Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. And even distribution, I'm still learning that. Even distribution nowadays it's very different and also in favor of the solo, not necessarily the solo, but it's like not necessarily that you're going to pull a lot of money on paid campaigns like a Base44 goal with close to zero marketing budget. I spent like $2,000 on an influencer post that didn't really bring anything, and then tried paid for a couple of thousands of bucks, didn't really work. And so everything was organically and built in public, and so even distribution is very different, but yeah, if you have an interesting take on end domain. Base44's first user was one of my best friends, like we grew up together, and up to few months ago, he was a restaurant manager. And then he left and started like a SaaS company for managing invoices for restaurants. And so this is a guy that has both distribution, obviously this is very local like software and company, but has distributions, like has those connections, but has a very deep domain knowledge. And now that the technical, he has no... like human coding are very different in very different places. And so I think if like domain knowledge become or domain expertise and some, again, interesting take on a domain or a product or a category becomes like a key thing, and then distribution, yeah, that's a hard one to get, but also all that's changing a lot. Yeah, and I love that you did it with no funding. The other thought here, as you're talking, is it feels like you could have kept doing this and made money and lived a great life, but there's this question of how ambitious do you want to be? I've gone through this myself where I was like, "Oh, this newsletter is I'm making a living off this writing one email a week. I could live really well just doing this." But then I'm like, "Oh, why not do a podcast? Why not do another podcast? Why not do some other stuff?" And the reason I do that is it just like it's boring to do something the same way forever, and there's this opportunity that's out there. I'm like, "I should do that." And I feel like some people are, "I just don't need that. I'm good. I'm going to live in, I don't know, Fiji and just code it, make 100, 300, 500K a year from this thing. " But I feel like folks like you, there's more ambition, and one way is raise a bunch of money and then they sell to a company that has a platform that you can build on. Yeah, I empathize with this a lot, but the funny thing is that Base44, for the first time in my life, was not trying to build the biggest thing ever. So I remember when I started Explorium, my previous company, I was so hung up on like, "Let's raise the most amount of money in the least amount of time." I remember that I showed like, now I looked, kept looking like, "Hey, Explorium raised $100 million before Snowflake. This is insane. This is amazing," and so on. And I did that for seven years, and I think Base44 is the first time, it's like I stopped and said, "You know what? I just want to go back to do what I really love, which is just building a product." I don't care like if it wins the category or not. I don't care if it's going to become really big or not. I remember when me and my girlfriend got back from like the trip to Asia, and we were on the plane, I told her, "Hey, you know what? If we get to 1.5 million," I don't remember why I said exactly this number, like, "If we get to $1.5 million in ARR till the end of 2025, we're going to buy a nice car." And we got there in like four weeks. And so it was the first time of like saying, "Let's not try and build the biggest thing. Let's just do something I really like, and let's just build a product that I'm going to enjoy building." But then at some point, it got to be very, very successful, and I think it comes with like once you're seeing success and you're seeing like true positive impact on people, then you're saying, "Okay, you know what? Let's go for the, like, let's play the big league, and try to scale it."…

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