Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…One of the things that I've noticed about these topics that the basics we talked about already, differentiation, this notion of you need a foundation for your project. It's a bit more under the radar for people. I think it's a bit harder for people to immediately see like, oh, we need this. We see the people who react the strongest to this and have the strongest immediate affinity to this idea actually being start-up founders, people who are really sophisticated in this challenge. Product managers who are at... We were invited in to speak at open AI and anthropic about this, and we see the product people, they're being like, oh my god, this is really powerful. This is the kind of stuff we need. I think for a lot of folks though, it can sound like this is just elementary, differentiation. Of course we need to differentiate. The problem is that all of this stuff gets backgrounded. It's something we've thought about a bit. We assume we're on the same page, we assume we're going to deliver something, but then business as usual happens, we build a product, we get kind of more interested in the technology and delivering that, and we end up trying to sell it to customers at the end. We end up putting a coat of paint on it with a marketing page or sales deck. We haven't actually built from the beginning the thing that we know is going to matter to people. One of the most useful steps here that I haven't seen before is just a starting place for how to even start thinking about differentiation. Everyone's always probably thinking price and speed maybe. You guys have a really cool just starting list that you showed here. Anything more you can add here for helping people start to think about ways to differentiate beyond the obvious price and speed. And I don't know, a couple more. So I'm just going to jump into another startup here just so we can see what this sheet looks like with scores on it. So this is a startup called Mellow. Anyway, the standard classic differentiators where we start, they are fast to slow, smart to not so smart, easy to use to hard to use, free to expensive, focused to one size fits all, simple to complicated and integrated to siloed. And so you could probably argue there's these others that should be included or some of those should be taken off. But what we like about this is that it's a small set. They're easy to understand. We know customers can understand these and they create a great starting place for your team to think about differentiation because you can quickly look at this list and start scoring where you think your product could be on these scales and you know that if you can use one of these, people will understand it. But it also starts to make the team comfortable with this notion of differentiation. And again, we want to make differentiation something that all of the co-founders or core team can participate in. It's not just the job of the person writing the pitch deck. It's not just the job of the marketer or the salesperson, but we're getting everybody's perspective in on it and this is a great warm up activity before we start to write our own custom differentiators.…

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