people buy your product people listen to your podcast people read your newsletter because they have a job they want you to do for them if you had told me a few years ago I'm going to have 500,000 or more subscribers based on writing about product management I would have punted you like a football and called you crazy I could have felt the same people spend so much time trying to think about where do I host my newsletter what do I call it let me design it beautifully anytime you spend on that is just waste of time you could be spending on writing awesome stuff if R A Passage existed to create an archetype of person I think it's just like you be high quality and do it again and again and again and good things are going to happen I guess like the best example I think of is Milky Way versus Snickers was not expecting you to go there Lenny your success is amazing to me because I wouldn't have thought that in this niche of people wrri about product management products Engineering in Silicon Valley growth that there would be any more room but you say that there's all always room for better content yeah I guess on the first piece it's wild to me that a newsletter about product management and growth is like one of the top five biggest newsletters on substa and somehow this like really random topic has done super well so that just continues to blow my mind and it's not where I expected the newsletter to go I feel like people don't realize like 99% of the stuff on the Internet is just like not actually good and they forget that there's an opportunity okay if I can do something really great people are going to pay attention but easier said than done how do you rise above the noise so there's a few things that I find to be really important one is just spending more time on stuff I feel like people don't actually have a lot of time most people so they just kind of put stuff out and if you can find the time to put into a post to make it awesome you have a chance so for me I spend about 10 hours per post something like that some post take like a 100 hours some more so so that's the one advantage if you could just like find more time I spend a lot of time on each post I I basically do this full-time and kind of on that note I feel like once you can do this full-time or even parttime you have there's kind of this flywheel that kicks in where you have more time so gets better and then you grow faster and then so you can have more time so you start to make money doing it and just kind of get this advantage over other people that are doing it part time uh back to your question of how to make it awesome and how to make better content the other thing I find is really important is just be really clear about the like what you're doing for someone like what are you trying to do for them with your content I think about this jobs to be done framework I don't know many people know about this but the whole idea is like when people buy your stuff or read your article there's a there's a job they're trying to they want you to do for them teach me how to see the world more interestingly tell me teach me how to make money teach me how to uh help my career and I feel like if you can do that better than anything else out there people read it and it'll be useful to them and it'll you know people share with their friends yeah so the job I'm trying to do for people is help them get better at Building Product help them grow their product help them accelerate their career and so if I could do that better than anything else out there people will gravitate towards it most of my readers are founders product managers product teams people that are building software products and their whole job basically is to build product that is successful so part of that is just building an awesome product that people want part of that is growing the product and so that's what I try to help them with so some my most popular post or how to get your first thousand users how to what is good retention how do you Kickstart and scale B2B business something that just worked out recently so it's these very like tactical questions that I try to answer for people um just broadly the way I think about this stuff is I think of this like puzzle Board of all the questions and problems Founders and product teams have and my job is to fill in each of those puzzle pieces do you actually have that NOP it's just kind of this Vision I have of like I'm not going to be done people always wonder like am I going to run out of topics and questions am I going to just like when does it end and I feel like until I can fill that whole puzzle Board of uh answering every question a Founder has or product team has and I I have stuff to write about you have a wonderful humility about you you don't stand up and say oh I'm a rider I get to write about whatever you're like no I'm building a product these are the jobs that need to be done from my readers and I'm just going to serve them on that there's a very practical orientation that you have about your writing yeah 100% uh there are many spart people than I at this specifically at the thing I read about and I never feel like I know it all part of this writing thing is me figuring out these things you talk about this a lot like part of writing is learning and crystallizing your own ideas a lot of this comes from that so I just I have a pretty low ego I'd say I just don't feel like I know a lot of things especially compared to any other people so I try to stay humble there and then um and then two I feel like there's just a lot of thirstiness on the Internet or people are just trying to build a following I'm going to build a following and you know grow their subscribers and all these things and I I try really hard not to come at it from like I need to build a following I just come at it from how do I just deliver value to people and I find good things happen so I don't spend any time on growth and like big strategy I just kind of see what's working follow that poll double down on things that are working as much as I can service instead of self-gain yeah yeah and I and not from like some altruistic like oh I'm just I'm just going to make all this like I don't obviously I think about the income and like with the sense of being but I feel like if I can just solve problems for people they will share it with their friends they'll share with their colleagues it'll grow and that's exactly how it's worked I just put out stuff people find useful they share it they come back to it they read it again and again and so there's a Einstein quote a podcast guest recently shared that I love that something like seek not to find success but but to be a value and that's exactly what I've been trying to do that's the great Paradox is that by serving others who end up serving yourself yeah yeah exactly it just works like you know the word of mouth like what what driv is Word of Mouth people find something useful they tell their friends about it hey this is really cool and that's exactly how it's work like the whole newsletters were on through Word of Mouth like I've tried Twitter ads I've tried Facebook ads LinkedIn ads uh cross promotion all the things nothing nothing's done anything like it's all a blip compared to just the the growth that comes from Word of Mouth plus this uh recommendation feature that substack has that we can talk about that's pretty magical tell me about one of these 100h hour posts how do you conceptualize that how do you do the research when you know it's good so one of the first things that I wrote was this uh seven part series on how to Kickstart and scale a Marketplace business that came out of I left Airbnb people started coming to me and they're just like Lenny what did their BNB do to grow Supply how did they figure out quality of homes how did they fix the booking conversion experience like I'm just like well here's what they did but I don't know if that's the right answer like maybe it was luck that they worked out uh who knows if that was the right way to do it so I was just feeling like I'm giving people this advice that wasn't fully true necessarily so I decided let me just go interview all the marketplace founders of all the biggest marketplaces and just synthesize the patterns across all of them and they were willing to do that that's a shocking thing I find again and again people just are so open especially in Tech and I'm sure you this people are so open with sharing what they've learned what happened in the early days like the series I just did on B2B businesses the same thing they talk about how they grow how they got their first users how they think about prioritizing Road like all the things that you would think they'd be really secretive about they're very open about that sort of thing partly because they think they've seen that grows they're you know people find out about them it's good marketing and there's a lot more to building a massive business than like here's the one tactic or here's the one idea so yeah they're all very open so I basically interviewed them how' you start how' you start Etsy how' you start angelist initial Marketplace things like that how did you get the first 10 users how did you get the first thousand how did you figure out Supply ver demand so and are you pushing on specific sure what makes a good interview I basically come at it from here's all the questions people that are building a Marketplace are going to have and I just ask them all those questions so I ended up interviewing 17 Founders at Marketplace companies either Founders or early employees ends up being like tons of writing and content that I have to synthesize so I interview them look for patterns try to find kind of a framework or a process so in that case there's kind of a four-step process that it turned out for building a Marketplace it's essentially constrain the marketplace to a very focused problem and a geography focus on Supply first and focus on demand so tell me about these interviews so when you're reaching out to people you reaching out to the biggest names you're reaching out to the smartest people is what are you looking for and what makes a good interview subject I start with what's the wish list of companies that everyone would be so excited to hear from like what are the dream companies like if I were building a Marketplace I'd want to learn from Uber Airbnb maybe Etsy uh Rover I don't know so I start with like my wish list and then I look for one do I know anyone there two do I know someone that knows someone there I look at LinkedIn do I have any overlapping connections so I kind of start from the top what are the best what are the best op companies and the best people and then I try to get them all and I have this habit of just like I just want more so I start on these things I'm like okay who else can I get how do I do one more how do I do one more and it becomes this like potentially never- ending thing and but ends up I'm like okay I'm just going to ship this freaking thing so you I presume have a bunch of notes on a sheet of paper and those are messy how does that work feel messy so how do you go from that to a post I basically so I interview them I ask them all the same questions so let's say how did you decide if your Marketplace is Supply constrained or demand constrainted that's a in a Marketplace like Airbnb have to decide do we focus on growing Travelers or do we focus on growing homes which one do we need more of so I asked them all that question then I copy and paste the answers of all those answers into a doc and then I just look through it and just look for patterns and usually a few things emerge like here's three ways that companies have thought about pising Supply so basically it's just like staring a lot of content looking for patterns starting to like create little bullet points of like oh here's some takeaways and then I look for is there a way to visualize it is there a really cool quote that highlights this idea so the algorithm here is find something that people are curious about like a question that they want answered question that they want answered go make information that's trapped in people's knowledge get it out of them synthesize it put it onto a page in a way that answers that original problem exactly and then at the beginning one of the steps is who are the best people in the world like who would be the ideal people to get this information from because if I'm anybody random Founders and startups people don't care about they're like I don't know like why would I trust this so so step two there I would add is uh think about the best possible people and I had the advantage where I worked at bban B for a while so I had a bit of a oh he worked at bban B maybe we should talk to him there's also flywheel that kicks in where the more of this I do the more Network I've built by doing previous interviews so it's becomes easier to get to people but like I didn't know anyone when I left you weren't interviewing Zuckerberg or Cheryl Sandberg for people at the top you were interviewing someone who's the senior vice president here the president there and those people probably have 1 15th of the inbound yeah that's a really good point like so I didn't maybe go for like you know Elon Musk from the beginning but uh but yeah that's right and if I can get to the founder I go to like an early employee or an early or just someone that was there that just knows a lot of stuff so yeah yeah so it's more like think about in my case the company you want to learn from and then like who's the best person to get to but yeah yeah don't start don't go too crazy well it seems like there's a big correlation between how much effort you put in and how well the post does but you have posts like your template posts which crushed with only a few hours of work talk about that right that's right uh generally there's a very strong correlation between the amount of time I put into post and how it does sometimes that is not the case so I have this post of just my favorite templates like my favorite strategy template and vision template and PRD and one pager and road map template and yeah it took me like it was like so I publish every week and I have to like put out something awesome every week and sometimes like I don't have any time this week so I'm like what can I do that's pretty easy so I always had this idea I'll just collect all my favorite templates and make it a post so one week I did that and yeah it's one of the top 10 most popular posts but if you think about it I spend time in the past collecting those things like or putting together those templates and I don't know if it's fair to say it was only three hours because there's time previously but it was very quick there's a few others there's this one on what is a mission I guess dipping back when you're building a product there's kind of the sequence of things you want to do there's like what is the mission of the company what's the vision what are the goals what is the road map what are the tasks so I laid it out for people just like how do you think about the sequencing of that Vision then Mission then strategy then goals and I described it in the frame of ocean 11 as they're as they're trying to rob the uh the MGM and the other casinos like what is their mission what is their Vision what is their strategy what is their goals do you like using pop culture references I I love it but I'm really bad at it like I'm not one of those guys that just can has these metaphors and examples in mind you know what I do what do you do I have the solution for you just ask GPT so what you do is you go in and you say hey this is the point that I'm trying to make I need a pop culture reference so here's what did I had a friend who was struggling with focus and he loves loves films so I called him I said dude you're working on like eight different things if you could just focus on one thing I'm telling you you'd be so much better off and he loves movies so I like I have to frame this for the perspective of a movie but I don't watch that many movies I'm not like a big movie guy same with TV shows so I go gbt I'm like this is a story that I'm trying to tell give me a pop culture reference and it starts off with like the story of Honda so I'm like actually I need it to be a fictional narrative and then it gives me this example this example I just narrow it down narrow it down I end up with Rocky four so I have rocky four I'm like yes that's the perfect story and I go to him with the rocky for framing and his whole life has changed since then and all I did was go to GPT I had the answer I worked with it and that's what I needed this is going to be the highlight of the podcast this is amazing so you just post the post in there like the the concept well I went to go have a conversation with him so I just reviewed the story arc and he's like I love that movie Rocky four amazing and something about that movie with the fighting I knew was really going to resonate with him it took me like seven or eight back and forths but then I found what I needed every every one of my posts now is going to have a story in a metaphor amazing okay thank you you heard it here first you heard it here first how much do you think about storytelling versus practical just get right to it wisdom so I find I have no training and writing I've never written anything online before I started this thing uh and so I find that the less I can think about the beauty of my writing and the style of the writing and like being a writer the better everything goes so I try really hard just like let's just focus on high signal to noise uh actionable succinct useful information and then at the end I'm like oh how do I make this introduction a little more interesting how do I simplify this how to introduce this in like a metaphor High signal to noise High signal to noise actionable actionable and succinct talk about all three of those yeah I think the reason my stuff does great is it's just like here's an answer to your question I've spent tens of hours thinking about this researching and giving you an answer and so how do you do that best it's just like just give me the information uh as an example I find that introductions are often way too long people just spend all this time introducing the thing they're writing about and you're reading it's like shut up just tell me the answer already and they leave the answer to the end and I just and I've learned this from a couple books that I've read about unw writing of just like just tell them right away here's the answer and then if you want to learn more here's how here's how I got to this and here's a bunch more detail so that's something that I along the lines of high singal and noise just like here's a chart of the entire answer to this question for example a recent post was around how to find product Market bit it was part of this broader series of how to start a B2B business and that's a question everyone has how do I know if a product Market fit how do I know how do I get there so I'm just like okay here's a big chart of how long it took everyone to get there and then here's four steps to get there and then cool if you want to keep reading here's all the quotes and stories from all these Founders tell me about your first post that went viral it's called what seven years at Airbnb taught me about building a business so this post was about basic basically what I learned for my time at Airbnb and one of the elements is just have a really high bar for everything and and I talk about all the examples of that and one of the examples is we're approaching a launch of this neighborhoods product where there's this idea of like when you're trying to book anbb you want to understand the neighborhoods in a city right like is the tender what The Tender Loin all about and so they were about to launch that as a huge thing and a few days before launch the designer was working on the homepage and she's just like trying to figure out a way to you know explain what this is and he's walking around and he looks at her example and what she's working on and he's like and she asks him like what do you think and he's like no let's build something the internet has never seen before for this for this homepage it's like a few days before launch and she ends up building this like Parallax look thing where you're scrolling and it kind of like shifts in interesting ways so she figured something out but it's kind of like the bar at Airbnb is just like let's just how do we 10x this thing how do we how do we build something in the internet never seen before uh which is very stressful uh hard to work in that environment for a long time but uh but it's part of the reason airbnb's been successful I think how did that influence your Quality Bar another reason I think the newsletter has done well as I keep a really high quality bar I try really hard to get to a place where I don't see anything else I can correct or improve so I read through my posts 10 20 30 times just again and again looking for what can I tweak what can I simplify what can I cut what can I move around until it's just like okay this is great I don't know what else I could do unless I just like redo it all or spend another 100 hours so I think a lot about just like how do I keep the quality bar really high coming back to the earlier thing we talked about there's just like a lot of bad content on the internet and the way you succeed is high quality and so it comes back again to just you need to spend a lot of time on it and people can tell if it's high quality and I don't know quality is also like rammar issues short intros just like really CLE ideas um but I think I think keeping yourself to a really high standard is really important there's a line from Steph Smith where she says how do you be great be good consistently yeah what do I always tell people when I asking me how to be successful in writing I think in content in general is just quality and consistency just be high quality and do it again and again and again and good things are going to happen and easier said than done on the quality piece and the consistency piece but it's exactly that quote and I think good is I'd say like I think good is is probably good enough like you don't need to be the best in the world at it but I think you should strive to be the best in the world and if you can get to like one of the best in the world on a topic that you're really focused on you'll have a really good shot at being successful but I think it's as simple as that just produce really high quality stuff again and again like for me I've been doing it for four years now the first N9 months is like very slow growing newsletters these days go shoot up so fast and it to I don't know it took me probably a year to get to something like 10,000 subscribers people get there a couple months at this point so uh but that's the thing I always come back to Quality and consistency how do you balance the desire to be good with the need to publish every week I think that is a really useful uh forcing function you ever pull all nighters absolutely not never no absolutely not no interesting never I think it's because I stress out about not being done so I publish on Tuesday so I'm always like I want to be done be way before Monday even I try to be done like over the weekend so I never get to a point of like oh it's Tuesday and I'm not 10 I've never gotten there honestly if I ever get to that point I would just take the week off and just like sorry guys I'm taking a PTO i i invented a PTO policy for myself because as a solo writer person like I don't have any benefits of any kind I have no PTO no uh 41k matching no time so I created like I'm just going to take four weeks off sometimes that's just when you're signing up just know that so I would do that if I was running behind so why do you think this Airbnb posted so well so the way it came about I left Airbnb I wanted to start another company and I was just like wait what did I learn in this time I spent seven years at airb be how do I not have to relearn all that stuff like things worked out great so I decided let me just draw some notes down of things I learned so culture is really important and really powerful having you really High bar quality is really important uh setting really ambitious goals really powerful and important so I just started writing that down and I started thinking it's very cliche writing a medium post about your learnings at your company I was like God damn it maybe I should actually do that and I I came up with this title of what seven years at Airbnb taught me about building a company and I told it I like shared it with a friend he's like okay that's going to go vir should write that that's a really good title actually let's talk about it s years gives you credibility there's a 've done studies at what does really well in Hacker News and when somebody says I spent this many hours I've spent this much time somewhere it instantly lends credibility or like I made this much money I know those do really well of course of course at Airbnb so you have the instant credibility there of the brand name taught me about building a business so we know it's going to be a personal testimony of your time there and then building a business so now I know I'm going to get something from the article the structure of that title if you want to turn into a template I think is A1 sweet nailed it right from the beginning yeah I mean you it does seem what I find to be so comical about your process is that you sort of stumbled into all this time and again yeah absolutely tell me about this Airbnb setting ambitious goals but you don't set ambitious goals what's going on there yeah no I don't I I set like little goals along the way so had this goal of if I can get once I started the paid newsletter mostly like if I get to 100,000 a year holy I could like do this and not have to get a job like all them my project avoid getting a real job this whole idea of the newsletter path so and then I got there I'm like okay if I get the 300,000 I'm making about what I made at Airbnb with salary and stock and all that stuff if I can get there holy that's I never have to get a job again I'll just keep doing this for a while and then and it kept growing um and I never like I have no vision or goal for this thing I'm not like here's the big master plan or here's this Empire I want to build I'm like actively not trying to build an Empire I'm actively trying not to build the media company of any sort I just want to do this you just want to write things are great like why do I I don't need more stress and work like the podcast is a good example or I just have this list of stuff I'll never do a podcast I'll never do a course I'll never do a book like I don't need that this newsletter is so fun and interesting and I make a living doing it like why do I need more work I can spend more time with my family and travel and all these things but eventually the podcast sucked me in I'm like I shouldn't do a podcast um I did a course so the one thing I haven't done yet is a book why have you decided to to do those things so I did uh Harry stubbings is podcast 20 VC and at the end of it we started stopped recording and he's like let you should do a podcast you fool what are you doing so I'm like okay let me try so it was it was that it was just that conversation he's like just enough motivation I'm like let me try it out so decided let me give it a shot and it's actually generates more Revenue than newsletter grew much faster than newsletter uh it's really energizing it's like such such a different Dynamic from the newsletter they work together really well one is just me sitting there writing the other is like there's a performance to it a little bit which I don't naturally do but kind of pushes me out of my comfort zone which I think is good when in your writing are you the happiest uh I always think about I don't know if Heming way said said this thing about how writing is easy you just sit at the keyboard and bleed and I definitely feel that in every post there's this like oh it's going to be so fun to figure out what is a good uh what is how do you improve conversion rate for signup flow oh wow I'm gonna come up with an answer and talk to all these interesting people like oh it's gonna be great and then it's like oh cool let's do it and then you go through this like trough of like oh my God this is never G to come together I'm so stuck yeah so stuck I'm I don't know the framework that I'm going to come up with this thing or I wish I had all these other people involved but then I always come out of that I'm like oh we it's coming together there it goes and then there's this like okay cool let's finish this thing so I'd say to answer your question like the beginning is really fun I'm just like oh this is going to be so fun and interesting and then and then i' say publishing it is is great like I just put out a post today about how linear builds product and it's doing great and that feels great you know like the the reaction is always really fulfilling I'd say the best part is just the messages I get from people that read the stuff I write and they're just like this changed my career this helped me get a new job this really unlocked something for me in the product like how much more fulfilling can a job be than getting these messages from people at them what kind of difficult emotions do you feel in theory I have to write an awesome newsletter for the rest of my life every week no pressure no pressure just the way that you frame that is like maximizing pressure that's really funny cuz I have a paid newsletter and people are buying it every day and there's annual plan so they're buying a year so I have to write a year at at least you can refund them I could but then giving up the revenue like I could shut this whole thing down 100% but that'd be really tragic you know like the revenue and the freedom this newsletter provides is really hard to give up so that'll be very hard and very painful and I think people would be really upset too so I think about the Indiana Jones Boulder always coming at me pop culture reference there we go they didn't even need CH GPT yeah yeah but that's kind of what it feels like like I've gotten really good at not thinking about that too much but I publish a post on Tuesday that took a long time and then it's like cool got to start thinking about next week so are you thinking about next week right now do you know what you're going to publish so you just published are you already working there's something that happens on Wednesday how do you think about that I I'm now in a place where I have the next like three or four posts in the works already oh wow yeah partly because one of the ways I avoid going insane and burnout is I found ways to have posts that are less work I have guest posts which are a growing percentage of my posts because probably I just run out of stuff that I know that I could share and partly because there's so many smarter people than I on topics so I just think about what is a topic who's the smartest person on that topic let me just have them write an awesome thing and then I spent a lot of time editing it to make it awesome when you edit what do people need help with introductions are often way too long as we talked about the they kind of lose the the focus a bit and so I try to just come back to here's like the most important part this is what you're trying to say yeah this what you're trying to say let's just say this a little more simply they get distracted and Go in different direction so it's mostly cutting a lot of stuff repositioning some stuff mostly I just like think about what is interesting to me and where do I get lost I just pay attention as a reading what's confusing what's not interesting or I getting to something that will really be like wow that's really interesting what's like an aha for the posto mostly just pointing out this thing's not interesting let's just probably cut this this gets off track and then there's also just like grammar stuff and streamlining and then the introductions always just like let's just let's make this 50% shorter and that often makes it a lot better what else makes a good introduction I struggle with introductions that's probably the thing I'm relas good at I'm trying to find like an Editor to help me I'm trying to find someone to just like help me make an introduction grade because I'm always like this company is unlike any other company that's existed and here's why uh I don't know makes a good introduction I think I'm still learning I think partly it's what's surprising okay here's something I do at uh in every post I have this template I start with that has like the framework and at the top I have these bullet points that I use to remind myself as I'm writing the introduction so one is just what's what's surprising about it what is a what is a good story I can start this thing with what is something that is I guess unexpected surprising there's a few more that I forget and this is why I'm not good at it I just always forget what should I what should I say to get people pulled in basically just want to pull them in mostly I try to keep it really short and just like get right into it it works distribution when you wrote this post about Airbnb medium featured it on your homepage you've really benefited from the substack recommendation engine that is a huge lesson from your writing how important it is to have the right forms of distribution and when a platform can go to work for you up and to the right yeah I think there's a few parts to growth of the of my newsletter one is the beginning how do you just kind of get it started like you may have the best content in the world if no one knows it exists not going to it's not going to spread at all so I think there's a few things you can do early on to get it going then there's a few things later on that work for me like the recommendation thing we can talk about but I'd say 99% of my growth has been word mou so I think that's just an important lesson is newsletters mostly grow through word mouth they're so affordable you get an email you afford it to your friends and colleagues and then you there's a link you can share it so so that's mostly how things grow I think a lot of people try paid ads and things like that but I think that's really hard unless unless you can monetize it in a really interesting way but I try to avoid that stuff so I think to get it started the thing that worked for me is I wrote a few things on medium initially I started on medium and having a few people retweeted was really powerful like Andrew found it really useful and he retweeted and a few VCS found it useful I had the advantage that it worked at RB and I had a bit of a brand it wasn't I wasn't just some random that just like here pay attention but I think you can get a lot of that attention even if you don't have that brand if your stuff is amazing you just have to get it in front of people so so yeah medium featured it which I did not expect it got like bazillion claps on medium if you remember claps uh so that that actually helped me build my Twitter following so medium is like not good for bwing your audience and and anything because you can't send things you're right to them you have to kind of trust medium sends it to them so uh something you should definitely do as soon as you can is move to a place where you collect email addresses so you can get right to people's inboxes that's like incredibly powerful um going back to out started so medium featured it a started where my tter Following also doing guest posts was really powerful for me writing a post on Andrew Chen's blog and on the first round review how did you get those to happen I was chatting with first round about a startup idea I had and I was in the office and then I ran into their editor who wrote the first round review which I loved it was like the best source of content on Startup stuff and I was just like hey I have this idea for a post that I kind of was toying around with and just like let's chat about it and so it led to that so it it's kind of it was kind of a serendipitous thing and then with Andrew Chen I met him as I was leaving herb randomly he was there in the office and I just like was Brave and like hey Andrew uh I'm leaving your RB I'm thinking of about starting in company love to chat sometime so we ended up chatting a bit and then I shared this post with him and he was like wow okay it's great let me retweet it and when you did those guest posts did you think about linking back to your own owned audience or was that not a focus no I think this is another lesson is don't like overthink any of this stuff initially I just like let me just write something interesting and see how it goes I didn't have any plan of any kind it's just like here's a thing I want to get out of my head and that did well and I continued doing it because it did well but no zero percent uh thinking about the future of this thing do you think about email conversion percentage now and trying to optimize for that or is it just like no I just sort of have it and hopefully it goes well people read it and doesn't matter if it's 2.4 2.7 3.1 like it'll just sort of work itself out I don't think about email conversion I think about just views of a post so I think about I do think about did this post do well and if they don't do well which is mostly views that it got cuz because I can tell roughly how many views on average post get and which one are doing better and worse I I knew get sad about it I'm like that did not go great yeah so do I do think about how do I do better how do I avoid this topic what was it about this post that didn't do great I was actually looking at a post yesterday around how to how to hire at your startup how to win at hiring and I was reading it I'm like this is not that great like I could see why it didn't do great it didn't do great and it was just like just a bu random stuff and the quotes weren't amazing so I do think about that what are the meta lessons from the failure of that post I don't say fail yeah so funny I said failure I was like who that's to say failure I think a Metals in there is I think of those so I had these like four framework four things to do when you're hiring have a compelling Vision that you tell your people that convince them this is amazing hire an A+ plus team because amazing early employees draw other amazing employees I just felt like it wasn't that unique it was like yeah I know I know all these things surprising surprising it wasn't that surprising I think that was part of it so if you were to rewrite that post now would the answer be I'm going to go to a bunch of interviews would it be I'm going to really think through this or would the answer be ah I don't really have much to say on that topic that I think is really good right now I'm just going to Poston that I do definitely left my let myself off the hook with posts sometimes or I'm just like this is good enough like I don't need my every post to be this like home run I find that if I get mostly like two I don't know second base what do you what's the Met for second base hits two two hit run go GPT what has a metaphor for two bases uh yeah if I get mostly doubles and triples within a home run every like a month or two that's that great but still I'd love everything to be awesome so I think with that post I'd probably think about a better way to frame each of these things that are more interesting which I'm bad at just like what is a good catchy way to describe these things and then maybe maybe like more fancy Founders I have one of the challenges in the work I do is I interview Founders and oftentimes those companies don't do well eventually and so I look back and like all these companies are not not doing great anymore so you lose credibility but how do I know how am I supposed to know H about your schedule no meetings till 3:00 p.m. used to be like 12: or 1 and then you were like no I'm going to push that back to three huh yeah uh I forget how I introduced this but I just decided I need time to think and work and research I'm G have no meetings until 12 o'clock and then after 12 I'll do I do Angel Investing and some other stuff so I'll do calls after 12 and then somebody was like try three p clock but I had a similar schedule I'm like wow that's crazy I only have like two hours to three hours of time for other stuff but uh but I did it and I would never go back it's incredible uh it also reduces the number of calls and meetings I end up doing because I have less time uh but I find it's such an amazing way to live there's no meetings until 3:00 like this is an example where I made an exception it's the morning right now like like the rest of the day is not going to be of any productivity no not productive at all because the morning C and gets jled but it you know this could be great thank you so no meetings till 3 pm and what then do your meetings look like uh so I do some Angel Investing talking to Founders a lot of interviews for the post that I do and then just like I try to have some fun stuff in the you know catch up with friends and stuff like that but even after three I try not to have any meetings like I try to avoid meetings I try to avoid I try to avoid everything I try to avoid interviews and talks and conferences and events because nval had this awesome quote that I so resonate with that as you become successful you just have less time to do that thing that made you successful and there's all these distractions that try to pull you away come to this networking event come to this talk be on this panel and I find it so easy just to get drawn into like oh this going to be so fun I'll me some fancy people and then you just lose the thing that you were really good at because you had the time to do that well and so I try really hard to avoid that because like I said I have to do this every week for the rest of my life make an awesome piece of content and I w't be able to do that if I'm just pulled into all these things so big part of what I do now is just say no to everything like I have to I came up with all these ways to say no like when we were trying to schedule this I'm like let's try again later maybe like I I try to like find ways to avoid stuff because I think that's the way to keep it at this what sorts of ways have you come up with to say now one is I create these policies of just like I have a policy no talks no events no interviews it's just like because I need to protect writing creative time I help people understand why that's important I I just find ways yeah I don't know I have these little templates that I kind of don't even think about so one is policies one is uh some excuse to like why I can't do right now like I just had a kid so that's a really good excuse I can use for a while I just had a kid I'm really busy right now can we just chat in in like six months the CTO of a public company signed up for r a passage and I said hey congratulations can't wait to have you I would love to do a meeting and just welcome you and make sure that whatever you need you'll be happy and he goes I don't do meetings and then this was the big thing he sent me a post that he had written on why he doesn't do meetings and I read out the entire thing with the rationale all of his reasoning and it was interesting because knows like I'm a big people pleaser so NOS for me will be like they sort of haunt me they hurt me because I'm like uhoh well this person think that I'm a bad person will they not like me but something about having that post and having it feel more like a policy made me be like you know what I admire this guy I admire what this person is doing yeah I'm going going to I'm going to do that that's a great idea cool uh I also get haunted by like I get so many messages and DMS and things of just people asking for things and like inviting me to stuff and I get I'm so worried about one time responding to someone in a non-ind way and then either thinking I'm some or just like you know trying to cancel me like I I try to be really when I do reply I try really hard to just like can I make this really nice and help them understand why this is not the case why I can't do something also also fine just not replying as often the best route just like go I don't know if I saw your message and they never know if they saw my message and that's a really that's actually a powerful way to avoid it's just oh I never got the same M sorry but it's hard what advice do you have for people who write at work my advice would be if you're at a company and you're trying to write the thing I would use writing for is to try to remember the things you're learning as you're in them because you leave the company like it's been four years now since I left that work that I write about and it fades and I forget the things I did and you run out of stuff to write about that you've done so you have a huge Advantage being at a company doing the thing where you can actually tap into thing like a challenge you're having that week or a lesson you just learned so that'd be my tip is use writing as a way to synthesize and remember the things that you're doing and it doesn't have to be that long you could just like tweets or an interesting way of doing it and then you can flush it out into something later if that works so that's one the other is I think a lot of people come at writing with I'm just going to I'm going to write about what people are excited to hear and what I think will grow my Twitter account or X my X account or what people will subscribe to but I find that because this is such a long-term game you need to it's much more important to focus on what are you excited about and what do you want to spend time on and what are you curious about because if you write about something that you think people want to read about and you don't really care about that much you're just going to get you're creating this like terrible job for yourself square that with the jobs to be done I'm answering a question that people have I'm sensing a disconnect there there is a disconnect so ideally like what you want to find is this vent diagram of the thing you love doing the thing people value and then uh yeah I guess those are the two most important parts how do you deal with criticism oh man stinks I hate it uh mostly I think about 99% of people love the thing and one% doesn't like it okay that's okay they get hated well you shivered when I asked you that was the what is it that you hate about it I guess just like to me frame this the scary version of this like every time I pulish something it goes out to 500 something thousand people like it's like a massive many stadiums of people and so I try not to think about this too much because if I do something say something super wrong in the post I lose credibility you're like who this he like I can't trust this guy anymore he's writing something that is super wrong for example something that just happened yesterday it's like not the best example necessarily but I I noticed that half that the second biggest Market of my YouTube audience for my podcast is is in India so I'm like how do I make it easier for people in India to listen to the podcast so I added a Hindi subtitles which feels like oh that'd be awesome more people in India can listen to my podcast and that's I tweeted about it and so proud hey everyone I got Hindi subtitles and everyone's like you fool everyone that is in Tech in India speaks English Hindi is like not necessary at all and it's it's like harder to read and it completely misinterprets what they're saying and I'm like it just makes it feel like I don't know anything about the Indian culture and I feel like everyone's going to think I'm an idiot uh so I thought about deleting that but it's fine I got good feedback I learned um so so anyway I mostly look for mostly look for what am I doing wrong what am I not doing great I don't know people are like hey this guest is is not great I don't want any more guests like this I'm like it's a good data point I try to get better another example is I had this post about product Market fit where it map the timelines of 30-ish companies uh row to product Market fit so I have like all these very specific dates and two different companies kind of ping me and they're like no this is not right uh we actually had product Mark fit at this point or here this thing happened and that and I tweeted that image and it went like crazy people loved in it everywhere and correcting it is kind of difficult is now that one out is out so mostly what I do is I just correct the image put in the post and then just tweet hey there's a correction for this post but again creates a sense that maybe I'm losing credibility people are like oh he's totally wrong how do I trust any of this information so try to avoid that what writers or people do you really admire and want to emulate in your work so this comes back to I don't spend a lot of time on like I am a writer I will be a beautiful amazing writer I try not to think about that I try to like signal to noise information and then like later on I'll try to make this beautiful and interesting as much as I can but that being said uh I'm in like a Rick Rubin hole right now just reading his book so just reading how he writes it is is really inspiring so I'm trying to bring some of that over I don't know what specifically but that book is really like every chapter is just like wow okay GNA try to remember this uh many guests on your podcast um and I think it's partly because they just have high signal noise Tyler Cohen Noah Smith that guy is just like a beast just like writes every day this like incredibly insightful thing I don't know how he does it and then um Kevin Kelly I don't know yeah just like really succinct High signal to noise writers is kind of what I what I'm really inspired by how do you edit your writing mostly I just look at it again and again I just read so every time I come back to it I don't I'm not like a I write it all at once guy I know there's like a philosophy of just write the first draft quickly and get it all out I don't I can do that I just kind of keep adding to it and have bullet points and keep pushing it up so I find every time I come back to the post I just read it from the top and look for things to improve and every time I do that I find things to improve improve then as it kind of flushes out again and again I just keep reading through it keep reading through it looking for things that I could cut things I could simplify things that are confusing my friend describes this as writing friction so what you want to do is you want to go through through and be sensitive to where's their friction where do you get caught where does something not quite work because for the kind of writing that you're going for is you're trying to transmit information that is the core thing you're trying to transmit useful information so what you want is the ultimate efficiency between this is what I learned and is in my brain to how quickly can I get it get into your brain it's like a smoothie right sometimes you'll be drinking a smoothie and too much too much fruit in the straw or something like you're trying to suck it it's just not going whereas other times we drinking a smoothie and it just comes right in and you want the the more liquid smoothie so to speak beautiful metaphor unless that piece of fruit is so good it's like worth it I'm going to really think about this part uh I love that metaphor yeah that's exactly how I think about it and sometimes I have to there's this phrase Kill Your Darlings like I try to do that all the time with just like I really love this idea but I just like it doesn't it just confuses everything goes off track maybe I'll save it to the end maybe I'll save it for a different post so I'm always just like I got to cut this thing I really like well I think one of the things that you're picking up on that hurts R of Passage students and it sounds like you refuse yourself to think like this is I need to make my writing beautiful I need to make it poetic and in English class that's how we think about writing we read these novels and the novels are written with all this purple Pros we're like in order to be a good writer I need to write like that and you're just stripping away all that you're like no there's a question that people need to answer and it's my job to answer that question and to have a high signal to noise ratio in a way that is super useful to my reader that's it and the fact that you don't even identify as a writer I think is one of your greatest strengths because you don't have ego and pride tied up in needing to write the most beautiful thing you're just like I just got to give a good answer over here yeah 100% I never call myself a writer like when I'm trying to describe what I do I just say I write a new say Thanksgiving hey Lenny how you been doing the last year how you been doing what are you working on what do you say what do you say I it's like very strange I read a newsletter I I I describe like the verb of what I'm doing that feels more natural I read a newsletter I have this newsletter and they're like cares about a newsletter like it always sounds very trivial by the way when I describe I write a newsletter but uh I say I write this newsletter I have a podcast I have a jaw board few other things so it's more like the action that I'm doing not like me as a person because I I don't definitely don't don't feel like a writer feels very strange and to your point every time I think about how do I write beautifully I just get stuck and it just slows everything down so I'm just like let me just share this stuff and then find ways mostly it's the introduction that I think about writing writing writing as a thing just like how do I introduce this concept and get people pulled in youever get writer block no how do I get writers block I get like man there's so much content here and how do I simplify it in overwhelm I get overwhelmed with them keeping things making it make sense and consolidating lots of ideas into something sying yeah and it gets just like my brain just hurts it's less like I don't know what I'm going to write or how I'm gonna yeah yeah I don't get writer block really I think it's just you just put in the time I think you talk about this just like just like find hours to spend on this thing and then just keep working at it like you'll get there do you work on vacation I vacation really hard because I have to put out something awesome every week like so and I have PTO policy but I can take two weeks in a row that's like too much because everything every time I take a vacation my growth slows plateaus it's like very linear you can like watch the growth and every I was on paternity leave for three months or or so and like complete flat growth during that period even though I did post something every week because I worked on it behind beforehand and created a backlog of posts that came out during my Pat Le so I worked extra hard before I went on Pat Le but I didn't have a chance to promote it really and tweet about it and Linkedin and all that stuff um so I do check Twitter and Linked In and stuff on vacation I do feel like I always have to think about work because there's always something more I have to work on there's like a post I'm working on in the future so what are your promotion Vehicles you have the email list you have Twitter LinkedIn what else that's basically it X selfies on Instagram no no no um uh yeah basically Twitter SLX and Linkedin and the newsletter and how do you think about Twitter versus LinkedIn differently so if I LinkedIn is much more effective actually it's like shockingly powerful for getting attention much like more than x Twitter uh more traffic comes from LinkedIn I think for my stuff it makes sense because it's business oriented but X Twitter is just so much more fun like that's where I enjoy posting more it just feels like more live there's like tweets and retweets and posts likes how he things LinkedIn is just like what sits there and like get some reactions and stuff what works on LinkedIn the benefit of LinkedIn is you can have like more content in the post so I usually start with Twitter keeping it really short and then I'm like okay if I could add a few more things i' do that on LinkedIn so LinkedIn gives me a little more a little more Breathing Room tell me about your research process toine a topic to write on list of Target companies you want to talk to find warm intros or cold DM an email throw collected info into a Google go doc stare at it for a while I want to hear about that and then finally turn it into a story or framework so those are your six steps but I want to hear about staring and finding the story or framework how does that happen for you so let's let's look at an example uh so recent series I did is on starting a B2B business and so I started with basically the series was how do you Kickstart and scale a B2B startup like I just want to give you manual basically how do you do that you're starting a company what are the steps how do I be successful so I start with make a list of all the companies I want to talk to talk to amplitude and uh GitHub and uh slack and all these companies I interview them all takes a lot of time uh so I interview them for about an hour and I collect all these transcripts and as I'm doing that I start to just jot down patterns I hear again and again and I start to jot down like a sequence essentially of things that they did just like roughly and then I also think about just like what are the questions people are going to have about building a BB company like how do I come up with an idea how do I get my first customers how do I know if I have product Market fit how do I hire my first people so it's kind of this combination of just like what are people going to wonder what comes up again and again so I start with just all the content and interviews and then look for I kind of just read through them and just look for stuff that comes up again and again so an example how do you find product Market fit something that came up again and again is start with just one company that loves you like if you're building say You're Building uh slack just like find one company that loves slack Pigman is actually a better example they uh Kota was their first customer their first user and they just obsess with let's make Kota so happy with figma and there's a story they tell where they set them up they went to their office they set them up on figma then they left and the engine Engineers started using it or the team started using it and they they call like hey it's not working it's not it's broken we're not going to we're not going to use it and they were they just got back to the office and they were like let's go so they drove all the way back to their office another hour drive and they showed up and turned out the Wi-Fi had a problem so their engineer is just sitting there fixing their Wi-Fi and just like guys it's going to be okay we're going to fix it for you and I got them on track and I became their first customer and they loved it so so so there actually like those stories that stick with me too like one example they're like oh wow maybe this is a pattern I can pull out of this whole process so in that post I'm just like okay the pattern is get one company to love you get a few companies to love you get them to pay for your product continue growing essentially and you write in Kota is that right yes okay so I start with Koda for tracking all my ideas tracking the content calendar starting the initial drafts yeah I actually don't use Google Docs I use Google Docs for um guest posts wait so walk me through what you do in Kota yeah yeah and then walk me through the Google Docs with the guest posts so Koda i' say is the home base with a newsletter I have all of my future posts as pages so there's like La left nav bar of all the posts I'm thinking about and the schedule that I think they're going to come out in and how many are in there I have probably 50 just ideas of posts that are for the future that have no content yet I have five are like in the works and then I put dates on the ones that I'm thinking about in the near future just to make sure I have a sense of when they're all going to come out so then I start just writing bullet points for an idea so so I don't know a bad example maybe is I'm thinking about a post on what is the essential uh library for product management like what are the books you should read what's like the essential reads if you want to get into product management like it's kind of an easier posts which I always like to have in the back pocket if I'm just stressed out so I start so I'm basically collecting things my guests on my podcast have said things people have tweeted of here's my favorite books on product management I'm just kind of like starting to put in raw data and then as that approaches I start to flush it out but I'm going off track from your question uh so Cod is kind of where I start everything eventually once it gets flushed out enough I move it all to substack and just use their editor because often there's formatting changes and things like that also substack is like really beautiful the way that it works and I try to like look at it and see is this making sense how are the headings going to look that kind of thing so in Kota are you coming back to things that you thought that you were going to write about in previous posts and bring them into new ones how is the search functionality do you have folders how does that work it's pretty simple I have folders for like upcoming posts that I'm working on ideas I have like coded docs of like writing advice to myself just like what's in that it's kind of stuff we've talked about like what something surprising about the thing you're doing how do you cut what what can you cut and what's a story you can tell what a metaphor those sort of things but pop culture G culture G that's gonna be a new thing just ask G gbt can you write this for me a beautiful metaphor uh so I have that and so it's basically just a way to organize a Content calendar meets initial draft of a post and then and then I move it to substack it's like it's pretty easy and about Google docs for guest posts yeah I find there's no better platform for collaborating on a post so good so simple and so good like why is it so hard but can anyone do something better it's great uh so I asked all my guests authors to just start in and Google Docs and then I just go through there and leave comments adjust edits things like that and eventually once it gets to a good Thum state so I have a copy editor I don't know we haven't talked about that but I have a copy edor who's uh incredible and that's like a gamechanging thing like she it's like a 100 bucks a post or something like that it's like not that much and she catches like a 100 things every time like no matter how much I think it's done there's like a 100 things that what sorts of things like commas and you know grammar type of things and capitalizing letters and pronouns things like that like stuff I have known and like you think I'd learn like oh okay here's all things I keep doing wrong but it's still a hundred things every time oh I'm blind to my own writing I'm just amazed I do I do a little Journal thing every day and I then send it to a friend and what I do is I'll run it through GPT and I'll say hey are there any typos and I swear at this point there's no typos like there's no way that there's typos here's eight things that you totally missed it's like I wrote 200 words and I don't know what it is but as a writer I'm just blind to what I've written especially right after I've written it there's I can't see the mistakes I right like the worst thing I do is I I tweak it a little bit right before it goes out after the copy Ed has D I'm like I don't need to run this by her it's fine it's great I just changed a few things there's always something wrong well the problem is fresh in your mind you have the intent of what you're trying to say you have the context so when you're reading something you're reading with that intent with that context a copy editor has none of that information so they see it in a much more objective way yeah I think that's right also just her brain works in this really crazy way where she just like can stand it being wrong just sees the problem it's like oh every time I email out something that has a problem she like immediately emails me Lenny you got this this needs to be fixed it's just like personally motivated to make it awesome know you need to know she's just like you know she takes pride in in the newsletter at this point and she just is really unhappy like in a h in a friendly supportive way of just like oh you screwed this up fix fix tell me about these writing prompts what do I want to learn about what do I want to remember what is interesting to me right now what do someone asked me that I didn't have a great answer to what have I said on Twitter that has resonated yeah so those are people ask me what should I write about I want to start writing what do I write about and I forget where I shared that but that's the the answer I had for people I think that fourth one is is interesting which is what do people ask me about that I don't have a great answer to that's essentially what led to my newsletter is just people were asking me about these Marketplace questions I'm like let me go find out I don't I don't know the answer and I think I think anyone can do that really as just like I don't know what are what are questions you wish you had an answer to go find out especially if you have some background in it especially if you can get to people that might have a good answer but roughly yeah those are ways to prompt what to write about and essentially what I do tell me about your writing environment what is your office like what kind of chair do you sit in how have you thought about that wow I feel so uh so fancy asking about my office environment I work in I try to work in different parts of the house I find that that's really helpful so I don't get like my office it becomes it's the podcast studio now and I just sometimes I get this like it's like a little bit stressful to go in there cuz like not my natural state to be a podcast person so it's like nerve-wracking so I sometimes feel that when I get in there so like no I'm not going to go in there right now uh so I sometimes work on the couch sometimes go to cafes I think you were telling me you have these four things that matter to you and things are great and basically that's like all I need is just like a laptop and head my my list is different laptop headphones good mute like I use brain FM to create this uh Zone feeling where I can focus I don't know how much you know about brain FM creates this binural beats thing just endless binaural beats that in theory help your brain focus and that works really well for me and then Wi-Fi is is all I need so so I'm when I'm out and about that's all I need uh and then when I'm in the office I don't know I got this Herman office home office yeah work from home it's amazing highly recommend especially with a new kid nice to be around do you put on clothes do WR in pajamas and slippers I put on Voris often oh that's what I wear nice high five yeah I do that the vori sweatpants are phenomenal yeah I just bought some yesterday some new ones they're so good Sunday joggers that's a post you got to write why is vori so much more comfortable than all the other workout casual gear yeah there's like so many soft Brands but something they did right I think it's like tight enough and soft enough it's like a nice combo and they're brand you know they did a good job so what I need anywhere in the world but I need these four things so much is comfy chair sparkling water coffee comfortable chair fast Wi-Fi but if I have those four things I can write from anywhere yeah I think I can do without a comfy chair I think that's I think I live with that for a while it would write from coffee shops yeah it's awesome I love it especially just getting out of the house is really nice I will say I spend a lot of time very distracted a lot of my days just check in Twitter and Linkedin I didn't expect you to say that absolutely I'm very very distractable uh and it somehow works so I have like a post I'm trying to work on I checked Twitter probably 30 times just like man what's going on especially if I just tweeted something but something about that like gives my brain a little break where I'm just like oh how do I gotta write something here I just like check Twitter get into a little pull get pulled into something and then come back to it somehow works so you're not bothered by the distraction I'd rather not be distracted like if I could not check Twitter and Linkedin and whatever I would I would not but it uh it's hard to avoid as much like I deleted the Twitter app on my phone I just used the mobile web site uh but it doesn't it seems to work is kind of what I've concluded like I don't need to block it I feel like I get enough done even though I check Twitter SLX uh often what's the coolest thing that's covered from your writing whoa this podcast that's the right answer that answer was not paid for we need like that fast guide and advertisement you know like at the end you know not sponsored naturual reaction what is the coolest thing that has come from this wow I guess the coolest thing is just that I can do this full-time and I don't need to get a regular job I don't know if that's a good answer to that question but it's insane that I could just do this full time and just sit around and think about stuff and write about it and I make a very meaningful income from it and it's also very fulfilling what is it that you love about this topic of product management and everything that orbits it so on that topic you talk about this actually I'd love to get your take I think you're big on create a personal Monopoly around like a very Lee topic so I find if I were to follow that advice fully and I don't know if I I fully understand the advice so maybe I wasn't fully uh aware of how you describe it but if if I were to do that I would be like I am Mr product management guy I'm just going to write about product management that's going to be my thing but I would just like be so bored if that was all I wrote about there's only so many things you can write about product management I I don't care about product management that much I'm not going to spend my life thinking about product management so what I decided to do let me just think about a few topics in the area like growth for product and career stuff and starting a company and product management all combined so I decided let me just give myself permission to go in any of those directions because they're all interesting to me and it's hard to describe what I do initially and to like have this whole sentence describing what it is I do but one it gave me enough motivation and excitement to keep going I was like oh yeah there's a new thing I want to write about oh there's a thing there's a thing uh so that helped me stay motivated and I feel like that's such a key part of this life is having like being excited about the thing you're writing about because you can so easily create a job for yourself you hate because you picked the topic and now you're stuck writing about that for years and why would you do that they have prison of your own creation yeah absolutely well to the person Monopoly Point rule number one is do whatever it is going to take for you to be able to write any advice that would take you away from writing any strategy that means I'm going to write 80 90% less is going to be bad advice so I would start with rule number one is you have to write you have to write consistently Lees and if you don't actually enjoy it then you have no chance of being successful you have no shot because you're going to burn out and all that but to the point about person Monopoly yes you have expanded but you're not writing about the philosophy of sea lions in the San Francisco Bay like I'd be pretty surprised if I saw that on your substack so there is a limiting factor and I think that the key thing is you have your own intuitive sense of what is part of your personal Monopoly what's not part of it and it doesn't need to be perfectly mapped out but the fact that I have a good sense for what a lennison post is I think is really all that you need and I also think about the word of mouth so I don't know if this would be a characterization you're happy with but I'm just imagining myself at a bar hanging out with some friends hey yeah you know there's this there's this guy named Lenny you're a product manager and he writes really well about startups and growth and product management that sort of his thing and I don't know exactly what he's written about recently but if that's what you're interested in you can go on his blog and basically everything you read is going to be pretty good I always think about that recommendation of how do you have something that's specific enough that somebody else can recommend you whereas there's other people who you don't have that for and then it actually gets a lot harder to recommend their stuff because I guess you can recommend a specific post here a specific post there but as a reader it is hard to situate yourself in their work and figure out exactly what they're focused on yeah it's exactly the same problem you have to solve with a startup is like when someone has a problem you want them to think of your thing like if you're trying to do an analytics you need analytics help like you want to think amplitude or mix panel so I think it's exactly the same thing like I'm building a product who's the newsletter it's connected to the jobs to be done thing like what is the job I need done I need to figure out how to become better product manager you want to be in people's heads when they're thinking about that um you going back to your question of was the coolest thing that's come out of this another thought that came to mind as you're chatting is every time I come to San Francisco now I live in in Marin uh somebody recognizes me and they often ask for a selfie which is crazy that that would happen with a a newsletter uh I'm just like every time I come there's going to be one person that's like are you lety which is surreal what's the right kind of Fame to to have I think this is a pretty good level where it's like very Niche like it's all product managers and like Founders it's not like uh uh Rando people trying to stalk me my wife's like very worried about getting too popular and she's like worried about what we do in public a little bit because like people might be like oh my God second uh so it be has a little bit of like things we have to think about but it's but I think it's the right level words a niche Community people like really like the stuff I do and they're like oh look at you here you are but it's not you know Paparazzi level Taylor Swift had to leave the Chiefs game in a popcorn stamp oh man she like really travels in those boxes and stuff right like crates it's like a it's a clever way what a life what a life yeah I call this Niche Fame you I know it's a good name because you called it nich without realizing that's what I call it so that is one way to think of a good name and I think of it like the fame of an academic Professor you can meet whoever you want to meet people respect you but you're not going to be recognized on the street and it's not like you're having at least right now a massive quality of life decrease but you can still meet the people you want to interview I'm sure you have access to really interesting conversations if you want to have them and also it is proof that you're doing good and important work and that's something to celebrate yeah I love it Niche Fame that's that's what I got over here tell me about the jobs we done framework and how should if I'm a new writer how should I be thinking about this so there's like a whole world of jobs to be done that Clayton Christensen CL yeah Clayton Christensen came up with this initially and there's this like famous I guess like the best example I think of is Milky Way versus Snickers I had I had one of the co-creators yeah not expecting you to go there I had one of the co-creators on the podcast and I just learned this metaphor uh so Milky Way and stickers you think compete with each other but it turns out sckers is what people go to when they're like they want to feel full they they just need a quick snack and they don't have time to eat something and a Snickers is like very filling versus a Milky Way which people buy for like Comfort they just want to feel better they're like sad they're on the couch they're watching a sad movie people buy Milky Ways turns out and so it turns out they're solving very different problems people buy them to do a different job for themselves so the whole idea of this jobs to be done framework is people buy your product people listen to your podcast people read your newsletter because they have a job they want you to do for them so it could be I want to get better in my career what am I going to hire to do help me with that I want to learn to write I want to learn I want to make money I want to I want to be entertained that's a job like I just want to be have a good time so what I find is the best newsletters and I think it applies to most things are ones that solve that specific job really well so your course is like the best solver of I want to learn to write online and so obviously that's why it does great because a lot of people want to do that so that's what I find is really important is just think about just like be really real what job are you doing for people and then just do that as well as you can for them and the newsletters and courses that don't do well are ones that are just like this they just want to pontificate on a ideas like here's what I think about technology here's what I think on Trends and there's a job there of like I just want to be smarter help they be smarter about the world I think the economists had this tagline at one point of like be smarter at dinner parties that was their pitch and so I think there's a job there but I think there the bar is so high you have to be like so smart you know you're competing with Tyler Cohen and Noah Smith and Ben Thompson Ben Thompson yeah so I always think of morning newsletters like the morning brew as the job to be done there is when people are talking about the news at the water cooler you have enough to say that you can contribute to the conversation yeah yeah that's great it's like help me stay aware of what's happening in the world I think that's a really good job then it's important that people have that job there's a lot of newsletters out there that are writing about stuff people don't really care about so that's an important thing you got to get right like are there enough people that have this job that they need done do you think that exists what enough people for what I mean is you have product managers I mean intuitively I would actually guess that that's not a huge Market but you've rushed it if you had told me a few years ago I'm going to have 500,000 or more subscribers based on writing about product management I would have punted you like a football and called you crazy I would have I would have felt the same yeah turns out I did a search on LinkedIn there's 800,000 product managers in the US and two million in the world in some form so like I didn't even know that so that's that's maybe part of it but I think it's partly because I focus on broader things like stuff founders care about just general people like designers enjoy the newsletter Engineers but you're I think you're right like often times a very small Niche is is totally fine like when I had a thousand paid subscribers I was making 100,000 bucks a year and that's like a very reasonable salary to live on so it's exactly Kevin Kelly's idea of a thousand true fans it's exactly what happens to me I'm like at a thousand okay this is working so uh you don't need it to be massive I don't know some point this thing like I I look for the S curve in my growth you know like growth starts accelerating and then it slows down that's usually how everything grows so I'm waiting for that day when it starts to like okay you've reached capacity haven't gotten there yet well you really reached an inflection point just the opposite with the recommendation engine on substack why do you think yours was so popular yeah so I don't know if people know about this feature but on substack you can as a writer you can recommend other writers so I recommend a few other newsletters so when they sign out for my newsletter they're like hey here's Lenny's recommendations do you want to subscribe to these other newsletters uh at this point 9,000 other newsletters recommend my newsletter and if you look at the growth of my newsletter there's a huge inflection the day they launch that feature so just on the one hand there's never been a better time to build and grow newsletter because that one feature exists and all the other newsletter platforms copied it still everyone's got that now the reason I think it worked well for me like I don't think it's going to work as well for everyone is I had like a known quantity at the point they launched that feature so a lot of people could be like oh what am I going to recommend oh yeah I know about let newsletter so I think that was really important I don't know if there's anything else I think I think it was just like a successful newsletter with that feature but if you have a successful newsletter today and people are thinking about who to recommend they'll they'll think of you so who do you read so many newsletters I subscribed to like 80 newsletters I think uh so there's a lot um Noah Smith is the one I really love I don't know if you know about all his stuff but I just feel like every time I read a stuff I'm just smarter okay that's great I've been listening to Ben Thompson on podcast I find of that's actually more interesting he's got smart Tech I think it's called where they talk about so I I've shifted to podcast for Ben Thompson I don't read as much as I used to because I have a kid now and I just don't have any time so my reading has been depleted uh so mostly Twitter and Linkedin those are fairly standard answers so how would you go from standard consumption to differentiated production you're clearly doing it so I'm trying to figure out how that's happening I don't know how much the cons informs my production even though Rick ran talks about his whole thing is like his skill is creating taste by consuming really high quality stuff like I love that he's just like a high taste person that doesn't have any skills in music he's just like I know it's good because I listen to good stuff all the time uh that's not me I don't I don't know how much that's so cool isn't it is it it's so cool that's like the best job ever yeah just I got great taste yeah I have great taste I just consume great things and I trust my intuition for what's great and then I produce great music I know nothing about music I just trust by taste I think that's awesome there's a meme that came around on in like product management with that where there's a clip of him being like I don't have any skills of any specific kind I just share my opinions and tell people what I think like that's product management um so to answer your question I don't know how much consumption actually informs what I it's mostly just like people writing so I think what this makes me think about is to build a successful newsletter you need to contribute something new to the conversation there's a lot of just like rehashing of stuff there's a lot of superficial analysis and thinking and pontificating on things and I find that what people really want is tell me something new that I haven't heard like how do I find product Market fit like what can I do that's a new insight into how to do that might be just like stories people have never heard about might be a new system so it's more just like okay I've seen people do this and this and that what can I do that's different in that direction and I think that's probably the the best way that does it I like I have a whole folder now newsletters I kind of like find I don't have as much time to even read other newsletters right now how does your experience as a web developer and an engineer shape your writing process I think the main way is I know what I'm talking about when I write about the stuff I write about I think there's a lot of people we talked about like thirsty online Twitter people are just like I'm going to build a following and then they just write about stuff they have no background in and just like it's very superficial not that useful so I think the fact that I was an engineer and then a product manager for a long time just like gives me background and stuff I'm writing about and I can helps me understand like what is super obvious and boring and also just what is probably not right and I need to dig in further like sometimes people give me these answers and interviews I'm like are you sure that's how it went maybe was there anything that was challenging around that say more about that like when people talk about fighting we keep going back to the product Market Market fit example people tell me how quickly they got to product Market fit and I'm just like that's unlike any other story I've heard is there like a period before that that maybe you spent thinking about this idea maybe it took you a little like how long did it really take you to build this thing kind of helps me understand to push on people so that's maybe one answer to your question the other is as an engineer you learn to focus you create flow States and things like that so I think just tapping into like how was I able to get into the flow when I was an engineer so binaural beats was really helpful avoiding distractions headphones what's that called Magic mind magic mind what's that uh yeah so I have this there's this product that a friend of mine made actually James bashara that is this like concoction of uh herbs and supplements that help you focus he calls it the first Focus energy drink Focus drink focused focus at a drink and uh I drink it when I really need focus when I need to like really buckle down and get into the Zone I took some before this interview actually just like just a bit because I don't want it work it's working great look at us go we're killing [Laughter] it uh yeah called Magic mind there's there's other things like this but I but I like it and it's like a little green bottle you just like shoot it and it's got like all the things that you need to focus how about product management I think one of the things that is revealing is you've become more systematic in terms of planning out posts over time and there is a discipline that you definitely have like when you said earlier sometimes I'm done by Saturday or Sunday I'm ready to go I heard that I was flabbergast and I was like I that would never happen to me and I know other writers who they would say what do you mean that I would get something done on time the deadline is the thing that gets me going and I would totally pull an all nighter and you're like no you know I just wouldn't really pull on nighter I would probably just go on PTO for the week that calmness that order that systematization that seems to be Downstream of product management it might be it might be the opposite like I became I got into product management because that's the way I like to be I think I just try to avoid stress and I don't want to get stressed by having a post not ready by the end of Tuesday um honestly people ask me a lot like how did product management influence the way you write and like I honestly don't do most of the things you would think I would do like think about the strategy for this thing think about the road map think about the vision like I don't do any of that I just focus on what you said is just right awesome stuff everything else is a distractions touches on something else I tell people a lot there's all this people spend so much time trying to think about where do I host my newsletter what do I call it where do I let me design it beautifully let me think about the big idea and the strategy and my positioning of how it's going to fit everywhere and I just like especially moving to other platforms like people keep moving to other platforms off upstack and I just notice that when they do that it just growth slows and because they're just distracted they're trying to like optimize their homepage and build this thing and tweak it when all really you need to do is write awesome stuff and it'll spread and anytime you spend on that is just waste of time you could be spending on writing awesome stuff so so maybe that's part of the answer to your question of product management because you as a PM you have to prioritize really well there's so much stuff there's everything's on fire all 10 so I think just coming back to how do I prioritize really intelligently maybe but otherwise I don't think about I don't think about what I do from the perspective of product manager well letny if right a passage existed to create an archetype of person I think it's just like you someone with domain expertise who just loves the craft doesn't get distracted and I admired your work a lot before we did this but now I admire you and the work even more and it's just makes you really happy that people like you succeed on substack and on the Internet thanks man imagine how much better this would be if I took the course if I actually knew what I was doing that'll take it to the next level well we're going to take things from this we'll put inside R passage and uh thanks for time man thank you
