Today marks exactly one year since I moved to a paid newsletter.

Since then:
✔️ Published 80+ posts
✔️ Subscribers grew from 8k to 58k
✔️ I've gone from zero to now making *twice* what I made at my last tech job

Below are my 15 favorite posts from the past year 🧵
1/ How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-the-bigg…
2/ What is good retention lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-good…
3/ How to increase your retention lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-incre…
4/ How to increase virality lennysnewsletter.com/p/increasing-v…
5/ How to increase conversion lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-21…
6/ Generating buzz for your product lennysnewsletter.com/p/creating-buz…
8/ What it feels like when you've found product-market fit lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-it-feel…
9/ How today's fastest-growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-todays-f…
10/ The most important bottom-up SaaS metrics to track lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-most-imp…
11/ How to price your SaaS product lennysnewsletter.com/p/saas-pricing…
12/ Content-driven growth lennysnewsletter.com/p/content-driv…
14/ My favorite product management templates lennysnewsletter.com/p/my-favorite-…
15/ A comprehensive survey of Product Management lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-mana…
16/ Getting better at product strategy lennysnewsletter.com/p/getting-bett…
16/ If you found yourself clicking into these links, consider subscribing! If one post helps you make one better decision this year, it'll be worth it. And most companies let you expense it 👌
lennysnewsletter.com
17/ Special thank you to @LeeJacobs and @leepnet for encouraging me to go paid, @andrewchen for being my VERY 1st paid subscriber, @VHSchneider for helping me develop my writing skills, @KiyaniBba for 30+ community wisdom posts, and all of YOU for allowing me to live this life 🙏
18/ Also! @nbashaw for early guidance on the paid newsletter path, and @joulee for writing an incredible newsletter for years that inspired my approach to newsletters.

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More from @lennysan

8 Apr
Types of projects you'll experience at work, as taught to us by Kurt Vonnegut:

1. Man in Hole: The project starts off OK, but you quickly find a huge issue, which you are able to recover from, and it ends up a big success.

More in 🧵 Image
2. Boy Meets Girl: The project starts incredibly well, but quickly turns into a nightmare, which you recover from and it ends up even better than it started.

3. From Bad to Worse: You take on a project that's going badly, and it only continues to get worse.
4. Which Way is Up: You're working on a project and you have no idea if it's going well or not.

5. Creation Story: Your project keeps getting more and more resources, which you take and find uses for.
Read 6 tweets
28 Mar
Looking at @a16z's Marketplace 100 got me wondering: what do marketplaces need to get right in order to beat non-marketplace alternatives?

Two main things:
1. Unlock an amazing new experience for customers
2. Unlock new revenue for supply

More in 🧵
a16z.com/marketplace-10…
1️⃣ Demand: Unlock an amazing new experience, in one of three ways

1. Provide much cheaper services through economies of scale: @Instacart @DoorDash @UberEats

2. Create brand new desirable supply: @BookCameo @outschool @Airbnb @Hipcamp @udemy @RoverDotCom
3. Aggregate previously disaggregated supply and make it easy to find and transact: @stockx @goatapp @thredUP @Outdoorsy @faire_wholesale @thumbtack @officialgooddog @Uber @lyft
Read 6 tweets
23 Feb
This week's post is live: A collection of my favorite job postings + what you can learn from them to make your job posting more successful.

Examples include @Superhuman, @delightchathq, @MightyApp, @basecamp, @Levels, and more
lennysnewsletter.com/p/examples-of-…
1/ Founders often say that hiring is their #1 job, but it’s rare that you find a founder who spends as much time on their job postings as they do on, say, their product’s sign-up flow. This feels like a missed opportunity.
2/ Also, as a startup, you don’t have many opportunities to break through the noise. Since job postings are all generally so meh, putting extra effort into creating a remarkable job posting can be a very high ROI task.
Read 5 tweets
19 Feb
Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap → Task

As taught to us by Oceans 11 👇
Mission: Rob the Bellagio, the Mirage, and the MGM Grand casinos, and get back at rival Terry Benedict.
Vision: Great wealth and revenge
Read 8 tweets
16 Feb
7 ways to increase your product's virality:
1. Nurture WOM
2. Incentivize WOM
3. Make the product better w/ friends/colleagues
4. Make the product only useful w/ friends/colleagues
5. Generate sharable content
6. Increase experiential serendipity
7. Increase engagement

Thread 🧵
But first, make sure your product is suited for virality:
✅ It's innately fun or rewarding to share (e.g. travel photos, homes for sale, incidents nearby)
✅ It's better with friends or colleagues (e.g. Snapchat, Slack)
✅ It's is remarkable — something worth remarking about
Strategy 1: Nurture organic word-of-mouth

Word-of-mouth is primarily driven by remarkable experiences (an experience worth remarking about), so start there.

Examples: Tinder, Clubhouse, Airbnb, Levels
Read 22 tweets
10 Feb
The future is going to be weird
Playing with the @WOMBO app. Here was the original. Image
One more
Read 4 tweets

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