Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…It was really hard for us to pivot to mobile. I think that was one of the most challenging things for me personally because it was a completely different paradigm. I actually have been building web apps since I was 12 years old. I built a full e-commerce business selling pirated games on the web, and I knew everything about growing a website. As we pivoted to mobile, I had to recalibrate my whole brain on how to do that. Mobile apps have such a low margin for error when it comes to designing them. Because I have this dogmatic view that every tap on a mobile app is a miracle for you as a product developer because users will turn and bounce to their next app very quickly. If you actually sit behind someone and watch them use their phone, they actually switch between apps at a pretty high frequency. Every tap that you get, every single one is so scarce that you should be optimizing everything. I had to change my whole brain when we started pivoting to mobile and building these mobile apps, and it took a lot of failures. 14 of the apps that we launched were basically duds, and then we started fixating on teens and building apps for them. Eventually, we figured out an interesting heuristic for identifying consumer product opportunities that ultimately led us to tbh. You spent four or five years trying a bunch of different ideas. I think people see this headline and we'll get into tbh of just like nine weeks after launch sells for $30 million to Facebook and everyone's like, "Oh, okay, that's amazing. I want that for my life." Nobody knows there's this four or five years of trying, you said 15 different apps before you got there, learning the things that actually work and don't work. We built 15 apps over the course of that pivot to consumer, and we built apps for every single app, map apps, chat apps, to-do lists. We just built every type of consumer app you could possibly think of. Also, we built for every audience too. We built for college students, we built for post-college. It was always very difficult to get the flywheel spinning for anyone after like 22 years old. That was the cutoff of when people just give up on adopting new products. It took us a few years to really internalize that, a lot of failures to realize no one needs another app after that age.…

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