Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That's true, yeah. So Ramp was the first one to be crowned the fastest growing, and then we took that crown from them. So I think we're both right, in that at a certain point in time we've each been the fastest growing. But they're amazing. What I want to start with is something that I heard about you, which is that you specialize in cheaper growth channels, and that's actually the reason that Deel ended up hiring you, is they wanted to find ways to grow cheaply. And so a couple of questions. One is just, what did you find worked really well from that perspective at Deel? And then two, what are today's maybe cheaper growth channels that you think people are under investing in? Whatever you're willing to share there, I don't know if you want to give away all your secrets. I'm happy to give away all and everything. So I think before we dive into the list of cheap channels, which I will get to, it's very important to notice, especially in the B2B world, most of the businesses are started because there's an active problem. And so when you go out to the market and try to answer people's questions, people don't want to be sold to, they want their problem solved. So those cheaper channels are often places where people are just trying to get an answer to their question. So whether that be search engine optimization through the articles that you write for people, looking onto Reddit where people are asking these questions in communities, forming partnerships with other groups that are trying to answer these questions, existing communities where other business leaders are connecting with each other and looking at their peers to find answers to shared problems that they're having, or places like Quora. That's, when you think about cheap channels, that's a really good place to start, is just add value to people, answer their questions. And when you answer their questions and present your solution, if it's a fit to what they're looking for, that ends up being a cheap channel for you. You don't necessarily have to advertise, when you go to Reddit and you set up those keywords to be tracking when people ask certain questions, you're not paying any money to do that. You're just seeing, oh, someone has this question, I have the answer to that, here you go. And connecting with them, it takes time. But early on, those were a lot of the things that we invested in. And I think a lot of people jump that because they think, "Oh, it's one person here, two people there." But when you start helping people, that combined with word of mouth, and guess what, these are digital places, you provide one answer and your answer lives out there for other people to repeatedly refine. As long as we're not talking about a closed Slack community, maybe a conversation happening in DMs. So when I think about cheap channels, I think about where are people asking the questions, that might be Google or that might be Reddit or any other channel, and providing them the answers, so they know that your solution exists.…

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