Lenny draws on interviews with founders and product leaders at Noom, Duolingo, Grammarly, Calm, Spotify, Future, Flo and others to explain what helps consumer subscription apps last. The core argument is that winners…
“Hello, and welcome to the free monthly editionof my weekly 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. Q: What do you consider GOOD and GREAT retention? “Great retention is the scalable way to grow a product. It’s the best indicator of product-market fit, it is the most important factor in a user’s lifetime value…”
This case study traces how Pieter Omvlee built Sketch, a lightweight vector drawing app for Mac, into a serious alternative to Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop. Omvlee started with a student project, charged for it…
This essay traces Medium's history from its 2012 launch by Evan Williams through its 2018 monetization struggles. It argues Medium's minimal design and long-form focus reinvigorated interest in in-depth writing and…
A guest post by Kyle Poyar compiling 25 low-effort, high-impact quick wins that operators at well-known tech companies used in their first months in a role. The ideas span funnel friction, pricing tweaks, workflow…
Lenny Rachitsky polls sixteen growth experts on what counts as a good customer payback period across B2C, SMB and enterprise businesses. The post explains how to calculate payback on a gross-profit basis, why it matters…
Seed fundraising is presented as one of the most high-stakes and confusing parts of a founder's job, and this guide, co-written by two seed investors who have been involved in over 1,000 seed rounds, aims to make it…
Lenny explains what investors mean by a "venture-scale" startup: a credible path to roughly $100M in annual revenue and a $1B+ valuation within about a decade. He argues most ideas, including many successful products…
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 Rachitsky reports first results from a compensation survey of about 5,000 newsletter readers, finding that 75% prioritize salary over equity during negotiations. The post argues this reflects a desire for…
Marty Cagan argues that many product teams, both in startups and established companies, spend most of their effort capturing value (pricing tests, ad optimization, cost cutting) rather than creating it. Startups often…
Teresa Torres recounts meeting a fitness-trainer founder at a startup pitch event whose customer definition was vague and whose validation relied on survey answers about hypothetical future purchases. She argues that…
Marty Cagan argues that 'specials'—large customer or partner deals that come with a condition to build exactly what they request—can derail a product company. Although the cash is tempting, especially for cash-strapped…
Cagan argues that many product managers, especially those coming from engineering, have only a shallow grasp of how their product and company make money. He recommends cultivating a relationship with someone in the…
Teresa Torres reviews how her coaching business has changed and lays out her plans for 2022. She explains that her main goal is to get more product trios adopting continuous discovery, but that this impact is hard to…
A practical brainstorming list of growth tactics organized by funnel stage and team area: top-of-funnel acquisition (short and long term), monetization, conversion and activation, retention, and team velocity. The post…
Product teams often face a flood of feature requests from support and sales, and it is hard to tell which ones deserve engineering time. Perri argues that a single question, asking how much revenue a request will…
Marty Cagan argues that a product team's primary scorecard metric should change depending on the stage the product is in. He describes three stages: MVP, where the only goal is winning several happy, referenceable…