Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…I've used a lot of different tools. I actually had a survey business that I sold to private equity years ago. It is called Qualaroo. That's an inflow survey tool. I think just using SurveyMonkey with emailed surveys works fine. And for me, it's a lot more of what's pleasant for the customer to fill out and then what's going to give me something where I can work really easily with the data? So at Bounce, for example, they had already intercom in place that had just introduced surveying, but it was a really crappy customer experience, at least at that time. That's been almost a year now or actually a little over a year. And so I'm really sensitive to is it a good survey experience for the consumer itself? But yeah, I don't think I'm stuck to any one platform there. Such an important topic. Just, again, to remind people why this is so important, one of the most common questions founders ask is, "Do I have product-market fit? Have I built something people want?" That's just an endless series of, "I don't know. How do I know? When do I know?" And this is telling you in a really interesting way. So your advice is this is a leading indicator. You don't actually know until people actually start using it and whether they retain and continue using it. Is there just advice on the shift you make from relying on the survey to actually looking at retention cohorts? Is it just once you have enough data, once you have a couple of cohorts, then start looking at that? Forget about the survey? Yeah, but retention cohorts don't give you any of the qualitative insights into the why, so that's why we continue to do the survey. So initially I would say if the survey comes back and it shows whatever your target number is... If you want to be Nubank, it'd be a 50%. Or two of the companies I launched, we launched in Hungary, and I would say it was the opposite end of the spectrum of Brazil, maybe more pessimistic than the average culture. And so maybe 30% is good enough there, but that ultimately, whatever your target is, that you have the signal that says, "Okay, we have enough value here. Let's start working on growing the business." But while you're working on growing the business, I would be paying attention to those retention cohorts. And if you're churning out all the customers who were saying that they'd be very disappointed without the product, then okay, let's retrench and rethink, do we really have product-market fit here and what do we need to do to get it if we don't?…

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