Lenny Distilled

Start niche or go broad?

Growth → Acquisition

For most startups I would choose towards the fewer people end of it, where you choose who's going to be your diehards and then you foster them and create really deep meaningful relationships with them. And the way to do that is to decrease the surface area and apply more pressure.

Lulu Cheng MeserveyGain attention as an underdog with this framework
Supporting

All we're looking for in the beginning is a white-hot center of opportunity, a small population that is an enormous fan that's getting enormous impact.

Jonathan LowenharHow a great founder becomes a great CEO
Supporting

Find the niche, start really small and find the niche. I think oftentimes I've seen other startup founders... being like, 'I'm going to build this world's largest community off this kind of thing,' and it almost starts at this super scaled version and then they set themselves up for failure.

Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram KrishnanHot takes and techno-optimism from tech's top power couple
With caveats

dbt had an ecosystem advantage and they were open source and this helped really dramatically for lots of people to have low barrier friction to just try it out and spread organically. They first got started with very horizontal. People could just get started without ever even talking to sales and think that was a competitive advantage.

Julia SchottensteinM&A, competition, pricing, and investing