Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Last question, I promise, along these lines. Say someone is listening and they're like, "Okay. Man, I'm getting 10%, I'm getting 15%. I don't know what to do to increase my product-market fit. " You should have just a strategy of just dig into the people that are very disappointed and see what they have to say. But any other advice/what do you find often works in helping people move from, say, 10% to 40%? Yeah, so one of the things that's cool about almost open-sourcing the survey approach is, again, watching how Nubank has evolved their usage. But one of the other companies that I think used it in an interesting way is Superhuman. And I would say that they basically ended up probably putting a lot more momentum behind the question than it had even before. They posted something about how they did it on First Round Capital's blog. And what I have always said, and again, it's me coming at it from probably initially a marketing background, which is I'm taking the product as a fixed thing, and how do I actually figure out how to market and grow this product? And product changes are going to take a long time, and so what are the variables that I can control with a marketing background? So one of the things I've always said is just ignore the people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. They're telling you it's a nice to have. They're as good as gone, so just ignore those guys. I'll put one piece in the middle there before I say what Superhuman did. The reason that I say ignore those guys is that if you start paying attention to what you somewhat disappointed users are telling you, and then you start tweaking onboarding and product based on their feedback, maybe you're going to dilute it for your must-have users. And ultimately, it becomes kind of good for everyone but not great for anyone. And so that was my fear of trying to read too much into the users who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. But the Superhuman guys actually found, I think, a good way around that where they said, "Okay, what is the benefit that my must-have users are focused on? And then of the users who say they'd be somewhat disappointed, so the nice-to-have users, of those users who are also focused on that benefit, what do they need in the product for it then to become a must-have for them?" And so they're staying true to that core benefit, but they're trying to essentially take those on-the-fence users and moving them up. And so I think their way of approaching that addressed what my concern was, which is are we going to break it for the must-have users?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.