Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Got it. And then on that concept of delight, I've always wanted to ask you this question. I've never had a chance for B2B. Do you find this is also something companies should really prioritize and do because not a lot of B2B products are delightful and a lot of them are still really successful? How do you think about that kind of framework in B2B? Okay, for first, I think that most or all of the frameworks I use work for both consumer and B2B. Personally, I've spent my whole career on consumer. The thing about consumer is you're sort of trying to catch lightning in a bottle, right? Where enterprise, you can actually walk into it a little bit more thoughtfully. You can always find your first customers, etc., Anyways, I was thinking about what's different. So for instance, one of the hard to copy advantages of B2B is switching costs, right? So I didn't bring that up in the context of Netflix. It's wicked hard to cancel. It's wicked easy to cancel Netflix and restart Disney Plus, whatever you want to do. I was thinking about, I used to complain that the user interface for B2B software was horrible. And it's like, you've got to do better than this. And of course, at Netflix, we prove that a simple, easy experience actually improves retention. So I would advocate, like, this is important. And they would explain to me all the basics. Hey, Gib. Actually, one of the basics surprised me. The people that are using our software are using it 10, 12, 14 hours a day. That's very different from a Netflix experience. And in fact, they want and need to engage in the complexity. There's stuff that they're trying to do that is really complex. You can just think about our use of spreadsheets to build a cash flow statement. I'm highlighting some differences, but the model, I think, is still there. If you're starting a punk B2B SaaS company, I think at the end of the day, you're trying to find something that's 10x better than what's currently out there today. And then over time, your hard to copy advantage, it will be different from Netflix. It'll be different for every startup. But if you can delight your customers in these hard to copy ways, that also builds a business. I mean, the reason you do that, you want to feel like you don't have to compete with peeps. really. Like you don't like it when you're always on guard about what your competitors would do. You sort of want to get to this place where you don't really care. And you're sort of true north is, okay, how can we best serve our customer? And that's what I really love about that particular model. Lenny, I would be very careful about anything I say about enterprise and B2B because I've spent zero hours in this. Okay. Now, half of my audience is in B2B and enterprise, and you hear a lot about the consumerization of enterprise software. And I think that's good. I think that's helpful and important. Awesome. That's a really helpful caveat for folks listening that if you're building a B2B business, maybe don't follow all this advice to the letter. But I imagine there's still a lot of things you can pull out.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.