Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…So examples, I think early HubSpot sales days, the renewal figures on our early paid product were only okay. And I think the team we initially wanted to work on, well, what feature could we add to all of these things? But when we actually went into customer combos, what we found was that a lot of the people that the sales team were selling to ended up being either not the persona that we ended up building for or they were selling a use case that we actually hadn't designed for. And that's because look, salespeople are there, they're cranking, they're just trying to close deals. Which is like that's what their role there is for. And so at some point we had to redesign the incentives for the sales team. I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I think we did something as drastic at some point as saying, hey, if you sell this type of persona or this type of company, you will not get comped on it. And that immediately changed behavior and we started selling the right. So that was an example where engagement and retention problems were created up at the top of the funnel. Similarly, I think in early Reforge days where we had a lot more in-person collaborative dynamics as part of our programs, we had this application process. And we learned over time that there were different behaviors and mindsets of coming ... or desires for what somebody wanted out of a program that actually created those peer-to-peer compelling experiences. And so sometimes people wanted to come into the program and all they wanted to do was network with peers and they didn't want to engage with the content at all. And then sometimes we had the opposite and they just wanted to be on their own little solo journey and not engage in stuff. And so over time, we iterated on that and we started to learn, what are the right questions to ask in order to create this better down funnel experience? Now over time, we've evolved the programs as COVID hit and we got rid of the in-person component. And all of these other changes that rendered those lessons not relevant in today's environment. But those are two quick examples that I can think of off the top of my head. We're now in a place where we've started layering on marketplaces to Reforge, and so this system level thinking is coming up more and more daily. Because as you know, every conversation we have about demand that we end up talking about supply. And every conversation we end up talking about supply, we end up talking about demand because that's just how it works. Good old marketplaces. I think just that lesson alone is really powerful. It's just how much the people you bring in impact every other metric and how everything looks. Like a story I often here is just paid users are just innately ... everything's going to be worse, basically. Retention's going to be worse, people that you're driving through Facebook and Google Ads and you just cut that out. And like, wow, retention went up. Wow, look at us go. Yeah. I mean, I think we both mentioned it in here, but we have this concept in Reforge that we teach around calling it good friction. And I think a lot of people are taught to always reduce, reduce, reduce friction. But actually oftentimes, the right thing to do is to add the right amount of friction to create those experiences and those right engagement metrics down funnel. It's all the incentives internally are not aligned to doing that. Because almost every time you add good friction in a product, in the very short window it's like conversion will go down and stuff, and you have to wait for those down funnel things to propagate. But people love quick wins. People love looking at those short-term metric boosts and are often rewarded and applauded for it. And so I think those types of things are actually hard to implement and even advocate for inside of organizations and products. And I think that's why you tend to see these things get chipped away at over time.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.