Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 571
May 12, 2020 · 22 min
“👉 Updated version of this post here 👈 Hello, and welcome to a free monthly edition of my newsletter. I’m Lenny, and each week I tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out at the office. Send me your questions and in return, I’ll humbly offer actionable real-talk advice. 🤜🤛 If you find this post valuable, check out some of my other posts: 1. How To Know If You've…”
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 1,022
Feb 28, 2023 · 21 min
Jorge Mazal, former CPO of Duolingo, recounts how the company reversed a slide in daily active user growth and eventually grew DAU about 4.5x over four years. The journey began with failed attempts: a…
Lenny’s Podcast79 min
Julian Shapiro · Sep 25, 2022
Key learnings- Pursue product-led acquisition by designing features where users naturally invite others, such as settling debts, sharing…
- Build user state, like reputation, audience, or social graphs that cannot transfer off-platform, so accumulated investment makes…
- Prefer evergreen topics and keep updating old writing, since Julian treats his handbooks and posts as living assets rather than…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 254
Jul 26, 2022 · 54 min
Lenny Rachitsky's fourth installment in a six-part series on launching consumer businesses argues that reliable early growth comes from a small menu of tactics, and that founders should pick two or three and focus…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 314
Sep 3, 2024 · 32 min
Phil Carter introduces the Subscription Value Loop, a framework for growing consumer subscription apps that face hard problems: app store control, dependence on paid acquisition, high churn, and low, hard-to-grow ARPU…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 224
Jun 9, 2020 · 12 min
Lenny Rachitsky and Casey Winters surveyed 20 experienced growth practitioners to define what good and great retention looks like across business types. They asked for benchmarks on user retention at six months and net…
Lenny’s Podcast105 min
Nikita Bier · Aug 25, 2024
Key learnings- Look for latent demand: when users go through a distorted workaround to get a value, that signal can reveal a product idea with…
- Target teens for social and communication products, since invitations per user drop roughly 20% per year from age 13 to 18, and…
- Build a reproducible testing process: Bier argues that the number of shots at bat and how reliably you test ideas matters more…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 166
Jul 7, 2020 · 18 min
Lenny Rachitsky investigates how fast-growing B2B companies won their first ten customers, drawing on interviews and stories from firms like Figma, Stripe, Slack, Shopify and Airtable. He finds that nearly every company…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 432
Nov 20, 2019 · 11 min
This is the first part of a multi-post playbook by Lenny Rachitsky, drawn from interviews with people who built marketplaces like Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Etsy and Thumbtack. The core argument is that the chicken-and-egg…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 250
Oct 25, 2022 · 14 min
Lenny Rachitsky and growth advisor Yuriy Timen ran a benchmarking survey of over 500 product teams to answer what counts as a good activation rate. The article defines activation as the share of new users who reach a…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 151
Nov 22, 2019 · 5 min
This second installment of a marketplace growth series tackles the chicken-and-egg problem: once a marketplace is constrained by geography or category, founders must decide whether to concentrate resources on supply or…
Lenny’s Podcast74 min
Crystal W · Jul 31, 2022
Key learnings- Run Wizard of Oz style experiments before building: use WhatsApp groups, screenshots, or manual processes to validate demand…
- Experiments are worth running even with around 30 users; the trends stay similar, and precision improves with more data, while…
- Define retention concretely as cohort retention; for a free weekly product, expect roughly 60% of the prior week's users to…
Lenny’s Podcast126 min
Sean Ellis · Sep 5, 2024
Key learnings- Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer use the product; a high share saying 'very disappointed' is a leading…
- Survey a random sample of users who have actually experienced the product and used it more than once recently, not just sign-ups…
- Use the very-disappointed group as a filter: find their primary benefit and the context ('why is this important to you') to craft…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 75
Apr 14, 2020 · 7 min
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader question on turning existing website traffic into customers, arguing that conversion work is one of the highest-return investments a growth team can make once acquisition channels are…
Lenny’s Podcast93 min
Dan Hockenmaier · Oct 9, 2022
Key learnings- A growth model is a spreadsheet formula for how your business grows; roughly half its value comes from the act of building it…
- Start with three core building blocks for a SaaS growth model: acquisition channels, retention, and monetization; marketplaces…
- Retention is often the most sensitive lever in a growth model, so small retention gains can be worth more than larger gains…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 54
Aug 25, 2020 · 14 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny explains how to measure retention using cohort charts, and why a curve that flattens signals product-market fit. He then lays out seven levers for improving retention, ranked by expected impact: improving the…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 172
Oct 11, 2022 · 9 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyLenny Rachitsky expands his Racecar Growth Framework, breaking a startup's growth into a self-sustaining growth engine, kickstarts for early users, turbo boosts for temporary surges, lubricants for efficiency, mid-stage…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 107
Sep 14, 2021 · 23 min
Brian Rothenberg argues that a surprising number of billion-dollar companies, including Airbnb, Uber, Square and Eventbrite, share a little-understood growth loop in which demand-side users convert into supply-side…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 139
Mar 2, 2021 · 21 min
Lenny Rachitsky maps the landscape of content-driven growth into five strategies, then zooms in on editorially generated SEO content (EGSO), where employees create search-optimized material. He profiles Slidebean…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 286
Dec 3, 2019 · 22 min
This is Part 4 of Lenny Rachitsky's marketplace series, focused on driving initial demand after supply is underway. It argues that the timing of investing in demand depends on product-market fit, where growth comes…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 99
Mar 3, 2020 · 6 min
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader's question about building referral programs for marketplaces, drawing on his experience leading supply growth at Airbnb, where the host referral program became the biggest driver of…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 233
Apr 16, 2024 · 19 min
Subscriber post — summary onlyKen Rudin introduces ARIA, a repeatable framework for growing a product by increasing engagement with features it already has rather than launching new ones. He argues that most growth comes from incremental…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 232
Jan 10, 2023 · 20 min
Hila Qu, a former VP of growth at Acorns and PLG lead at GitLab, lays out a practical guide to starting a product-led growth motion for B2B SaaS. The piece argues that PLG is not just a feature set but a go-to-market…
Lenny’s Podcast128 min
Sarah Tavel · Dec 27, 2023
Key learnings- Pick one core action that defines an engaged user and track it as your North Star, rather than vanity metrics like MAUs or…
- Build the product so it gets better the more it is used and users have more to lose by leaving, which drives retention.
- Design network effects and re-engagement loops so that each user's activity pulls in and re-activates others without extra effort.