Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…you first ship, you can speak to those early adopters and you can put it in enough words that they're going to convert. But then the second version of the product, you're getting these later adopters. And you've got to speak in their language. And the third set of adopters who are really laggards, you've got to really speak to them and go through that and it could be totally different. And so this was a very interesting story that it was so emblazoned in my mind. Back in 2001, '2, '3, still when Apple had no presence outside of the US, Apple was really, it was selling in the US, some Canada, and some in Japan, but that was it and that was the max. So we were selling iPods into those areas. And so we had the early adapter, and then we had some other language. And then by the third, fourth version of iPod, we had some really refined language for those late adopters. So then we said, "We're going to go back and get a push into Europe." Because iPod hadn't taken off in Europe, so we're going to push iPod into Europe. And so we're on, I think the fourth generation or something like that. And so what did we do in Europe? We ran the same marketing as we were doing in the US in Europe. And the thing is it didn't resonate with the early adopters. It didn't resonate with the later adopters because we didn't have the same messages. We were going for a different set of people and we're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sales aren't working. We got to change the marketing. We got to meet those Europeans where they're at, because they're slower to adopt technology. Versus it starts with the coast and goes inward in the US. And so we're like, "Oh, we got to change things up." And so sometimes it's when you get to new areas, you have to rethink your marketing for that area and remember to meet them where they're at and where if it doesn't have an installed base for word of mouth, you're going to have to get that word of mouth started to work with those people to get that going. Now it's different with all software products and all these things and many products can go global right away, but marketing, you still got to tell a story. So it just reminds me that even though we've maybe compressed the time for some pieces of the adoption puzzle, because we can distribute faster, doesn't mean the awareness can get accelerated. And that we can get people to intelligently understand with this product faster if we just say the words of somebody who might have known about the product for three years. I got to ask about maybe the most famous, I don't know, tagline of all time when a product was launched, "1,000 songs in your pocket. " Songs in your pocket.…

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