In 2022, Lenny Rachitsky decided to try a new venture: Lenny's Podcast.
The now 42-year-old founded a successful newsletter on product management, Lenny's Newsletter, in 2019. Rachitsky made a living by writing one post a week, working 10 to 20 hours at a time, and was unsure if he wanted to take on another project. But another podcast host convinced him to give it a try.
Lenny's podcast quickly found an audience. He now publishes two episodes a week interviewing product management experts and earns more than $500,000 a year. That's in addition to the more than $500,000 he already makes from the newsletter.
For anyone looking to launch their own similar projects, “The most important thing I’ve learned about being successful along the way is that quality and consistency are really important,” he says.
Here's why.
For Rachitsky, when it comes to quality, “it’s the way I think about it.” [what] What problem are you solving for people?” he says.
People face all sorts of problems: They want to excel at their job. You want to make more money. They want to improve their cooking skills or learn to be better parents. “And if you can solve those problems for people better than what’s out there, people will listen, read, subscribe, share and all those things.”
Rachitsky's most popular posts of all time include how to influence people, what product managers need to do in their job, how to improve your product strategy, how to strengthen your communication skills, and how to structure your pitch to executives.
“If you don’t solve people’s problems well enough,” he says, “you won’t be successful.”
Then there is consistency. Rachitsky plans to stick with his once-weekly newsletter post and his twice-weekly podcast episodes. He finds that he has no shortage of content to keep up this pace.
Having worked as a product manager and engineer for more than a decade, gaining a lot of know-how about how things work, “I realize that there are endless things I could write about,” he says. He has a running list of topics that is usually around 15 items long.
The same goes for his podcast. “There are just endless interesting people to talk to and learn from,” he says. “And I have this long list of people that I want to include on the podcast that just keeps growing.”
That's what has helped keep both projects going and what he believes keeps people coming back. “The greatest success in this world, in my opinion,” he says, “is the combination of consistently high quality.”
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