Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I think it does, and it also cannot be an excuse for rigor around building well and being precise in what customers need, but overall, if you can be a results-oriented organization that just wants to do the right thing and move with urgency, then in my opinion, that's the way that you can have the most impact. Cool. Okay. I didn't expect to spend that much time on that question, but there's so much there. That was really interesting. What I want to spend the bulk of our time on is onboarding. Something that I found myself, and I think you agree with a lot of this but I'll confirm, is that I've done a lot of research into the growth stories of the most successful startups, and what I find, one, is that retention ends up being the thing you got to crack. If you can't crack retention, nothing else matters. And then, two, more interestingly, onboarding ends up being one of the biggest levers to increasing retention which basically A then B equal C, onboarding ends up being one of the biggest areas of opportunity for growth teams both early on and late stage. And so, I guess the first question, would you agree with that general sentiment that onboarding is this huge opportunity and often undervalued? Yes, I definitely agree. It depends of course on the shape of business. Not every business should prioritize onboarding first, but if you have some sort of self-serve element of your product, if someone can give your product a try, maybe you have a playground or a sandbox demo, if there's a premium element to your pricing scheme, if you maybe offer things totally for free and don't even have monetization yet, onboarding is that first really important choke point that from which downstream of onboarding so many important metrics and results flow for the business, from converting someone to a paid customer to closing a deal to growing, how many people in an organization are using your product. So, all of that really comes back to onboarding and if you can get that right, lots of good things will follow.…

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