Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Vision & Mission
If you're building and the product that you're building is kind of right on the edge of the capabilities of the models, keep going because you're doing something right. Give it another couple months and the models are going to be great, and suddenly the product that you have that just barely worked is really going to sing.
I'd start with the thing your product does. What's the core premise behind it? Why do people use it? What problem does it solve for them? That kind of thing. So, go back to basics. And then ask, 'Can AI do that?' And for a lot, the answer is going to be, 'Yes, it can.'
We literally ripped up our strategy almost entirely, and started again, from first principles and said, 'Okay, why do people use Intercom?'
We were about to hit $0 net new ARR, which means we would've been in negative growth territory. We never got there. I managed to stop it before we got there, but we were falling each quarter.
We wanted to change the lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product had changed at all.
You have to think about the whole cohesive system. And I started realizing that. I asked one person on your team, somebody you know well, and I asked him, I said, 'I feel like I open our app and the product hasn't changed and four years.'
Phase one is build something people want to buy. Phase two, the one we don't talk about is now you have to build a company around that thing people want to buy. Building a company is always the same.
It is to enable those who have such a hard time finding people who are good at creating software that's been their absolute bottleneck and let them take their ideas and their dreams into reality.
Finding product-market fit is the single most important thing that your startup does in the first three years, and it's just underexplored and it's just underexplained as a topic.
Extreme product-market fit is a state of widespread demand for a product that satisfies a critical need and crucially can be delivered repeatably and efficiently to each customer.
What you have to do is to actually have, when you come up with a new product or you discuss a new product, you have to derive it from first principles. You have to say, 'How would we solve this problem given every fundamental building block that we have available right now?'
You want to work at a company that has a balanced portfolio of investments. You don't want to work at a company that, when times are tough, kills all future growth and just shores up in the core business. That's a company that's just committing itself to dying at some point.
Who's your VP of Free? If you have this massive free base, who's your VP of Free? I know almost no one that has a VP of Free.
There's a question before that question, which is how do you find company product fit? A company essentially is a portfolio of products, and every large company, medium-sized company also has a portfolio. Every company has unique strengths and weaknesses. How does that product, assuming it's successful... does it actually serve the right place in a company's product portfolio?
I think the biggest probably lesson learned, frankly, is that we were really close with the Instagram folks early on... I think in hindsight we were a little bit mistaken to believe that the atomic unit would be a person talking about a place that they're at... versus a person sharing a moment or an experience that they're having in the world.
We had this really interesting moment where the users were all telling us, there's no problem. We love this product. They were using it every day, they were coming back. It was slowly growing and we were just like, this just isn't going to get us to where we need to be.
My probably most spectacular failure was, I was the first PM on Hangouts. We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power of Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do and we still didn't manage to build a great messaging product.