Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…My joke when I give talks is, "Only 20% of you are going to do this when I give a talk on it, and so I'm not even going to talk deeply on it. You 20%, come talk to me, I've got a whole framework for you," that type of a thing because I think people just nod their heads and they tweet it, and they just don't end up doing it. Status quo is hard to overcome sometimes. We're onto our eighth topic, we've got three to go, and it's on competitive intelligence. And this touches on a really interesting part of your background that I don't know a lot of people know. Yeah. So my background, I started my career... I worked in US Intelligence, I worked for NSA. And I was just a entry level intel analyst, basically, I was only there for just over a year. And what was interesting is you get taught first principles thinking in so many different ways because you're solving essentially puzzles every day. Now those puzzles are finding a bad guy or a gal or finding this piece of information. Those are all the puzzles, but you have to think through how to figure this out. And a lot of those puzzles involve, "You have these number of entities, how are they going to react?" And you're trying to predict how they're going to react, and you're also trying to help figure out how you're going to react or act in the context of them, so like node analysis, basically. And what's interesting from a startup or a business perspective is I think that don't focus on your competitors is terrible advice. It's amazing advice for product teams. When you have a competitive intelligence program or you have competitive intel, I try never to share that with product ever because products should just focus on the customer, they should not give two craps what's going on with competitor A or competitor B. But as an overall missive, don't focus on your competitors is terrible advice. And if I'm being charitable, it's just outdated because some fun facts, and I alluded to some of them before, over the past decade, if you're building in tech, particularly in SaaS or subscriptions, you now have 16 times the number of competitors if you started a business today, than if you did 10 years ago, and this is because everyone and their mother can spin up a website, a server, they can drive traffic to that site. So there's just a bunch of stuff in the market. And then because of all that stuff, all these marketing channels are getting denser and denser. CAC and B2B is up about 110% over the past 10 years. Consumer, it's up 145%. If you're selling sales and marketing software, it's up 220% because there's just so much sales and marketing software doing sales and marketing things in the market. And so the other reason for this is we haven't had a brand new marketing channel since 2015, and that was Snapchat. We have TikTok, but TBD, depending on how you think about it. But we're going from brand new marketing and advertising innovation every quarter to basically every five years. My point is, if you are not in a Blue Ocean, you're not in the Peter Teal, go to a market of one, you're not in those types of things, which is most of us, and even some of us who think we're in those things, we're actually not, you do have to focus on your competitors on some level. And the levels I particularly think are a bare minimum, just knowing who they are, having a strategy. So for ProfitWell we never had comparison pages because we very quickly went from a challenger in this very competitive market to the leader in the market.…

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