Lenny's Newsletter - Growth inflections
Below is a peek at today’s paid subscriber-only post. Subscribe today and get access to this issue—and every issue. Growth inflectionsStories behind growth unlocks for Figma, Facebook, Airbnb, YouTube, Tinder, DoorDash, and others👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and working with humans.
I love this question. Though I’ve written about how to kickstart a product’s growth, ways to boost growth, and what it feels like once you’ve found product-market fit, I’ve never looked into what precedes sudden inflections in growth. To find an answer, I spent the past couple of weeks researching inflection points for two dozen of today’s most successful products, and I found a few surprises:
Below, I’ll share stories of growth inflections from Figma, DoorDash, Tinder, YouTube, Snap, Airbnb, and many others. Here’s a quick overview: It’s important to note that long-term sustainable growth is never as simple as just one thing. Although a single moment can (and often does) ignite growth, to build a durable business you’ll eventually need to get all three pieces right:
But it often starts with a single moment. Let’s explore these stories. Thank you, Badrul Farooqi (Figma), Cem Kansu (Duolingo), ChenLi Wang (Dropbox), Evan Goldin (Lyft), Jeff Chang (Pinterest), Jonathan Badeen (Tinder), Max Mullen (Instacart), Merci Grace (Slack), Micah Moreau (DoorDash), Lauryn Isford (Airtable), and Steve Chen (YouTube) for contributing to this post. 1. Product improvementsThough Andrew Chen popularized the Next Feature Fallacy—the mistaken belief that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product—interestingly, the most common source of growth unlock appears to be adding that one additional feature. This doesn’t mean that you are one feature away from 🚀, but it does tell me that a better product experience is often at the heart of unlocking growth. Figma (releasing team libraries)
Snap (launching ephemeral messaging, Stories, and face filters):
Facebook (adding translations, and then mobile)
Netflix (tweaking the combination of offerings)
Tinder (launching their Android app—plus see part 2 below)
Duolingo (launching on mobile)
In marketplace businesses, the user product experience is tied directly to the quality and quantity of supply, and so, unsurprisingly, the biggest improvements, and thus inflections, in marketplace businesses usually come from improving supply: Airbnb (expanding internationally and adding translations)
DoorDash (increasing selection)...Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)
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