Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…I think there was two weeks between... no, a week between being on a pace of 20 users a day to seeing 4,000 users come into your product, like new users a day, break the product. It was hard scaling it. Also, just some things I needed to learn while moving. It's like, yeah, I wasn't a DevOps engineer. I don't know how to scale databases. I didn't know that the virtual CPU would really come back at me when trying to scale and so on. And again, trying to be profitable and so you try to use every free tier that you can, but then once you start scaling it [inaudible 00:48:04]. So, yeah, I think once I started sharing in public it grew to a few thousands a day and then [inaudible 00:48:14] the credit thing did the rest. Okay, so this is kind of the whole journey. I know there's a few other elements I want to touch on, but let me point out a few things that stood out to me that I think might be helpful to folks. The first is right at the beginning, coming back to a lesson you shared at the beginning, which is build for specific people. So initially it was build for yourself, build for your girlfriend, build for the Scouts program, and then it was built for these three friends, just building it, sitting with them, building the things they need to use it, which is really interesting because a lot of times the advice you get is look for pull, look for people with problems to solve. You almost went the opposite. You're like, "Use my product. I need you as a favor. Use my product and help me make it better." Absolutely. Also, I don't know though. I think maybe paradigms are changing, but there are some things that I don't believe in is MVPs, first and foremost, is like if you're building something that people will not be able to use or is not good enough, especially these days where it's so much easier to build software, so the attention span for people to actually try out new software products is getting shorter and shorter, so, yeah, pick a bunch of people that, I don't know, owe you something or have any reason to use your product when it's bad, build for them, be there physically. I remember that even when we passed 20K users, 50K users and 100K users, it was still very tough to get the right feedback. So I would bring 20, 30 people to a room together, almost like a focus group or a small hackathon. I'll do that every other week, just to get feedback, and it was so much easier than any other thing. It was the same thing that I tried developing when we were just three users and five users. So, yeah, build it for them. They can come from different backgrounds. Again, something else that I don't really empathize with or agree with is you have to have a certain ICP. It's not necessarily about the profile of a person. More of what they're trying to do is way more important. So you can have different types of people, but they're all trying to do the same thing. They're trying to build a tool.…

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