Lenny's PodcastHow to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable)
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
120 min read · 24,393 words- 0:00 – 9:46
Yuriy’s background
- YTYuriy Timen
The only thing that's worse than a channel or a tactic that you tried not working, the only thing that's worse than that is when you didn't give it the appropriate shot, right? And, and, and you prematurely or erroneously concluded that it doesn't work. And it's remarkable how often you find that to be the case when I talk to companies. "Oh, YouTube? We tried it. It doesn't work." I am like, "Okay, can I see what you've tried?" And then you look at it and you're like, "Oh, this thing was not designed to, to even have a s- have a, have a shot at working from the get-go."
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(instrumental music) Yuri Timon is a full-time advisor to companies looking to figure out their growth strategy, and he's worked with companies like Canva, Airtable, Otter, Whimsical, Hims, Flo Health, and a dozen others. I know a number of founders who have worked with Yuri, and they all tell me that he transformed how they think about their growth. Before becoming an advisor, he spent nine years at Grammarly, where he led growth and marketing and helped turn it into the household name that it is today. In our chat, we get incredibly tactical about all of the ways that you can grow your product, including when and how to invest in virality, SEO, and paid growth, what's changing across each of those channels, and the most common failure modes for B2C startups. This is the most tactical and actionable conversation I have had yet on how to grow your product, particularly a subscription product, and I'm really excited for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Yuri Timon. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?
- NANarrator
At least 40%.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And how many of them screw that up, and what happens when they do?
- NANarrator
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock-full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.
- NANarrator
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zuora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Modern Treasury. Modern Treasury is a next generation operating system for moving and tracking money. They're modernizing the developer tools and financial processes for companies managing complex payment flows. Think digital wallets, fiat crypto on-ramps, ride-sharing marketplaces, instant lending, and more. They work with high growth companies like Gusto, Pipe, ClassPass, and Marqeta. Modern Treasury's robust APIs allow engineering to build payment flows right into your product, while finance can monitor and approve everything through a sleek and modern web dashboard. Enabling real-time payments, automatic reconciliation, continuous accounting, and compliance solutions, Modern Treasury's platform is used to reconcile over three billion dollars per month. They're one of the hottest young fintech startups on the market today, having raised funding from top firms like Benchmark, Altimeter, SVB Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Y Combinator. Check them at moderntreasury.com. Yuri, uh, welcome to the podcast.
- YTYuriy Timen
Thanks for having me, man. This is, this is great.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
It's, uh, it's even better for me.
- YTYuriy Timen
All right. All right.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs) So I'm gonna give a quick bio. Let me know if I missed anything really important. You were head of growth at Grammarly. You spent nine years there kind of doing all the things that helped turn that company into the killer product that it is today. You left that, I think, a couple years ago. Now you're advising companies mostly full-time, I think mostly on growth strategy and I think mostly consumer startups. Is that about right?
- YTYuriy Timen
Uh, a couple of super critical corrections. Number one, it was only eight and a half years at Grammarly.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. (laughs)
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Usually people round those up. I'm, I'm impressed that you, uh, you get ac-
- YTYuriy Timen
I figured eight and a half is, um, long enough, so I, I, I made... you know, I, I, I-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah.
- YTYuriy Timen
I'm not, I'm not sure I wanna round up time now. But I, I, I'm kidding, obviously.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- YTYuriy Timen
Uh, yeah, I mean, that's largely it. I mean, you know, Grammarly was a hell of a run and trying to take a step back from that, and that stepping back has kind of taken on a life of its own, uh, you know, vis-a-vis advising.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
How many companies have you worked with at this point, advised, and what are some examples just, like, companies people would know?
- YTYuriy Timen
It's now been about, uh, I guess two years and three months since, you know, my last day at Grammarly in an, in an operating capacity. I've probably worked with maybe 15 companies in the last, you know, two and a little bit o- of years. Obviously, not all at once, right? It's usually four to five at any given point in time. But some of the ones that I've been really, uh, that I've really lucked out with in terms of, I mean, in terms of getting aligned with, uh, you know, companies like Canva, uh, Airtable, Hims and Hers in the personal care space. There is otter.ai. Who else? Flo Health, uh, you know, the, the, the world's most downloaded period tracker.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I use that for my wife. It's handy.
- YTYuriy Timen
Good. Good. Yeah. Um, yeah, I was trying to, um, to, to get my wife to try it out, but I've been unsuccessful.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- YTYuriy Timen
(laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
You're failing in your growth.
- YTYuriy Timen
She, she was like, "Are you trying to push me into having a third kid?"
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- 9:46 – 13:21
Different paths to growth for subscription-based products
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That was a lot of meta stuff, so let's get into some meat stuff here.
- YTYuriy Timen
Mm-hmm. All right.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So you talked to a lot of consumer startups. You help them figure out how to grow, how to evolve their product. Something I'm always curious about, and I'd love your thoughts on, is when you look at a consumer startup, I imagine there's a few archetypes of how they grow. And I'm curious if that's a mental model you use when you're like, "Oh, I see company X. They're probably gonna grow this way and here's what they should focus on." How do you see that?
- YTYuriy Timen
Great question. I think there are a couple of ways to, uh, to, to, to answer that. My sweet spot is subscription companies. And it's not just consumer, right? I do work with a lot of B2B companies. It's just that most of them... What, what they all have in common is they lean into consumerized type of growth loops and growth motions, right? So they're very kind of self-serve in nature or have meaningful self-serve engines. So, so i- if I think about subscription companies, I think there are, you know, probably a couple of, uh, uh, buckets that I see them falling into, right? Uh, if you were able to nail your unit economics, and you have really strong consumer LTVs, think Grammarly, think Canva, the single player LTVs for those companies, uh, are, are very, very high. They're kind of like average SMB LTVs for B2B companies.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
What's like a number there, just for folks to have a little context?
- YTYuriy Timen
I'm not at liberty to speak-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs) Okay. Right.
- YTYuriy Timen
... to those. But, but, but we're talking like i- i- in the hundreds of dollars, right?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yep. Great. Great.
- YTYuriy Timen
Whereas some other con- Like, most consumer subscription companies, uh, that are like five to $7 a month, their LTVs typically cap out at like 50 to 60 bucks.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- YTYuriy Timen
Right?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Cool.
- YTYuriy Timen
And so if you have really healthy LTVs, and that usually means that you're attracting a prosumer buyer, so they may be single player, but they're using it for work, right? And so maybe they're expensing it, or just the perceived value is so much higher that they're willing to bear that, you know, 120, $130 a year, uh, subscription. If I'm seeing things like that, and I'm seeing that you're converting, you know, seven... Like, five-plus percent of your free users to a paid subscriber, then there is a big opportunity to play it safe, right, and lean into kind of paid, paid growth loops and paid acquisition loops.There is another arch- archetype, which is, um, you know, i- i- i- if there are network effects, for instance. You don't find it as much with, kind of, like s- you know, single player consumer subscription- subscription companies. But obviously, you know, social media, consumer companies, there may be a strong referral angle, viral loop angle, uh, if the utility increases. The utility of the product increases, uh, the more users are using it. Another archetype I see are companies that can lead into SEO very heavily, especially if there is like a long tail programmatic angle. Take Canva, for instance, right? Uh, their biggest, uh, initial growth loop, and I think this is public knowledge, uh, was their long tail SEO strategy, uh, where, you know, any kind of design project that you could think of, uh, uh, you know, you- you would search for, you know, designing... I- i- it's kind of like two categories of keywords, make keywords and template keywords, right? So if you're searching for a template of any kind, a wedding invitation, yada, yada, they had incredibly strong SEO and they were just capitalizing on all that long tail, uh, traffic. Not- not every product is gonna lend itself to that, but I always look for that early on because that can become, that can, that can just, you- you can build incredible moat with that kind of strategy.
- 13:21 – 15:39
When to lean into virality
- YTYuriy Timen
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That, that makes sense. C- there's kind of like these three engines that you can tap into, and I imagine the preference would be word of mouth virality, and then if that isn't gonna work, SEO, and if that isn't gonna work, paid. Maybe just to kind of simplify it for listeners, what are kind of signals you can go after virality and invest in that and think that that could work 'cause-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... every founder would be like, "Yes."
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
"Virality, that's how I'm gonna grow."
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah. Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. So...
- YTYuriy Timen
Well, yeah, I mean, I mean, look, honestly, the first thing you look for is that, is there inherent product network effects? It's something that it, it's either there or isn't from inception, from my experience. I think it's, it's very difficult to manufacture. I mean, you, you, you know, this better than I do. Um, it's very, it's very hard to manufacture, uh, you know, product network effects if they aren't there from the get-go, right? So, you know, like Airbnb from your days, obviously, you know, marketplace, very strong product network effect dynamics. Uh, you think of, you know, collaboration tools, um, Airtable, monday.com, uh, Whimsical, um, whom we both know, very strong inherent product network effects. Contrast that with a company like Grammarly. It just wasn't there. It's not an inherently multiplayer task, uh, you know, constructing communication. Um, and so you can try to engineer that, but from my experience, it is a, it is a, it's a, it's an uphill battle. So if you have inherent product network effects, that's when I think layering on referral loops and viral loops, right? You think about like what Dropbox has done around, uh, you know, file sharing, like that's a iconic example. That is really powerful. I think that there is another case where referral and buyer loops can work even when there aren't inherent network effects if you have a really beloved product, beloved brand. There, there's a company out of, uh, uh, Australia that I, that I, um, had the opportunity to invest in called Laika. They do like fresh dog food, uh, subscriptions, and, uh, incredibly beloved brand, a premium product. And so they were, they're able to lean into, uh, you know, kind of a give one get one referrals. Even though there is an inherent, you know, product network effects, they're still able to kind of generate meaningful results off of a, an incentivized referral program.
- 15:39 – 16:32
What are network effects?
- YTYuriy Timen
- LRLenny Rachitsky
When you talk about network effects, what does that, what does that mean to you? How would you kind of define that briefly?
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah. Yeah. To me, I mean, honestly, I define it in a, in a, I think, uh, uh, probably a pretty quintessential way, which is for every individual user, the utility that they derive from the product increases the more, uh, the more users there are on the platform. The expanded version of that is, you know, in the case of marketplaces, it may not be the more u- users, uh, broadly speaking, but the more users in the markets that you care about, right? In the case of collaboration tools, it's not the more users in abstract terms, it's the more users within your team, the more users within your company, right? That correlates with your, uh, kind of the rise in your utility
- 16:32 – 24:22
SEO strategy and timeline: how long can it take to see results?
- YTYuriy Timen
curve.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome. So if you have network effects, AKA, if the product becomes more useful with more people, or there's amazing word of mouth already, or there's collaboration-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... probably a good sign that you could lean into virality-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... and maybe referrals. What about SEO?
- YTYuriy Timen
Ooh, that's a good one. It's a very, it's a very timely question because I'm, I'm actually in the process of we're helping a couple of, uh, a couple of, uh, of my companies figure out if, if it's the right time to invest in SEO. So I've been sort of at the forefront of taking like exploratory meetings with agencies and, and, and, and SEO consultants and things like that. I mean, I would say the first thing to figure, I mean, I, I, there are a couple of pillars, right? 'Cause obv- obviously we all know that SEO has a different, um, a different, uh, return horizon than say paid acquisition, right? It's longer out, it's maybe six months is the earliest you can see results. And even then it's gonna be a small trickle that compounds over time if you're successful, right? Or you may spend three to six months leaning into an SEO strategy and then realize that it's not gonna back out typically, at least in, in historically. A company, you know, probably isn't like series B before it starts feeling like it has the luxury of making these kind of medium to long-term investments. But I think that's shifting right now, but that's maybe a, a topic for later or even for another pod. But a lot of the strategies that I think were reserved for like series B are, are, are trickling down to series A companies because they have to diversify away from paid, but maybe more on that later. So I think as, you know, with SEO, it's like the first pillar I would say...... is, do you have a unique angle? When you take a look at the SEO landscape today, uh, you look at editorial, uh, landscape, which is typically how-to searches, uh, and, and who are the players there, and what kind of information is being offered. Do you have something unique to contribute to that conversation? Another thing that's, you know, if I had to do like an, like an audit checklist, the other thing is like, do you have a unique programmatic angle? Right? Like for instance, like Canva did that with templates. You know, who else does programmatic? Uh, you know, Zillow, Redfin, like obviously all the real estate, right? That's like really strong-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Zapier.
- YTYuriy Timen
Zapier, right. So, do you have a programmatic angle? And then understanding the competitive landscape. Or the other one is, do you have a unique data angle? So for instance, a company, uh, I, I, I work with called Monarch Money, which is in the personal finance management space. Think of it as like, you know, a new and improved version of Mint. There's a lot of, uh, you know, users are connecting accounts and, and, and you kind of have a sense of spending patterns and things like that. Clearly there's a unique, un- unique data and so it's a question of can you turn it into some kind of valuable, organic search experience? I won't go into, into too much detail in terms of what we're thinking of there, but that's another checkbox. If you can check two of, two or three of those boxes, right? As like a back of the envelope framework, you may be in good shape. And then it's a question of like, how can you lower the cost of experimentation in SEO as much as possible? I think as a, as a rule of thumb, like if you can time box it to three months, like what can I do that, that the end of three months I know, like is this likely to work or not?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome. Couple follow-up questions.
- YTYuriy Timen
Absolutely.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Uh, one is, SEO feels like this dark art where you need some SEO wizard to come help you through this.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Uh, do you suggest companies find somebody or work with an agency or something else? Like, what's your general feeling on agency versus some other route?
- YTYuriy Timen
I think SEO is pretty specialized skill set. There are some basic principles that always hold, right? Like best content wins, right? And don't do, don't do like shady back linking, right? And make sure that your on-page, uh, SEO is good and your pages are easily crawlable. But you know, I, I feel like everybody knows that, and, and where the winners are determined are between the lines. I don't know, is that a sports analogy? Maybe. May- maybe-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Uh, between the lines.
- YTYuriy Timen
(laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs) I don't know what that, where that comes from.
- YTYuriy Timen
I have no clue. I have no clue.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Maybe you're right.
- YTYuriy Timen
But anyways, what I mean is that there is a lot, a- a lot more nuance SEO, um, developments and angles where I think is re- where the opportunity really lies to differentiate yourself. And, and that requires keeping up with the latest algorithm changes. It's very hard to do that unless you are specializing in the art, right? Or the black magic of, of SEO. And so that's why I think getting an outside resource at least for like an audit is really helpful. Now whether it's a boutique agency or, you know, a solo consultant, I think that's, that's more circumstantial. But I've found like, you know, at least with, with the companies that I've worked with, if we wanted to quickly vet the SEO opportunity, like I can do it in a very kind of amateur, at an amateur level where I just like plug things into like SimilarWeb and, and, and try to figure out if the opportunity is there. But you can get these relatively inexpensive audits done from companies that, that, that you can then choose, do I hire them to help with my SEO or not? But I think that audit is usually a very good use of time because they have templates, so what they can turn, what they can turn around, you know, for 5 to 10K would take you many, many human hours to try to pull together yourself.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome. Are there agencies that you want to name that people can go check out or would you prefer just to keep it from-
- YTYuriy Timen
Uh, I'll give-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... having favorites?
- YTYuriy Timen
... I'll give one plug.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Great.
- YTYuriy Timen
I think one of the most innovative, disciplined, first principles SEO thinkers that I've met is Ethan Smith from Graphite. It's not for everyone. It's a pretty high-end SEO shop. So I would, I wouldn't send a series A company there. But Ethan also produces a lot of resources and what they've been focusing on at Graphite lately has been actually automating a lot of their work and, and turning it into SaaS. So, uh, I don't know how far along they are, but y- you could probably already get, you know, into some of their betas, uh, some of the tools that they're offering.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Sweet. I'm gonna try to get Ethan on this podcast.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah. Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I've seen his stuff and it's awesome.
- 24:22 – 28:09
The shifting landscape of paid media
- LRLenny Rachitsky
too.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So I guess my big question is like, is paid still...... lucrative and a good path for many companies is, like, 50% of the time less-
- YTYuriy Timen
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... effective. How do you, how do you see that shifting recently in, and how should people think about paid in a consumer subscription startup?
- YTYuriy Timen
Well, I think in the short term, um, let, let's break it down into phases. I think in the short term-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- YTYuriy Timen
... paid acquisition and just paid media dollars are contracting. And we're seeing it already, right, with, uh, Meta's advertising revenue, Snap's advertising revenue. Right, there's clearly a global contraction happening to paid media budgets. A big part of it is because all of a sudden the definition of efficient acquisition and good payback windows is shifting, right? So if before for a consumer subscription company, you know, 12-month payback was decent, now it's like, you better pay back your paid media in six months or less. That's the sentiment. So, you know, the, the obvious reaction is like, anything that's north of six months, or well north of six months, we're cutting that. And so there's that. Then there is just less tolerance for ambiguity in attribution, right? When it's like, when the sentiment is like, "Let's grow at any, you know, grow at all costs," if you can attribute things perfectly, that's okay. Now it's like, you know, especially with venture-backed companies, you have to have, you know, two-plus years of runway, manage your burn a lot more diligently now. And so whatever you can't attribute sales to, like, that shit's gotta go. I don't know if we can curse on the pod or not. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I'm fully available.
- YTYuriy Timen
Well, I've been holding back (laughs) for the last 30 minutes. No, I'm kidding.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Let loose.
- YTYuriy Timen
All right, all right.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Not, not kid-friendly, but nobody's cursed yet, so, so this could be-
- YTYuriy Timen
Okay. All right, all right. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... this could be a first. Very loud.
- YTYuriy Timen
All right. Um, uh, but anyways, yeah, so, so I think there is a short, a short-term contraction. However, that opens up an opportunity for smart kind of attribution investments. So you're seeing an emergence of some interesting attribution-related, attribution incrementality related products, a couple that I've personally started exploring and looking into. And then you just see a lot more heads of growth, heads of user acquisition thinking about attribution, in, uh, building their attribution stacks. And so I think that once we settle into some kind of new normal, which is gonna be a combination of just better attribution, uh, attribution stack on average for companies, combined with just a level of acceptance that attribution will never be as good as it maybe once was, we're gonna probably go, you know, hit, like, come out of that and, and, and you'll see paid budgets start making their way back. But even right now, they're in contraction. There are gonna be some winners. The companies that had strong cash positions, had strong unit economics, strong payback periods already, right? Grammarly, Canva, to name two that I know personally, a couple of others, or many others probably. Th- they're gonna be winners because all of a sudden, if previously they were competing with companies who were nowhere as efficient as them, but for whatever reason had the green light to keep spending, right? Now all of those are gonna pull back their budgets. And so those that have been disciplined, have the instrumentation to track things better than, than, than average, they're gonna benefit from, uh, you know, decreased competition on ad platforms, decreasing CPMs, et cetera. So there are gonna be winners, that's for sure.
- 28:09 – 32:01
The return of media mix modeling
- YTYuriy Timen
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Wow, I have- I haven't heard this perspective. It's so interesting that the fact that it's gotten harder is creating new opportunities for companies to do it better and more intelligently. You said you mentioned a couple tools, products-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yep.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... that you found to be potentially helpful in this. Is there anything that you could mention there?
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah, yeah. I'll mention a couple that I've kind of connected with in the last couple of months. So, uh, first of all, media, media mix modeling is making a comeback, which is, you know, something that kind of got, got popularized in, in the Mad Men kind of advertising era of the '50s, right? Pre-digital, um, and that's how people... That, that, that, that was basically the methodology. I can't speak to the specifics there. Uh, the science is a little bit, you know, I, I'm out of depth there. But it, it was basically, um, you know, a way to u- use some data to determine a budget allocation across channels, right? At the time, it was probably, you know, newspapers and, and billboards, et cetera. It was leveraging data to some extent. You were prob- you were doing it maybe on a quarterly basis, and then you would only update it every quarter. There was no way, with media mix modeling, there was no way to adjust budget, like, in-quarter, right, because you weren't getting the data feedback loop that frequently. But media mix modeling is now making a comeback because there are so many offline channels that are part of folks' channel portfolio today. And then plus, a lot of the online channels are becoming less trackable, right? Meta, for instance, right, with the iOS 14 shift. And so media mix modeling is making a comeback, and the company that's leading the charge of bringing the media mix modeling methodology of, like, the traditional advertising era and ushering it into the digital world is a company called Recast.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Recast?
- YTYuriy Timen
Recast, yeah. So I've heard really good things. I haven't tried them with any of my companies yet, but there are a couple, a couple that I'm, uh, that are on the horizon, hopefully.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Just to double-click there-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... for a moment, uh, is that still useful if you're not doing TV and other forms of advertising?
- YTYuriy Timen
I think it's still useful.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Or if you're just doing...
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah, I think, I think it's useful if you're spending a considerable amount. What's considerable? I'd say north of 100,000 a month on paid media.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- YTYuriy Timen
And if you have some level of channel complexity, so you're not just on Google or on Facebook, but maybe you're on three-plus, um, you know, uh, uh, uh, channels, then I think it still makes sense. The other ones, in the incrementality space, they have very different methodologies. You know, actually, because at the end of the day, uh, uh, this might be obvious to folks, but-Maybe some, some will find value. Click-based attribution, right, or the digital attribution we were all fawning over, cookie-based and, and, and click-based and URL parameter based attribution, it never demonstrated a causal relationship between our media spend and business results. It was only good for correlative insights, right? And, and, and, and the only way to determine causality is through like real, you know, controlled experiments, randomized control experiments through incrementality testing, which is typically really hard to do cleanly, and also companies have always been, uh, uh, often been wary about doing it because you have to, like, turn off a channel potentially in a key demo, and you're like, yeah, like the, the benefit is the learning of whether it's actually incremental, but the cost or the sales that I will lose today. But the only way to really know y- uh, h- how, how effective your paid media is is through ongoing incrementality testing. So there are two companies that are addressing that, or two that I am excited about. One is Measured, it can be found at measured.com. Amazing domain name.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Amazing domain name. Go, go them.
- YTYuriy Timen
A- and then the other one is Incremental. But, uh, in- incremental.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Dot com.
- YTYuriy Timen
No, no vowels except-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Hmm.
- YTYuriy Timen
... except the last A between the T and the L.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Excellent. Great job.
- YTYuriy Timen
So many free plugs today.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. Yeah. I love
- 32:01 – 33:44
How can you tell if media spending equates to business results?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
it. It's great. This is what people need, right? They're just like, "Okay, what do I actually do?" And so the more it's clear what to actually try and how to solve these problems, the more people can actually-
- YTYuriy Timen
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... m- make, make change. I had a couple questions here that I wanted to follow up on. One is, founders might be listening to this and they're like, "Amazing. Okay, we're gonna grow. There's three ways to grow. Let's do it all. Let's get someone on SEO, let's get Jane on paid, let's get-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... Fred on, uh, virality."
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
There we go. Uh, so in your experience, is it smart to focus on one and then expand down the road, or try them all, see which one works best? How do you advise companies think about these options?
- YTYuriy Timen
I would say focus paired with rapid iterations, right?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- YTYuriy Timen
With limited resources, naturally you have to practice some form of essentialism and, and, and ruthless prioritization. But at the same time, the clock is always ticking, right? You, you have burn. There, there, there is a finite number of tries that you have at finding what works, right? What's gonna help you unlock the next level of growth, right? Get to the next funding round, right? Extend your runway. And so I think either one taken to an extreme, focus or trying multiple things, is not a good thing, right? And, and just in case it's not obvious, right, if you focus on one thing, uh, and if, and it ends up being the wrong thing, you've wasted really valuable time and now you have, you know, so much less time left to find something that does work. Spreading yourself very
- 33:44 – 36:01
Don’t spread yourself too thin
- YTYuriy Timen
thin, oftentimes, you know, in the early stage companies it's one person who's in charge of all of growth, but they also have some other kind of responsibilities like maybe ops and customer success, right? If you get them to try like five different things, they may not try them fully, e- e- anyone individually fully enough, right? 'Cause I like to say the only thing that's worse than a channel or a tactic that you tried not working, the only thing that's worse than that is when you didn't give it the appropriate shot, right? And, and, and you prematurely or erroneously concluded that it doesn't work. And it's remarkable how often you find that to be the case when I talk to companies. "Oh, YouTube? We tried it. It doesn't work." I'm like, "Okay, can I see what you've tried?" And then you look at it and you're like, "Oh, this thing was not designed to, to even have a s- have a, have a shot at working from the get-go." So to answer your question, I think it's focus with some guard rails so that you know exactly when it's time to move on to the next thing.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
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- 36:01 – 38:02
How to tell if you’ve taken a strategy far enough
- LRLenny Rachitsky
This might be too hard to answer in a chat like this, but do you have any guidance for how to know when you've gone far enough? I imagine there's a lot of, uh, nuance and detail there. Is there anything that you could share?
- YTYuriy Timen
Love the question. It's very thought-provoking. I think with some tactics and some channels you can fairly objectively create some test guard rails where it's like, if it's YouTube, we know kind of like minimum number of impressions that you gotta get. You know, try two to three creative angles... here's the click-through rate range that you're looking for. Like, uh, you know, if you, if you get in- in- in- within these ranges on these KPIs, keep going. If you don't, abandon. I think it's important to also know that abandonment doesn't mean we will never revisit it again. Right? It just means that because every time you're evaluating, right, the concept of sunk cost, right? So you have these periodic, I think, periods of reevaluation, where it's like, "Okay, did we, did we try enough?" What is... And this is more art than science, frankly. It's like, what's the incremental lift for us as a team to, to try to experiment with the next phase of this channel or this tactic? And what is the opportunity cost of that, right? What are the other high-profile things that we could be trying? I know, you know, you were right in saying this is probably too hard to answer in this format, but I would break things down maybe into two types. Like there are, there, there, there are some channels or tactics where you can objectively figure out like some guardrails for when you know, uh, it's showing promise or not. Because you can pull benchmarks on like good click-through rates and things like that, right? Then there are other tactics where you just have to exercise more judgment outside of benchmarks.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. Yeah. That was, that was actually really valuable and a very challenging question-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... to try to summarize quickly, so thank you.
- 38:02 – 42:13
When to lean into a strategy that’s working vs. when to think about diversification
- LRLenny Rachitsky
One more quick question along these lines. So you talked about these three broad ways companies grow. Oftentimes a couple of them work. Something I've seen, and I'm curious if you agree, usually one is like 80% of your growth, and then you layer on a couple more-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... to optimize. Is that what you see?
- YTYuriy Timen
Uh, yes.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
All right.
- YTYuriy Timen
I think, I think companies that we know and admire and reference in case studies or in podcasts such as this one, from the outside looking in, you oftentimes assume that it's a highly diversified growth engine. I have to say it's often not the case. Definitely the eight and 20 applies. There's usually some kind of strat- uh, there's some kind of strategy that's working overwhelmingly well, and there is a scramble internally to minimize reliance on that one thing, and on, you know, discover/unlock the next step function, the next growth horizon, right? In the case of Grammarly, it was performance marketing, kind of over-reliance on performance marketing during, you know, part of the company's life cycle. And so it was like, "Okay, this thing is working, it's efficient," so you don't want to stomp, pour a fire on it, but you're also thinking, you know, months and years ahead, you know, what kind of risk does it open you up to? And so there is a scramble to find... And, and Grammarly has been successful there. You know, with Canva, it was the SEO angle, right? So for them, that was working really well, which is more defensible than paid, right? That's sort of like long tail programmatic, uh, SEO angle. But look, you're always susceptible to Google algorithm updates, right? And so how do you de-risk yourself from that? But to your point, yes, and, and I think that surprising thing to people probably is that it's also the case with some later stage companies. It's not just early stage companies that are kind of like one-trick ponies. Sometimes it's later stage companies as well.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
What this makes me think about is there's kind of these three phases to growth. There's the kickstart phase where you're just doing a bunch of stuff, trying to get things moving. Then there's the, you discover your first main growth engine, and then there's layer on additional engines-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... because you want to diversify.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yep. And one interesting, what I believe is an interesting, um, period, a- and a lot of it is gut feel, right? And I try to ??? . Like I encounter sometimes early stage companies when one thing is working well, and they're already worried about over-reliance, and I'm, and they're starting to talk about diversification. And, and I commend oftentimes, and, and I see it showing up in their OKRs, like all this, I'm like, I'm like, "No, no, too early. Like I'm glad that you're such a forward thinker, put all of your energy... Like sure, this one tactic is accounting for say 80 plus percent of your new user acquisition, but your user acquisition is still small." (laughs) Right? So like, don't, don't get distracted with diversification. We'll get there. Lean more into this, hit this growth rates, like stand this up, build this into a real strategic advantage, this thing that's working. So I actually have to talk them out of focusing on diversification too early. Contrast that with some later stage companies for whom the div- for, for, who are, you know, at scale, I don't know, 50 plus million ARR, 90 plus percent reliant on a single acquisition channel, which is just, you know, mired with risk and diversification is a blind spot for them. And then with those I have to be like, "Hey y'all, here's a risk that you're carrying", right? Let's start carving out bandwidth resources to try to go into, you know, go and explore these other channels and tactics.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That's such an important point. It reminds me, Casey has this hilarious line that he uses that the money's always in the banana stand, or there's more- always more money in the banana stand, from Arrested Development, that basically your growth is probably gonna come from the same place it's already come from.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yep.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And that you shouldn't take that for granted, and you should put most of your efforts into continuing to optimize that versus being distracted by, "Oh, let's do SEO now."
- YTYuriy Timen
I see that argument for sure.
- 42:13 – 46:19
Is there a shift from growth to survival?
- YTYuriy Timen
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So you mentioned this point about how later stage growth strategies are starting to move earlier into-
- YTYuriy Timen
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... growth strategy planning.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I'd love to hear more on that.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah. Let me, let me expand on that. In the world that we lived in in the last 18 months, or let's say, let's say up until say three to five months ago, right? Uh, we were living in the world where funding was abundant and plentiful, startups were conditioned to think that they can raise twice a year.... right? Valuations were quintupling within a year, right? Like you raise in January and then you, you raise in, like, November and your valuation 5X. And so companies were coming off of these, like, ridiculous Series A's of like, you know, 15 to $25 million A's. And they were like, "We gotta grow as quickly as possible. What can we activate to give us immediate return?" And the answer is almost always paid. That's what's gonna give you ... Especially if you're thinking you can w- you, you wanna go back to raising, uh, uh, you know, less than 12 months later, that forces you to focus on very kind of short term tactics, short payoff, uh, tactics. And so things like SEO, there was no, there was no room for, for to think about that for early stage companies. 'Cause like payoff is gonna come like, you know, maybe in like 12 months in terms of meaningful payoff. We care about getting to the next round and maximizing our valuation between now and then. SEO is for the grown up companies, right? When we're that, we can think about it. And they were getting this reinforcement from everywhere, from peers, from VCs. It's like, it's growth, growth, growth, right? The growth at any cost. I think what happened now, and we'll see where things stabilize because I think we're still in the midst of a little bit of a, of a, uh, of, of chaos. What's happening now is the same VCs, right, are saying, "Okay, it's now survival. You have to extend your runway, minimize burn, you know, hibernate if you have to." A- a- and all of a sudden growth, whether explicitly or, you know, via inference becomes kind of a secondary objective, especially for all these companies that are far from being cashflow positive, right? They have to figure out how to stay alive and not have to go back to the market and, and be sort of a victim of shitty terms. And so I, I feel this is me extrapolating, 'cause venture capitalists didn't actually tell me this, but I'm extrapolating that growth is a secondary objective now. It's really focusing on sustainability due to economics, extending the runway, control of your destiny, getting to default alive, right? And all of a sudden it's like, okay, plus pain is a lot less attractive. Now we can't afford to be acquiring users at like LTV cap one to one, right? Like that's a, that's, that's now a no-no. And so SEO is now becoming more attractive 'cause you, you know, you're like once you got your burn under control and you're thinking, "Okay, we saved all this money by reducing our paid budget or cutting it entirely. Like how, how do we put some of those resources back to work?" And all of a sudden SEO starts looking a lot more lucrative because it's almost like you, you took the urgency of like grow at any cost in the next six months. You took that out of the equation. So now it's like we're in a position where we're gonna, you know, we don't have to go back to raising, uh, you know, 12, you know, 18, 24 months. We have, you know, 18, 24 months worth of runway. And now companies are starting to think more in terms of, you know, building more sort of sustainable and defensible growth initiatives.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Fascinating. And as much as people may want to do SEO like we talked about earlier, it doesn't mean they will be able to pull it off, right?
- YTYuriy Timen
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Because there's these things that have to be true-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yes.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... for your type of company and-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yes.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. Going back to a point you made earlier about paid being a really interesting opportunity right now because it's become harder,
- 46:19 – 56:45
Two reasons to do paid media
- LRLenny Rachitsky
would you say generally you're kind of like pro try paid, go paid be- in this time? Because I'm finding a lot of startups are like, "Oh, we can't do paid anymore. We're trying all these other approaches to grow." Is that like alpha right now? Start thinking about paid in a creative way and maybe this is gonna be a huge advantage?
- YTYuriy Timen
So there are two reasons to do paid. I mean I, I'm oversimplifying, but I think people will hopefully appreciate the over, the, the, the oversimplification. Number one because it actually like drives re- drives returns at efficient unit economics, whatever that may mean for your company, your business, your industry. The other way to do it is because it's a very quick way to get learnings on messaging and positioning, on designs, on features you're thinking of launching, et cetera, right? It's, it's hard to get faster learnings at scale, right, than like A/B testing headlines, Google search or whatever. I think the problem that I, that I find is when a company can't tell me which camp they're in, right? Or where they, where they try to say that they're in both, but really it's like, okay, you're, you're funneling 100K a month. It's like super inefficient and you're not even like running experiments to actually get the learnings. I can assess a company, like even if I don't know, don't know the industry as well, based on like just seeing their funnel performance, right, their conversion rates, their retention curves, their LTVs, understanding their churn. I could say whether they stand a chance at making paid work as a former strategy, right? So not just a learning mechanism, not just a kind of a feedback engine, but actually a, uh, you know, like, like a profitable, like delivering acquisition channel or strategy. And if I see that they're, that, that, that they're not there, right, because the funnel doesn't convert well, the users don't retain, the LTVs are too low, then I say, "Hey, it's not, it's not time for paid." Maybe carve out a little bit of budget if you wanna quickly test, you know, positioning and, and, and, and things like that, but it's just, it's just too soon. But if instead I encounter a company that has really healthy conversion rates, strong LTVs, I do a little bit of competitor research and I can see where the opportunities are, which channels are less saturated than others, then I may say, "Hey, it's, it's worth a, it's worth a go." And also just seeing the bigger picture of their financial health. How much runway do you have, right? What is your, you know, what does your monthly burn look like?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Right. 'Cause paid is like cash going out the door.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And it will return hopefully-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yep.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... at some point. Might be six months-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... might be a year. And so that's a real constraint.You mentioned onboarding and funnel conversion. Two questions there. One, do you have kind of a heuristic of like here is good for conversion rates? Is there something that you think about there that you could share or is it very case dependent?
- YTYuriy Timen
Um, I think it's case dependent but, uh, I can... You know, uh, it is ca-... Uh, it's not even case dependent, it's category dependent, right?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- YTYuriy Timen
So it's not that every company is its own case, but it's like we gotta know about what buckets we're talking about, right? I will say that if... Let, let, let's say if we talk about prosumer freemium SaaS, à la Grammarly, à la Canva, Whimsical, InVideo, things like that, yeah, I could probably ca-... I can confidently say that like a healthy, you know, website visit to a free user, a free account creation conversion rate is probably like in the 20 to 35% range.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
From landing on the site to signing up?
- YTYuriy Timen
From landing on the site to like a free user.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- YTYuriy Timen
At scale. Earlier stage, if you have really strong product market fit with some kind of small audience segment, that conversion can be 40 to 50%. But as you go broader, it will probably asymptote at like 25, 30%. What about like a conversion, you know, from a... If you, if you're a freemium from like a, you know, free user to a, uh, premium account or a paid account? I think anything under 5% is not gonna, uh, i- i- is not gonna work long term. Like regardless of how big your top funnel is. Like you make get to some point, but like for you to remain an independent company, continuously growing, um, you know, pre-IPO, like I don't think it's gonna happen. It's gotta be north of 5%, ideally like north of 7%.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Wow. Super handy. On the onboarding point, what's your thoughts on investing in onboarding and that part of the flow? Like how often is that a fruitful area of investment?
- YTYuriy Timen
Almost always. Um, a lot of my work in, in... is in that sort of, uh, prosumer space, so the products tend to be more complex, right? Airtable, Whimsical, Canva, InVideo, right? There is like... They're very robust products. And so it's very easy to get lost in their editors, right? And I think what all of those companies are trying to do for their respective verticals and use cases is they're trying to democratize access to, you know, things that previously you had to rely on professionals for, right? Maybe, you know, in the case of Airtable, it's y- your engineers, right? In the case of Canva, it is, you know, professional graphic designers. Uh, in the case of InVideo, it's professional video editors. So when they're trying to democratize access but they're also trying to make the products robust enough to be comparable to a professional-grade quality, and it's a very difficult place to play in, right? It's like how do you make it simple enough where, you know, a non-professional can use it but robust enough where they go and say, "Oh, yeah, this is as good as if I would have hired, uh, a professional..." fill in the blank. And that's where onboarding... Sorry for the long-winded answer. That's where onboarding is really, really important, because there's such a huge difference between landing someone on that initial editor page, be it Airtable, Canva, um, you know, left to their own devices, versus getting as much information or r- as much relevant information up front and then customizing that landing experience for them so that if they're there to do X and we know XYZ about them, we're able to guide them and not expose them to the robustness of the product all at once. So the sh- the short answer is, almost all the time, onboarding is a big opportunity.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome. That's what I was expecting to hear. To give folks some context, what's kind of an order magnitude that you've seen improvement on onboarding and maybe impact on a company improving onboarding?
- YTYuriy Timen
Earlier stage companies where, you know, you still haven't really approached the local maximum and you haven't, haven't experimented with a ton of things, I mean, you can two to four X activation rates easily through onboarding. I think later stage companies, like, you know, maybe series B and beyond, I think you can still probably get to 20 to 30% lift in activations. It depends on how many low, low hanging fruit are left to tackle.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That makes sense. Yeah. TL;DR onboarding, there's always money in the onboarding banana stand. Uh, on that kind of same idea, do you have a general feeling of like investments in this stuff often pays off and helps you grow and is often higher ROI, and investments in bucket B are rarely successful? What are... What would those two buckets be?
- YTYuriy Timen
So thinking of investments broadly, right? Not, uh, not, not just monetarily?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. Yeah. Time. Time and resources.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah. I mean, I would say that getting to know your customer always pays off (laughs) . So it's, uh, you know, user interviews, and getting to know your market, right? Your customers and your prospects always pays off. Customer research, insights, surveying, interviewing, you know, panels, uh, in- incredibly useful, and I found it to be very... Especially early stages. The amount of clarity and momentum that it can create inside of a, you know, seed, series A, up to series B company when you first do some, a proper research push...... the way it can galvanize the team and give them focus and clarity and purpose is, is remarkable. So that always pays off. What doesn't pay off? I mean, I think, I think over-reliance on paid. It comes to bite you in, in, in, in, in the rear end. I think, when I think about tracking and attribution, I think it's a question of, like, the right level of investment at the right stage. Rarely do companies get it right. They usually fall into one of two buckets, where they under-invest i- in attribution, and they are now, you know, their budgets are high, they, they, they're, they, they have a, a broad channel portfolio and they have a hard time figuring out what's working, what isn't, and they just get into this inertia where it's like, "Well, overall the company's been growing, and it's, i- it's been growing roughly over the same time that we've been increasing our spend. We're scared to break it, so we just gotta keep spending." Right? And so ... Or companies that read horror stories about other companies' over-spending, they sometimes try to invest in attribution too much, believe it or not, where they're trying to get everything perfect and, and scientifically pure. But what they don't realize is that the payoff may not always be there. And so, how do I fit this into your question of ... I think, I think attribution, tracking attribution incrementality is definitely a worthwhile investment arena, but it can both be a good or a bad thing, depending on the level of it. So you gotta make sure the level of investment is appropriate for your stage and what you stand to gain from it.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome. You're such a good interviewee, that you come back to the question.
- YTYuriy Timen
No practice, I promise. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs) Shh. That was great. Okay. One last question
- 56:45 – 59:36
Why you shouldn’t dismiss TikTok (and other channels you might be overlooking)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
before we get to our very exciting lightning round. I'd love you to get your thoughts on advertising on TikTok and YouTube and broadly, is there any other tactics, avenues that you think are kind of under-utilized or emerging that folks should be thinking about?
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah. So TikTok, like, definitely, uh, one thing I'll say about TikTok is I'm seeing it come up more and more as a channel that works well, and sometimes even the most efficient channel, most efficient digital channel for some brands. But I think that the, the thing about TikTok that, that oftentimes I was surprised about is you often hear, "Oh, TikTok. That's for the 15 to 22-year-olds." Right? "I'm, I'm-"
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah.
- YTYuriy Timen
"... I'm done with my, with my Gens." Gen Z, right. And, uh, "Oh, my, my audience is different, so I'm just gonna ignore the channel." TikTok has so many users, and it's still so relatively unsaturated with advertisers that, like, your audience is on there, on there. Like, you'd be surprised by, you know ... I, I've worked with brands that, you know, their, their core demo is like 40 plus, married, you know, making 200K plus in, in household annual income. And you wouldn't think that that demo is on TikTok, and it is. So that's, that's, that's one point about TikTok. Other, other channels, I mean, I think out-of-home is still not getting enough love. Podcasts, okay. Uh, yep, yep. (laughs) Sponsor this one.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
There we go. You heard it from Yuri.
- YTYuriy Timen
Direct, direct mail. Wh- what has happened? They've gotten better with attribution, th- 'cause before a lot of them, a lot of those channels were written off as sort of like, "Look, attribution's just too hard on there, and attribution is so good and reliable on digital." Right? So that, that gap, that canyon that existed in attribution capabilities of online and offline deterred a lot of people from offline. Today, offline has gotten better at attribution and at, at positioning themselves as being able to do attribution. But also, online attribution has deteriorated. So all of a sudden, that argument kind of slimmed down a little bit, and I'm seeing offline get a lot more traction. And, and podcasts especially are actually very, very performant, uh, for a lot of, a lot of brands. Yeah, those are, those are the c- a couple of things that come to mind.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Those are great. Happy to hear the podcast piece, excellent. And then I actually, I, I'm an investor in a startup that did a big out-of-home campaign, and they just told me that it was like a ten to one positive ROI on the deals that they got out of it, so I've been seeing that too. And that's such a good point, that the, uh, mea- measurement and attribution on online has come down, where it maybe makes more sense to try stuff like that.
- 59:36 – 1:08:15
Lightning round!
- LRLenny Rachitsky
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Amazing. All right. Are you ready for our very exciting lightning round?
- YTYuriy Timen
Okay.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I'm gonna ask you five questions, I think, and then just, yeah, let's go through it quick.
- YTYuriy Timen
Okay. Let's do it.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs) Let's do it. Okay. What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?
- YTYuriy Timen
Ooh. That's something that I think is very prone to recency bias, right? It's like-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- YTYuriy Timen
... what are some of the books you've read recently that you've enjoyed? But I would say there are a couple of books that stuck with me o- over the years. I think on the business side, or like on the, on the, on the business side, productivity side, it's a book called Essentialism. I forget the author's name. I think his last name is McKeown or something. And it's basically the book about cutting out the noise and finding a singular focus and doing that really well. It's a book that I, th- that was a game-changer for me at Grammarly, being sort of new in my career, having really aggressive goals, not being scared to say no, taking on a lot, just feel, like, thinking like, "Well, I'm only working 12 hours a day. There's 12 more left. I could just, you know, like, like I can, I can, I can do it." And then when it, when you, when you end up stepping into a leadership role, which happened for me, I mean, it happened prior to Grammarly, but really I was able to kind of grow into that role at Grammarly. That book was, was incredible and I, and I used it a lot. I pretty much got copies for everybody on the team.... like, 40 plus people. And, uh, s- so that- that is a book I swear by. Um, I read a lot outside of, like, work and business, so I don't know if it's appropriate, but I'll say that Viktor Frankl's A Man's Search For Meaning is just a remarkable memoir on, you know, perseverance and, uh, I think the biggest takeaway is you can't control what's happening around you, but you can control your reaction to it. And then I'd say the- a book that I read recently, 'cause I was very, you know, uh, affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I'm originally from- from Ukraine, I believe you are as well. Um, and so it- it- it hit-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah.
- YTYuriy Timen
... very close to home, and there've been a lot of references drawn between, like, the- President Zelenskyy and his response in this war and Winston Churchill's response in 1941 when, you know, Hitler started marching through Europe. And so I read a book called, I think, The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. I read- I read that- I read that recently too.
- YTYuriy Timen
Uh, did you also read it-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- YTYuriy Timen
... since the invasion?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
No. It was before that. But, uh, I totally get that now.
- YTYuriy Timen
Reading it right now, because I've been following the conflict, uh, very closely, but for people who haven't followed the conflict or maybe have only followed, you know, the Russian- no, the- the- the- the war, kind of, in a cursory way, you can put what's happening into historical context remarkably well. Uh, so I feel like that book accomplishes two things. Number one, it's, like, you learn something about, you know, not so distant history that maybe you didn't know, which was about, you know, Great Britain's and Winston Churchill's, kind of, courageous response in the face of, you know, uh, um, uh, Hitler's invasion of Europe. But you also can draw so many parallels to what's happening today. And hopefully, hopefully that helps us understand what's at stake. Not to end on too grandiose of a note.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
We'll go less grandiose quickly. But I will add one thing that stood out in that book, that is also true in Ukraine, is how during the firebombing of the- of- of Britain, people are just, like, going out every day-
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... going to clubs-
- YTYuriy Timen
I know.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... still having a-
- YTYuriy Timen
I know.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... still living their life.
- YTYuriy Timen
Even today.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And same thing with in- in Ukraine.
- YTYuriy Timen
Even today is... And not just Kiev, but the- but, you know, it's- it's very live.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I love that. Okay.
- YTYuriy Timen
Yeah.
Episode duration: 1:08:15
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