Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, we see this as a great tool for product people. It's a way to give you a structure for leading your team through those decisions. And a way to give all the folks on a team, including the person who's the product leader. But the person who's the engineering leader, the person who's the marketing leader, sales leader, the design leaders, the exact right opportunity to contribute and participate in forming the strategy. The exact right opportunity as we get into design sprints, following the foundation sprints, to then make it real. And turn that idea, that hypothesis about what might work into hopefully evidence that it does work. I feel like it's actually more helpful to engineers, like non-product people, because I think a PM my brain would be like, I want to do this intuitively. Whether they do it right or not. I think it's other functions almost they're like, no, let's just jump straight to design, straight to prototyping. Let me ask you ... while we're on this tangent, we're on this wild tangent out of this process, but want to ... this question has been in my mind. Because I recently had a founder on the podcast, Maor, who built this company called Base44. He built it, it sold in six months for $80 million. And this journey of that is he just had a problem he wanted to solve for himself, for his girlfriend, for a scouts program. He built it, people started using it, and he kind of evolved it from there. And obviously he didn't go through a process like this. Thoughts on just like, is it okay to just do that? When should someone think about, "Okay, I should actually set aside time to do a Foundation Sprint." Versus, I'm just motivated to solve a problem for my friends. I'm just going to build it, evolve it, iterate with them, and kind of go from there. One of the observations from our hundreds of experiences working alongside founders in the early days of their projects and watching them make decisions and watching them try things and succeed or fail, is that there are so many founders who are incredibly bright, incredibly capable. They have great insights about the market, about an opportunity. And yet, their startup does not work out. And there's a problem with selection bias that we hear from the folks who they were brilliant, they checked all those boxes I just described. They saw a great opportunity, they were smart, they executed well, they had courage and conviction, and they did it and it worked out, and it was a tremendous success. And I think that the danger in thinking like, "Well, they didn't follow a process, so I don't need to." And that may be true and maybe you don't need it. But what we believe is you have a better ... this just increases your odds. This is a chance to get more clear on, is this a good opportunity? To get more clear on, will the thing I build click with customers? And if you've already figured out that no, this thing's ... my product has taken off, my product is working. We've actually had founders in labs who they started off character labs and they said, "I started selling this thing and it's already taking off. I want to stop running experiments." And we're like, "Yeah, stop running experiments." You don't need to do this if you've got product market fit, if you've got evidence that this thing is clicking and you have conviction, run with it. But if you're not there, this is a great path to get you going. And if you're not sure if the thing you're going to build is going to turn into that $80 million exit in six months, we believe this is a good chance to improve your odds.…

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