Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…Most likely, you'll never get network effects. There's actually an interesting study many years ago that some academics in Spain did, I think it was in Spain, and they looked at how many people you text per year of your life, and it goes up very quickly from 14 to 18. It peaks around 21, so it's growing. The number of people you text is growing up until about 21, and then it just falls, it collapses, and then it comes back up at end of life. There's a few reasons all this happens, but basically, once you exit college, you reduce the number of contacts, your daily contacts. Once you get married, it's even fewer. Then as you get older and your kids start having kids and you become a grandparent, you start texting again more or you join a retirement home. If you're building a product with network effects that's a communication tool, you want to be on that upward curve of adding connections to your social graph because then the urgency to connect is higher. If you really want to actually innovate at the edges of communication products, you really have to target that cohort that has the highest urgency to communicate, and that's teens. I love that you found these things out, not through just research and not through just thinking, it was through actual trying things over and over and over and trying different audiences, trying different experiences. A lot of people see your advice and they're like, "How does he know?" It's just you've done all these things yourself. You've seen them, you're sitting there watching teens use these apps. I think very few people actually do that, and they just come up with these theories that aren't based in empirical evidence. We got pretty good at building these apps. I think our first mobile app took us about a year, and then our last one took us about two weeks. We also got very good at testing apps. The most important thing that I often instruct teams to do is to develop a reproducible testing process, and that will actually influence the probability of your success more than anything. It's so unpredictable whether a consumer product idea will work. If you actually focus more on your process for taking many shots at bat, that's what actually reduces the risk more than anything. We figured out ways to seed apps into schools. We also, during the course of that company, we figured out how to seed it into affinity groups, hobbyists, things like that. We were on app number 15, a lot of failures during the course of this company, and I remember a lot of our team members were like, "I kind of want to leave. I think this is it for me." One of our key team members actually put in their two weeks' notice. The day before we launched our final app, we were getting kind of low on money. I was tired. I called our lawyer to ask, how do you dissolve a company? I messaged a few mentors saying like, one people that have been through it, and I said, "What are the steps to do this?" Then I had a conversation on the way out with that team member that wanted to leave, and I said, "I understand, but what if the app actually starts charting on the App Store?" He said, "What are the chances of that? You know that's not going to happen." I said, "Sure, okay." We launched this app and it was a polling app, tbh, and it immediately took off in the school that we seeded it into, in Georgia. We picked the one school that had the earliest start date in the United States because we needed to launch as soon as possible, given the state of the company. I think it spread to 40% of the school downloaded it in the first 24 hours and it rapidly spread to the neighboring schools. Suddenly, I was like, "Oh, we might have something here." Servers started crashing and watching it climb the charts. I looked at our numbers and I'm like, "We will be number one in the United States in six days." Then I looked at our Amazon bill and it was like 120,000. I looked at our bank account, it said 150,000. I'm like, "Okay, these two numbers don't really..." I quickly had to put together a funding round and I told my team, "Can you guys just pause for two months and just really focus on this? I think I could probably sell this thing." It turned into a pretty competitive bidding process, actually. There was a really, really great moment where there was one of the acquirers, or one of the bidders was based in LA, had told me to fly down, and they told me to fly down that day. I got on a plane, went to the airport without a ticket, showed up. When we were rolling out this app, we were doing a state-by-state rollout strategy where every state was geo-fenced. We hadn't launched California until that morning.…

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