Lenny's Newsletter

Lenny’s Newsletter—The #1 business newsletter on Substack

Every week, I humbly tackle reader questions about product, growth, people management, and anything else that’s stressing you out at the office. Paid subscribers get the weekly post, non-paid subscribers get a monthly post.

A sampling of past posts

📈 Growth strategy

1. How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users

2. How the fastest-growing B2B businesses found their first 10 customers

3. Improving retention

4. Improving conversion

5. Increasing virality

6. Winning at content-driven growth

7. Winning at SEO

8. The Racecar Growth Framework

9. Magical growth loops

10. Flywheels, flywheels, flywheels

🤌 Product management, the work

1. Getting better at product strategy

2. My favorite product management templates

3. Prioritizing a roadmap

4. Getting buy-in

5. Where great product roadmap ideas come from

6. The Minto Pyramid Principle and the SCR framework

7. What Buddhism taught me about product management

🦸‍♀️ Product management, the career

1. How to get into product management (and thrive)

2. Should I become a product manager?

3. Becoming a senior product manager

4. My favorite PM interview questions

5. 14 habits of highly effective product managers

6. How to know if you’re doing a good job as a product manager

7. When to hire your first product manager

8. Surviving as the first product manager

9. Moving from IC product manager to manager of product managers

10. A comprehensive survey of product management

11. Product management career ladders

12. Startup PM vs. big-company PM

🔭 Finding product-market fit

1. How to know if you’ve got product-market fit

2. What it feels like when you’ve found product-market fit

3. How long it takes to find product-market fit

4. What to ask your users about product-market fit

📣 Marketing and GTM

1. Positioning

2. Generating buzz

3. Finding your distribution advantage

4. How people discover new products

5. Pricing your SaaS product

🌱 Scaling your startup

1. A playbook for fundraising

2. The secret to a great planning process

3. Increasing team velocity

4. Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product

5. Winning at early-stage hiring

6. Healing your co-founder relationship

7. What seven years at Airbnb taught me about building a business

8. Building a referrals program

🎭 Marketplaces

1. How to kickstart and scale a marketplace business

2. How marketplaces win

3. How marketplaces fail

4. Evaluating a (marketplace) business idea

5. Choosing a take rate

6. Kickstarting supply in a labor marketplace

📊 Metrics

1. What is good retention?

2. Choosing your north-star metric

3. Setting goals

4. The most important consumer subscription metrics to track

5. The most important bottom-up SaaS metrics to track

💼 Management and career

1. Navigating your early career

2. Performance reviews

3. Managing up

4. On taking time off

✍️ Posting schedule

Paid subscribers will receive a fresh post every Tuesday morning PT, plus a Community Wisdom post every Friday morning. Meaning, you will receive over 100 new posts over the course of the year. Unpaid subscribers receive roughly one email a month.

PTO policy: Each year, I take four weeks off. During those weeks, you’ll receive no new posts. However, during other weeks, you’ll receive two or more issues. This way, you will receive at least 100 posts over the course of the year. The time off helps me recharge and write better stuff the rest of the year. ✨