Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…But the weird thing is it's working backwards. See, the thing saying working backwards, would a movie be created that way? Is it called working backwards when you say, "I'm going to make a script, and I'm making the treatment, and I'm going to really know what it is. I know what my characters are and how I do character development." Is that really working backwards? It sounds like it's backwards. It's, no, that's the way you do it. It's just because it's so technology led and technologist, and this is what I thought when I was 20, I was like, "Yeah, now it sounds backwards." It's actually, no, that's actually insane. It's not working backwards. It's just an insane way of working. Come on, let's really think through this. It says so much that you as one of the, I don't know, most successful insightful builders are so into marketing. I think that's a really important takeaway for people, just how obsessed you are with that piece of building that I think a lot of builders don't think about at all. Well, when you live in that world and you live in the customer... Because you're coming from a customer point of view. So you have to see the lens. And the customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing and sales. And so you have to be in their shoes and you go, "Okay, when I do the press release, I can only have three or four key features." After that, it becomes gobbledygook for a customer. So you're like, "Okay, what are those three or four things? Okay, what is that? That's what we're going to focus on." And so no, we're not going to add five more features. That's not going to make it sell better. Or, "Oh no, we're going to cut these two features and ship it." It's like, "Well, wait a second, we cut out two of our three key tentpole features. How are we going to sell that anymore?" So it's a holistic design. It's not [inaudible 00:46:41]. Because we think the technology's in service of the customer, not we're going to jam the technology down the customer's throat, and they're going to figure out how to use it. There's too much noise that you've got to make it frictionless, and you got to fit it in their world and see from their point of view go, "Oh, that's why I need it. " General Magic was the perfect story for that. I don't know, your viewers should definitely watch the movie General Magic because-…

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