Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…The biggest thing is an amazing product that people love to use. I mean ChatGPT is the most hypergrowth product that we've seen in history potentially, because people are so excited to use it and it's working in interesting ways. So Miro, whiteboards were the number one most uploaded asset in Jira forever. Because people all get together and they write their ideas on a whiteboard, and then they need to remember it and iterate on it. And that bringing that concept to life just hit a cord that people wanted to use. And when one person uses it, another person uses it. 1Password similarly, I've been a 1Password user for more than 10 years. We used it at Atlassian, as a corporate. And then they have the family plan. So I used it at home and then my dad got elderly, so I had a family that I was the administrator for, and then I go into different companies and you bring it with you. And one of the other companies I advise is Productboard. And I became an advisor of Productboard because 1Password's CPO had it in another company, brought it into 1Password, rolled it out company-wide to get alignment and visibility on the product roadmap. So in order to get hypergrowth, you have to have organic, inbound, and viral word of mouth. You can't pay enough to grow at those rates and have a viable company, especially in this economic efficiency market. So has to be an amazing product, has to have some viral activity. So we just talked about Miro or Atlassian. You could have an individual person use it and then they say, "Hey, I'm going to present at this meeting with Miro, come join me on my board. I've got these confluence pages we'd set up as a wiki about these engineering topics, and I want your team to collaborate on them." So those natural points where your users are selling to other people is way more efficient than having sales people that have to sell to other people. And then I think the third thing is really riding the lightning, I would call it. So hypergrowth companies go through the stages of growth that would take other companies five years or 10 years. They're going from 10 to 50, they're going from 50 to 100, they're going from 100 to 200, they're jumping. And so they really need to keep hiring 2X and 3X leaders who have seen the next stage of growth. And then the people inside can be homegrown talent, but it's tricky to keep up. So my whole business is based on people who are trying to be homegrown leaders, but don't know what the next stage of growth looked like. And so a lot of hypergrowth companies hire ahead, hire advisors. Leaders need to really think about mentors and friendships of people who know what great looks like at the next scale, because it's going to be here before you know it. And so I would say those things. Amazing product, viral movement, and company that can ride the lightning. I imagine founders listening to this that don't have insane virality or huge word of mouth are like, "Is there no path to being a really successful company?" And then I think about companies that did succeed with other channels, like say paid or SEO. And so I guess the question for you is, do you need to grow in this environment, I guess, primarily through word of mouth, organic reality, growth engines? Or do you still see opportunity for companies to grow other ways, say paid, or SEO, or sales eventually? For sure. All of the things are important. I think what I wanted to say first as you were talking was that it's easy to look at a company after they've been viral and be like, "That's amazing." I would like to start a newsletter. I have. It's carilu.com. Lenny has a newsletter. How can I ever grow like Lenny's virality? But Lenny started with one blog, and then another, and the consistency. And when I look back at Atlassian, people would be like, "It must have been so easy to go from 100 to 500 million." And it never felt easy. It was a slog to do exactly what you're talking about. New features, listen to customers, strong SEO. Actually SEO was the number one marketing motion that we used, and SEM. We spent probably between 15 and 25% of our leads from paid search marketing at the time. Now I have a ton of customers that are pretty deep into account-based marketing. Getting to virality and getting the hypergrowth is not a magic bullet. It's consistency, customer obsession, incremental improvements across all parts of the business. So I think founders just need to double down on having a product that's differentiated and does something that their customers really love. And each incremental step is a step forward.…

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