Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Thanks, man. I appreciate that. And it's actually cool because I think for us, because the fact that product teams don't really think about this stuff, we stumbled into this whole thesis that could be a whole episode, which is all the product features are done for you. So what I mean by that is, you noticed this, but when you log in and set this up, you're not writing emails, you're not setting up the flows. And the reason is because we have all this data from $30 billion in ARR flowing through our metrics product that we can study and understand what works and what doesn't. And that kind of stumbling that is useful for folks is what we discovered is this anti-active usage type product, it retains itself at a really, really high rate because people are just getting the value and they don't have to use it. And so what we found is a little bonus thing on retention. When we look at churn rates across different types of products, those products that are workflow products you use every single day or mostly every single day, or those products you don't have to log into but you still get the value, that's where the lowest churn rates are, the highest retention. Anything in the middle, it's like death. And this is why ProfitWell metrics ended up being free because we were just like, "It's terrible to build a metrics and analytics product. It's so hard because people just don't appreciate how much work goes into it, therefore they don't retain at a high rate, they're not willing to pay that much," et cetera. I think that alone is a really interesting story, and I don't know if we should get too deep, but just to highlight what you just said, so many startups build an analytics product that it's just a better way to measure and track all the stuff that's going on. And what you've found is you won't make money doing that, people don't want to pay for a SaaS analytics tool. You have two options. You go up market and you pretty much become a data product with a UI or you go super niche. And even super niche, it's super hard and it's just because, I don't know, everyone's trying to kill a spreadsheet, and it's like, "You're not going to kill a spreadsheet." All real analysts will do everything in a spreadsheet. So for us it was we want to give you a clean UI and then we want to help you get this data into spreadsheets or email or whatever you're using for your databases, things like that.…

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