Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Correct. And the other thing is people say, "Oh, it's really expensive and it takes an amount of time." As compared to what? You've lived a lot of your life in the product world, yes? As have I. Well, if you ask smart VCs, if you ask Brian Roberts at Venrock, the number one healthcare tech investor in the world, I believe he says it's eight to 10 years for a product to really have some maturity and be really stable. And I don't know whether he's right or not, but he's a super smart guy. We know how long does it take to create a legendary culture, how long does it take to get a legendary innovative business model to really hum. "Ah, it's mainly hard." Well, so is building a product, so is building a company, so is raising VC, so is doing sales, so is doing marketing, so is doing HR. If you want to be easy, go work at the fucking DMV. That's point A. Point B is the reality, Lenny, when you look at it, the vast majority of innovation comes from startups. People say, "Only big companies can do this." Listen, my collaborator partner Eddie Yoon, is the Obiwan Kenobi of category design in the Global 2000 Arena and particularly on the consumer side. And he will tell you that most of these major companies... And he's worked for, you name a big food company, you name a big beverage company, he's worked for many of them. They fail miserably. The reality is six people with a small investment from a rich uncle can stand something up that has the potential to be worth $3 trillion dollars. That's what Apple is. And I sat there with Don Valentine and asked him about why he signed the check to Steve and Steve, and he said it was the stupidest use case he ever saw. The use case was a stay-at-home mom, keeping track of her recipes on the Apple personal computer. This is the stupidest use case ever. However, Don could see the potential in the category and in the guy's willingness to go get after it. And so for a VC, if you're going to raise money, the VCs who invest in early stage mass potential companies are the ones who see your different future. Along those lines, I had this note that you had this quote around product market fit and it's this hot take that product market fit is a very dangerous idea. I'd love for you to speak to that, because I think most people are in the opposite camp that it's the only thing that matters. Why do you think it's such a dangerous idea? There's a bunch of these product myths. Product led growth is another one, but let's go to product market fit. And God bless Mark Andreessen, he's the guy that framed it. And Kevin just wrote a really super thoughtful piece on why it's backwards, and I'm happy to send that to you if you want. Kevin Maney, genius. Here's the aha, again, category design principles. Listen to the words, product, market, fit. Product market fit. Now, let's think, what there is for me to do is find a way to fit my product into a market. Pretty simple way to determine or to distill product market fit. And what product market fit has come to mean is, we're a brew pub, you and I want to start a craft beer place like everybody else on the West Coast, and we're going to make a bunch of samples and shit, and we're going to feed those samples to our friends and to our ideal customer profile that I learned from Lenny. And if enough people amongst my friend group and my ideal customer group say, "That's a yummy IPA, I like it," then we're going to build it. And then if people start buying that IPA, we have, and these are the words people use, "achieved product market fit." Okay, well, Threads achieved product market fit faster than any product in the history of the world. Here's the aha, categories make products not the other way around. What you want is you want to design a market category for your product, not fit your product into a market category. And the problem is, our industry, like many others, but the tech industry, is full of product bigots, because they really, really, really, really, really believe, like they believe in the availability of oxygen, the best product wins. They really believe it. And they believe what marketing's job is, "Could you put a demo on our website and get a demo? Can we get a viral video that's a demo? Because once people see how much better, faster, cheaper, smaller, bigger, whatever our thing is, they're going to buy it," and they don't. What they buy is a new insight around a problem/opportunity that requires a different solution. That's what they buy. Here's another simple example. This is the one I hear right now a lot, "What we need now the story, we need a story brand. The number one thing you can do in marketing as a startup founder is to share your startup founder journey. Share your journey." This is all the shit we're hearing. We've been hearing this for a while. Well, guess what? No one gives a fuck about your journey. They really don't. You know what they care about? Themselves. Their problems, their needs, their opportunities. For our book, Snow Leopard, we did the first ever comprehensive data science research ever done using Nielsen data to study nonfiction books. And we know that because what Nielsen told us, and we had to sign an NDA that would choke a horse in terms of what we can say and can't say about the data.…

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