Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I guess me, too. I was an operator. I was a consultant. Well, I was an employee. I was a consultant. Then I was an operator, which is a fancy way to say employee at a startup. And then now I'm a founder and a VC and an angel and whatever this is.. Awesome. Awesome. So I think that's a really important takeaways. Just there's a lot of time to do stuff and don't stress if things aren't moving as fast as you want. I'm curious, what's a mess-up or a big mistake maybe that you made or your teammate that was like, "Oh wow, that was a big waste of time." Yeah, look, a lot of things didn't work out. More than 50% of our A/B tests didn't work out. We made bets that didn't make sense. I will say though, that in the spirit of A and B sides, I, and I think in general, we are really good at forgetting the B stuff. I talk so much about all the stuff that worked that it's hard to remember all of those moments that didn't actually work. And the thing that I tend to talk about, which is this mistake that we made as the growth team is almost like one of those, when you get asked in an interview, what's your biggest weakness, and you're like, "I'm a perfectionist." It's like one of those things that actually makes you sound good because it's the story about how my team really wanted to implement badges. We spent a lot of time playing all the games that were popular at the time, trying to understand how those gamification growth hacks that we could find in those apps would potentially overlay onto Duolingo and how we would do that. And badges was just pervasive in all of the top games. And so it seemed like a no-brainer, but since we ranked all of our experiments in terms of ROI and return being like how many users we think we're going to get from this DAUs, and time investments, it never made sense to focus on this because we thought that the time sink would be too high. So I actually ended up not letting the team run this experiment for six months so that we focused on lower hanging fruit. So that's a mistake on my end. Then we decided to run this experiment in the most lean way possible. We're like, "You know what? There's MVEs. There's minimum viable experiments. We don't have to run a whole badges thing. We can just do something more simple and actually see if that leads to growth in an interesting way, and then we'll know." And we ran this very simple experiment that was like, you signed up and then you get a badge. And it was like this girl with a balloon. I don't know, she was happy or whatever. And of course in retrospect, it led to no results, because no one is proud of signing up. It's not an exciting moment, and you don't even have badges to collect. You can't show it to other people. None of the things that make badges compelling were there, but we were like, "Okay, well, we tested it didn't work." And then we moved on. So we moved on for another, I don't know, eight months and we didn't look back. And then when we did look back, first of all at that point we discovered that we hadn't been dogfooding, which also was embarrassing. Looking back, we hadn't been dogfooding in the growth team. We just come up with hypotheses. We were super careful about prioritizing them and making sure that we were doing the best possible write ups and all these things. But the dogfooding piece, I didn't come from a product background. I was a marketer and I didn't really understand the term dogfooding, but when we thought, we had a conversation, we were like, "You know what?…

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