to do that where writers have the max amount of control. We picked that way even if it might seem harder to pull off. And then that feedback loop of, "Oh, that actually worked," is really awesome to get to experience. Yes, I definitely wanted to talk about this recommendation feature. I feel like it's maybe the most underappreciated radical shift in Substack and just platforms in general. I think this is going to go down as one of the most legendary impactful features of any platform or marketplace. I'm just putting this out there. It's such a huge deal and I don't think people appreciate this. Just to quickly summarize what this is, essentially you allowed writers like me to recommend other newsletters that I specifically pick. I pick 10 newsletters that I think are awesome. Once someone subscribes to my newsletter, they see these 10 as, "Hey, you should check these out. I think these are awesome." It's very curated. There's no algorithm involved, which to your point is Substack's I think vision and mission is just avoid algorithms as much as possible. The reason I think this is crazy and amazing is at this point, 70% of my growth is coming from this one feature. There's something like 500 other newsletters recommending me. As soon as the feature launched and you look at my growth chart, it's just a hockey stick starting that day. I don't think people appreciate this enough, and I'm really excited to just chat about how this feature came to be. Coming back to a point we talked about earlier of Chris having a very strong opinion about how to build product, something I heard through a birdie is that Chris was not excited about this feature when it was proposed and it took a bit of pushing to get it out. Maybe we start there. How did this come to be? Sure. The way it came to be was that we noticed this organic behavior emerging, which was that a lot of readers of Substacks were starting to discover Substacks, but the way that was happening was typically through the lens of that original writer. This could happen in a bunch of different ways, right? I think you've used the guest post feature to have guests write post on your newsletter. Obviously that is a really good way for your readers to go and discover some of these other writers in a way that you're curating. There's some less obvious ways that this happens too. If you have comments on, which I think you do, if I scroll down and click on the profile of someone who's commenting on your post, it'll show me the other Substack that person reads too. Again, this is a very personalized and very writer centric way of doing discovery. At the same time, we talked about the supply and demand side of the marketplace. The supply side of Substack has just grown over time consistently to the point where now there's a huge amount of amazing writers on the platform and a huge number of collective readers on the platform too that we knew that this sort of like cross-pollination, this discovery loop could be a really powerful thing. If you'd start from the first principles, you're like, "All right, how do we help readers discover more things?' The most obvious way to do this would be something like, "Here are some Substacks you might. Based on what we know about your reading habits, here's like a few that Substack is just going to recommend you." This is the thing that worked really well. At Facebook in particular, I think when I joined in 2011, it was definitely still during the era... I think Facebook maybe had just over 500 million users and was on this path to a billion and beyond. This thing that we called PYMK, which was People You May Know, this little unit that would show up in the newsfeed and it would just tell you that eight other people that you obviously know because you have million mutual friends. That kind of thing drove a very non-trivial amount of Facebook growth in the early days. Of course, lots of other products have done things like this. We could have done something like that. But then going back to that principle of like, okay, well, if we were to do that, let's say we were to insert it at the bottom of our post or in an email or something, it's clearly a thing now where the writer who owns that space is not really in control over what the experiences that they're offering their readers. The reader who signed up for Lenny is now seeing these other things that have nothing to do with Lenny. Does that break this control principle, like putting writers in charge, putting readers in charge? Okay, so then back to the drawing board, what would be the most obvious maximal way to just put writers in control? What is the simplest version of this? What if we just ask writers, who do you recommend?…

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