Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, sure. Recommendations specifically now have driven in the millions of new subscriptions for writers across the board, across I think like tens of thousands of unique writers that have received subscriptions from the recommendations feature. Of course, recommendations in particular are still just one component in this broader basket of network driven discovery. I think we recently shared the stat, more than one in three new subscriptions across Substack are coming from the Substack network and around one in 10 paid subscriptions now too. But these numbers are just, as you can imagine, growing up and to the right, getting stronger every day, and I think we'll have some more interesting stats to share on that soon. Awesome. One thing I wanted to acknowledge, I think some people worry about this feature that it drives lower intent users. I find that not to be true. They're definitely lower intent, but it's not meaningfully and significantly. The fact that 70% of my user growth comes from this feature and my open rates have only come down a little bit, it says a lot about it. It's like useful really in tenfold people as much as it can be from someone that hasn't actually been planning to subscribe and just recently found out about it. It's really impressive how high intent they are all things considered. You bring up a point too that leads into some of the next things we're thinking about here, which is that right now most of the subscriptions that come from recommendations are coming from one particular flow in the product, which is when someone subscribes to someone else on Substack, they will then see a recommendation for Lenny. It's being serviced to people at a moment where not only are they just hearing about you for the first time, but they might just be hearing about the recommending writer for the first time too. They are new subscribers. They don't have this long standing trusted relationship built up yet. Of course, you have people now who've been subscribing to you for years and who trust you greatly and would probably take your recommendation very seriously, but the people that you're recommending are only getting these subscribers at the first moment that someone finds out about Lenny in many cases. A big part of the next step of this product now is thinking about recommendations less as a step of the flow and more like a really interesting social graph that is being built of goodwill and of influence. You now recommend a bunch of other writers. There's much more that could be done in the network than just show some of those writers in the subscribe flow of lennysnewsletter.com. There's a lot more we could do there. I'm curious if you have any ideas, but we've got a bunch of ideas that we're cooking up that I think will not only drive more subscriptions, but also probably higher intent ones as well, because these are going to be people that might already have been reading you for years who never right now would know who you're recommending.…

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