Lenny's Written Position
Virality is a natural fit for products that are better with friends, innately fun to share, or remarkable enough to talk about, while performance marketing fits revenue-generating products and content fits those generating public UGC.
Podcast Moments
“All of the ingredients for new distribution platform are essentially happening. My prediction, the new distribution platform will be ChatGPT. There's a bunch of signals that they're about to launch that.”
Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · Brian Balfour
“It ends up being a prisoner's dilemma. Don't trick yourself into thinking that you can't play the game. The cycles seem to be getting shorter and shorter, so you actually have a smaller amount of time. If you don't do it, your competitors are going to go to the new platform and your customer expectations change. There is no opting out of the game.”
Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · Brian Balfour
“If you're a late-stage company, you place multiple bets. For startups, it's a totally different ballgame. You have to choose one and go all in.”
Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · Brian Balfour
“Some people focus on conversion rate, like, 'I'm going to make this really, really slick.' And that's cool. You get a bit more growth. But to get to recommendation, you're going to blow your user socks off. You have to give them an experience they didn't know was previously possible.”
How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · Nilan Peiris
“When you are in that place of doing something that no one has ever done before, that's when you get it.”
How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · Nilan Peiris
“Products who try to be viral just for what I call synthetic virality that fail. Because in the end, if you're synthetically viral and people get to the product and it sucks, that's it.”
Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian) · Oji Udezue
“Only after all of those questions are answered, should you then consider, do I have money? Can I put it behind some paid ads to make sure people come to my website?”
An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · Meltem Kuran
“The reason for the progression the way I've described it is the channels get more expensive as you go farther along and they get more effective as you understand more about your customers.”
Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · Sri Batchu
“We talk about the 10X engineer and we don't really talk about the 10X growth advisor or 10X growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue it applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact.”
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · Luc Levesque
“Something I've experienced several times in hindsight when you're like, 'Okay, here's the needle in the haystack.' And then it's implemented and you can see hundreds of percentages, sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right.”
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · Luc Levesque
“It's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company. You can't say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them.”
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · Luc Levesque
“Being able to identify the various micro and macro loops, how they're all connected, being able to document them in a qualitative model to communicate a shared understanding of how you grow, it's really powerful. Augmenting that with the quantitative side that helps guide quarter to quarter focus and ensure you can be intentional about where you're investing, that becomes a big enabler.”
How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · Ben Williams
“If you're building a SaaS business, you're a construction worker, you're building the product and the features and selling it, and it's this very linear thing. For a marketplace, you're like messing with this ecosystem that you don't actually really understand how it works.”
Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier (Faire, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Dan Hockenmaier
“Sometimes you might do something over here which drives this long-term effect two months later, and then you're going to be pulling your hair out two months later trying to figure out what you did over here that made that thing happen.”
Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier (Faire, Thumbtack, Reforge) · Dan Hockenmaier
“Start by assuming you no longer have product market fit, because you had product market fit in a different market. It's a different market now, so you have to start over.”
When and how to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass) · Adam Grenier
“But if you just assume you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem, you're going to be wrong, because your entire customer base changed, not just the next 10% of customers that you're looking for.”
When and how to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass) · Adam Grenier
“It's remarkable how often you find that to be the case when I talk to companies, 'Oh, YouTube, we tried it. It doesn't work.' I'm like, 'Okay, can I see what you've tried?' And then you look at it and you're like, 'Oh, this thing was not designed to even have a shot at working from the get go.'”
How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · Yuriy Timen
“The goal of your Kindle strategies, these like non-scalable hacks, they only exist to unlock the fire strategies, to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users.”
How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite · Casey Winters
“Growth is a fairly new field. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks, like what is the sure things to get growth. In the age of social media everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks. Oftentimes things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern.”
Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more · Elena Verna 3.0
Cutting Room Floor
Guest insights on this topic that Lenny hasn't (yet) written about in his newsletters. Potential material for future posts.
“All of the ingredients for new distribution platform are essentially happening. My prediction, the new distribution platform will be ChatGPT. There's a bunch of signals that they're about to launch that.”
Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · Brian Balfour
“It ends up being a prisoner's dilemma. Don't trick yourself into thinking that you can't play the game. The cycles seem to be getting shorter and shorter, so you actually have a smaller amount of time. If you don't do it, your competitors are going to go to the new platform and your customer expectations change. There is no opting out of the game.”
Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · Brian Balfour
“When you are in that place of doing something that no one has ever done before, that's when you get it.”
How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · Nilan Peiris
“Only after all of those questions are answered, should you then consider, do I have money? Can I put it behind some paid ads to make sure people come to my website?”
An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) · Meltem Kuran
“The reason for the progression the way I've described it is the channels get more expensive as you go farther along and they get more effective as you understand more about your customers.”
Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) · Sri Batchu
“We talk about the 10X engineer and we don't really talk about the 10X growth advisor or 10X growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue it applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact.”
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · Luc Levesque
“Something I've experienced several times in hindsight when you're like, 'Okay, here's the needle in the haystack.' And then it's implemented and you can see hundreds of percentages, sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right.”
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · Luc Levesque
“It's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company. You can't say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them.”
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) · Luc Levesque
“But if you just assume you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem, you're going to be wrong, because your entire customer base changed, not just the next 10% of customers that you're looking for.”
When and how to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass) · Adam Grenier
“It's remarkable how often you find that to be the case when I talk to companies, 'Oh, YouTube, we tried it. It doesn't work.' I'm like, 'Okay, can I see what you've tried?' And then you look at it and you're like, 'Oh, this thing was not designed to even have a shot at working from the get go.'”
How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · Yuriy Timen
“The goal of your Kindle strategies, these like non-scalable hacks, they only exist to unlock the fire strategies, to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users.”
How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite · Casey Winters
“Growth is a fairly new field. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks, like what is the sure things to get growth. In the age of social media everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks. Oftentimes things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern.”
Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more · Elena Verna 3.0