Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…An obsession for the product. Again, sounds obvious but isn't. When we look back to products that existed before the internet, before the app store, you built this thing, you made it, and then you tried to convince people to buy it. That was it. So look, I made a chair, this is a beautiful chair. And then you spend all this money trying to get it out into the world, and people buy the chair. And you hire all these salespeople, and you hire an amazing marketing agency, and you try to sell the chair. It's no longer at all that because products are constantly in motion and evolving. And unless you're able to own that data and understand what it can tell you, you're never going to win. So I hear a lot of people come to me and say, "Gina, Gina, we built Duolingo for this." And I'm like, "Okay, cool." And then they show it to me, and it looks exactly like Duolingo. And I'm like, "Okay, cool." And then I'm like, "How did you get to this design?" They're like, "Oh yeah, we used Duolingo." So I'm like, "Great." But then as I started talking to them, I understand they don't have the engineers and PMs there looking at Mixpanel or whatever it is that they're using every day, understanding how every single change is leading to other changes that enables them to ask the questions and come up with the hypotheses that allow them to get to the next step. So it's almost like they just copy-pasted something. You know how I think of that? It's like those students who are able to copy the best student's answer on the math test, and then they get frustrated that they didn't get an A because the work wasn't there, but they copied the answer. But if you don't know how to do the work, you get another math question and you're not going to get it right. And so that I think still misses, and I would venture to say most early stage tech startups out there. It's certainly the case in Latin America, where people think they can outsource the code or outsource the growth, and they're not just looking like hawks at the quality of the data and statistical significance and running hypotheses and questioning them. And that rigor is a culture at Duolingo that was there from day one before me and continues to be there today. Amazing. So I think if a listener is trying to build a subscription consumer app, I would suggest just rewind and listen to that again. I think there's so much gold there. And in my experience, I get a lot of decks because I do a bunch of angel investing. I just discount consumer subscription apps because they never work, except when they do once in a while. And so my advice is if you're building something in this space, just listen to exactly what you just said. There's a lot of important stuff, and actually internalize it. Stay really lean, stay really focused, obsessed with retention, obsessed with making sure the product is solving the problem you're going after. I'm so glad that you agree, Lenny. I really admire you. So it makes me very happy.…

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