Lenny's Written Position
Gamification mechanics like leaderboards can drive massive retention improvements when they tap into social comparison and competition instincts.
The 'current user retention rate' (CURR) metric — measuring the percentage of current users retained over time — is more actionable than traditional cohort analysis for mature products.
Push notifications should be treated as a product feature, not a marketing channel — optimizing for user value rather than clicks.
Streak mechanics create powerful habit loops, but they need protective features (streak freezes) to prevent user frustration and churn.
Instead of evaluating a startup's current product, look for strong customer pull where users cannot stop talking about the product even when it is early and the market is niche.
Traditional B2B growth channels (inbound, outbound, product virality, events, lifecycle emails) are becoming less effective because AI has made it easy for everyone to produce content and flood channels.
Ecosystem -- leveraging partners, creators, communities, and integrations who already have trust with your audience -- is emerging as the most important growth channel for B2B startups.
A well-designed ecosystem strategy makes every other growth channel more effective by serving as both a distribution path and a source of content.
Every ecosystem partnership must be a win-win-win for you, the partner, and the prospect -- never just one or two out of three.
When starting an ecosystem strategy, pick one partner program that fits your product and audience and prove it works before expanding, rather than launching every kind of partnership at once.
Individual people (employees, customers, partners) perform eight times better than brand accounts on LinkedIn for content engagement.
A startup is a company designed to grow fast -- being newly founded, working on technology, or taking venture funding are not essential; the only essential thing is growth.
Lovable reached $100 million ARR just eight months after launch, making it the fastest-growing company in history — faster than even Cursor.
Bolt grew from 0 to $40 million ARR in five months and is used by 72% of Fortune 500 product teams, differentiating itself by integrating frontier agents like Claude Code rather than relying on homegrown agents.
Figma Slides launched less than a year ago and is already ahead of Apple Keynote and tied with Canva as a most-used presentation software among Lenny's readers.
The only way Lenny's Newsletter has meaningfully grown is through word of mouth, with the sole exception being Substack's recommendation feature which accounts for roughly half of the journey from 500K to 1M subscribers.
The podcast takes less work and generates more revenue than the newsletter, with each podcast episode requiring 3-5 hours versus 10-30 hours per newsletter post.
For creator-driven businesses, prioritizing stamina over virality is essential because one viral post is easy but publishing weekly for five years is what builds a sustainable audience.
Roughly half of Lenny's Newsletter audience are PMs, over a quarter are founders, and the fastest-growing segment is non-PMs including engineers, designers, and growth/marketing professionals.
Adding one-click PayPal and mobile wallet checkout options increased GiveDirectly's online donations by 14%, raising an incremental $1.3 million per year.
Changing email opt-in checkbox copy to be transparent about email frequency and value doubled the subscription rate from 25% to 55%, driving an estimated $400,000 per year in incremental donations.
A polished homepage redesign with an embedded donation form made visitors 35% more likely to donate, with 20% of the lift from the embedded form and 15% from the design improvement.
Setting the default donation frequency to monthly instead of one-time was more effective than using an interruptive modal, because smart defaults work better than adding friction.
Donor-recipient individual matching did not improve conversion or long-term retention despite being a common nonprofit strategy, but matching donors to a specific village had a 58% higher click-through rate at far lower operational cost.
Teams should balance small optimizations with big bets, because low-hanging fruit like checkout improvements can have a bigger payoff than expected while maintaining team morale when bigger experiments fail.
Even top-quartile consumer subscription apps only convert roughly 1 in 20 installs into a paid subscription and lose more than half of annual subscribers after the first year.
The best consumer subscription apps grow by building on a core value promise that drives a compounding Subscription Value Loop across three steps: Value Creation, Value Delivery, and Value Capture.
Pricing and packaging optimizations consistently generate 5% to 15% lift on subscription revenue, yet many startups set prices once and never revisit them for years.
More than 75% of trial starts occur on the same day a user installs an app, often in the first few minutes, making speed-to-value in onboarding critical for conversion.
Web conversion flows can boost subscriber LTV by 30% to 50% by avoiding app store fees and reducing involuntary churn from payment failures.
Twenty to forty percent of churn in consumer subscription businesses is involuntary churn caused by payment failures, expired cards, and processing errors rather than deliberate cancellation.
Duolingo grew DAUs 4.5x from 2018 to 2022 by focusing on current user retention rate and investing in motivation tactics like streaks, badges, and leaderboards.
Consumer subscription apps should target a Day 1 Paywall View Rate at or above 80% to maximize conversion opportunities.
Internal linking is the highest-ROI quick win for SEO, yet more than 90% of websites are not utilizing it effectively.
Editorial SEO with manually written content has become more effective at driving traffic than programmatic SEO and is broadly underappreciated.
AI is useful for content workflow steps like extracting structure, identifying topics, and keyword research, but should not be used for the actual writing because factual accuracy cannot be guaranteed.
A page's proximity to a high-authority crawl point directly influences its share of link equity, so you want the shortest path from a crawl point to every important page.
Growth roles are the fastest-growing product-adjacent roles in the U.S., growing much faster than sales and marketing roles, potentially signaling an increasing focus on product-led growth.
Functional models optimize for product growth through cohesive customer journeys that create organic flywheels, as demonstrated by Shopify becoming the sole system of record for many customers after switching from GM to functional.
Out-of-home billboard campaigns can deliver a 25%+ uplift in branded search traffic during the campaign and sustain a 10-15% uplift after billboards come down.
Effective out-of-home advertising requires either a lot of placements, an extremely resonant message that goes viral, or a mix of both to achieve recall through frequency and resonance.
Billboard campaigns should not exceed 20% of your marketing budget and work best as brand awareness amplifiers rather than direct demand generation.
A Highway 101 billboard in San Francisco costs about $20,000 minimum per month, with high-profile locations running $50K-$80K, delivering 400,000 to 1 million impressions per week.
Your first 90 days at a new job have an outsize impact on your next one to two years because they establish trust, influence, and reputation within the org.
Only 20-30% of signups actually matter in most products; hyperfocusing on the segment driving revenue rather than growing overall signup volume can drive non-linear business growth.
As a rule of thumb, 50% of signups will not activate, and 40% of users who activate for the first time will drop within seven days; focusing on that 40% churn first yields the fastest results.
Restarting a paid trial for existing users on a predetermined date, not just new signups, can drive upgrades by instilling urgency and showcasing latest product improvements.
Product teams can frequently drive more growth by optimizing engagement with existing key features than by launching new ones, because most new features target only a subset of users.
The ARIA framework (Analyze, Reduce, Introduce, Assist) provides a structured repeatable process for increasing adoption of existing features that drive growth.
When Google focused on raising awareness of frequently-changing search types (sports scores, weather, movie times) rather than building new features, they nearly doubled the number of users doing these searches and generated millions in incremental ad revenue.
The right time to introduce a feature to users is in context, meaning at a point when the user is most likely to want to use it, rather than during onboarding or via What's New pop-ups.
A sense of urgency in launching experiments leads to compounding growth because improvements stack multiplicatively over time, especially when combined with word-of-mouth effects.
When copying proven app mechanics like leaderboards, your first MVP should closely resemble an existing successful implementation rather than trying to innovate, then innovate after establishing a baseline.
Notifications are a nearly infinite source of small-to-medium growth wins, but must be treated as a precious channel; sending too many notifications will rot the channel over time even if each individual experiment shows positive metrics.
Duolingo's strategic advantage is that their users consciously want to build a habit, which is an advantage over entertainment apps like Instagram and TikTok where nobody downloads hoping to use them for hours each day.
When prioritizing experiments, you should consider the total size of the user base affected (the whole pie), not just the percentage improvement; opt-out features affect far more users than opt-in features.
Product Hunt's algorithm favors steady engagement throughout the day rather than a single spike, making time-zone strategy and staggered outreach critical for ranking well.
A valuable long-tail effect of launching on Product Hunt is SEO benefit from a high-authority backlink, which can make a big difference for brand-new startups that have not yet focused on SEO.
Pricing is the most under-leveraged growth lever: a 1% improvement in pricing can increase profits by up to 11%, yet 50% of software companies have never run a pricing study.
The Van Westendorp method for pricing research suffers from significant hypothetical bias where people state higher valuations than their actual willingness to pay, and should be used with caution unless combined with incentive-compatible elements.
For unfamiliar or high-ticket products, choice-based (discrete choice) pricing methods outperform direct methods because people struggle to evaluate pricing for products they have never used.
Price is perception: changing how a product is described or positioned can change willingness to pay without changing the product itself, as demonstrated by pasta described as 'sauceable' commanding 80% higher prices.
Every business can be distilled into a simple equation, and until you can express your business as one, you do not fully understand it because the equation reveals which levers have the most impact.
Customer acquisition payback period is a better measure than LTV/CAC because it tells you how quickly you can reinvest in driving more growth.
Your initial target audience should be almost comically narrow with at least three narrowing characteristics, because focus enables solving one problem better than anyone, and narrow audiences are easier to reach and convert.
A single-player utility mode is critical kindling for social products because it unlocks retention independent of network size, giving you time to iterate on social features without the destructive inverse K-factor that kills purely social apps.
Hyper-personalizing a product to feel like it was built just for a specific community drives dramatically faster adoption; Saturn achieved majority student body adoption at schools within hours by white-labeling apps with school colors and mascots.
Doing unscalable things is acceptable and even valuable at the start of a consumer app because the operational lessons extracted from manual processes provide the insights needed to later productize and achieve national scale.
Going freemium and removing onboarding friction nearly destroyed Equals' business: while they initially 4x'd active companies, engagement and retention tanked, and they could not grow their active company base beyond the initial surge of pent-up demand.
Adding onboarding friction such as requiring a credit card and data source connection can outperform removing friction because the goal of onboarding is not completion but activation, and upfront investment creates urgency and commitment to reach the aha moment.
The allure of seeing a new product is the strongest motivator new users have to complete setup, so if you let them skip a critical setup step, their motivation to return and do it later will only decrease.
Freemium requires five conditions to work: a massive potential user base, very short time to value, a foundational product for end users, low incremental cost to serve, and free users contributing to your growth model through viral loops or network effects.
By picking even slightly better projects through improved prioritization, a PM can double their team's impact without increasing build speed.
DRICE (Detailed RICE) invests 30 minutes per idea to create bottom-up financial estimates, and teams at Dropbox that used it had twice the impact rate of teams using simpler prioritization.
If your experiment win rate is above 70%, you can delay investing in formal prioritization processes because you are still in the easy-wins phase.
Top B2B startups took on average about 2 years from founding to hit $1M ARR, and roughly 1.5 years after closing their first customer.
The biggest growth channel for top B2B companies is organic inbound (word of mouth), and eventually 100% of B2B businesses build a sales team regardless of their initial growth motion.
Databricks' revenue flatlined when they tried a pure zero-touch PLG motion in 2015, and their CEO now believes PLG without a sales force does not work for enterprise products.
The PMF journey in B2B follows five steps: get one company to love your product, get one to pay meaningful money, get multiple companies paying, notice a shift from push to pull, then grow consistently.
Quality plus consistency is all that matters for newsletter growth; design, title, strategy, and growth plans are secondary to publishing valuable content people want to share repeatedly.
There is a strong correlation between time spent on a post and how well it performs; Lenny spends a median of 10 hours per post with some taking hundreds of hours.
Growth teams should not be hired before product-market fit is validated; growth is about increasing distribution of core product value, and if PMF does not exist, there is nothing to grow.
A growth leader should not be your first growth hire; instead hire a builder-profile IC focused on a specific growth lever like acquisition or activation, because even experienced leaders take 6-12 months to understand the local problem.
90% of the time, acquisition is the first goal new growth teams should take on, because there is more volume for experimentation and the biggest drop-offs occur in the acquisition stage.
A good free-to-paid conversion rate for freemium self-serve B2B products is 3-5% and great is 6-8%; for freemium with sales-assist it is 5-7% good and 10-15% great; for free trial products it is 8-12% good and 15-25% great.
Reverse trials, which give users full premium access then downgrade to free, convert at twice the rate of classic freemium while maintaining similar sign-up rates.
Having sales reach out to free accounts is the single biggest driver of increasing free-to-paid conversion; nearly half of free-trial companies have sales contact more than half of sign-ups.
Over 40% of top consumer brands use at least two marketing measurement methods (MTA, MMM, CLS) together, and about 20% use all three to triangulate the truth of what is working.
Marketing mix modeling (MMM) has surged in popularity after iOS 14 because it only needs aggregate data and has no privacy concerns, with 82% of the top brands studied talking about MMM in case studies.
The recommended triangulation approach is to use MTA for daily ad optimizations, MMM for channel budget allocation forecasting, and conversion lift studies every few months to calibrate the MMM model with causal ground truth.
The feel of software is vital to product-led growth adoption, and launching with a polished but feature-limited product is better than launching with all features but poor feel.
When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins, making market size more important than team quality.
Making something people want is necessary but not sufficient for a venture-scale business; you also need enough people who want it and the ability to make enough money from them.
Always run a correlation analysis before running a linear regression, because if variables aren't correlated, the regression will produce inconclusive patterns.
Standout PLG products disproportionately attract users through organic search/SEO (40% of new users) and product virality (16% of new users).
Building free sidecar products specifically designed to attract users through SEO is one of the most effective product-led marketing strategies.
For PLG products, the target marketing KPI should be product activation (activated signups), not website traffic or monthly signups.
PLG companies need to keep customer acquisition cost below $1 per unique visitor because the average PLG product generates only $1-2 in first-year revenue per visitor.
Duolingo runs over 200 A/B tests at any given time, testing every product change as an experiment before rolling it out.
For mature product teams, balancing resources as a 50/50 portfolio between big features and incremental improvements is optimal because incremental changes compound but you must avoid local maxima.
Letting users pause or snooze a subscription instead of canceling is an effective retention strategy.
Investing in resurrecting churned users is a high-leverage growth tactic since growth equals new users plus resurrected users minus churned users.
The majority of growth inflections at successful companies sprang from a product improvement rather than external events or growth tactics.
The most durable growth inflections come from doubling down on a company's primary growth engine like SEO or virality rather than from one-off events.
Long-term sustainable growth requires all three pieces: ongoing product improvements, ongoing events that spread the word, and a well-oiled growth engine.
Figma's biggest growth inflection was the release of Team Libraries in 2017, which provided so much leverage to design teams that it changed the competitive conversation.
Product-led growth is essentially data-led growth because without usage data infrastructure, you cannot activate or convert free users.
Companies commonly skip buying an experimentation platform and jump to building their own, which is a mistake because it requires not just engineering but also data science and statistical expertise.
Heads of growth most commonly report to product leaders (CPO), but sometimes roll up into sales/GTM organizations to better align PLG incentives with revenue targets.
For B2B PLG products, there are four distinct aha moments for different personas: user, team, buyer, and paid-customer, and most companies stop strategizing after the first.
Product-led activation should be product-led, not product-only, using a multi-channel approach including lifecycle marketing, human assistance, documentation, and forums alongside product onboarding.
The biggest challenge when layering PLG onto an existing sales-led company is resistance from sales teams worried about quota impact and marketing teams worried about PQLs replacing MQLs.
True virality is mostly a myth; what we call viral growth is almost always driven by one-to-many broadcasts from people with large audiences rather than many-to-many friend-to-friend spread.
Even the most viral products like Dropbox, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram show roughly linear growth when you zoom out, with viral moments appearing as short-lived S-curves.
To sustain growth, you need both mechanisms of virality (word of mouth, invites, referrals) and a strategy of ongoing one-to-many broadcasts (PR, influencers, TV) to keep reigniting spread.
Pre-PMF, you want either overwhelming market pull or no sales at all; steady sales with no acceleration is a dangerous riptide that can trap you.
The three-step process for finding your activation metric is: brainstorm potential aha moments, run regression to find correlation with retention, then experiment to prove causation.
Figma's core activation metric is collaboration in the same file with someone else within 24 hours, which allowed them to focus on winning design teams rather than solo users.
Slack's early activation metric was a team with 2+ users having 50+ messages within the first seven days, focusing on team success rather than individual user actions.
The average activation rate across 500+ products is 34% with a median of 25%, and for SaaS products specifically the average is 36% with a median of 30%.
The most common and impactful ways to increase activation are simplifying onboarding UI/UX and reducing onboarding friction, not adding more features.
The most common mistake when setting activation milestones is setting them too early (just completing signup) or too late (multiple purchases), when the milestone should be a leading indicator of habit formation.
A good activation metric should be predictive of long-term retention at a rate at least 2x better for users who hit it versus those who don't.
The Racecar Growth Framework identifies five components of startup growth: growth engine, kickstarts, turbo boosts, lubricants, and mid-stage accelerants.
There are only four common growth engines: SEO, paid ads, sales, and virality, and the growth engine is the most important component because it is the only one that can be self-sustaining.
When just starting out, focus energy on kickstarts and turbo boosts until your growth engine begins to drive the majority of growth, then invest in lubricants.
The nine most common kickstart tactics for getting your first 1,000 users include sharing with friends, reaching out to targeted strangers, pitching where your audience hangs out, enlisting influencers, getting press, creating viral content, physical placement, hosting events, and being first on a platform.
The primary growth engine for nearly all of today's biggest B2B products is sales, though some have a product-led or self-service element.
Distribution is just as important as, if not more important than, what you are creating in marketing; if no one will see it, all the time spent making it is wasted.
At Change.org, monitoring and slicing Day 7 and Day 30 retention of petition starters helped grow their 'petition starters per day' KPI by 450%.
Channel partnerships and geographic expansion are two mid-stage growth accelerants that are rarely useful in early stages but can significantly accelerate growth when used effectively at the right moment.
Geographic expansion is one of the biggest growth accelerants a startup can have but is something you can only really do once, and normally happens post-PMF but before the growth engine is at full steam.
Channel partnerships are game-changing when they work but normally go nowhere or take far too long to make a dent; founders should treat them like any high-risk/high-reward opportunity.
The majority of startups grow primarily through just one growth engine, and a common pitfall is trying to invest in too many engines at once without nailing any.
For consumer startups there are only three feasible growth engines since relying on sales is rarely economical: SEO, paid ads, and virality.
For marketplace and platform startups, supply driving demand is an incredibly powerful growth engine where suppliers market your platform to their own customers, as seen at DoorDash, Etsy, and Eventbrite.
You will likely grow primarily through virality if you have to share the product to use it, the product is only fun with friends, or the product is super-fun to share.
At Airbnb, word of mouth was the biggest growth driver early on, accounting for over 50% on the guest side and over 70% on the host side.
There are only seven reliable ways to kickstart consumer growth and acquire your first 1,000 users: friends and colleagues, targeted strangers, going where your audience hangs out, enlisting influencers, getting press, creating viral content, and getting physical placement.
Pinterest initially failed by targeting tech friends, but when Ben Silbermann found that 30-something female bloggers at Alt Summit were the right audience, the product reached over a million users within a year.
TikTok's early growth strategy treated the platform like a new country where initial wealth should be distributed to a small number of creators to make them role models that attract migration from established platforms.
There are six effective ways to build trust in a new marketplace: reviews, verifying supply, leaning on social proof, creating a perception of quality, providing a safety net, and delivering magic.
High-quality photos are instrumental for building trust with customers in marketplaces, and Airbnb's professional photography program along with host profile photos contributed to immediate trust for new visitors.
Udemy purposely had instructors set prices very high at $199 then discounted to $10 because high prices signal quality and trust to students while the low actual price drives conversion.
The magic moment for marketplace trust is when both sides experience something better than expected: for Thumbtack pros it was getting hired and paid for their first job, and for consumers it was finding a pro better than through word of mouth.
The three patterns of winning B2C subscription businesses are an obsession with efficiency, alignment between product strategy and acquisition strategy, and a singular focus on building a magical sticky product through rapid iteration.
Duolingo built a massive user base through word of mouth and no paid marketing by offering all learning content for free, because limiting free experience heavily slows organic growth since only payers can tell friends.
Noom targeted one-month payback on paid acquisition which allowed immediate reinvestment into their performance marketing engine, making them less reliant on raising money to grow.
Companies underestimate the power of experimentation volume; Noom ran up to six tests per week per PM, with 90% failing, because high velocity of learning beats high effort per test.
For early-stage consumer businesses, investors focus on intensity of engagement, virality, and retention rather than revenue, with greater than 50% DAU/MAU or greater than 50% D30 retention considered excellent.
It is a huge mistake to focus on the growth number before getting retention because you can hit great early growth by brute force with small numbers, but it will not translate to continued growth.
The four most important marketplace metrics are fill rate (percentage of intentful sessions converting), bookings growth (completed transactions), supply growth (new active supply), and GMV growth (dollars through the system).
Fill rate is the ultimate measure of marketplace health because it bakes in supply quality, availability, and booking conversion, measuring whether people can consistently find what they want.
The founding insight for most great marketplace businesses is principally a 'liquidity hack' such as Uber paying drivers to circle neighborhoods, Airbnb paying for professional photos, and Faire guaranteeing items would sell.
80% of marketplaces start out supply-constrained and about half stay that way, making supply growth a major priority for most marketplace businesses.
Waitlist-to-free-signup conversion averages around 50% if users are admitted within a month, but drops below 20% if they wait over three months.
Founding teams should create the first growth model themselves rather than outsourcing it to a Head of Growth hire, because only they understand the DNA of the product and market deeply enough.
A growth model consists of growth levers (acquisition, retention, monetization) and growth motions (product-led, sales-led, marketing-led), and the unique combination creates a defensible growth strategy.
The first growth hire should be a Builder generalist who proves the growth model's validity, not an Innovator who thinks big or an Optimizer who squeezes marginal gains.
Poor distribution, not product, is the number one cause of startup failure, and getting your product in front of the right people efficiently is increasingly what separates winners from losers.
There are seven early-stage distribution advantages: pre-existing audience, unique viral loop, being first on an emerging platform, remarkable story, pre-existing relationships, strategic partnerships, and extraordinary hustle.
Marketplaces beat non-marketplace alternatives on demand by delivering a much cheaper product, a much better product via exclusive supply, or a much better experience via aggregating disaggregated supply.
There are five distinct content-driven growth strategies mapped on a 2x2 of SEO vs virality and user-generated vs editorially-generated content: UGSO, EGSO, DGSO, UGVO, and EGVO.
Content marketing does not generate returns as quickly as other forms of marketing, but once you find a format that works you should double down on it rather than trying to do everything at once.
SEO content is much easier to pursue than viral content because keyword research provides a straightforward source of topic ideas, while viral content depends on creativity.
Most companies find the vast majority of growth from just one of four engines -- virality, performance marketing, content, or sales -- and optimizing a secondary engine before scaling the core one is rarely time well spent.
There are seven distinct types of virality across three categories: word-of-mouth (offline and online), invitation (social, incentivized, utility), and experiential (passive and active).
Consumer subscription businesses must nail six things in sequence: acquire users sustainably, get them to experience value quickly, keep them finding value, convert to paid, retain paid users, and deliver profitably.
The most successful companies optimize monetization every quarter, but this goes far beyond changing the actual price to include target segments, packaging, and positioning.
The intensity of PMF pull is a factor of both fit (how good your product solves the problem) and initial market size -- broad markets create sudden pull while niche markets create steady compounding pull.
Retention is the best indicator of product-market fit, the most important factor in lifetime value, and drives all the best acquisition strategies.
A business flywheel identifies which elements of your business feed off each other to accelerate growth, and you create one by listing core assets, actions, user needs, outputs, and optimizations then connecting them in loops.
SEO experiments must be bucketed at the page level rather than the user level because Google recrawls pages as different 'users' each time, and the only metric to measure is incoming organic traffic.
Title tag experiments led to a 15-20% aggregate increase in organic traffic at Airbnb, making them the most impactful type of SEO experiment to run.
Increasing conversion is one of the highest ROI investments a growth team can make because the wins make existing channels more efficient and last indefinitely.
Funnel optimization has three core levers: maintaining user focus, maintaining user motivation, and reducing user friction.
The three core re-engagement strategies for bounced users are reminders of unfinished actions, notifications that something has changed, and providing additional information that addresses why they stopped.
Referral programs work best when strong word-of-mouth already exists; the added incentive simply adds fuel to an existing fire.
Referral programs are most effective when customers are consumers or small business owners who know many other potential users, and the product requires a lot of trust to use.
At Airbnb, testing a doubled referral bonus in some markets occasionally showed no significant improvement, indicating incentives plateau at a point where more money won't motivate additional referrals.
A profitable company should raise capital only when confident it can use that capital to attain a higher growth rate worth the tradeoff in dilution.
A divide-and-conquer cycle for international expansion works by constraining to a geo, achieving liquidity (e.g. $10k GMV over a rolling 30-day period), then splitting or expanding to adjacent markets.
When seeking a growth role, focus on demonstrating foundational tools like data analysis, user psychology, and experiment-driven methodology rather than listing tactical ideas.
At Etsy, nearly the entire product and engineering team's activity had nothing to do with actual growth for years, with hundreds of people working on pages selling 700 items per day while only three worked on search which sold 100,000 items per day.
About 40% of marketplace companies start supply-constrained and remain supply-constrained throughout their entire history, while very few are always demand-constrained.
The primary reason most of these marketplace companies became successful was great product-market fit, not amazing growth insights; the growth levers helped accelerate and control growth but were secondary.
The six key strategies for building user trust are social proof, authority signals, guarantees, reputation systems, great UX, and consistent delivery on your promise.
Podcast Moments
“The way you really lose trust around quality and releasing something early is if you release it early and then nothing ever happens. But whenever you put something out early, it's possible to maintain the brand of your company if you commit to iterating, responding to feedback, and continuously shipping improvements.”
Jenny Wen · Jenny Wen
“Starting a company has never been easier. The flip side is the number of companies formed is going to mushroom. There's so much noise and competition, it's just going to be hard to stand out and really accelerate and scale. It's never been easier to start, never been harder to scale.”
Sequoia CEO coach: Why it’s never been easier to start a company, and never been harder to scale one | Brian Halligan (co-founder, HubSpot) · Brian Halligan
“When growth stalls, 90% of the time it's a retention problem, not an acquisition problem. But teams always want to fix acquisition first because it's more fun.”
5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · Jason Cohen
“Logo retention is the most honest metric in B2B. Net revenue retention can mask churn with expansion. Logo retention tells you if customers are actually staying.”
5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · Jason Cohen
“The best growth teams I've seen all have one thing in common: they measure retention before acquisition. If your bucket is leaky, pouring more water in doesn't help.”
Elena Verna 4.0 · Elena Verna 4.0
“Gamification gets a bad rap because people think of it as badges and points. But the good kind — leaderboards, streaks, social proof — those are fundamentally about making progress visible.”
Elena Verna 4.0 · Elena Verna 4.0
“Notifications are the most underinvested growth lever. Most companies treat them as marketing spam. The companies that win treat every notification as a product decision.”
Elena Verna 4.0 · Elena Verna 4.0
“The standard playbook is to get product market fit by pivoting every two weeks, chase growth with dark patterns, blitz scale. I've always disagreed. Just build the one thing only you could build.”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“We grew to $100M ARR largely through product-led growth. The key was making the creation experience so fast that people would share their Gamma decks, and viewers would sign up to make their own.”
“Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · Grant Lee
“We use gamification elements — streak-like engagement mechanics, progress indicators — but we never call them that internally. We call them 'momentum features.'”
“Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · Grant Lee
“We get more than a million requests from our community every year. This year we've closed more than 200 loops.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“We didn't worry about competitors at all. It's better to solve a small number of people's problem really well.”
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · Melanie Perkins
“AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI.”
Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · Robby Stein
“For Stories, we knew we needed to do something new. We made a bunch of decisions that made it Instagram — letting people upload from camera roll, adding pause.”
Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · Robby Stein
“At Duolingo, the leaderboard was transformative. But the insight wasn't 'add a leaderboard' — it was understanding that social comparison is the most powerful retention mechanic we had.”
How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · Albert Cheng
“The streak is the single most powerful feature Duolingo ever built. But it only works because we invested in making it forgiving — streak freezes, streak repair, grace periods.”
How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · Albert Cheng
“Don't just look at your retention curves. Look at what your most retained users do differently in their first week. That behavioral signature is your growth playbook.”
How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · Albert Cheng
“Answer Engine Optimization is how do I show up in LLMs as an answer? You need to get mentioned as many times as possible.”
The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Ethan Smith
“LLM leads are significantly more valuable. Webflow saw a 6X conversion rate difference between LLM traffic and Google Search traffic.”
The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Ethan Smith
“For Google SEO, you need domain authority. For AEO, you can get mentioned by a citation tomorrow. Early-stage companies can win quickly.”
The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Ethan Smith
“Reddit is hugely cited in LLMs. Find a thread that is part of a citation. Say who you are and give useful information. Even five comments could be great.”
The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Ethan Smith
“One out of 20 landing pages drive roughly 85% of all your traffic. If you knew the few things that would work, you could push all that money to that one page.”
The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Ethan Smith
“ChatGPT and Google Search citation overlap was around 35%. Perplexity was around 70%.”
The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Ethan Smith
“WhatsApp didn't win because it had stickers or stories. It won because of the phone book, reliability, and privacy.”
How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · Asha Sharma
“We're the largest expert network in the world. The only moat in human data is access to an audience.”
Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · Garrett Lord
“Separate engineering team, separate design team, separate finance team. People only had one job — making Handshake AI successful.”
Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · Garrett Lord
“We were about to hit $0 net new ARR, which means we would've been in negative growth territory.”
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · Eoghan McCabe
“Fin is our AI agent who will pass 100 million ARR in less than three quarters.”
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · Eoghan McCabe
“They moved the price from 79 to 99, and built a decoy at 299. It was a 30+ percent increase in MRR.”
Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam · Madhavan Ramanujam
“Don't give the farm away in your entry level product. Use the compromise effect so people avoid the extremes.”
Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam · Madhavan Ramanujam
“90% of customers who claim to have a land and expand strategy are only landing. They're not expanding because they gave their farm away.”
Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam · Madhavan Ramanujam
“When you go from one to 100, you have to plan your chess moves out in advance and build systems that are going to let you go sustainably faster. Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. I like to think that Newsfeed has stood the test of time because we thought very carefully about how people wanted to interact.”
From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · Peter Deng
“One of the first things I did was always to build a growth team. When you build a growth team and you hire the right growth leader, they start asking all the right questions because the archetype of person who is a growth PM will be like, 'Well, wait. Why is this happening? Let's get the data.' That's when you realize you don't have X, Y, and Z thing logged.”
From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · Peter Deng
“It's really important to give two people on your team different charges. One is like go grow the product and the other one is maintain that beautiful aesthetic, the craft that your product is known for. That tension is extremely healthy. I've seen this at Facebook, Instagram, Airtable, ChatGPT, same exact thing.”
From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng · Peter Deng
“Everyone knew of ChatGPT, but when you clicked one zoom level further, the thing that came up was, 'I don't know what to use it for.' The work of marketing ended up becoming creating this use case epiphany where people could say, 'I had no idea ChatGPT can do that.'”
Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · Krithika Shankarraman
“A lot of marketing metrics tend to be vanity metrics about the number of clicks, views, and impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. What is that experience that you want your customers to come away with when they interact with your brand?”
Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman · Krithika Shankarraman
“We had the daily numbers concept. You buy a TV, put it on the wall, and when you had a new paying account, you had the Simpson saying the same with the $1 million. For new signups, you had a tick. Suddenly, everyone is living it.”
Inside monday.com’s transformation: radical transparency, impact over output, and their path to $1B ARR | Daniel Lereya (Chief Product and Technology Officer) · Daniel Lereya
“You have to deliberately not act on the feedback of many of your early users, and this is at the same time as listening to people intensely and building what people want. That's what we're here to do, is to make something that people want, but it can't be all people.”
Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · Rahul Vohra
“You can classify anything that you build in a company into one of two categories, solution deepening and market widening. Solution deepening means making your product better for its existing users, but not making it available to more users. Whereas market widening means making your product available to more users, but not making the product itself any better.”
Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · Rahul Vohra
“The biggest secret of Superhuman, which is something that nobody else does, is that we would manually onboard every single new user for the first five years. People would sign up on the wait list, and when we were ready, our growth team would reach out, schedule a call, get on Zoom, and walk the person through every feature, every shortcut, and every workflow for Superhuman.”
Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · Rahul Vohra
“The company was on the verge of going under when we launched Bolt, and what ended up happening is, in the first two months it went from zero to 20 million of ARR. And we've already crossed 30 million of ARR, with the current rate we're on, our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of ARR.”
Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · Eric Simons
“We say publicly it's about a half a billion dollars in sort of ARR revenue right now.”
The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic) · Matt Mullenweg
“For the first several years, it was doubling, 10-xing every year. Taping user counts that we printed out to the wall, and then running out of space on the wall.”
Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) · Drew Houston
“We started getting all the incumbents. Apple, Microsoft, Google. All of them launched competing products, but weirdly, it was sort of like you see the videos where there's the mushroom cloud in the distance. You see it. But you don't hear, or notice it.”
Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) · Drew Houston
“Streaks is the most impactful feature. We have, right now, over 9 million users with a year plus streak. If you look at the numbers, I think it's been our biggest growth lever.”
Behind the product: Duolingo streaks | Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team) · Jackson Shuttleworth
“Test everything. We've run in the last four years over 600 experiments on the streaks, so every other day. We've actually set up really good infrastructure for copy testing.”
Behind the product: Duolingo streaks | Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team) · Jackson Shuttleworth
“We used to say continue, our standard CTA is continue, and we changed that to commit to my goal, and it was a massive win.”
Behind the product: Duolingo streaks | Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team) · Jackson Shuttleworth
“Loss aversion is way more powerful than reward seeking. The fear of losing your streak is more motivating than any badge or reward we could give you.”
Behind the product: Duolingo streaks | Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team) · Jackson Shuttleworth
“If you don't build the network effect into what you are making, you are almost certainly going to fail. The question is, will this work better for my users if they tell other people about it?”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“When you have teams naturally break up the world into different funnel stages, it gets very seductive to look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate. But in practice, it's actually almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate.”
Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · Archie Abrams
“The best way to get more people to get to a step is just get more people in the door in the first place. That will always hurt your conversion rate, but it may actually give you more people on the outside.”
Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · Archie Abrams
“We actually optimize for churn. Not to reduce it to zero, but to make sure we're acquiring the right merchants. If we reduce churn by making it hard to leave, we're just trapping bad-fit customers.”
Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · Archie Abrams
“We build toward a 100-year vision. That sounds abstract but it changes every decision. You stop optimizing for this quarter's numbers and start building things that compound.”
Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · Archie Abrams
“I think when you're running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit, looking at stats and thinking like, 'If only we could get people to do X, it'd be better for everyone.' I think that's missing the point that we're humans.”
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Benjamin Lauzier
“I'm a huge believer in market forces and empowerment, so provide guardrails for what a good experience is in your marketplace, set a clear bar for quality, and provide the right coaching and tools for supply to be successful, and then take a step back and see where the gaps are.”
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Benjamin Lauzier
“Think of SEO as a product. The product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question. This is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey. If you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on, then don't do SEO.”
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · Eli Schwartz
“Transparently, I thought this was going to be an apocalypse. Up until AI Overviews, whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first click. But now that doesn't exist anymore.”
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · Eli Schwartz
“In their documentation, they say that AI itself is not the problem. It's the helpfulness, the usefulness of the content that would be a problem.”
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · Eli Schwartz
“The question is, how would you feel if you could no longer use this product? Once you got a high enough percentage of users saying they'd be very disappointed, most of those products did pretty well. If you felt too low, those products tended to suffer.”
The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · Sean Ellis
“Just ignore the people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. They're telling you it's a nice to have. If you start paying attention to what your 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.”
The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · Sean Ellis
“It's usually much more function of onboarding to the right user experience than it is about the tactical things that people try to do to improve retention.”
The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · Sean Ellis
“Before the referral program, Dropbox had amazing referral rate. Companies that are trying to copy it are like, 'Why isn't anyone talking about a product? Let's add a referral program with incentives.' To me, I think it's a great accelerant when it's already working, but it can't fix it if people don't want to talk about your product.”
The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · Sean Ellis
“I start with the value that's uncovered through the test. So with a company, I'll say, 'This is what the must have value is according to our most passionate customers, and we want to think about a metric that reflects us delivering that value.'”
The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · Sean Ellis
“I looked on the App Store and the number one app in the United States was an app called Surah, but the entire app was in Arabic, like the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something.”
How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · Nikita Bier
“We launched this app, it immediately took off, servers started crashing. I looked at our numbers and I'm like, 'We will be number one in the United States in six days.'”
How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · Nikita Bier
“Hot take, paid is for everyone. If you look at the way each platform is doing, Google, you have to scroll pretty far down to get to an organic listing. Meta, it's almost a pay for play now.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“Instead of thinking about being on top of the page, and that's like ego marketing, I want to be number one. I want to be there all the time. It's about showing to the right person as often as possible.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“Way underestimating the power of creative. Do you remember Dollar Shave Club? There you go. You remember it. That was creative.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“I'm always forward thinking, backwards planning. 'Where do you want to be and ultimately how do you think you're going to get there?' Because say your goal is to be on all platforms... forward think, that's where you want to be. Now let's backwards plan.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“Retention is a terrible thing to goal on. It's almost impossible to drive in a meaningful way in a short term. Ultimately, you want to find a short-term metric you can measure that drives a long-term output.”
Building a world-class data org | Jessica Lachs (VP of Analytics and Data Science at DoorDash) · Jess Lachs
“I think the hill climb metaphor is really useful. You might be on a local maximum, but if you want to get to the global maximum, you sometimes have to go downhill first. That's terrifying for a company.”
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · Ami Vora
“The Safety Funnel is amazing. You basically put a hard stop and you limit the number of people who had bad experiences. And you do that for a while, up until you can prove it's amazing and then you invite more people.”
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery) · Tanguy Crusson
“Product-market fit is a journey, not a destination. With Waze, we changed the product significantly three or four times before we got it right. The first version, nobody used. The second version, a few people used. The third version, people started using and telling their friends.”
Lessons from a two-time unicorn builder, 50-time startup advisor, and 20-time company board member | Uri Levine (co-founder of Waze) · Uri Levine
“The biggest unlock for growth at Canva was making the product useful for teams, not just individuals. When one person brings Canva into a team, suddenly 10 people are using it.”
Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO) · Cam Adams
“What I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do. Someone says, 'Hey, you know what? This would be great to build.' And you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. Call that identify, justify, execute. First you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand, identify, execute.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“When you're in a hypergrowth product, it's really important to understand who your users are today and the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it, but then also to understand who is the next user? Who is the user who could be using this product, but for some reason it doesn't work for them.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“We had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody because we were basically biting our nose to spank our face. The regular person wasn't having a great experience.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“Usually it's somewhere in the onboarding to habit-building experience. What does it take for someone to actually understand the value, that first moment, that first aha moment in the product? And a lot of teams, it's shocking how many teams don't really understand what that moment is for them.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“We were losing 10, 12 million people a year from what we called account access churn. So we worked on this problem... just being really thoughtful around what is actually the core job that people are trying to do.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“Another part that goes unspoken, still critical to this day was the celebrity partnerships was critical, because basically they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how to make it work for them, how to tell their own story.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“We're not trying to be incrementally better, we are trying to be fundamentally different. We want our customers to love us fanatically.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“We built a lending product, we built an investment product, we built an insurance product, we built a series of small business products. We rarely scale a project until we know the Sean Ellis score hit a threshold that we find really compelling.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“One of the things we do at Nubank is we ask every product team to articulate what we call a 'magic moment.' What is the moment when the customer goes from 'this is interesting' to 'I love this'?”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“80% to 90% of our growth is through word of mouth. That only happens if your product is fundamentally different. No one tells their friends about something that's slightly better. They tell their friends about something that blew their mind.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“At Gojek, we had to build products for a market where people were coming online for the first time. You can't assume anything about user behavior. You have to go watch them use the product in their environment.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“Network effects are the most powerful of the seven powers. If you have a product where every incremental user makes the product more valuable for every other user, that's an extraordinarily durable position.”
Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers) · Hamilton Helmer
“At the developing stage, the biggest mistake I see is premature scaling. You have a few happy customers and you think you should hire a sales team and start marketing. But you haven't really nailed what makes those customers happy.”
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital) · Todd Jackson
“Every time you see that the product efficiency delta is greater than or equal to four, three things happen. It is irreversible. Second is that you have a very high tolerance for it to fail. And the third thing is what I call the UBP, 'Unique Brag-worthy Proposition.' Every time humans unlock a Delta 4 product or service, they cannot stop talking or sharing about it.”
Kunal Shah on winning in India, second-order thinking, the philosophy of startups, and more · Kunal Shah
“And that's love. And when you are extending yourself, you're not nice. It's not always nice or like, it sometimes is having hard conversations.”
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · Ebi Atawodi
“Communication is constantly underrated. And communication isn't about being able to convey a message, it's about being able to convey a message in a way that the listener receives it, and understands it, and remembers it. And that's really hard to do.”
Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · Gina Gotthilf
“Again, it's about how you make people feel. And you feel like either you giggle, or you're like, wait what? They just did what? And using that to your benefit.”
Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · Gina Gotthilf
“An activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe for most companies five to 15%, is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention and you're really working hard to get most of your users to reach a state that they're not reaching today.”
Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · Lauryn Isford
“Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that a hundred percent of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting a hundred percent feature adoption of anything else in your product, right?”
How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) · Adam Fishman
Cutting Room Floor
Guest insights on this topic that Lenny hasn't (yet) written about in his newsletters. Potential material for future posts.
“AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI.”
Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · Robby Stein
“For Stories, we knew we needed to do something new. We made a bunch of decisions that made it Instagram — letting people upload from camera roll, adding pause.”
Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · Robby Stein
“ChatGPT and Google Search citation overlap was around 35%. Perplexity was around 70%.”
The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · Ethan Smith
“We're the largest expert network in the world. The only moat in human data is access to an audience.”
Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord (Handshake CEO) · Garrett Lord
“Don't give the farm away in your entry level product. Use the compromise effect so people avoid the extremes.”
Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam · Madhavan Ramanujam
“We say publicly it's about a half a billion dollars in sort of ARR revenue right now.”
The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic) · Matt Mullenweg
“We started getting all the incumbents. Apple, Microsoft, Google. All of them launched competing products, but weirdly, it was sort of like you see the videos where there's the mushroom cloud in the distance. You see it. But you don't hear, or notice it.”
Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox) · Drew Houston
“Test everything. We've run in the last four years over 600 experiments on the streaks, so every other day. We've actually set up really good infrastructure for copy testing.”
Behind the product: Duolingo streaks | Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team) · Jackson Shuttleworth
“If you don't build the network effect into what you are making, you are almost certainly going to fail. The question is, will this work better for my users if they tell other people about it?”
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more · Seth Godin
“When you have teams naturally break up the world into different funnel stages, it gets very seductive to look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate. But in practice, it's actually almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate.”
Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · Archie Abrams
“The best way to get more people to get to a step is just get more people in the door in the first place. That will always hurt your conversion rate, but it may actually give you more people on the outside.”
Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · Archie Abrams
“We actually optimize for churn. Not to reduce it to zero, but to make sure we're acquiring the right merchants. If we reduce churn by making it hard to leave, we're just trapping bad-fit customers.”
Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · Archie Abrams
“I think when you're running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit, looking at stats and thinking like, 'If only we could get people to do X, it'd be better for everyone.' I think that's missing the point that we're humans.”
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Benjamin Lauzier
“I'm a huge believer in market forces and empowerment, so provide guardrails for what a good experience is in your marketplace, set a clear bar for quality, and provide the right coaching and tools for supply to be successful, and then take a step back and see where the gaps are.”
How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Benjamin Lauzier
“Think of SEO as a product. The product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question. This is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey. If you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on, then don't do SEO.”
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · Eli Schwartz
“Transparently, I thought this was going to be an apocalypse. Up until AI Overviews, whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first click. But now that doesn't exist anymore.”
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · Eli Schwartz
“In their documentation, they say that AI itself is not the problem. It's the helpfulness, the usefulness of the content that would be a problem.”
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · Eli Schwartz
“It's usually much more function of onboarding to the right user experience than it is about the tactical things that people try to do to improve retention.”
The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · Sean Ellis
“Before the referral program, Dropbox had amazing referral rate. Companies that are trying to copy it are like, 'Why isn't anyone talking about a product? Let's add a referral program with incentives.' To me, I think it's a great accelerant when it's already working, but it can't fix it if people don't want to talk about your product.”
The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · Sean Ellis
“I looked on the App Store and the number one app in the United States was an app called Surah, but the entire app was in Arabic, like the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something.”
How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · Nikita Bier
“We launched this app, it immediately took off, servers started crashing. I looked at our numbers and I'm like, 'We will be number one in the United States in six days.'”
How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor) · Nikita Bier
“Hot take, paid is for everyone. If you look at the way each platform is doing, Google, you have to scroll pretty far down to get to an organic listing. Meta, it's almost a pay for play now.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“Instead of thinking about being on top of the page, and that's like ego marketing, I want to be number one. I want to be there all the time. It's about showing to the right person as often as possible.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“Way underestimating the power of creative. Do you remember Dollar Shave Club? There you go. You remember it. That was creative.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“I'm always forward thinking, backwards planning. 'Where do you want to be and ultimately how do you think you're going to get there?' Because say your goal is to be on all platforms... forward think, that's where you want to be. Now let's backwards plan.”
The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify) · Timothy Davis
“I think the hill climb metaphor is really useful. You might be on a local maximum, but if you want to get to the global maximum, you sometimes have to go downhill first. That's terrifying for a company.”
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG) · Ami Vora
“When you're in a hypergrowth product, it's really important to understand who your users are today and the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it, but then also to understand who is the next user? Who is the user who could be using this product, but for some reason it doesn't work for them.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“We had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody because we were basically biting our nose to spank our face. The regular person wasn't having a great experience.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“Another part that goes unspoken, still critical to this day was the celebrity partnerships was critical, because basically they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how to make it work for them, how to tell their own story.”
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · Bangaly Kaba
“80% to 90% of our growth is through word of mouth. That only happens if your product is fundamentally different. No one tells their friends about something that's slightly better. They tell their friends about something that blew their mind.”
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google, Quantcast) · Jag Duggal
“At Gojek, we had to build products for a market where people were coming online for the first time. You can't assume anything about user behavior. You have to go watch them use the product in their environment.”
A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) · Vikrama Dhiman
“Network effects are the most powerful of the seven powers. If you have a product where every incremental user makes the product more valuable for every other user, that's an extraordinarily durable position.”
Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers) · Hamilton Helmer
“And that's love. And when you are extending yourself, you're not nice. It's not always nice or like, it sometimes is having hard conversations.”
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber) · Ebi Atawodi
“Again, it's about how you make people feel. And you feel like either you giggle, or you're like, wait what? They just did what? And using that to your benefit.”
Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo) · Gina Gotthilf
“An activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe for most companies five to 15%, is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention and you're really working hard to get most of your users to reach a state that they're not reaching today.”
Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · Lauryn Isford