Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Prioritization
One of the mistakes that I see a lot of product managers make is they over index on people who are going to be unhappy with the products they're launching... Design it for the bigger number of people who are going to be using it tomorrow.
We used to have this rule, the 80/20 rule, where it's like you can't just build for that 20, I don't think we made this up by the way. I think this is a common thing, but we'd always refer to it and say, we want to be building for the 80%, and even though the 20% are going to be more vocal.
I think it's better to solve a small number of people's problem really well than trying to solve a large number of people's problem not very well at all.
When you are an early stage company, the worst thing you can do is try to be everything to everyone because you don't have enough runway. You just don't have enough of anything to do that successfully.
And the hardest thing I think about building these marketplaces is that the ambition can often feel like this sun, like the heat of the sun that's trying to warm everything up, and you're going after this big market, warming the ocean. And I think that, really, what the the best, ambitious founders do is they focus that ambition like a laser beam on a small market, the thimble.
The only way to get to that place, to get to that moment of real dominance where you have this winner take most dynamic is that you have to tip your market, and that's the only scalable way to do that, and that's what level two is. And so, how do you maximize your chance of tipping a market? You have to focus on a really constrained opportunity, and that is level one.