Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. And again, comparing it to beer or cars, beer goes back to pre-civilization. Cars were obviously [inaudible 01:10:38], but at some point you had to convince people why they would want a car instead of a horse. For your new AI-based recruiting tool or your calendar app or whatever, there's some reason why you think that people should use yours instead of the thing that they're using now, which might be a wholesale one-for- one replacement, or more often is a change in the way that you're working that has a bunch of other adjacencies and you want to expand into these other categories. You're not just responsible for creating the product, but also, to a certain degree, creating the market. There's this book, Positioning, which is an absolute classic. It's very short. I would recommend everyone read it, where the point of it is, from my perspective, it's almost impossible to create a new idea in someone's head. It's much easier to take a couple of existing ideas and put them together. So it's much easier to say it's like Jaws meets Star Wars, or it's Uber for Pets or something like that, than to come up with an actual new idea. But you have to do that because if your thing is different in any significant way from the alternatives, you're not just creating the product. You're creating the market. They're really kind of one and the same. The reason I wanted to touch on it is I think still people continue to not listen to this advice and continue to over-invest in more features, more products, things like that. Just the specific example of, "We don't sell saddles here," just to quickly communicate this to folks, and correct me if I'm missing anything, is just instead of, "Hey, look at this amazing saddle we've bought," which you want to communicate as, "Here, go horseback riding. Look at this incredible experience you can have." And then they decide, "Oh, shit. I need to go buy a saddle to do that." Yeah. And 100%, that aspect of it is not original because I think that's something that marketers have done for a long time, certainly in the marcom and advertising. If you want to sell Harley-Davidson's, there are people who are going to geek out on the engines and stuff like that and the quality of the leather and stuff like that. But when you're selling the motorcycle, you're selling the open road and freedom and the wind in your hair. And if you're Lululemon, you are obviously selling yoga pants, but you're also selling health and aspiration and being the best version of yourself and a bunch of other stuff. Oh my God, I forgot the classic version of it.…

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