Lennys Podcast Newsletter

Lenny's Podcast & Newsletter 知识库

基于 Lenny Rachitsky 的完整内容存档（289 播客转录 + 349 篇 Newsletter），支持搜索、阅读、问答和学习。

数据概览

• 289 篇播客转录：硅谷顶级产品人访谈（完整对话逐字稿）
• 349 篇 Newsletter：产品管理、增长、职业发展深度文章
• 17 个主题标签：design, leadership, strategy, growth, startups, career, product-management, b2b, engineering, b2c, ai, analytics, go-to-market 等
• 289 位嘉宾：包括 Brian Chesky, Satya Nadella, Lenny 本人等
• 数据来源：lennysdata.com

数据路径（自包含在 skill 内）

references/
├── 01-start-here/    # README + index.json（元数据索引）
├── 02-newsletters/   # 349 篇 Newsletter Markdown
└── 03-podcasts/      # 289 篇播客转录 Markdown

脚本自动使用 skill 目录下的 references/，无需配置外部路径。

搜索脚本

SCRIPT=~/.claude/skills/lennys-podcast-newsletter/scripts/lenny_search.py

命令列表

1. 索引搜索（快速，按标题/描述/嘉宾/标签匹配）

python3 $SCRIPT search "关键词" [--type podcast|newsletter] [--tag TAG] [--limit N]

示例：

python3 $SCRIPT search "product-market fit" --limit 5
python3 $SCRIPT search "pricing" --type newsletter
python3 $SCRIPT search "" --tag ai --limit 10          # 列出所有 AI 相关内容
python3 $SCRIPT search "Brian Chesky"                   # 按嘉宾搜索

2. 全文搜索（遍历所有文件内容，较慢但精确）

python3 $SCRIPT fulltext "关键词" [--type podcast|newsletter] [--limit N]

适用场景：索引搜索找不到时，或需要在正文中查找具体观点、引用。

3. 阅读具体文章

python3 $SCRIPT read "03-podcasts/scott-belsky.md" [--lines 200]

返回 JSON 包含 content、total_lines、truncated 字段。超长内容分段读取。

4. 列出标签

python3 $SCRIPT tags [--type podcast|newsletter]

5. 列出嘉宾

python3 $SCRIPT guests [--limit 30]

6. 统计信息

python3 $SCRIPT stats

Workflow

用户提问关于 Lenny 内容时

1. 理解意图：判断用户想查什么（某个主题、某位嘉宾、某个概念） 2. 搜索：先用 search 快速匹配，找不到再用 fulltext 全文搜索 3. 阅读原文：用 read 读取相关文件，理解完整上下文 4. 回答：基于原文内容回答用户问题，引用具体来源（嘉宾名 + 文章标题）

用户想学习某个主题时

1. 用 search "" --tag TAG 列出该主题所有内容 2. 推荐 3-5 篇最相关的文章/播客 3. 读取并总结关键观点 4. 如果用户想深入，读取完整内容详细讲解

用户想了解某位嘉宾的观点时

1. 用 search "嘉宾名" 或 guests 找到对应播客 2. 读取播客转录 3. 提炼嘉宾的核心观点和金句

回答格式

回答时需注明来源：

**来源**: Lenny's Podcast — {嘉宾名} ({日期})
**标题**: {文章/播客标题}

{回答内容，引用原文关键段落}

注意事项

• 播客转录包含完整对话，每段有发言人和时间戳（如 **Scott Belsky** (00:12:34):）
• Newsletter 包含完整文章内容，有 YAML frontmatter（title, subtitle, date, tags, word_count）
• 内容为英文原文，回答时可按用户语言偏好翻译或保留原文
• 超长文件（部分播客转录超过 15000 字）需分段读取

lennys-podcast-newsletter

Lenny Rachitsky 播客与 Newsletter 知识库 — 用自然语言搜索、阅读和学习 638 篇硅谷顶级产品内容

Search, read, and learn from Lenny Rachitsky's 638 podcasts & newsletters using natural language

[English](#english) | [中文](#中文)

---

<a name="english"></a>

English

What This Does

Turn Lenny Rachitsky's complete content archive into a searchable knowledge base for Claude Code. Ask questions about product management, growth, design, AI, leadership — Claude searches through 289 podcast transcripts and 349 newsletter articles to give you answers with sources.

Content Overview

Prerequisites

• [ ] Claude Code installed
• [ ] Python 3.8+ (built-in on macOS)
• [ ] Lenny's data archive (from lennysdata.com paid subscription)
• Place the extracted data at: ~/乔木新知识库/20-29 学习/23 播客转录/lennys-data/
• Or modify the DATA_DIR path in scripts/lenny_search.py

Installation

npx skills add joeseesun/lennys-podcast-newsletter

Verify:

ls ~/.claude/skills/lennys-podcast-newsletter/SKILL.md

Usage

Just ask Claude naturally:

• "Lenny 有没有聊过 product-market fit？"
• "Lenny's podcast about pricing strategy"
• "What did Brian Chesky say on Lenny's podcast?"
• "Summarize Lenny's newsletters about growth"
• "Search Lenny for AI product management"

Search Commands (used by Claude internally)

Troubleshooting

Credits

• Lenny Rachitsky — Original content creator
• lennysdata.com — Data archive for paid subscribers

---

<a name="中文"></a>

中文

功能

将 Lenny Rachitsky 的完整内容存档变成 Claude Code 可搜索的知识库。用自然语言提问关于产品管理、增长、设计、AI、领导力的问题，Claude 会搜索 289 篇播客转录和 349 篇 Newsletter 来回答，并标注来源。

内容概览

前置条件

• [ ] 已安装 Claude Code
• [ ] Python 3.8+（macOS 自带）
• [ ] Lenny 数据存档（来自 lennysdata.com 付费订阅）
• 将解压的数据放在：~/乔木新知识库/20-29 学习/23 播客转录/lennys-data/
• 或修改 scripts/lenny_search.py 中的 DATA_DIR 路径

安装

npx skills add joeseesun/lennys-podcast-newsletter

验证：

ls ~/.claude/skills/lennys-podcast-newsletter/SKILL.md

使用示例

直接用自然语言问 Claude：

• "Lenny 有没有聊过 product-market fit？"
• "Lenny 播客里谁讲过定价策略？"
• "Brian Chesky 在 Lenny 播客上说了什么？"
• "总结一下 Lenny 关于增长的 Newsletter"
• "搜一下 Lenny 关于 AI 产品管理的内容"

常见问题

致谢

• Lenny Rachitsky — 原始内容创作者
• lennysdata.com — 付费订阅者数据存档

---

关注作者

• X (Twitter): @vista8
• 微信公众号「向阳乔木推荐看」

<p align="center"> <img src="https://github.com/joeseesun/terminal-boost/raw/main/assets/wechat-qr.jpg?raw=true" alt="向阳乔木推荐看公众号二维码" width="300"> </p>

License

Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast Content

Copyright (c) 2019–2026 Lenny Rachitsky. All rights reserved.

---

This archive is provided exclusively for the personal use of paid subscribers to Lenny's Newsletter. By accessing or using this archive, you agree to the following terms.

These paid full-archive terms are intentionally more restrictive than the public starter repo license.

What you CAN do

• Use with AI tools — Load this content into AI assistants (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.), RAG pipelines, or any other AI tools for your own personal or hobby use
• Train models — Fine-tune, train, or build personal AI models and embeddings using this content, for non-commercial purposes
• Build on top of it — Create personal projects, tools, apps, or prototypes that use this archive as a data source, and share those projects publicly, as long as you do not charge for access to the archive or redistribute the raw files
• Adapt and remix — Create derivative works (summaries, guides, analyses) for your own personal use

What you CANNOT do

• Redistribute the raw content — Do not share, upload, repost, or redistribute the archive files (or substantial portions of them) in any form. This content is for paid subscribers only.
• Charge for it — Do not sell access to this archive, or sell any product or service that is primarily built on this content
• Use it commercially — Do not use this content in any commercial product, service, or offering, including commercial AI/ML products, paid APIs, or SaaS tools
• Claim ownership — This content remains the intellectual property of Lenny Rachitsky

In short

This archive is yours to learn from, build with, and feed to AI tools for personal and hobby projects, including projects you share publicly. Just don't share the raw content with others or use the archive itself to make money.

Questions?

For licensing inquiries or commercial use requests, visit lennysnewsletter.com.

Lenny's Data ZIP

This ZIP contains the full private archive for paid subscribers.

What is included

• Newsletter posts: 349
• Podcast transcripts: 289
• 01-start-here/index.json is the source of truth for this ZIP and uses the bundled file paths
• Paid subscribers can also connect to the full MCP at lennysdata.com
• Newsletter posts published within the last 3 months are intentionally excluded from this archive

ZIP layout

• 01-start-here/: README.md, LICENSE.md, and index.json
• 02-newsletters/: full newsletter markdown posts
• 03-podcasts/: full podcast markdown transcripts

👋 Welcome to a✨ free-edition ✨of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. Annual subscribers now get a free year of [Perplexity Pro, Notion Plus, Superhuman, Linear, and Granola](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/announcing-the-greatest-product-bundle). For more: [Lennybot](https://www.lennybot.com/) | [Podcast](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/podcast) | [Courses](https://maven.com/lenny) | [Hiring](https://www.lennysjobs.com/) | [Swag](https://lennyswag.com/).**

This newsletter just hit a big milestone: one million subscribers. This is both exciting and absurd. No part of me imagined it would reach these heights.

What started as an “experiment” just over five years ago is now the world’s largest product newsletter, podcast, and community. I’m feeling very proud.

Milestones like these are a great opportunity to pause and reflect, so I put out a call on X and LinkedIn and asked y’all what burning questions you had for me. Below is my first-ever mailbag edition. If you have any additional questions, post them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Leave a comment

If you’re wondering what might change now that we’ve hit this milestone, the answer is: nothing. You can expect a high-quality, high-value newsletter in your inbox every week, like always. That being said, I’m cooking up some exciting new stuff (a bigger and better bundle, a new podcast, and a few other surprises). But mostly, it’s back to work.

Let me also say this: From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter, for sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and for making this work possible. Your support means the world to me.

An added thank-you to Jean-Francois Monfette, Rashi Kakkar, David Anderson, Jonah Wolfraim, Patrick Morgan, Mike P. Lewis, Siddhant, Sherry Jiang, David Lobo, Daria Aleksandrova, Anxo, Ender, and Axaia for the questions below, and to everyone else who submitted questions 🙏

On to the mailbag. . .

What! So many product managers?

I know, right?

Seriously, though, there are apparently over a million product managers globally. But more importantly, my audience is much wider now. Roughly half are PMs, but over a quarter are founders, and the rest (and the segment growing fastest) are a mix of adjacent functions: engineers, designers, growth/marketing, data, UXR, etc.

The newsletter (and podcast) are growing fastest among non-PMs because, with the rise of AI engineers, as I’ve written, the skills that matter more and more are PM skills:

• figuring out what to build
• prioritizing the highest-ROI opportunities among endless ideas
• getting buy-in
• clearly and succinctly articulating requirements
• having the taste and experience to know if what you’ve built is good
• driving adoption, growth, and retention

That’s exactly the kind of stuff I write about.

While I initially positioned the newsletter around product management so it was easy for me and others to explain what it was about, I’ve always intentionally kept the focus much wider (“A weekly advice column about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career”) because I knew I’d be incredibly bored just writing about product management week after week.

Do you have employees helping you with the newsletter? Why or why not, and how many?

I have no full-time employees (that’s been a goal of mine), but I do have an all-star team of freelancers and contractors. I look for stuff I can delegate, and for people who can help me level up the quality of my work.

Here’s what the team looks like today:

1. Newsletter: I do all of my own writing and editing (10 to 30 hours per post), but I’ve also got an amazing editor (who gives me content and structure feedback), copy editor (who edits for grammar, typos, and clarity), and designer. For the first couple of years it was just me, but now I can’t live without this crew. 2. Podcast: I work with two boutique agencies that help me with basically everything outside of finding guests and recording the episode. They handle audio and video editing; titles, thumbnails, and descriptions; coordinating with guests and sponsors; social clips and episode trailers; publishing each episode, and more. I did most of this myself to start, and I still review everything (refining titles and thumbnails, tightening episodes, simplifying top takeaways). I’m also experimenting with a researcher to help me get background on the fancier guests. Btw, check out this post on my podcast stack. 3. Community: I’ve got a (new!) community lead and a small team of contractors and volunteers who help me run the 20,000+-member Slack community. The community that’s formed around the newsletter and podcast is the thing I’m proudest of, of all the things I’ve done. It’s very special. 4. Other: I also have an EA and an engineer who help across all of the areas above.

I suspect the team won’t grow too far beyond this.

What was the moment you realized, “OMG, this is actually working, and I can do it full-time”?

There was a moment nine months in, after publishing something every single week, when I realized that it was still fun for me, people were finding it valuable, and I still had dozens of ideas for things I wanted to write about—after 36 posts. I realized then that maybe this could be a real thing. And that’s also the moment I decided to add the paid plan. (Because adding a paid plan means you need to commit to writing for at least another year, since people are buying annual plans.) After adding the paid plan, people started to pay for it.

I found my Ikigai.

In the beginning, did you feel like you were preaching in the desert?

The reason I started writing was to crystallize my own thinking and to not forget what I’d learned. After leaving Airbnb, I was planning to start another company, and I asked myself, “What did I actually learn over the course of my time at Airbnb?” I wasn’t totally sure. I started putting together a bullet-point list of some lessons. I realized those might be useful to other people, so I turned that into this Medium post (a cliché, I know). The post did really well, and that motivated me to keep writing.

I wrote a few more things on Medium and got good enough feedback from people I respected to motivate me to keep going. So I kept going.

After a handful of posts, I moved over to Substack (because I got advice that collecting people’s email addresses was useful no matter whether I started a company or kept up this writing thing), and that led to adding the paid plan, and now we’re here.

As I write out the answer to this question, I see that the key was getting enough positive signals in the early days (while the idea was an “ugly baby”) to motivate me to keep going. So there’s a tip: Find the folks who can give you the motivation to keep going.

What did the growth curve look like in the early days? How did you sustain momentum when you were under 5K?

Here you go:

Three things that most helped me grow in the beginning:

1. Two guest posts in other newsletters to kick things off (in July): The First Round Review and Andrew Chen’s blog 2. A popular series of posts that led to a large spike (in late November): How to kickstart and scale a marketplace business 3. Otherwise, simply publishing something valuable every single week, week after week, for 9+ months

Have you thought about your off-ramp plans? Someday you may not feel like writing or podcasting. Will you build a team? Shut down? I am always curious about solopreneurs’ long-term plans.

This is a very astute question. I have no idea how this story ends.

I can obviously just stop if I want to, but then everything I’ve built falls apart. I don’t want that. I’m also not aware of anyone who has done what I’m doing and found a clean off-ramp.

This is a real problem and an open question. But I’m very lucky to be able to do this for a living, so I’m not complaining. I’m also experimenting with ideas that may reveal an answer about the long-term plan:

1. Leaning into guest posts (which also end up being my most popular posts) 2. Incubating new podcasts (with new hosts) 3. Finding ways to delegate more of the work (mixed results so far) 4. Giving myself more ways to take time off (e.g. PTO policy)

If you have ideas here, I’m all ears👂

What were the key inflection points in your journey to 1M subscribers? What growth strategies have worked best for you in growing your newsletter, YouTube, and podcast audiences? What growth tactics didn’t work?

I’ve experimented with all the growth levers—paid ads, SEO, referrals, BD—and none of them have done a damn thing.

The only way this newsletter has grown, with two exceptions, is good old-fashioned word of mouth. That’s actually one of the best parts of an email newsletter—it’s very easy to forward and share.

Outside of that, two things did make a dent:

1. Substack’s recommendation feature. If you look at the chart at the top of this post, the hockey-stick moment was the day they launched that feature. Today, over 5,000 other newsletters recommend my newsletter. Without it, if you extrapolate from the trajectory beforehand, I’d maybe be at 500,000 subscribers. It’s important to note, though, that the Recommendations feature only works if other writers find your stuff worth recommending. Which is essentially word of mouth. So it still comes back to WOM. 2. The Greatest Bundle Ever. This didn’t accelerate my free subscriber growth, but it did do a lot of good for my paid subscriber growth. However, this sort of approach works only if you already have a large following. So it wouldn’t work for folks just getting started. And to get here . . . WOM.

How do you drive word of mouth? In the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger: Be useful. As I shared in my post when reaching 500,000 subscribers:

There’s no trick to making something like this grow. Growth comes from publishing something valuable, that people want to share with their friends and colleagues, over and over and over.

Here’s some tactical advice on how to actually do this.

What would you have done differently? Put another way, are there opportunities you missed? Things you wish you’d started or stopped sooner?

I honestly can’t think of anything too meaningful. I did do a Maven course at one point that I stopped doing. It went great and people liked it, but it didn’t bring me enough joy (something I try to look for in the things I take on). So I stopped. That ended up creating space to try a podcast, which proved to be much better aligned with my goals.

Outside of that, I joke that maybe I should have thought harder about the name of this newsletter, instead of going with the default name suggestion the Substack onboarding flow gave me.

How do you think about balancing writing what you know will do well vs. writing what you feel is important to you to express?

Initially, my heuristic was 80% writing about what I’m energized/curious/excited to write about and 20% writing about what people want me to write about. These days, it’s actually 100% what I’m curious about. I now never publish anything only because I know it’ll do well.

This is actually a very important lesson I’ve learned: In this line of work, individual (viral) posts come and go, but it’s all about how long you can stick with it. One viral post: easy. One post every week for five years: much less easy. You need to prioritize stamina over anything else. In other words, play “infinite games.”

How do you allocate your time between newsletter and podcast? Which one gives you more pleasure and which one more revenue? If contradictory, how do you reconcile that?

I bet this answer will surprise a lot of people.

The podcast takes less work and generates more revenue than the newsletter.

However, the newsletter is the main reason the podcast even had a chance at breaking through. Very few podcasts have the luxury of a massive newsletter promoting their podcast.

To be more concrete, each podcast episode takes me 3 to 5 hours, including prep time, recording time, and reviewing draft edits, titles, thumbnails, etc. Each newsletter post takes me 10 to 30 hours. People always ask me how I’m able to put out so much content, but if you add this together (one newsletter post plus one to two podcast episodes a week), that’s basically a 40-hour job. Very doable.

Who was your favorite guest on the podcast, and why was it Nan?

Haha, that actually is one of my favorites and has been the most mentioned over the past month when I run into folks. A few others to check out that you may have missed:

1. Tobi Lütke 2. Elizabeth Stone 3. Drew Houston 4. Nikita Bier 5. Elena Verna 6. Dalton Caldwell 7. Mihika Kapoor 8. Jen Abel 9. Todd Jackson 10. Katie Dill 11. Jeff Weinstein

How do you keep your content fresh and engaging when scaling to such heights?

Guest posts. A few years ago, I realized that there’s no world where I have 52 lessons a year for the rest of time. The solution is to use this platform to help the best product and growth minds in the world share their best lessons. The trick is that most people aren’t necessarily great at writing. To make this work, I spend 10+ hours with each guest author editing, refining, and tightening their post. We go through 5 or 6 iterations before we get to something that hits the bar I set for this newsletter. And it’s working. Most of my most popular posts are now guest posts, and most of the guest posts are far better than my posts. It takes a lot of work, but it pays off.

What do you think modern product management is going to look like in the age of AI?

As I was answering this question, Marty Cagan published a post about the same topic, and I 100% agree with his take. Go read it. The gist, to answer your question, is that I expect product teams will shrink by 25% to 50% (mostly, fewer engineers); PMs will have even more influence and leverage, and oversee more scope, but they’ll spend more time in discovery and GTM, and less time designing and building.

It’s actually a really good time to be a PM. Companies will continue to need product people who can help them figure out what to build, work with AI and humans to build it, make sure it’s great and correct, and then drive adoption. But the bar will continue to rise.

If you want to stay on top of what’s going on, check out these posts:

1. A guide to AI prototyping for product managers 2. Product manager is an unfair role. So work unfairly. 3. How to become a supermanager with AI 4. Five proven prompt engineering techniques (and a few more-advanced tactics) 5. How to use ChatGPT in your PM work (and Perplexity)

Any dream podcast guests you haven’t yet had on the show?

Yes. Here’s my current list:

1. Gwynne Shotwell 2. Levelsio 3. Mira Murati 4. Jensen Huang 5. Jony Ive 6. Andrej Karpathy 7. Sheryl Sandberg 8. Tony Fadell 9. Paul Graham 10. Elon 😬

Anyone else you’d love to see come on the podcast? Leave a comment and let me know 🙏

What three pieces of advice would you give yourself to reach this point even faster?

Why try to reach this point faster? What’s the rush? Play infinite games. Enjoy the ride. You’ll do great.

Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏

🏅 Featured role of the week

Halo Science is hiring for a Head of Product. In this role, you’ll:

• Be hands-on executing, while also helping craft strategy for the future of Halo’s product
• Work cross-functionally across GTM, design, and engineering—with exposure to the entirety of the business’s moving parts
• Report directly to their CEO

Why I think the company and role are interesting:

• I’m an investor! I’m a big fan of what they’re doing.
• They are well funded but also very early. This is an opportunity to not only lead product for a company that is disrupting the science R&D space but also help build the exact team you want.

If you’d like to get your profile sent directly to their team, just fill out this quick form. All submissions from my readers get priority (but no guarantees beyond that).

If you’d like to get your role featured here, [apply here](https://airtable.com/apphKJD0wLIHfPcZu/pag09IdQYrMpolMa5/form). If you’re interested in working with my white-glove recruiting service specializing in senior product roles (e.g. Directors, VPs, and Heads of Product), apply to work with us [here](https://www.lennysjobs.com/).

Start hiring

If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already. There are [group discounts](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe?group=true), [gift options](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe?gift=true), and [referral bonuses](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/leaderboard) available.

Sincerely,

Lenny 👋

## Q: I’m just starting out as a PM and wondering what makes product managers great. What habits should I be building early on?

I was a very mediocre PM at first—I wouldn’t have hired me. But I did learn fast, mostly by watching how the best PMs operated. How they ran meetings, how they organized documents, how they made decisions—and then modeling these behaviors and habits.

#### Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.

>

#### —James Clear

These observations all went into a list that I’ve been adding to and refining over the years, and your question was a great forcing function to synthesize the list and turn it into something useful. Below, you’ll find what to me are the 14 most important habits of highly effective product managers. Why 14? Because PM’ing is at least twice as hard as normal life.

Don’t get overwhelmed by this list. There’s a lot here, yes, but you don’t need to nail all of these overnight, or ever. My advice to you is to skim through the list, pick one habit you want to work on, and focus on that habit for the next two weeks. If you want more time, stick with it. Otherwise, pick a new habit. Take it easy, but keep at it. For extra credit, start your own list! Watch the best PMs around you and jot down what they’re doing well. If you note any other essential habits for new, highly effective PMs to develop, leave a comment 👇

Leave a comment

14 habits of highly effective product managers

1. Great PMs take pride in the clarity and conciseness of their documents, emails, presentations, and meetings

They know that people judge the quality of their thinking by the quality of their writing and speaking, and that effective communication is the most fundamental PM skill.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Ask your manager (and ideally a trusted peer) to actively give you brutally honest feedback on your docs, meetings, and presentations. 2. Leverage the Minto Pyramid and the SCR framework when crafting an argument. 3. Start a “swipe file” where you save examples of well-executed documents, emails, presentations, etc. that you can later come back to for inspiration.

2. Great PMs build an aura of “I’ve got this”

They rarely drop balls, they come prepared, and their colleagues know that when they take on a task, it’ll get done.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Be very selective with what you take on (say no!), and spend more time than anyone else on the things you do take on. 2. Prioritize and communicate: When you’re asked to do something new, first determine its priority (i.e. slot it into your already existing set of priorities) and then make sure to communicate that priority to the person (i.e. where it sits in your list of priorities). Both steps are essential to set accurate expectations. 3. Keep a Waiting For list to avoid losing open threads.

3. Great PMs hold the bar high for the work they, and their teammates, do

They resist the urge to let people settle for good enough. They push their team, and themselves, to make documents clearer, to make meetings more valuable, and to help people do the best work of their lives.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. When you see subpar performance, don’t ignore it. Push back, e.g. “Hey, this strategy doc is confusing, tbh—what if you tweak X, Y, and Z to clarify your point?” 2. When you’re about to share a PRD/one-pager, ask yourself: What’s one thing I could do to make this doc more succinct? 3. Make sure to review each major document, meeting, and presentation that your team is outputting—make sure the work your team puts out into the org is always A+.

4. Great PMs hunt for misalignment and quickly push everyone back into alignment

They know that team dysfunction is often rooted in people simply having different information, motives, or priorities. They know that rooting these out is some of the highest-leverage work they can ever do.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. When reviewing new designs, always bring people back to “What problem are we trying to solve here?” 2. When you get a hint that team members are misaligned (e.g. quoting data not everyone has seen, optimizing for different goals, shifting priorities), just say, “We may be misaligned on this. What’s your understanding of X?” 3. Create, and keep coming back to, a source-of-truth document that crystallizes the goal, the succinct problem being solved, key assumptions, and key decisions.

5. Great PMs always have a point of view, but loosely held

They know they aren’t on the team simply to coordinate other people’s work—that their team is looking to them for new ideas, novel insights, and to push their thinking. They also know they need to be ready to quickly change their POV when they have new information.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Keep this question in your mind: If someone were to ask for my opinion right now, what would I say? 2. When you don’t have a strong POV (e.g. which design to go with, whether to launch the experiment or not), create a simple pros and cons list. 3. When you change your point of view based on new information, share it publicly. Make it very clear you aren’t stuck in your views.

6. Great PMs ruthlessly prioritize, both the team’s work and their own

They know that there are always more ideas than time, and that the greatest gift they can give their team is focus.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Say no. Or “not yet.” Prioritizing is another word for sequencing—make it clear that if it isn’t a priority today, that doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen. 2. Try using the phrase “ruthless prioritization” when prioritizing as a team or saying no to an ask. 3. Align with your team and your manager on a single prioritized source-of-truth roadmap. All changes to the plan need to be updated here, which will automatically surface trade-offs and constraints.

7. Great PMs endlessly look for blockers to unblock

They’re always on the hunt for bottlenecks, unmade decisions, and anything that is keeping their team from operating like a well-oiled machine.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Always prioritize tasks that unblock your team members. 2. Ask your team members often: What’s slowing you down? 3. Look around corners—what’s a looming soon-to-be blocker that you can keep from becoming a blocker?

8. Great PMs build a tight leadership triad with their EM and DM

They know that their team operates best when the leaders of the team speak with one voice, and since most of the team reports to the eng. manager and the design manager, it’s essential that these three leaders work as an aligned unit.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Sit next to your EM and DM (when possible). 2. Have a weekly meeting to align on priorities, share information, and unblock the team. 3. Spend time outside of work hours in order to connect as humans.

9. Great PMs frequently remind teammates of how their work connects to the mission

They know that people don’t work at companies to pull levers, move metrics, or hit goals.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Include your team’s mission and/or vision in every strategy document. 2. In kickoff meetings, find opportunities to remind the team how this random project enables the team/company to come closer to its mission. 3. At the top of your roadmap documents, include your team vision or mission.

10. Great PMs speak with their customers regularly

They know that no matter how confident they are about what their customers want, they are frequently wrong.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Create systems where you and your team interact with customers regularly, like a weekly “Lunch with a customer,” a monthly CX rotation, or a quarterly customer visit. 2. Make an agreement that for any feature that takes more than X weeks to design and build, you first talk to five potential users/customers to validate the desirability of the feature. 3. Build a one-on-one relationship with some of your larger customers, and use that connection to learn about their pain points, gather ideas, and get quick and raw feedback.

11. Great PMs anticipate what’s around the corner so that they can get ahead of it

They know that the most successful PMs are the most prepared PMs, and the best way to be prepared is to have more time to prepare.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Schedule a 30-minute meeting with yourself, each Monday morning or Friday afternoon, to look at your upcoming week and note meetings and deliverables you need to get ahead of. 2. When you hear of priority or strategy changes happening up the ladder, ask yourself: How could this impact our team, and what could we start prepping now? 3. When everything is going smoothly, ask yourself: How could I help my team move even faster?

12. Great PMs make sure everyone has a chance to be heard

They know that most of the best ideas won’t come from them, and that the simple act of listening goes a very long way.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. At the end of meetings, check in with people who’ve been quiet to see if they have anything to add. 2. Before finalizing your strategy, roadmap, or spec, give your team a chance to give feedback asynchronously. 3. Organize brainstorms and offer types of ideation sessions where team members can contribute their ideas.

13. Great PMs amplify the successes and contributions of team members

They know that the success of a PM is measured primarily by the success of their team.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Forward examples of great work to your teammates’ managers. 2. Highlight team members’ achievements in your team meetings and email updates. 3. Start a “#team-huzzah”-type Slack channel to celebrate wins, big and small.

14. Great PMs bring good vibes to the team

They know that they are the unofficial-but-de-facto leader of the team, and that the vibes they bring trickle down throughout the team.

Some ways to build this habit:

1. Always start off each meeting with energy and positivity. 2. Find something fun for the team to do regularly—a weekly happy hour, a monthly team-building event. 3. Bring surprise and delight to regular events—a team band at your all-hands, goats on your Zoom calls, birthday surprises at your standup.

Leave a comment if you’ve found any other habits to be essential for new PMs to build.

Leave a comment

Have a productive and fulfilling week 🙏

🔥 Featured job opportunities

Product Management

1. Duolingo: Principal Product Manager (NY/Seattle) 2. Companion Labs: Head of / Senior Product Manager (SF) 3. Curology: Group Product Manager, Growth & Subscription (SF/Remote) 4. Curology: Group Product Manager, Medical & Pharmacy Ops (SF/Remote) 5. Grand Rounds: Senior Product Manager (SF/Remote) 6. ClassDojo:0 to 1 Product Manager (SF/Remote) 7. AbstractOps:Head of Product (Remote) 8. Dialogue:Vice-President, Product Management (Remote) 9. Amazon Music:Principal Product Manager - Tech, Podcasts (SF) 10. Intercom:Senior Product Manager - Self-serve Growth (London/Dublin/Remote) 11. Chime:Senior Product Manager, Growth (SF) 12. Miro: Senior Product Manager (Workshops Core) (Amsterdam) 13. NexHealth:First Product Manager (SF) 14. Elementl:Product Manager (SF/Remote) 15. Clockwise:Product Manager (SF/Remote) 16. UserLeap:Product Manager (SF)

Growth and marketing

1. OpenPhone: Head of Marketing (Remote) 2. neo.tax:Head of Growth (Mountain View/Remote) 3. Reforge:Lifecycle Marketer (Remote) 4. Coda:Growth Associate Program (SF) 5. Ojo:Head of Marketing (Remote) 6. Labelbox: Director of Growth and Demand Generation (SF/Remote) 7. Livepeer:Go To Market Lead (Remote)

Engineering

1. Playbook: Head of Engineering (Remote) 2. Karat: Senior Software Engineer (LA/Remote) 3. Cable: Backend Engineer (Remote) 4. Discord:Engineering Manager (SF) 5. G2i:Senior React, React Native, or Node Developer (Remote) 6. Novi Connect:Senior Software Engineer (Remote) 7. Endgame:Principal Frontend Engineer (Remote) 8. Eppo:Backend / Infrastructure Engineer (SF/Remote) 9. Causal:Full-stack Engineer (Remote) 10. Flux.ai:Fullstack Software Engineer (Remote) 11. Coinbase:University Grad, Software Engineer (Remote)

Design

1. Cardless: Product Designer (SF) 2. Cameo:Senior Product Designer (Remote) 3. Tango:Product Design Lead (LA/Remote) 4. Scratchpad:Senior Product Designer (Remote) 5. Rewatch:Senior Product Designer (Remote) 6. Orbit:Product Designer (Paris/SF/Remote) 7. Imperfect Foods:Senior Product Designer (Remote) 8. Karat: First Designer (LA/Remote)

To browse ~200 open, or to add your open roles, [visit Lenny’s Job Board](https://lennysnewsletter.com/jobs).

🧠 Inspiration for the week ahead

1. Watch: How to Draw a Self-Portrait in 11 Levels of Increasing Complexity

Watch on YouTube

2. Listen: The 7 Powers with Hamilton Helmer & Jeff Lawson by NFX 3. Read: 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice by Kevin Kelly

How would you rate this week's newsletter? 🤔

Great • Good • Meh

If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, consider sharing it with friends, or subscribing if you haven’t already.

Sincerely,

Lenny 👋

I started this newsletter a year and a half ago, as an experiment.

At the beginning of this year, six months into the experiment, I had 6,000 subscribers, a couple dozen posts, and no real plan for where all of this was going. I still thought I wanted to start a company, and this newsletter was still a distracting side-project. As the year progressed though, the picture became clearer.

Today, with nearly 45,000 subscribers, over ~3,000 paid subscribers, a Slack community of over 2,500 helpful-smart-driven people, and ~100 posts, I’ve never been clearer on what I should be doing: this.

To all of you who subscribe, share, ask questions, and share words of encouragement: THANK YOU. I could not be more grateful to you for allowing me to do this work 💖

Here’s what we accomplished this year:

1. At least one post every single week of the year (64 in total) 2. 700% YoY growth in subscribers, sitting somewhere in the top 15 most popular Substack newsletters 3. Launched a paid plan, which went from zero to over 3,000 subscribers in ~6 months 4. Launched the private Slack community, which continues to be one of my proudest achievements with this whole endeavor 5. Added a second weekly email, which highlights the best advice from the community itself, curated by Kiyani

What you can expect in the coming year:

1. More in-depth deep dives, including a “grand unified theory of growth” 2. A live online course for new product managers 3. A personally curated guide of the best resources for anything product, growth, startups, working with humans, or anything else that stresses you out at the office 4. More investment in the community, including a regular cadence of fireside chats with the most interesting people in growth, product, and startups 5. And generally, more of the same: actionable and concrete advice delivered to you weekly

I can’t wait to get started.

To leave you with something concretely valuable this week, I’ve collected the most popular posts (and tweets) from this year, along with a fun bonus. Enjoy, and see you in 2021!

Most popular posts this year

Growth

1. How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users 2. How today's fastest-growing B2B businesses found their first 10 customers 3. What is good retention 4. Strategy and tactics for increasing conversion 5. Magical growth loops

Product Management

1. My favorite product management templates 2. A comprehensive survey of Product Management 3. Getting better at product strategy 4. Flywheels, flywheels, flywheels 5. Managing up

Building a company

1. How to price your SaaS product 2. A playbook for fundraising 3. What it feels like when you've found product-market fit 4. How to know if you've got product-market fit 5. The Transition: Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product

Most popular tweets this year

Bonus: My favorite mother-in-law’s takeaways

For those of you who don't follow me on Twitter and have no idea what I’m talking about, I gave my mother-in-law a free subscription to my newsletter, and ever since she’s replied to every single issue with her insightful and heart-warming takeaways. Here are some of my favorites:

Thank you again so much for your support, and see you next year ✨

🔥 Job opportunities

✨Sponsored job of the week: [Product Manager at UserLeap](https://boards.greenhouse.io/userleap/jobs/4279026003) ✨

1. Product: Cerebral, Descript, KUDO, Hipcamp, Prenda 2. Growth: BasisOne, Coda, Levels, Prenda 3. Design: Ashby, Office Hours, Runway, Stytch, Watershed 4. Engineering manager: Cerebral 5. Frontend engineer: Levels, Practice, Tome 6. Backend engineer: Coda, Transform 7. Fullstack engineer: Cascade, Centered, Icebreaker, Iggy, Primer, Runway, Snackpass 8. iOS engineer: Pairplay, Primer, Stytch

How would you rate this week's newsletter? 🤔

Great • Good • Meh

For full access to the weekly posts, past archives, and private community, consider subscribing 👇

Sincerely,

Lenny 👋

What does it take to drive employee AI adoption at your company?

Longtime product operator and creator Peter Yang has been investigating, sharing, and applying AI best practices for years now, and he’s been getting this question more than any other. So have I! We decided to collaborate to bring you the best, most in-depth answer to this increasingly important topic.

Peter interviewed founders and product leaders at six fast-growing AI-forward companies and collected all of their best tactics for driving employee AI adoption. This post includes their best 25 battle-tested AI tips that you can implement right away at your company.

Peter shares more practical AI tips via his newsletter and YouTube channel.

P.S. You can now also listen to these posts in convenient podcast form: Spotify / Apple / YouTube.

I never feel alone anymore when I’m stuck on a problem.

From summarizing user feedback to crafting product strategy, having AI as a patient, knowledgeable, and always-available thought partner has completely transformed how I do product work.

But here’s the reality: According to a recent Gallup poll, only 8% of U.S. workers use AI daily. Meanwhile, teams that crack the AI adoption code are seeing incredible results. For example, Zapier’s sales reps save 10 hours per week on lead research, Ramp built AI user personas that give PMs instant feedback on any spec, and Duolingo went from 100 courses in 12 years to 150 courses in just 12 months with AI’s help.

From what I’ve seen and from talking to leaders at AI-forward companies, I’ve learned that:

The biggest barrier to AI adoption isn’t technology; it’s organizational change.

At many companies, employees are struggling with vague AI mandates, procurement bottlenecks, and lack of guidance on the highest-impact use cases to focus on first.

After interviewing leaders at the 6 AI-forward companies below, I’ve identified 5 recurring steps that companies can take to supercharge AI adoption:

1. Explain the how 2. Track and reward adoption 3. Cut the red tape 4. Turn enthusiasts into teachers 5. Prioritize the high-impact tasks

Let’s break down exactly how these companies made it work.

1. Explain the *how*

Saying “we are AI-first” means nothing if employees don’t know what that actually means for their day-to-day work.

The companies that succeed provide specific tactics that employees and teams can adopt to meet those expectations.

Here’s what this can look like:

1. Include specific tactics in your memo: Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, didn’t just say that “using AI is now a baseline expectation” in his now-famous memo. Instead, he shared concrete tactics he expects to see, like making AI prototyping part of the company’s GSD (get shit done) process. 2. Declare a “code red” moment: Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, called an all-hands-on-deck moment in March 2023 after ChatGPT’s launch. He then shared a playbook and gave all employees a week off to put it into practice. 3. Define what “embracing AI” means: Luis von Ahn, Duolingo’s CEO, defined AI adoption as both “making our products better” and “empowering employees to do their best work.” Teams were encouraged to use AI for everything from speeding up lesson creation to prototyping. 4. Embed with individual teams: Darragh Curran, Intercom’s CTO, set a goal to “2x productivity with AI” and then spent a week every month embedded with individual teams to identify and execute on the 2x opportunities. 5. Lead by example in real time: When a PM brings a problem to Hilary Gridley, Whoop’s Head of Product, she’ll say, “Want me to show you how I solve this with AI?” Then she shares her workflows live.

You don’t need to be an executive to drive this change. At Roblox, I constantly share my favorite AI workflows in Slack and one-on-ones. I’ve even started screen sharing AI’s output during meetings to solve problems with my teammates in real time. Seeing a colleague save time with AI is an incredibly strong incentive to try it yourself.

2. Track and reward adoption

Like any good PM, you should track AI adoption as inputs (who’s using AI) and outputs (what business value it’s creating). You should also reward employees who are leading the charge to keep the momentum going.

Here’s how top companies are tracking and rewarding adoption:

1. Make AI adoption part of performance reviews: Shopify asks employees to rate colleagues on a 1-to-5 scale for how well they “reflexively use AI tools for improving and amplifying work outputs.” 2. Publish AI usage by team: At Ramp, leadership shares the number of AI power users (5+ actions a week) for tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and ChatGPT. This transparency creates natural accountability across teams. 3. Track team-specific impact: Zapier tracks the impact of AI adoption by function. In sales, for example, when targeted leads engage with marketing content, AI auto-packages that information for the account rep—leading to 10 hours saved per week per rep. 4. Use proxy metrics for productivity: Intercom tracks merged pull requests as a proxy for productivity gains. They’re already seeing a “durable improvement (about 20% year-over-year)” from AI-assisted development. 5. Make it a daily habit: Whoop gave employees a 30-day challenge with bite-size 2-minute tasks to complete and rewarded those who kept the longest streak.

The point is that:

People will change their behavior with the right incentives.

Tracking both the leading indicators (AI usage) and lagging indicators (business results) creates a link between AI adoption and the real impact on teams, businesses, and people’s careers. Connect the dots on impact for your employees and you’ll see adoption skyrocket.

3. Cut the red tape

Most companies have long approval processes for AI tools. But what they don’t realize is that their employees are already using AI. They’re just using it from their personal accounts.

Cut the red tape if you don’t want employees to use AI tools that aren’t approved:

1. Create an AI learning budget: Duolingo gave every employee $300 to try AI tools, courses, and subscriptions. This incentivizes constant experimentation. 2. Assign a lead to expedite approvals: Zapier assigned a lead PM to own working with procurement, legal, and engineering to fast-track AI tool approvals and eliminate bottlenecks. 3. Give employees time to tinker: “No time” was the main reason employees cited for not trying new AI tools, so Intercom CTO Darragh encouraged managers to give employees dedicated time to skill up. 4. Provide multiple tool options: Shopify provides access to a wide range of tools, including Claude, Perplexity, Cohere, Gemini, Cursor, Copilot, and Claude Code. They also encourage employees to contribute to a growing library of AI prompts and agents. 5. Embrace internal enthusiasm: Whoop lets employees nominate tools they’re excited to trial, like Fireflies for note-taking and Zapier for automation.

If you’re wondering which tools to approve, here are my personal favorites:

As an employee, don’t be afraid to champion your favorite AI tools even if you’re not responsible for procurement.

4. Turn AI enthusiasts into teachers

Every company has AI power users who are just itching to share what they’ve learned. Set up the right channels and resources for them to train everyone else.

Here’s how to turn your AI enthusiasts into teachers:

1. Run AI learning villages: Shopify hosts dedicated AI training at company events, with hands-on challenges and subject-matter experts. They have a “build in the open” culture where teams constantly share AI experiments. 2. Host FriAIdays and show-and-tells: Duolingo protects two-hour blocks every Friday for AI experimentation and demos. They also do “AI Show and Tell” at all-hands meetings. 3. Create an AI SWAT team: Ramp’s cross-functional team identifies each group’s top AI automation need and builds solutions. They also run PM AI offsites for vibe coding. 4. Host regular demos and hackathons: Zapier hosts live demos that attract over 60 employees every week and quarterly hackathons where the best prototypes are presented to leadership. 5. Make “upleveling others” part of promotion: Helping others get better at using AI is a great signal of leadership. Hilary at Whoop looks for examples of how employees improve others’ AI fluency when reviewing promotions.

An AI-forward culture is one where employees feel comfortable sharing not just what they’ve built but how they did it. At Roblox, we have an “#AI-tips-and-workflows” Slack channel where employees share everything from basic prompting tips to weekend AI projects.

5. Prioritize the high-impact tasks

Most companies fail at AI adoption because they try to do everything at once. Instead, find the high-volume and repetitive tasks that are taking up the most employee time and streamline those first with AI.

Here are the tasks that AI-forward companies are focusing on:

1. Automate support triage workflows: Zapier built a workflow that checks Zendesk tickets and identifies customers ready for sales conversations, turning customer support into a revenue driver. 2. Streamline performance review prep: Shopify built an AI tool to help employees summarize feedback and identify strengths and working areas. This cuts review time and improves discussion quality for managers and their reports. 3. Create content with AI: Duolingo rebuilt their course content creation process with AI, going from 100 courses in 12 years to 150 courses in just 12 months. From CPO Cem Kansu: “We vibe coded the first Duolingo Chess lesson in hours instead of weeks.” 4. Build AI personas: Ramp built AI personas loaded with all their user research context. PMs can now give any product spec to these personas and get instant feedback on what they’re missing or haven’t thought through. 5. Empower employees to build internal AI tools: A PM on Hilary’s team at Whoop built an evaluation tool that tests whether prompts perform better across dozens of persona types—without going through engineering.

When it comes to building internal (and external) AI tools, here’s what separates real adoption from theater:

Instead of focusing on shiny demos, look for rigorous data and evaluations.

I’ve seen too many PMs present flashy demos to executives only to stumble when asked about data and evaluations (including some lessons I learned the hard way!).

When you share your AI product, you should clearly answer four questions: What customer problem are you solving? Can AI solve it better than non-AI solutions? What ground-truth dataset and evaluations do you have? How have you prepared for the model to fail?

True AI adoption happens when teams become skeptical of flashy demos and demand to see the rigor behind AI products. When employees start asking about accuracy metrics, evaluation frameworks, and failure modes—that’s when you know AI adoption is real.

Where to go from here

The companies succeeding at AI adoption understand that it’s not just about making vague AI mandates. Instead, they explain the “how” with detailed tactics, and track both usage and impact. They eliminate procurement roadblocks, turn enthusiasts into teachers, and build AI products with rigorous evaluations to streamline high-impact tasks.

The goal is to empower every employee to work with AI to solve their problems. Someone in sales, product, or operations might create an AI tool that transforms your business.

What tactics are you implementing at your company? I’d love to hear about your wins (and failures) in the comments.

Thanks, Peter! For more from Peter, check out his [newsletter](https://creatoreconomy.so/) and [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@peteryangyt).

Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏

If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already. There are [group discounts](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe?group=true), [gift options](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe?gift=true), and [referral bonuses](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/leaderboard) available.

Sincerely,

Lenny 👋

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be a guest contributor to [Andrew Chen’s blog](https://andrewchen.co/grow-marketplace-supply/). The response has been amazing. Below I’ve included that entire post, along with a dozen bonus examples and tips that didn’t make it into the original post. My intention is to dive deeper into some of these tactics and strategies in future posts, so if there’s anything specific that you’d like to hear more about, I’d love to know. [Tweet me](https://twitter.com/lennysan) or leave a comment below.


Airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure.

>

— Paul Graham, founder of YC

Deciding to open your home to strangers is a complex decision. Over the course of the seven years that I spent at Airbnb, my work centered around helping people all over the world make this decision. As the number of homes on Airbnb scaled from around 100,000 in 2012 to over 6 million today, I led teams tackling everything from supply growth, to guest booking conversion, to marketplace quality. As a result of this experience, I’m often asked what I’d recommend startups do to grow supply in their marketplace. The truth is that at the root of Airbnb’s success was a very good idea — affordable and unique travel experiences for guests, and great income for hosts. That being said, an idea is nothing without execution.

Below is an overview of every tactic and strategy I’ve seen used to bootstrap and accelerate supply growth, both at Airbnb and other successful marketplaces. Though some of these worked at Airbnb, and some didn’t, every marketplace has different challenges — my advice is to pick a few tactics that resonate, experiment with them, learn, and adjust.


Examples of marketplaces: Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, eBay, Etsy, Hipcamp, DoorDash, Caviar, Uber Eats, GrubHub, Rover, Wag, Postmates, Patreon, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, Outschool, Fiverr, Kickstarter, Lugg, Peerspace.


Tactic #1: Nail the value prop on your site/app 👌

Understanding the context and expectations of your audience is vital to engaging them. At Airbnb we tailored the value props all the way from ad creative to landing pages.

>

— Dan Hill, ex-Airbnb Growth Lead, CEO of Alma

What: You need to convince visitors why they should become “hosts” on your platform when they visit your site (and then deliver on that promise). This may be obvious, but this is a foundational piece that enhances every other tactic below. It’s especially impactful for marketplaces that primarily grow organically because you’ll end up converting a significantly larger portion of your traffic.

Stage: Start on day 1, and continue iterating

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: X-Large

Examples:

At Airbnb, the earnings estimate was an order of magnitude more effective than any other value prop. Any time we hid or obscured it, growth dipped. However, it’s critical that this estimate is realistic, both for legal reasons and to set the right expectations for your users.


An example where an opportunity is being missed (doesn’t show possible income):


Tips:

1. Take your best shot at the pitch at first, and keep iterating as you learn more about your users. 2. Help the user understand how they would benefit from hosting with you, and address all of their concerns. In most cases, it’s primarily going to be about the income they can make. 3. Deliver on the promise. Or at least get close. This will lead to word-of-mouth growth, which is key.

Question: What has worked when pitching your existing “hosts”? Make sure your site/app says the same thing boldly and directly.

Tactic #2: Add entry points to the value prop 👉

What: Drive your site visitors towards your “host” pitch. This includes call-outs in the top level nav, in the footer of every screen, and sprinkled throughout the user experience. Do not assume your visitors know this exists, or why they should ever consider it.

Stage: Start on day 1, and continue iterating

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Large

Examples:


An example where an opportunity is being missed (no entry point into becoming a driver):


Tips:

• It’s hard to have too many entry points into your “host” pitch. Users will ignore it if it doesn’t apply to them. Resist the urge to be shy about this, especially if you are supply constrained.
• Every time your user has a good experience, encourage them to become a “host”, to provide this experience to others (while making money).
• Be more aggressive with this than you’re comfortable.

Question: Where else can you include a call-out to consider becoming a “host”?

Tactic #3: Offer a referrals program 👭

If your product requires word-of-mouth to convince most people to start using it, you can engineer more growth by building an incentivized referrals program. The incentive will be fuel that pushes people over the edge to tell their friends about something they love using

>

— Gustaf Alströmer, ex-Airbnb Growth Lead, Partner at YC

What: Incentivize word-of-mouth by paying existing members for every new member they refer to the platform.

Stage: Start early with a scrappy version, and get smarter over time

Cost: Medium

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Large

Examples:

At Airbnb, the host referral program became the single most efficient and effective growth lever for consumer supply, cost efficiently driving both the largest share of attributable supply AND the highest quality supply,


Uber: <https://www.uber.com/drive/partner-app/new-driver-referrals/>


Airbnb: <https://www.airbnb.com/refer?r=6>


Lyft: <https://www.lyft.com/driver-bonus>

Tips:

• If most of your supply growth is coming from word-of-mouth, and especially if your users have large social graphs, then a referrals program is going to be huge for you.
• Once you have this, don’t hide it. Promote it throughout the user experience.
• Once you reach scale, fraud becomes a real issue. Watch for it as you grow, and invest in addressing it.

Question: What’s the simplest way you can test a referrals offering?

Tactic #4: Run direct sales ☎️

After calling and activating 100 listings in a market, we then drove demand there to see what converted. We then called these hosts to help them convert their requests into bookings. This was all manual, but super effective, all the while we were getting direct market feedback.

>

— Georg Bauser, ex-International Expansion at Airbnb

What: Call, email, or go door-to-door to pitch potential “hosts” on joining your platform. Sometimes this includes convincing them to switch from a different platform, sometimes it includes teaching them how to do it in the first place. This tactic is one of the more complex and operationally heavy, but also often the most effective at bootstrapping a marketplace.

Stage: Early-stage for B2C, an evergreen lever for B2B

Cost: Medium

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Medium-Large

Examples:

• Lyft: <https://www.saastr.com/build-sales-team-1-100-video-transcript/>
• DoorDash: <https://medium.com/@DoorDash/doordashs-inside-sales-team-is-driving-the-growth-of-key-merchant-relationships-b1f926819426>

Tips:

• Hand-hold your early members. Help each new early member becomes successful in order to seed the platform with the type of supply you want. As a bonus, these early hosts will become loyal and unlikely to switch to a competitor, because you are building the business together.
• This tactic is particularly effective if your supply is un-commoditized and has high LTV, and if you’re creating a new market or behavior.
• Be creative in how you figure out contact information.

Question: What’s stopping you from cold-calling potential “hosts” today?

Tactic #5: Piggy-back off of existing networks 🔌

Initially, the Etsy team were freelance web designers and one of their clients was a craft forum called getcrafty.com. Throughout the redesign process, the Etsy team interacted with the website’s 10,000 users to best understand their needs. They began to notice that there was a large number of users who were looking for a platform to sell their handmade wares. While they were building Etsy, they also found out about Crafster.org, this time a message board with 100,000 users and were able to tap into another willing market. We extended an accommodating bridge to a preexisting online community, and they jumped aboard happily.

>

— Chris Maguire, co-founder of Etsy

What: Go to the place your existing supply is distributed and convince them to switch.

Stage: Early-stage

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Large

Examples:

• Airbnb: <https://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/>
• Omni: <https://www.reforge.com/blog/omni-bootstrapped-marketplace-liquidity-growth>
• General: <https://platformed.info/whatsapp-instagram-marketing/>

Tips:

• To be successful here, you’ll have to be “creative” in how you do said piggy-backing. Airbnb piggy-backed off of Craigslist for both supply and demand.
• Make it super easy to switch from them to you.
• You will only win if you can drive more demand or profit to that same supply. Otherwise, why would they choose you?

Question: Where do people currently find what you are offering, and is there a way you can piggy-back off of that channel?

Tactic #6: Hold meetups 👋

To launch a city, we’d travel there and hold a meetup. Here in San Francisco, it’s not a big deal to meet a founder. In other places, that’s pretty novel. They would get so excited that they met us that they’d tell their friends. The markets started turning on, and we religiously focused on making sure customers loved us.

>

— Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb

What: Bring “hosts” and anyone considering become a host together in person. This can be small intimate gatherings or large’ish events.

Stage: Early-stage

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Medium early-stage, Small late-stage

Examples:


Source: <https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/839209664197754880>

• Read the first part of this interview with Reid and Brian.
• Lessons in Building Movements through Community Action from Douglas Atkin, Global Director of Community at Airbnb

Tips:

• The highest value of the meetups is for employees to listen to users, to answer questions, and simply to give people a chance to meet and share. Resist the urge to fill the time with presentations and speeches.
• You don’t need to spend a bunch of money on each meetup. They can be scrappy and simple.
• Don’t expect to be able to quantify the impact of hosting meetups. We tried this many times and we never saw any measurable impact. But, looking back, it’s clear that it was important early on.

Question: Where is your early community most concentrated? Why aren’t you there right now?

Tactic #7: Leverage events and PR 🎪

In the early days we targeted a lot of events: the DNC, the Presidential Inauguration, music festivals, the World Cup, Olympics, etc. Events and PR were the main way we bootstrapped the network in the early days.

>

— Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb

What: Leverage a specific event to pitch potential “hosts” and seed PR stories about how your service is helping people.

Stage: Early-stage

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Medium

Examples:


• Airbnb: <https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/may/18/airbnb-float-a-house-on-the-thames-in-london>
• Uber: <https://www.annexcloud.com/blog/ubers-marketing-strategy-in-7-steps-revisited/>
• TaskRabbit: <https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223168/-1-500-to-be-first-in-line-for-an-iphone------or-a-publicity-stunt-.html>

Tips:

• Find ways to be creative and stand out during the event.
• Use that same creativity to develop PR pitches. What would give the press an interesting angle on the event?
• Get on the ground. You need to be there, hustling.

Question: Are there punctuating moments where your offering is most beneficial for your supply?

Tactic #8: Run performance marketing 💰

Performance marketing is about reaching people where they are, inspiring them to take action and doing so cost effectively. You quickly learn that it’s a unique blend of art and science, and we were most effective at scaling this powerful lever when we had a dedicated cross-functional team sitting together — product, marketing, engineering, data science, design, content, and finance.

>

— Fatima Husain, ex-Airbnb host paid growth lead, Principle at Comcast Ventures

What: Run Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. ads.

Stage: Early-stage for some businesses, late-stage for others

Cost: Medium/Large

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Medium

Examples:


Tips:

• Knowing your supply LTV is key, so that you know how much you can spend.
• You can figure out the basics yourself, but try to hire people that have done this before.
• This lever works, but can easily become addicting.

Question: Where do your potential “hosts” spend time online?

Tactic #9: Convert demand to supply 🙃

Converting travelers to hosts definitely moved the needle when we launched a new market. Plus, these new hosts were the most empathetic as they remembered the guest’s needs.

>

— Kati Schmidt, ex-Head of B.D., Airbnb Germany

What: Convince users to become “hosts” on the platform. This builds on Tactic #2 — go deeper into the user experience and find moments when it makes sense to pitch “hosting” (e.g. after a great experience).

Stage: Start early, and continue iterating

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Medium early-on, Small later-stage

Examples:


Tips:

• This can be manual/ops based at first, and productized over time.
• Think about a clever pitch you can make to your users, e.g. “Pay for your trip by hosting your home”.
• See how Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb do this throughout the demand-side experience.

Question: What percentage of your demand could potentially be the supply? If it’s in double digits, see if you can suggest or even incentivize this behavior.

Tactic #10: Invest in SEO ⛓

What: Drive organic search traffic to your site.

Stage: Early for some businesses, late-stage for others

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small

Tips:

• SEO is generally more effective for demand. I haven’t seen SEO be a major driver of growth on the supply side, including at Airbnb.
• The best SEO content is user-generated-content that is created as a part of the user experience.
• Find an SEO expert to help you figure this out.

Question: What job are you solving for potential “hosts”, and what does that translate to when they search for solutions?

Tactic #11: Acquire supply 🤑

We needed to move fast and acquiring companies with inventory in these competitive markets provided an immediate benefit. Often times the expense of the acquiring the company that had the inventory was cheaper than the cost to go about acquisition in an organic way. The key is to understand the migration percentage that would come through. We aimed for 60–80% to migrate over.

>

— Jonathan Golden, first PM at Airbnb, partner at NEA

What: Acquire companies that currently have the supply you want.

Stage: Always

Cost: Large (but strategic)

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small globally, Large in key markets

Examples:

• Airbnb: Crashpadder, Statthotel
• Rover: DogBuddy, DogVacay
• Eventbrite: Ticketfly, Picatic

Tips:

• Since you are betting on network effects, the value of that supply to your network should be much higher to you than to a small local company. Thus, it may be worth paying a premium.
• Make sure the supply you are buying is actually good.
• Don’t underestimate the work it’ll take to migrate the supply, both technically and interpersonally.

Question:Are there small players with a strategic foothold you can acquire or merge with?

Tactic #12: Partner with supply aggregators 👋

What: Plug-in a partner’s supply into your marketplace, through partnerships, licensing, or even scraping.

Stage: Always

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small

Examples:

• GrubHub: <https://table.skift.com/2018/05/01/grubhubs-aggressive-growth-fueled-by-chain-partnerships/>
• DoorDash: <https://medium.com/@DoorDash/the-doordash-outside-sales-team-builds-partnerships-and-empathy-with-business-owners-across-the-3fbdf1f0723b>

Tips:

• Be strategic and thoughtful about the type and quality of supply you bring on. The quality and experience with that supply will reflect directly on your brand, not theirs.
• Make sure you are clear on your long-term competitive advantage, and not only growing this partner’s business. What’s your differentiator, and how will you maintain it?
• Make sure the user experience is smooth and feels native.

Question: What would be the biggest upside of adding 3rd party supply to your marketplace?

Tactic #13: Build your own supply 💪

One of the smartest things we did in the early days of Udemy was produce our own courses. Production (i.e. filming & editing video content) is a huge friction point in our supply-side process. So, we produced a few of our own courses in the beginning and then marketed the heck out of them. This wasn’t scalable, but it did allow us to build powerful social proof points which were critical to our long-term success.

>

— Dinesh Thiru, VP of Marketing at Udemy

What: In some marketplaces, you can either bootstrap supply by creating it yourself (e.g. videos), pay early users to become supply (e.g. Uber/Lyft paying drivers a salary), or your build your entire business on your own supply (e.g. Sonder).

Stage: Depends on business

Cost: Medium/Large

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small

Examples:

• At Airbnb, read Brian Chesky’s answer to the first question in this interview. His and Joe’s apartment was the first unit of supply on Airbnb.
• See example #1 in this post about Udemy.

Tips:

• Set the norms through the type of supply you create.
• Often not possible due to the business model.
• Be careful about the legal implications.

Question: What would it cost to build your own supply, and how does that compare to customer acquisition costs?

Tactic #14: Run broadcast and out-of-home ads 📺

What: TV commercials, podcast ads, movie ads, etc.

Stage: Always

Cost: X-Large

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small

Examples:


Airbnb Billboard, source


Lyft bus ad, source


Uber TV commercial, source

Tips:

• Don’t expect to ever be able to measure the impact. Because you won’t.
• The main benefit is generally brand-building.
• Do something unique and noteworthy.

Question: Are your potential “hosts” watching the same (ideally not super-popular) media or passing through the same physical parts of town?

Tactic #15: Run affiliate marketing 📝

What: Incentivize content producers to send you traffic by paying them for every member they refer.

Stage: Mid/Late

Cost: Small/Medium

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small

Examples:


Affiliate marketing for Uber/Lyft


Affiliate marketing for Airbnb


Affiliate marketing for Postmates

Tips:

• Takes very few people to operate, should pay for itself from day 1.
• There are companies out there that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
• Make sure to have brand guidelines that content creators must follow, otherwise the content ends up being bad.

Question: Are your competitors doing affiliate marketing?

Tactic #16: Send direct mail 📬

What: Send potential “hosts” physical mail, pitching them on your platform.

Stage: Always

Cost: Medium

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small

Examples:


• Uber: <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ubers-print-marketing-so-crazy-seth-engel/>
• GrubHub: <https://blog.sendwithscout.com/grubhub-knows-how-to-design-a-postcard/>

Tips:

• This is an under-appreciated channel.
• Tricky to measure, but possible.
• Check out Lob to make this super easy.

Question: Is this a channel your competition hasn’t tried yet?


Tactic #17: Optimize conversion 📈

All conversion optimization should start with user research. The biggest gains in optimization don’t come from brute-force A/B tests, but from trying to understand the real barriers to people using your product. For example, early at Airbnb we realized that the biggest hurdle for new hosts was knowing how much to charge for their space. So we built price guideance into the flow.

>

— Dan Hill, ex-Airbnb Growth Lead, CEO of Alma

What: Improving the percentage of people that start publishing that actually finish it.

Stage: Start early, and continue iterating

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Medium

Tips:

• Top-of-funnel levers will generally be orders-of-magnitude higher impact than any mid-funnel levers like this one, but early on are often low-risk big-wins. Later-stage, you can continue to squeeze % point’s of growth for a while.
• Figure out which part of the conversion funnel is the biggest issue, and focus all of your efforts there. Be careful spreading yourself too thinly across the entire funnel.
• In my experience, a big redesign of the flow often ends up hurting conversion.

Question: Which part of the funnel is most important to improve, and what are three things you do to improve this?

Tactic #18: Send re-engagement emails/pushes 📩

What: Emailing users that didn’t complete publishing, encouraging them to finish.

Stage: Always

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small/Medium

Tips:

• You’ll get most of the win by simply having an email, and then quickly hit diminishing returns once optimizing it a few times.
• Don’t be afraid to send a few reminders.
• Make the CTA extremely clear.

Question: What’s one helpful thing you can suggest to bounced users to re-inspire them?

Tactic #19: Make re-engagement calls 📞

What: Calling users that didn’t complete publishing, encouraging them to finish.

Stage: Early-stage for B2C, an evergreen lever for B2B

Cost: Medium

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small

Tips:

• Always ask users why they didn’t finish the process — this should inform your roadmap and processes.
• Early on you can use this as a customer development opportunity.
• Long-term, measure the ROI to make sure it’s worth the time.

Question: Which bounced users appear to be the most valuable and worth a call?


Tactic #20: Optimize activation 🥳

When I think about the ROI of things that you can do in a business, make certain that your customer is safely handed from acquisition to the activation. Make certain that they are activated and you have done everything in your power in order to make certain they have found their “Aha” moment and they have began habit forming.

>

— Shaun Clowes, CPO at Metromile

What: Getting new users to a key milestone that you believe is important for long-term retention. This is sometimes called the “aha” moment.

Stage: Early/Mid-stage

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small/Medium

Examples:

• At Airbnb, an activation was getting a new listing to its first booking within the first month.
• At Uber, an activation was completing the first ride.
• Inside the 6 Hypotheses that Doubled Patreon’s Activation Success

Tips:

• First, you need to figure out what milestone is key to a new “hosts” long-term success. It’s rarely an exact science.
• Goal your supply teams on reaching this point, vs. simply when they go live.
• Adjust this milestone if you learn something new down the road.

Question: What’s the one most impactful thing a “host” can do to improve their chances of getting booked?

Tactic #21: Optimize retention 🔐

Retention is the core of your growth model and influences every other input to your model. This is important because if you improve retention, you’ll also improve the rest of your funnel.

>

— Brian Balfour, Founder/CEO of Reforge

What: Increasing the percentage of new users that stick around for at least X months.

Stage: Always

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Medium early-stage, Small late-stage

Examples:

• At Airbnb, we didn’t spend a lot of time focused directly on retention. When we did, the majority of our efforts centered around helping new hosts get booked and have a great first stay.
• Excellent retention reading over at Reforge, including Why Retention Is The Silent Killer and Retention is Hard, and Getting Harder — Here’s Why.
• Retention metrics roundup of articles and links by Andrew Chen.
• Casey Winters on how to create long-term growth

Tips:

• In my experience, it’s difficult to significantly impact retention head-on. The key is that your product/service needs to continue to be genuinely useful. Make it more useful and retention will grow.
• Track retention by cohort, vs. globally.
• Make sure to capture data on why people leave, to inform future work.

Question: What is the single most common theme in why “hosts” leave, and what can you do about it?

Tactic #22: Expand existing supply 🤲

What: Convince existing successful “hosts” to increase the number of units they offer.

Stage: Always

Cost: Small

Impact on Airbnb supply growth: Small

Examples:

• An Airbnb host buying additional properties to manage.
• A Hipcamp host adding additional campsites.
• An Outschool teacher offering additional classes.

Tips:

• This can be one of the biggest growth drivers for certain businesses, don’t underestimate the potential here.
• In some cases, this is going to be easy (e.g. online classes), in some very hard (e.g. homes).
• Educate users on what kind of new supply would be most successful. Channel their excitement and point them in the right direction.

Question: Have you actually talked to your successful “hosts” about adding additional supply?


Strategy #1: Increase benefits, reduce costs ⚖️

What: Potential “hosts” will do mental calculus when considering signing up: is the cost (e.g. work, risk) worth the benefits (e.g. money, status). Make a list of ways to increase the benefits and reduce the costs, do them, and share this clearly.

Stage: Start on day 1, and continue iterating

Examples:

• Airbnb — Reduce costs: Host Guarantee, free photography
• Airbnb — Increase benefits: Guaranteed revenue, online payments
• Uber — Reduce costs: Car leasing, guaranteed income
• Uber — Increase benefits: Choose when to get paid, flexible hours

Tips:

• Building it won’t be enough, make sure to make it clear what you do for your users to increase benefits and reduce cost.

Strategy #2: Single-player mode 🦸‍♀️

OpenTable sold software to restaurants that created value for them without requiring any diners on the “buyer” side of the marketplace. They built a unique table management and CRM product (the “Electronic Reservation Book”) and charged a subscription fee for the service. The initial benefit to restaurant customers was the software. Once OpenTable acquired hundreds of restaurants in a city, they started to have a compelling diner value proposition.

>

— Eli Chait, ex-Director of PM at OpenTable

What: Make the platform to “hosts” useful even when there is no demand.

Stage: Early-stage

Examples:

• OpenTable: Simplified reservation management for restaurants
• Eventbrite: Created free web pages for your event
• More: <https://blog.elichait.com/2018/04/09/how-the-100-largest-marketplaces-solve-the-chicken-and-egg-problem/>

Tips:

• In most marketplaces, supply is king, so your single-player-mode should generally be focused on the supply side.
• This won’t be possible for every marketplace.

Strategy #3: Get to critical mass 💥

Our co-founder Nate Blecharczyk is highly quantitative and had determined that 300 listings, with 100 reviewed listings, was the magic number to see growth take off in a market. Observing New York, Paris, and a few other top markets, we saw a step-function change in the rate of bookings growth at 300 listings, the point at which guests had enough options to find a listing that matched their tastes and their travel dates.

>

— Jonathan Golden, first PM at Airbnb, partner at NEA

What: There is a point at which you have enough supply that you see an inflection point in demand conversion — estimate it and get your supply to that number.

Stage: Early-stage

Examples

• Airbnb: <https://medium.com/@jgolden/lessons-learned-scaling-airbnb-100x-b862364fb3a7>
• Airbnb and others: <https://medium.com/immutable/network-effects-1b975c7a6859>
• Facebook: <https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/how-facebooks-7-friends-in-10-days-got-everyone-confused-about-correlation-and-causation-25da4bb8220e>"

Tips:

• Don’t overthink it. Figure out a milestone enough people believe within the org, and use it until you can figure out something better. It’s more important to have something good-enough than to have nothing.

Strategy #4: Bootstrap trust 🤝

We looked at people’s willingness to trust someone, based on how similar they are in age, location, and geography. The research showed, not surprisingly, we prefer people who are like us. The more different somebody is, the less we trust them. That’s a natural social bias. What’s interesting is what happens when we add reputation to the mix — in our case with reviews. When you have less than three reviews, nothing changes. But if you’ve got more than ten, everything changes. High reputation beats high similarity. The right design can actually help us overcome one of our most deeply rooted biases.

>

— Joe Gebbia, Co-Founder of Airbnb and CPO

What: At first all you have is new supply, but users have no reason to trust it. Give them reasons to trust.

Stage: Early-stage

Examples:

• Airbnb: Early employees were given credit to travel for free as long as they left reviews for new hosts.
• Airbnb: Make the supply look great, e.g. free photography, structured data with limited customization.
• Airbnb: Reduce risk, e.g. Handle payments online, Host Guarantee, 24/7 support.
• Uber and Airbnb: <https://firstround.com/review/How-Modern-Marketplaces-Like-Uber-Airbnb-Build-Trust-to-Hit-Liquidity/>

Strategy #5: Internationalization ⛩

Internationalization is a challenge and risky. But tech companies need to be global to win. It’s about the right strategy and answering the right questions at the right time. Not going international is a wasted growth opportunity.

>

— Georg Bauser, ex-International Expansion at Airbnb

What: Make your site and experience work outside of initial native language/culture. This includes building out translations, local payment types, customer support in those languages, and often people on the ground getting things rolling.

Stage: Mid-stage

Examples:

• Launching airbnb.jp in record time
• Who did what in international expansion in 2018
• How Netflix Expanded to 190 Countries in 7 Years

Tips:

• International expansion is often one of the major inflection points for growth accelerating, so time it wisely.
• Pick the markets you want to win and go big there, vs. going broad immediately. It’s hard enough to win one market.
• This often requires doing things that don’t scale at first.

Strategy #6: Segment supply 👩‍🌾 👩‍✈️👩‍🔬

Early on Airbnb presented only one image of itself to hosts. Many types of hosts deemed the platform unsuitable, but opening ourselves and marketing to business travel hosts and luxury home hosts gave those hosts a message they wanted to hear. They could host the types of guest they felt were suitable for their property. This allowed us to onboard inventory we previously couldn’t, and gave existing hosts more optionality in how they marketed to and serviced those guests.

>

— Marc McCabe, ex-Head of Airbnb for Business

What: Determine what categories of supply you have and/or want, and dedicate teams to growing that type of supply. Generally, different categories require very different tactics, skills sets, and operating cadences.

Stage: Mid/Late-stage

Examples:

• Airbnb: Private homes, vacation rentals, luxury home.
• Uber: Black cars, individual car owner, scooter.
• eBay: Individual sellers, brick and mortar stores, wholesalers.

Tips:

• When introducing a new class of supply, there are many important considerations, including making sure you have a team whose ass is on the line for making this supply successful, making sure the demand side is set up to convert this new supply well, and avoiding overly diluting your marketplace differentiation.
• New segments often appear organically, and it’s up to you to decide if (and when) you want to double down on segment, or squash it.
• For the more professional segments, you’ll likely need to build advanced tools and integrations in order to fit into their existing workflows.

Final thoughts

Looking back at my time at Airbnb, a few things become clear. One, there were no silver bullets — success came from many wins building on each other. Two, most things we tried didn’t have an impact — but enough did. Three, it all only made sense in hindsight. My advice to you as you navigate scaling your marketplace is above all else, stay focused on providing value to your users. Their success will make or break you. Beyond that, avoid spreading your team too thinly across many tactics (aka focus), double down on the things that show promise (aka focus), and never lose sight of your north star (aka focus). Also, focus.

For more writings about growth, product, management, and related topics, make sure to subscribe to [my new newsletter](https://lenny.substack.com/) and hit me up [on twitter](https://twitter.com/lennysan).

Sincerely,

Lenny

Thank you [Andrew Chen](https://twitter.com/andrewchen), Gustaf Alströmer, [Jonathan Golden](https://twitter.com/jpgg), [Fatima Husain](https://www.linkedin.com/in/fatima-husain-0a278711/), [Marc McCabe](https://twitter.com/mccabe?lang=en), [Dan Hill](https://twitter.com/danhilltech?lang=en), [Kati Schmidt](https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinschmidt/), and [Georg Bauser](https://expansion-partner.com/) for reviewing early drafts of this post and contributing great ideas. 🙏