构建Substack | Sachin Monga（Substack, Facebook）

我真的认为我们才刚刚进入互联网写作的黄金时代。在互联网历史上，支持优秀写作的经济模式一直相当糟糕。在Substack早期，出现了一些希望的曙光，比如Matt Taibi或Bill Bishop这样的早期作者，他们都是非常成熟的作家，显然被低估了价值，现在来到Substack后能够实现其真正价值。这太棒了，看到这一幕真的很酷。

I really think that we're just starting into this golden era of what it might mean to be a writer on the Internet. The economic model for supporting great writing on the Internet has been generally pretty terrible for, like, the entirety of the Internet's history. And in the early days of Substack, there's a couple of these glimmers of hope where you'd have people like Matt Taibi or Bill Bishop, some of the early writers on Substack that were really well established writers who were clearly just being undervalued and now could come to Substack and and see their true value. And that was awesome. That was really cool to see.

但在过去一年左右，甚至最近几个月，我认为出现了许多非常有趣的成功案例，这些作者甚至可能不认为自己是作家。他们能够谋生，甚至发家致富，只需要做出优秀的工作，而不需要数百万的观众或参与其他网络的注意力游戏，只需做出真正高质量的内容，让相对较少的人高度认可并愿意为之付费。

But in the last year or so, even in the last few months, I think there's been so many really interesting success stories now from writers who might not even consider themselves writers. People who are able to make a living, maybe even make a fortune just doing great work and not needing to have millions and millions of viewers or play the sort of attention games of other networks, but just do really high quality work and have a relatively small number of people value it highly enough to pay for it.

欢迎来到Lenny的播客。我是Lenny，我的目标是帮助您更好地掌握产品构建和增长的技术。今天我的嘉宾是Sachin Manga，他目前是Substack的产品负责人。在加入Substack之前，他创办了一家名为Cocoon的初创公司，并出售给了Substack。更早之前，他在Facebook工作了七年多，负责视频和相机产品，开发开发者平台，并领导广告增长团队。

Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of billing and growing products. Today, my guest is Sachin Manga, who is currently the head of product at Substack. Before Substack, he had a startup called Cocoon that he sold to Substack. And before that, he spent over seven years at Facebook working on the video and camera products, building out the developer platform, and leading the ads growth team.

在我们的对话中，我们深入探讨了Substack的方方面面：在Substack构建产品是什么感觉，在初创公司工作与在Facebook这样的大公司工作有何不同，Substack产品的未来。我们还花了很多时间讨论我认为将成为历史上最传奇的增长功能之一——Substack推荐功能。Substack作为一个产品和公司改变了我的生活，让我能够从事现在的工作。能与Sachin交流真是莫大的荣幸。

In our conversation, we dig into all things Substack. What it's like to build product at Substack, how different it is to work at a startup versus a big company like Facebook, the future of the Substack product. We also spent a lot of time on what I venture to say will go down in history as one of the most legendary growth features ever created, the Substack recommendations feature. Substack as a product and a company has changed my life and allowed me to do the work that I do now. And it was such a treat to be able to chat with Sachin.

希望您能像我一样觉得这次对话有趣。接下来有请Sachin Manga。谁对内部工具有看法？内部工具可能是您直到必须使用时才会想到的东西，或者甚至从未想过要考虑它们。但如果您在大公司工作，可能会有一堆一次性的定制应用或仪表板，它们只专注于为特定团队或某个角色完成一项任务，而且构建和维护总是非常麻烦。

I hope that you find this conversation as interesting as I did. With that, I bring you Sachin Manga. Who has an opinion on internal tools? Internal tools are something you probably don't think about until you have to, or it probably didn't even occur to you to think about them. But if you work at a big company, you probably have a bunch of one off custom apps or dashboards that are laser focused on just one job to be done for one specific team or just one role, and they're always such a huge pain to build and maintain.

这就是为什么我如此推崇Retool，并认为Retool如此受欢迎。Retool让小到一个人的团队也能在您想象时间的一小部分内构建一套定制内部应用。定制应用的生产力提升现在不仅对大企业触手可及，对小团队也是如此。随着公司规模扩大，Retool也能随之扩展。Snowflake通过基于Retool构建的定制内部应用，每周节省约26小时的手动电子表格工作。

And that's why I'm such a big fan of Retool and why I think Retool is so popular. Retool allows teams as small as just one person to build a suite of custom internal apps in a fraction of the time that you think it takes. The productivity gains of custom apps is now within reach, not just for large enterprises, but for small teams as well. And as you scale your company, Retool scales with you. Snowflake saves about twenty six hours a week of manual spreadsheet work with custom internal apps built on Retool.

亚马逊使用Retool处理GDPR请求。Coinbase、DoorDash和NBC等公司的数千个团队围绕定制构建的Retool应用进行协作，以更高效率运营。也许您之前考虑过使用Retool但尚未行动。我在这里告诉您，现在最多五人的团队可以免费构建无限量的Retool应用。立即开始，请访问Retool.com/Lenny。

Amazon uses Retool to handle GDPR requests. Thousands of teams at companies like Coinbase, DoorDash, and NBC collaborate around custom built Retul apps to operate with greater efficiency. Maybe you've thought about using Retul before but just haven't. And I'm here to tell you that now teams of up to five can build unlimited Retul apps for free. Get started today at Retul dot com slash Lenny.

你想减少用户注册流程中的摩擦吗？让我来介绍一下Stitch，注意是带Y的Stitch。Stitch的使命是消除互联网中的摩擦。他们从让用户认证和注册流程更加无缝、更安全开始着手。为各种规模的公司提供超级灵活、开箱即用的认证解决方案。

Do you wanna reduce friction in your onboarding flow? Then let me tell you about Stitch, and that's Stitch with a Y. Stitch is on a mission to eliminate friction from the Internet. They're starting by making user authentication and onboarding more seamless and more secure. They offer super flexible, out of the box authentication solutions for companies of all sizes.

从邮箱魔法链接到短信验证码，一键社交登录甚至生物识别，Stitch是您的一站式认证平台。Stitch客户在仅花费一天集成后，转化率就能提升超过60%。通过他们的API和SDK，您可以提高用户转化率、留存率和安全性，同时节省宝贵的工程时间。您的工程师会来感谢您使用Stitch，因为Stitch让您无需自建认证系统，且集成过程超级快速、超级顺畅。要获得1000美元免费额度，只需访问stitch.com/lenny注册即可。

From email magic links to SMS passcodes, one tap social logins to even biometrics, Stitch is your all in one platform for authentication. Stitch customers have been able to increase conversion by over 60% after spending just one day integrating. And with their API and SDKs, you can improve user conversion and retention and security, all while saving valuable engineering time. Your engineers will come and thank you for using Stitch because Stitch keeps you from having to build authentication in house, and the integration process is super fast and super smooth. To get $1,000 in free credits, just go to stitch.com/lenny to sign up.

这就是带Y的Stitch。Sachin，欢迎来到播客节目。

And that's Stitch with a y. Sachin, welcome to the podcast.

谢谢邀请我。

Thanks for having me.

我真的很高兴能邀请到您。我之前就跟您说过，也跟创始人们说过，Substack在很多方面改变了我的生活。如果没有Substack以及你们构建的那些神奇功能组合，我绝不可能从事现在的工作。同时我也非常好奇你们是如何构建这个平台的，它的发展方向是什么，以及幕后是如何运作的。

I'm actually really excited to have you on. I've told you this before. I've told the founders before Substack has changed my life in so many ways. There's no way that I would be doing what I'm doing now if not for Substack and just, the magical combination of features that you all built. And I'm also just really curious about how you all build the platform, where it's going, how it all works behind the scenes.

再次感谢您的到来。

And so again, thank you for being here.

我很高兴能来到这里。听到这些真是太棒了。

I'm so happy to be here. That's so great to hear.

为了给大家提供一些背景信息，你能谈谈你是怎么加入Substack的吗？你现在是Substack的产品主管。能说说这段加入Substack的历程吗？

Just to set a little context for folks, can you just talk about how you got to Substack? You're currently head of product at Substack. What was kind of that journey to Substack?

嗯，我大约一年前通过一次收购加入了Substack。在那之前三年，我和我的好朋友亚历克斯·康奈尔一起创办了一家名为Cocoon的公司。Cocoon和Substack不太一样，它本质上是一个面向亲密朋友和家人的小型照片分享应用。但有一条共同的线索让我们最终来到了Substack，那就是在创办Cocoon之前，亚历克斯和我都曾在Facebook工作多年，并且实际上都在研究同一个问题：如何帮助人们与朋友和家人分享更多，并且对理想化的体验应该是什么样子有很多想法。

Well, I joined Substack around a year ago now exactly through an acquisition. I'd started a company called Cocoon about three years prior to that with my good friend, Alex Cornell. And Cocoon is not like Substack. It was a essentially, like a little photo sharing app for close friends and family. But there there is a common thread which led us to Substack, which was prior to starting Cocoon, Alex and I had both worked at Facebook for a number of years and had worked on effectively the same problem of helping people share more with their friends and family and had all these ideas for what an idealized experience might look like.

而我不断碰壁，当你最终意识到广告是支撑这一切的商业模式时，你就会遇到这种困境。这意味着你需要积累大量的使用时间和注意力，并将其转化为基本上可以出售的眼球。但想象一个更好的解决方案并不难。只是广告作为商业模式使得实现这一点非常困难。因此，Cocoon在很多方面就像是一次探索之旅，探索在‘帮助你与少数几个人保持亲密感’这个特定用例下，这种更好的解决方案会是什么样子。

And I just kept running into the wall that you run into when ultimately advertising is the business model that is powering this whole thing. And what that means is you need to accumulate a lot of time spent and attention and convert that into basically sellable eyeballs. But it's not that hard to imagine what like a better solution would be. It's just that ads as the business model made it really hard to pull that off. And so Cocoon was in a lot of ways like a journey to explore what that might look like for this one particular use case of just like helping you feel close to a handful of people.

我们一直将Substack视为一个非常好的范例，它体现了同样的原则：如果你想象围绕付费订阅、在Substack的案例中是读者和作家之间的直接订阅来重构互联网，那能释放出什么潜力？它能带来明显更好的用户体验吗？我认为，是的，我们把Substack视为一个真正的灵感和成功范例，与一些创始人关系也很好，有过几次交谈，并意识到尽管博客软件和照片分享应用非常不同，但我们底层的动机非常一致，这有点像天作之合。整个团队在一年前加入了Substack，我很荣幸能够领导产品和设计团队，到目前为止一切都非常棒。

And we always looked up to Substack as a really good example of basically that same principle, which is if you imagine rewiring the internet around paid subscriptions, direct subscriptions between in Substack's case readers and writers, what could that unlock? And could it unlock a clearly better user experience? And I think, yeah, we looked at Substack as a real inspiration and an example of that really working out and got some of the founders pretty well and had a few conversations and realized that even though the blogging software and the photo sharing app are pretty different, our underlying motivations were really consistent and it was a bit of a match made in heaven. The whole team joined Substack a year ago, and I've been privileged enough to get to lead the product and design teams, and it's been a blast so far.

在你创业之前，你在Facebook工作了多年。是这样吗？

And before your startup, you were at Facebook for a number of years. Is that right?

是的。我于2011年在那里从增长团队开始，有机会在不同的团队工作过，比如增长平台广告团队，最后到了一个我们称之为‘分享’的团队，该团队致力于帮助人们在主Facebook应用中分享更多内容。

Yes. I started in 2011 there on the growth team and had the chance to work on a bunch of different teams there, growth platform ads, and then eventually, the team we called sharing, which was helping people share more in the main Facebook app.

太好了。我想花点时间聊聊这个。但回到Substack，我很好奇产品团队是如何运作的。你们有多少产品经理？结构是怎样的？

Sweet. I wanna spend a little time on that. But coming back to Substack, I'm curious just how the product team runs. How many PMs do y'all have? How is it structured?

你认为随着规模扩大它会如何演变？在这方面你能分享些什么？

How are you thinking it'll evolve as you scale? What can you share there?

当然。也许要从我加入Substack时说起，当时我们零产品经理。只有少数几位设计师。大概有15名左右的工程师。我认为我们正接近完成这个一次性的转折点，即将成为一个产品驱动型公司，拥有产品流程、组织结构、产品经理和全栈产品团队。

Sure. Maybe to start from when I started at Substack, we had zero PMs. We had a handful of designers. We had maybe 15 or so engineers. I think we're coming to the close of this kind of one time inflection point of becoming a product driven company and having a product process and structure and PMs and full stack product teams.

所以当我加入Substack时，这些基本上都不存在。虽然我们仍处于早期阶段，但现在已经有了一些进展。除了我之外，我们还有四位产品经理。并且我们现在基本上有三个全栈产品团队，每个团队都配有产品经理、工程经理、数据人员或设计师以及工程师。事情开始运转起来，我们终于正在走出这个转型阶段。

And so when I started with Substack, there was really not much of this. And we're still pretty early, but we have something going now. So we have four product managers in addition to myself. And we have three essentially kind of like full stack product teams now that have a PM and an engineering manager, a data person, or a designer, engineers. And things are starting to roll, we're finally emerging from this transition phase.

这个过程非常有趣。

And it's been super fun.

这三个团队分别是做什么的？

What are these three teams?

这三个团队分别是：一个服务于写作者的作者团队，一个服务于读者的读者团队，以及一个负责增长事务的增长团队。另外需要提到的是，我们还有第四个工程团队，类似于系统团队，虽然没有配备产品经理，但负责维持系统运行并帮助我们进行扩展。

The three teams are we have a writer team that serves writers. We have a reader team that serves readers. And we have a growth team that does growthy things. And I should mention, we have a fourth engineering team that's like the systems team that doesn't have a product manager on it, but is keeping the lights on and helping us scale.

太棒了。这样很合理。所以你们目前是按照用户类型（加上基础设施和平台方面）来划分的。对于未来几年在组织结构上可能如何演变，你有什么想法吗？你认为会坚持这种模式吗？

Awesome. That makes sense. So you you currently align it around the user type of user plus kind of the infra and platform stuff. Do you have a sense of where this might evolve over the next few years just structure wise? Do you think you'll stick to that?

你们是否有计划，随着公司发展这种情况会如何发生根本性转变？

Do you have a plan of how this might radically shift as you grow?

是的。说实话我有点惊讶这种结构能持续这么久且保持稳定。我记得在Facebook时，我们感觉每三个月或六个月就会调整团队结构，时不时就会重组。我认为能保持相对稳定的部分原因正是你提到的——我们的团队不是围绕产品界面来组织的。我们没有所谓的'应用团队'或'播客仪表盘团队'。

Yeah. I'm actually kinda shocked that it's lasted this long and stayed consistent. I remember at Facebook, we would change our team structure what felt like every three months or six months and just have a reorg every once in a while. And part of why I think it's remained pretty consistent is exactly what you mentioned, which is the teams aren't oriented around product surfaces. We don't have a team that's like the app team or a team that's like the dashboard podcasting team.

我们的团队是围绕客户和解决永恒客户问题来组建的。比如，服务作者的工作永远都不会完。说实话，我们最近才开始集中精力服务读者。增长也永远不是一个可以打勾完成的任务。所以我希望我们能保持这种基本结构。

We have teams that are oriented around customers and solving a bit of a timeless customer problem. Like, we'll never be done serving writers. We just started honestly having a concerted focus on serving readers. Growth is never a problem that you you check the box off on. So I hope that we are able to maintain this general structure.

随着业务范围的扩大，我相信我们会拥有超过三个团队。这是目前的状况。但我真的很喜欢这种以客户和永恒使命为核心的方式，而不是围绕可能更短暂的产品界面或当下热门产品来组织。

I think as the subset grows and expands, I'm sure we'll have more than three teams. This is where we're at right now. But I really like the focus on a customer and a timeless mission really, rather than orienting around what might be a bit more of a ephemeral surface area or product du jour.

太棒了。向作者团队致敬。感谢你们打造了所有这些我能使用的优秀功能。你们最近加大读者团队投入也很合理，因为Substack具有平台特有的魔法优势：供给驱动所有需求。比如我出去推广我的新闻通讯，

Awesome. Shout out to the writer team. Thanks for building all the awesome stuff that I get to use. And it makes sense why you are more recently investing in the reader team because Substack has this magical advantage platforms have where your supply drives all your demand. Like, I go out and promote my newsletter.

人们就会注册Substack。所以最初没有重点投入需求增长是合理的，但现在开始投入也合乎逻辑。听起来你们正在这样做。你们的应用很棒。我想探讨的是，作为一家规模较小公司的产品负责人，你处于一个有趣的位置——创始人产品嗅觉非常敏锐，

People sign up for Substack. So it makes sense why there's not initially a huge focus on the demand growth, but makes sense to get there. And so it sounds like you are. Your app is awesome. One thing I wanted to touch on is you're kind of in this interesting position as a head of product at a small ish company with a founder who's very product sense strong.

这对产品领导者来说是个经典挑战：在规模较小的公司担任首任产品经理甚至产品负责人，而创始人对产品有很强的主张。我很好奇你在这种环境下作为PM学到了哪些工作方法。

And that's a classic challenge for a product leader to be in, where it's a smallish company, either a first PM or even a head of product, where the founder is very opinionated about the product. I'm curious what you've learned about how to work in that environment as a PM.

这是个很好的问题。我不确定我是否有完美的解决方案，但或许可以分享一些我想到的事情。我认为首先是在产品方面，从一开始就把我的角色更多地视为促进者而非决策者。团队规模也足够小，理论上每个人都能很好地了解其他人在做什么。我记得刚加入时遇到的一个具体问题是，我们正处在一个转折点：每周的会议中，克里斯无法每次都到场。

That's a great question. I don't know if I have the recipe for this, but I can just maybe share a few of the things that come to mind. But I think the first thing was really treating my role in the beginning more as a facilitator than a decision maker when it comes to product. I think the team was also small enough that everyone in theory could have a good sense of what everyone else was up to. And like a specific problem we had, I think when I joined was that we were just getting to the point where we wouldn't have one weekly meeting where Chris could be in the room.

克里斯是Substack的CEO，也就是你提到的那个人。之前都是由他来决定我们接下来两周要做什么。我们刚刚走出那个阶段，然后就遇到了这个问题：突然之间，克里斯不太清楚各个团队在做什么，而团队也不太清楚克里斯对他们应该做什么以及愿景是什么有什么想法。

Chris is the CEO of Substack and the person you're mentioning. And like decide what we're doing in the next two weeks. Like, were just emerging from that phase. And we had this problem, which was all of a sudden, Chris didn't really know what all the teams were doing. And the teams didn't really know what Chris had in mind for what they should do and and what the vision was.

我们当时招聘速度很快，招进来的人可能没有多年与他共处一室、参加所有全员会议的那种背景。我刚加入时，感觉我的主要角色其实就是解决这个问题。最起码，如果克里斯能清楚了解所有团队的动态，而团队也能理解他的出发点，并开始更好地模拟他的思维和愿景，那就算是一种成功。所以头几个月，我觉得这就是我全力在做的事。现在克里斯和我都有了一些经验积累，团队也是如此。

And we were hiring really quickly and hiring people who might not have all the context of being in the room with him for years and being in all of the all hands meetings. And when I first joined, I felt like my main role was actually just solving that. And if nothing else, if Chris could have a really good sense of what all the teams are doing and if the teams knew where he was coming from and could start to get better at modeling him and his vision, that would be a win. So for the first couple months, I'd say that was all I tried to do. I think now Chris and I have some reps under our belt and the teams have some reps under under their belts too.

信任就这样开始建立起来。每周开始时，克里斯和我会坐下来花一个小时讨论：我们认为本周需要关注哪些重大问题？我们担心的事情有哪些？

And that trust just starts to form. We start the week. Chris and I, we sit down for an hour. We go through what do we feel like are the big problems to focus on this week? What are the things we're worried about?

周末我们再次坐下来检查进度。我们之间保持着非常开放的沟通，我觉得这对帮助很大。

We sit down at the end of the week and we check-in again. And there's just a lot of open communication. I think that helps a lot.

明白了。所以听起来核心在于建立信任，这很合理。而你建立信任的方式，一是通过反复实践，然后克里斯开始信任：好吧，

Got it. So sounds like the core of this is building trust, which makes sense. And the way that you've build been building trust, one is just do it again and again. And then Chris starts to trust. Okay.

萨钦会去做那些我认为可能是正确的事情。你还提到你们有这种每周会议。在战术层面，你是否发现还有其他非常重要的组成部分来维持这种关系？或者关于如何保持这种关系健康且富有建设性，你还有哪些其他经验教训？

Sachin's gonna do the things that I think are probably the right things. And then you said you have this weekly meeting. Is there anything else that either tactically you find is a really important component of this relationship? Or any other lessons you've learned about just how to keep this relationship healthy and constructive?

你知道，我一直在思考一件事，因为就像任何初创公司一样，总会有非常艰难的时期，也会有非常有趣的时刻。Substack 现在确实正在经历这个转型期，我们正从工具向网络平台演进。我们正处于实现克里斯五年前就构想好的愿景的关键阶段。实际上我们不久前在一次全员会议上做了件事——回顾了Substack参加Y Combinator的经历，大概是在六年前吧。

You know, one thing that I think about a little bit, because like any startup, there's gonna be times that are really difficult, times that are really fun. And Substack is certainly going through this really transformative time where we're really evolving in a lot of ways from a tool into a network. We're sort of in the thick of seeing this vision through that in a lot of ways Chris has had in his mind for like five years. We actually we did a thing at an all hands a little while ago where Subsec went through Y Combinator. I think it was yeah.

我们观看了2017年2月那次60秒演示日的路演。最酷的是，克里斯当年在台上说的所有设想，我们现在都在实现。比如未来Substack会涉足播客领域，我们会形成网络效应，通过平台上的作者群体帮助写作者成长。所有这些事情，都需要我们先在行业中站稳脚跟，获得实施这些计划的资格才能实现。

Maybe now six years ago. And we watched the sixty second demo day pitch from like 02/2017. And what was so cool about that was we're actually doing all those things now that Chris got up on stage and talked about. Like, you know, one day in the future, Subsec's gonna get into podcasting and we're gonna have this network effect that helps writers grow by virtue of there being other writers in the platform. There's all these things that like we kinda couldn't do until we earned our place at the table and the right to be able to do those things that we're doing now.

回到你的问题，我现在特别注重的是：如何快速理解并跟上节奏？克里斯思考这个问题的时间是我的五倍。如果我能充分理解他愿景的起点，弥补这几年的认知差距，并帮助团队做到同样的事情，那将会大有裨益。因为现在每个人都是从不同视角来看待问题，我们拥有了更多数据和实证依据。

And so to go back to your question, I think a thing that I really try to be mindful of right now is how do I get a really good sense of how do I catch up? Chris has been thinking about this problem for five times as long as I have. And if I can get a good sense of where his vision kind of starts from and catch up those few years and help the teams do the same, that'll go a long way. Because at the same time, everyone now is coming at it from a different perspective. We have a lot more data and evidence.

团队中有来自其他公司、能提供不同视角的成员非常重要。这很大程度上需要协调促进，我认为这是我职责的重要组成部分。

It's really good to have people on the team that have come from other companies and comply that perspective. It's a lot of, again, facilitation, and I kind of view that as a big part of my role.

很棒。我好奇的是，担任你现在这个职位最大的挑战是什么？有没有什么特别棘手的案例？或者换个角度，什么样的人不适合这种角色——在一个拥有产品思维创始人的小型公司担任产品负责人？

Awesome. I'm curious what are the biggest challenges with being in the position you're in? Like, are there any examples of a man that sucked? Or if you wanna go in a different direction, is there a certain type of person that just isn't a good fit for this kind of role, being a head of product at a smolsh company with a very product minded founder?

我先回答第一个问题。这个角色最大的挑战在于公司现阶段的发展——正如我提到的，我们正在从没有成熟产品体系和流程向建立体系的过渡期。本质上，每当你掌握某个方法时，公司就会进入新的增长阶段，这个方法就会过时。我经常对团队说：我从不担心我们是否有完美的规划流程或沟通流程。任何流程都不可能是完美的，即使有，也会因为我们的快速发展而很快失效。

I'll start with the first one. I think the biggest challenge with this rolecompany phase, like I mentioned, we're going through this one time transition from not really having a product function or a product process to having one, is almost by definition, anytime you figure out how to do a thing, you'll now reach this next phase of growth and it'll be obsolete. Something that I've repeated a bunch of the teams is I'm never too worried if we have the perfect planning process or the perfect communication process. Whatever our process is, we're never gonna have a perfect one. And even if we did, it would soon be obsolete because we did a really good job.

比如当我们规模翻倍或人员增加时，流程就必须调整。我最关心的是：我们是否每周、每月、每年都在持续进步？这说起来容易做起来难。理论上很美好，但当你身处其中，不断感到不知所措——因为刚掌握的方法很快就失效时，确实非常艰难。我认为这是所有初创公司和高速成长企业的共性：把事情做好往往意味着你永远处于'不知道自己在做什么'的状态。

Now we've grown two x or something and we have more people and the process needs to change. The main thing I care about is, are we just getting better every week, every month, certainly every year? And I think that's easier said than done. Like, it sounds good in theory, but then when you're in the thick of it and you're constantly basically feeling like you don't know how to do the thing because as soon as you figure it out, it's obsolete, it's just really hard. I think that's true of basically just startups in general, high growth companies doing the thing well means that you're not going to know what you're doing.

也许这正好引出了我对第二个问题的回答：产品管理并非适合所有人。我觉得这几乎像是一种性格类型，必须能够接受不断被打击、始终感觉自己不知道在做什么的状态。我认为你完全可以在一个更稳定、更持续的公司成为一名出色的产品经理，真正精通你的工作。而有些人则非常适合那些处于某种发展轨迹的公司——对于没看视频的观众，我正在用手比划一个‘增长不太快’的动作——这其实是另一种不同的工作。

And maybe that leads into my answer to the second question, which is that's not really for everyone. Think there's almost like a personality type that has to be okay with being humbled all the time and feeling like you don't know what you're doing. And I think you could be an amazing product manager at a company that is a bit more stable and consistent and get really good at what you're doing. And someone who's gonna be really good at a company that is on a bit of this sort of trajectory for folks who aren't watching the video, making a motion with my hand that's like not growing too fast. It's kind of a different job.

变化速率是一个巨大因素。

The rate of change is a huge factor.

你提到的随着公司发展一切都会持续变化这一点非常重要，我觉得这个观点在本播客中出现的频率比预期要少。人们总是向我寻求建议：如何构建产品团队？如何确定优先级？如何制定计划？

The point you made about how things are gonna keep changing as you grow such an important point that I don't feel like comes up as much as I thought would come up on this podcast. Like people are always asking me for advice. How do I structure my product team? How do I prioritize? How do I do planning?

我学到最重要的是：无论你最终采用什么方案，三到六个月内它都会改变，你会获得更多认知。我的建议就是：现在只管做你能想到的最佳方案。别指望任何方案能永久适用——这样就够了，从来不存在完美的方法。

And the main thing I've learned is no matter what you end up with, it's going to change in three to six months anyway, you're going learn more. The advice is just do the best thing you can think of right now. Don't assume this will last anyway. That's good enough. There's never the perfect way to do it.

永远都是在当下能做到的最好方式，然后你才能学会如何迭代进化。

It's always the best way you could do it at this moment and then you learn how to evolve it.

100%同意。

A 100% agree.

你在Facebook工作了七年左右。我很好奇，从Facebook这样的大型公司构建产品的经验中，有哪些可以迁移到Substack这样规模较小的公司？哪些经验能很好地转化，哪些则不行？

You worked at Facebook for, I think it was seven years. I'm curious, what were you able to take from that experience about how Facebook and a massive company like that builds product to a smaller company like Substack? What translates well, and then what just doesn't?

随着时间的推移，我发现能转化的东西比我预想的要少。不过，我不确定这有多少与Facebook本身有关。我或许可以提一件事。我在Facebook核心应用上工作了很长时间，那是我大部分时间的工作内容。Facebook可能是最极端的例子，试图在一个小小的矩形区域内为众多不同人群解决众多不同问题。因此，在这种情况下，产品经理工作的很大一部分将是管理权衡取舍。

Over time, I'm finding that less translates than I thought. I don't know how much of that has to do with Facebook specifically, though. I'll I'll maybe mention one thing. So working on the core Facebook app, which was what I was working on for the bulk of my time there. Facebook may be the most extreme example of trying to solve so many different problems for so many different people in one tiny rectangle, basically, that a big part of the product manager's job in a situation like that is going to be managing trade offs.

这是一个非常吸引人的智力挑战。回到之前的话题，我认为很多人确实在这种环境中茁壮成长：如果我们把这件事做得很好，就会直接影响到另一件事的完成。这甚至不是先后顺序的问题。当你考虑优先级时，有时你会想我们先做这个，然后做那个，再然后做另一个。而在Facebook，有时候情况是：如果我们做了这个，就根本做不了那个。

A super fascinating intellectual problem. And I think going back to the previous point, I think a lot of people really thrive in that kind of environment where if we do this thing really well, it is going to directly trade off against doing this other thing. And it's not even like a sequencing thing. When you think about prioritization, sometimes you think we will do this and then we'll do this and then we'll do this. And Facebook says sometimes it's, if we do this, we just can't do this.

就像，这会对其他事情产生负面影响。如果我们在底部放一个Watch标签，这是否意味着人们就没有Marketplace标签了？这对整个组织以及产品本身意味着什么？所以我认为在优先级排序这类事情上，情况截然不同。当然，有些东西是一致的。

Like, it's gonna be bad for this other thing. If we put a watch tab at the bottom, will that mean that people don't get a marketplace tab? What does that mean for this whole org and like what the product is? So I think when it comes to something like prioritization, it's a very different ballgame. There's certainly some things that are consistent.

你通常希望优先处理那些影响大、成本低的事情。这类产品管理框架，我认为很多方面可以保持不变。但当你真正深入到具体事务层面，比如你的一天是怎样的？我认为在高增长公司担任助理产品经理（APM），或者至少...我无法一概而论。但现在在Substack的工作，与我记忆中2018年2月左右在Facebook的工作看起来相当不同。而且我认为，在这种情况下，产品经理的工作可能更多地是 navigating 这类内部权衡。

You generally want to prioritize things that are going to be high impact, low Like, these types of product management frameworks, think, like, a lot of it can hold constant. But when you really get into the object level, like, what does your day look like? I think being APM at a high growth or I can at least just I can't generalize this. But the job at Substack right now, it looks quite different than what I recognize as my job from Facebook circa 02/2018. And I think it's maybe even gotten more the case that the PM's job in a situation like that will be navigating these types of internal trade offs.

所以我认为在优先级排序这类事情上，非常不同。

So I think on something like prioritization, very different.

再稍微深入探讨一下，你说的主要区别是：在Facebook，问题不在于我们是否做某件事，而在于先做哪件、后做哪件。而在Substack，更像是如果我们现在不优先处理这个，可能一年内都做不了。你是这样理解的吗？就像权衡取舍的时间尺度不同？

Just to double click on that a little bit, the main difference you're saying is that at a Facebook, it's not like whether we do a thing. It's just like what comes first, second, third. At a substack, it's like we probably won't get to this for a year if we don't prioritize it now. Is that how you think about it? Just like the time scale on your trade offs?

不。实际上我认为在Facebook，问题并不一定在于我们是否做某件事。不是说我们现在做这个，以后做那个。而是做这件事可能意味着我们根本无法做另一件事。或者这意味着，在让数字上升之前，图表可能不会保持平稳，反而会下降。

No. I think actually, at Facebook, it's not necessarily whether we do a thing. It's not like we do this now, we do this later. It's doing this thing might mean we can't do this other thing at all. Or it'll mean that instead of that chart being steady until we make the number go up, it might go down.

做A这件事，可能意味着B更难实现，甚至永远无法完成。所以我认为在初创公司，时间往往是主要变量。我们现在做这个，就意味着要推迟做那个。我认为在Substack这样处于形成阶段、正在多方面蜕变成全新事物的公司中，执行顺序也非常重要。

By doing A, might mean B is harder to do, like forever. And so I think whereas at a startup, a lot of it is time. Time is the main variable. We can do this now and it means that we can't do this other thing until later. There's also an element of sequencing that matters, I think, a lot at a company like Substack that is in this formative stage of becoming an entirely new thing in a lot of ways.

Substack最初像是为写作者打造的单人工具，是写作者的软件。如果现在还把Substack简单描述为新闻通讯工具，就有些片面了。它实际上已经发展成一个正在以各种有趣方式进化的生态系统。这里存在一定的操作顺序——现在做某件事可能会为我们将来做其他事创造条件。

Substack started off kind of like a single player tool for writers. It was software for writers. And if you describe Substack now as simply newsletter tool, that would be kind of reductive. And it's really now much more of this ecosystem that's evolving in all sorts of interesting ways. And there is a bit of an order of operations at play here where doing something right now might unlock our ability to do something later.

这对我们Substack当前的处境来说非常重要。

And that matters a lot in a situation like we're in at Substack.

明白了。所以本质上，大公司会有更多不可逆的决策。在这里，你们能更快做决定部分是因为决策产生的二阶效应没那么复杂，还有回旋余地。

Got it. So essentially, there's a lot more one way doors at a larger company. Here, you can make decisions more quickly partly, but also you can go back and there's not all these second order effects of decision you're making.

我觉得是这样。或者至少说，二阶效应的类型有所不同。

I think that's right. Or at least there are different types of second order effects.

懂了。我知道在Substack，写作者就像灯塔，公司的愿景是让写作者成功，帮助人们以写作为生。所以我想写作者就是指引方向的北极星——帮助写作者成功。但关于你们在Substack内部如何优先处理工作事项，能否多分享一些？比如你们是如何看待这个北极星指标的？

Got it. I know at Substack, writers are like the beacon and the vision of making writers successful, helping people make a living writing. And so I imagine writers are the North Star helping writers be successful. But is there anything more you could share about how you prioritize things that you work on within Substack? Like, how do you think about the North Star?

回到你之前关于Chris的问题，我认为Chris、Hamish和Jay这几位创始人做事在很多方面都是从原则出发的。比如：我们为什么要做这件事？不仅仅是为了帮写作者赚钱，也不仅仅是为了实现这些很酷的功能。这源于他们对互联网应该如何运作的见解——人们应该比过去十年、十五年广告驱动的少数几个公共广场时代更能掌控自己的命运。

Going back to your question about Chris too, I think Chris and Hamish and Jay, the founders, I think really start from a place of principle in a lot of ways. Like, why are we even doing this thing? It's not just to help writers make money. It's not just to unlock these cool things. It starts with like an opinion for how the Internet should work, where people should be in control over their destiny to a much greater extent than has ever really been the case over at least, you know, the last ten, fifteen years where all of a sudden everyone just started spending all of their time in a handful of these public squares that were powered by ads.

当你思考这对Substack现在意味着什么时，这意味着作者能够掌控在自己的条件下向受众提供最佳作品，直接从订阅者那里赚钱，同时读者也应该掌控自己的体验。比如当你访问subset.com时，这种体验应该让你拥有更高程度的自主权。或者如果你下载了应用程序，那体验应该比打开TikTok之类的东西更有掌控感。从优先级的角度来看，这往往引导我们从这个问题开始：如果我们能用多种不同方式做某件事，是否存在一种方式能为作者提供更多控制权，或为读者提供更多对自身体验的控制权？是否存在一种方式提供的控制权少得多？在所有条件相同的情况下，是否应该选择那种坚持控制原则的方式？

And when you think about what that means for sub site right now, that that means writers are in control over being able to deliver their best work on their terms to their audience, make money directly from their subscribers, and also that readers should be in control over their experience. Like, when you show up to subset.com, that experience should be something that you have a much greater degree of of agency over. Or if you download the app than if you maybe opened up TikTok or something. I think where that leads you down from a prioritization standpoint is often starting from, okay, if we could do something in a bunch of different ways, is there a way that provides more control to the writer or more control over the experience that the reader has to them? And is there a way that provides much less control and, you know, all things equal, like do the one that kind of holds constant this principle of control?

我们可以再讨论几个类似的例子。但我认为从优先级和战略的角度来看，Substack是一家非常有原则的公司。能在这样的环境中工作并亲眼见证它如何实际运作，真的非常有趣。你对推荐功能感到兴奋，我们可以更详细地讨论这一点。我认为这是一个很好的例子，说明确实存在一种让作者拥有最大控制权的方式，而我们选择了这种方式，即使它可能看起来更难实现。

We could talk about a few other examples like this. But I think from a prioritization standpoint, from a strategic standpoint, Substack is a pretty principled company. I think it's been really fun and interesting to get to work in an environment like this and also see how it like actually can work. You are excited about recommendations, the recommendations feature, and we can talk about that in more detail. I think that's a good example where there's certainly a way to do that, where writers have the max amount of control and we picked that way even if it might seem harder to pull off.

然后那种‘哦，这真的奏效了’的反馈循环，能够体验到这种感觉真是太棒了。

Then that feedback loop of, oh, that actually worked is really awesome to get to experience.

是的。我确实很想谈谈这个推荐功能。我觉得这可能是Substack乃至整个平台领域最被低估的激进变革。我认为这将会成为任何平台或市场上最具传奇色彩、最有影响力的功能之一。我先把话放在这里。

Yes. I definitely wanted to talk about this recommendation feature. I feel like it's maybe the most underappreciated radical shift in Substack and just platforms in general. I think this is gonna go down as one of the most legendary impactful features of any platform or marketplace. I'm just putting this out there.

这就像是一件大事，但我觉得人们没有充分认识到这一点。简单总结一下这是什么：本质上，你们允许像我这样的作者推荐我特别挑选的其他时事通讯。所以我挑选了10个我认为很棒的时事通讯。一旦有人订阅了我的通讯，他们就会看到这10个推荐，就像在说‘嘿，你应该看看这些’。

It's like such a huge deal, and I don't think people appreciate this. And just as quickly summarize what this is, essentially, you allowed writers like me to recommend other newsletters that I specifically pick. So I picked 10 newsletters that I think are awesome. Once someone subscribes to my newsletter, they see these 10 as, hey. You should check these out.

我认为这些都很棒。而且它是非常精心策划的，没有任何算法参与，正如你所说，这是Substack的潜台词。我认为其愿景和使命就是尽可能避免算法。所以我认为这非常疯狂和惊人的原因是，目前我70%的增长都来自这一个功能。

I think these are awesome. And it's very curated. It's there's no algorithm involved, which, to your point is subtext. I think vision and mission is just avoid algorithms as much as possible. So the reason I think this is crazy and amazing is at this point, 70% of my growth is coming from this one feature.

大约有500个其他时事通讯在推荐我。这个功能一推出，你看我的增长图表，从那天开始就是一条曲棍球棒式的上升曲线。我觉得人们没有充分认识到这一点。我真的很兴奋能聊聊这个功能是如何诞生的。回到我们之前谈到的一点，Chris对如何打造产品有非常强烈的观点，我从小道消息听说，当这个功能被提出时，Chris并不兴奋，需要一些推动才让它得以实现。

There's something like 500 other newsletters recommending me. And as soon as the feature launched and you look at my growth chart, it's just a hockey stick starting that day. I don't think people appreciate this enough. And I'm really excited to just chat about how this feature came to be. And coming back to a point we talked about earlier, Chris having a very strong opinion about how to build product, something I heard through a birdie is that Chris was not excited about this feature when it was proposed, it took a bit of pushing to get it out.

那么也许我们可以从这里开始。这是怎么形成的？

So maybe we start there. How did this come to be?

当然。它的形成过程是我们注意到这种有机行为正在出现，即许多Substack的读者开始发现其他Substack。但这种情况通常是通过原始作者的视角发生的。这可以通过多种不同的方式实现，对吧？

Sure. The way it came to be was that we noticed this organic behavior emerging, which was that a lot of readers of Substacks were starting to discover other Substacks. But the way that was happening was typically through the lens of that original writer. And this could happen in a bunch of different ways. Right?

所以，你知道，我认为你使用过客座文章功能让嘉宾在你的新闻通讯上发文。显然，这是让你的读者去发现其他作者的一种很好方式，而且是由你策划的。还有一些不太明显的方式也会发生这种情况。如果你开启了评论功能（我想你是开启的），如果我向下滚动并点击评论你文章的人的个人资料，它会显示该用户阅读的其他Substack。这又是一种非常个性化且以作者为中心的发现方式。

So, you know, I think you've used the guest post feature to have guests write posts on your newsletter. And obviously, that is a really good way for your readers to go and discover some these other writers in a way that you're curating. There's some less obvious ways that this happens too. If you have comments on, which I think you do, if I scroll down and click on the profile of someone who's commenting on your post, it'll show me the other subset that person reads too. And again, is like a very personalized and very writer centric way of doing discovery.

与此同时，我们讨论了市场的供需双方。Substack的供应方随着时间的推移持续增长，到现在平台上已经有大量优秀的作者和庞大的读者群体。我们知道这种交叉传播、这种发现循环可能成为非常强大的力量。所以如果从第一性原理出发，你会想，我们如何帮助读者发现更多内容？最明显的方式可能是类似'这些是你可能喜欢的Substack'。根据我们对您阅读习惯的了解，Substack会直接向您推荐一些内容。

At the same time, we talked about sort of the supply and demand side of the marketplace. Like the supply side of Substack has just grown over time consistently to the point where now there's like a huge amount of amazing writers on the platform and a huge number of collective readers on the platform too, that we knew that this sort of like cross pollination, this discovery loop could be a really powerful thing. So if you start from first principles and you're like, alright, how do we help readers discover more things? The most obvious way to do this would be something like, here are some substacks you might like. Based on what we know about your reading habits, here's a few that Substack is just gonna recommend you.

这类推荐在Facebook上效果特别好。我记得2011年加入时，肯定还处于那个时代。Facebook当时可能刚超过5亿用户，正在向10亿乃至更多用户迈进。我们称之为PYMK（你可能认识的人）的功能，这个出现在信息流中的小单元会告诉你另外八个人，显然你们认识，因为你们有无数共同好友。

This is the kind of thing that worked really well in Facebook in particular. I think when I joined in 2011, it was definitely still during the era. I think Facebook maybe had just over 500,000,000 users and was on this path to be to to a billion and beyond. And this thing that we called PYMK, which is people you may know. This little unit that would show up in in the newsfeed and it would just tell you that eight other people that, like, you obviously know because you all have a million mutual friends.

这类功能在早期为Facebook带来了非常可观的增长。当然，许多其他产品也做过类似的事情。我们本可以这样做。但回到那个原则：如果我们这样做，比如在文章底部或电子邮件中插入推荐，那么显然，拥有那个空间的作者就无法完全控制他们向读者提供的体验。而订阅Lenny的读者现在会看到这些与Lenny无关的内容。

Like, that kind of thing drove a very nontrivial amount of Facebook growth in the early days. And of course, lots of other products have done things like this. So we could have done something like that. But then going back to that principle of like, okay, well, if we were to do that and let's say we were to insert it at the bottom of a post or in an email or something, it's like clearly a thing now where the writer who owns that space is not really in control over what the experiences that they're offering their readers. And the reader who signed up for Lenny is now seeing these other things that have nothing to do with Lenny.

这是否有点违背这个控制原则——让作者做主，让读者做主？好吧。那么回到绘图板。最明显的、最大程度让作者控制的方式是什么？最简单的版本是什么样的？

Does that kind of break this control principle, like putting writers in charge, putting readers in charge? Okay. So then back to the drawing board. What would be the most obvious maximal way to just put writers in control? What is like the simplest version of this?

如果我们直接问作者们：你们推荐谁？然后把这个功能直接放到订阅流程里，让它尽可能简单，会怎么样？我记得克里斯最初对这个想法的反应是：这恐怕很难实现。因为需要满足的条件太多了——需要作者们自愿参与。

What if we just asked writers, who do you recommend? And what if we just put that in the subscribe flow and just made it as simple as possible? And I think Chris's reaction to that originally when that idea came up was that's probably just going to be really hard to pull off. It's just like a lot more things that have to be true. You need writers to opt in.

需要他们推荐合适的人选，还需要找到方法向读者展示这些推荐，以产生足够的曝光面。当时对这种机制能否奏效确实存在一些怀疑。但我们尝试之后，它迅速火爆起来。现在形成了一种病毒式传播效应：当你推荐一批作者时，这些人会收到邮件说‘伦尼推荐了你，这是他带给你的所有读者’。

You need them to pick good people. You need to find a way to surface those recommendations to their readers in a way that's going to generate a good amount of surface area. And I think it was a bit of skepticism that something like that could work. But we tried it and it took off really quickly. And there was this virality at play now where when you recommend a bunch of people, those people will get an email that say, hey, Lenny's recommending you and here's all the readers that he's sending you.

这形成了一个良性的病毒传播循环，观察这个过程非常有趣。其中包含许多值得借鉴的经验，我们可以深入探讨任何你觉得有意思的点。但克里斯的质疑点并非是否应该做跨领域发现——显然这个功能是有效的。

And it created this goodwill viral loop, which was really interesting to see play out. And I think there was a bunch of interesting lessons in there. We could dig into anything that seems interesting. But I think Chris's skepticism was not, should we do cross pollination discovery? Clearly, this is something that's working.

问题在于：需要满足这么多环节的前提下，这种机制是否真能产生巨大影响力？而结果证明，它的发展速度远超我们预期。

But is this kind of thing going to work given how many steps are required for it to be true that this becomes really impactful? And it just turned out that it took off way faster than I think we had imagined.

能否分享一些具体数据说明它带来的影响？对Substack产生了什么效果？

Is there any stats you can share about just the impact it's having, what it's done to Substack?

当然。截至目前，推荐功能已为全网作者带来数百万新订阅用户，涉及数万名通过该功能获得订阅的作者。当然，推荐功能只是整个网络驱动发现体系中的一个组成部分。我们最近披露过：Substack上超过三分之一的新订阅来自平台网络，付费订阅中也有约十分之一来源于此。这些数字正如你所想，正在持续向右上方增长，每天都在变得更强劲。

Yeah, sure. Recommendations specifically now have driven in the millions of new subscriptions for writers across the board, across, I think, like tens of thousands of unique writers that have received subscriptions from the recommendations feature. Of course, recommendations in particular is still just one component in this broader basket of network driven discovery. And I think we recently shared this that more than one in three new subscriptions across Substack are coming from the Substack network and around one in 10 paid subscriptions now too. And these numbers are just, as you can imagine, growing up into the right, getting stronger every day.

相信很快我们会有更多有趣的数据可以分享。

And I think we'll have some more interesting stats to share on that soon.

太棒了。我想承认一点，有些人担心这个功能会吸引低意向用户。嗯。我发现事实并非如此。他们确实意向较低，但并不是说意义重大或程度严重。

Awesome. One thing I wanted to acknowledge, I think some people worry about this feature that it drives lower intent users. Mhmm. I find that not to be true. They're definitely lower intent, but it's not, like, meaningfully and significantly.

所以，我70%的用户增长来自这个功能，而我的打开率只下降了一点点，这充分说明它实际上对真正有需求、有意图的人非常有用，就像对那些原本没打算订阅、最近才刚发现它的人一样有效。

So the fact that 70% of my user growth comes from this feature and my open rates have only come down a little bit, It says a lot about just it's not actually it's, like, useful, really intentful people as much as it can be from someone that hasn't actually been planning to subscribe and just recently found out about it.

没错。

It's Right.

考虑到所有因素，他们的意向程度之高真的令人印象深刻。

Really impressive how high intent they are, all things considered.

是的。你还提到了一个点，这引出了我们接下来在思考的一些事情：目前，大部分通过推荐产生的订阅都来自产品中的一个特定流程——当某人在Substack上订阅了另一个人时，他们会看到对Lenny的推荐。所以这个推荐是在一个特定时刻呈现给用户的：他们不仅可能是第一次听说你，甚至可能是第一次听说推荐你的作者。他们是新订阅者，因此还没有建立起长期信任的关系。

Yeah. And you bring up a point too that leads into some of the next things we're thinking about here, which is that right now, most of the subscriptions that come from recommendations are coming from one particular flow in the product, which is when someone subscribes to someone else on Substack, they will then see a recommendation for Lenny. So it's being serviced to people at a moment where not only are they just hearing about you for the first time, but they might just be hearing about the recommending writer for the first time too. They're new subscribers. And so they don't have this long standing trusted relationship built up yet.

当然，你现在也有已经订阅你多年的用户，他们非常信任你，可能会非常重视你的推荐。但你所推荐的作者，在很多情况下，只是在用户第一次发现Lenny的那一刻获得这些订阅者。接下来这个产品的一个重要发展方向是，不再把推荐仅仅视为流程中的一个步骤，而是将其视为一个图谱——一个正在构建的、充满善意和影响力的有趣社交图谱。你现在推荐了很多其他作者，而在这个网络中我们能做的远不止在lennysnewsletter.com的订阅流程中展示其中一些作者。我们还可以做更多事情。我很好奇你是否有任何想法，但我们正在酝酿一系列方案，我认为这些不仅能带来更多订阅，还可能带来更高意向的订阅，因为这些可能是已经阅读你内容多年、但目前却不知道你在推荐谁的用户。

Of course, you have people now who've been subscribing to you for years and who trust you greatly and would probably take your recommendation very seriously. But the people that you're recommending are only getting these subscribers at the first moment that someone finds out about Leni in many cases. And a big part of the next step of this product now is thinking about recommendations less as like a step of the flow and more kind of like a graph, a really interesting social graph that is being built where of of goodwill and of influence and you now recommend a bunch of other writers and there's much more that could be done in the network than just show some of those writers in the subscribe flow of lennysnewsletter.com. There's a lot more we could do there. I'm curious if you have any ideas, but we've got a bunch of ideas that we're cooking up that I think will not only drive more subscriptions, but also probably higher intent ones as well because these are gonna be people that might already have been reading you for years who never, right now, would know who you're recommending.

我暂时没有特别好的想法可以分享。由于目前只是免费订阅者，我确实需要做更多工作来向上销售，鼓励他们尝试付费。但另一方面，拥有大量感兴趣但尚未准备转化的用户池只有好处。当我发送免费文章并提到'嘿，订阅付费版你可以获得更多内容'时，效果非常好。本期节目由Vanta赞助播出，帮助您简化安全合规流程，加速业务增长。

No no great ideas to share. I do find since it's only free subscribers, I have to do more work to upsell them to try paid. On the other hand, having a huge pool of interested people that aren't ready to convert yet is only beneficial. And when I send a free post and mention, hey, have a paid subscription, you can get more, it works really well. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth.

如果你的企业在云端存储任何数据，那么你很可能已经被询问或将要被问及SOC 2合规性。SOC 2是一种证明你公司正在采取适当安全措施保护客户数据的方式，并与客户和合作伙伴建立信任，特别是那些有严格安全要求的客户。此外，如果你想向企业销售，证明安全性至关重要。SOC 2要么为你打开更大更好的交易之门，要么让你的业务停滞不前。如果你没有SOC 2，很可能你连谈判的资格都没有。

If your business stores any data in the cloud, then you've likely been asked or you're gonna be asked about your SOC two compliance. SOC two is a way to prove your company is taking proper security measures to protect customer data and builds trust with customers and partners, especially those with serious security requirements. Also, if you want to sell to the enterprise, proving security is essential. SOC two can either open the door for bigger and better deals, or it can put your business on hold. If you don't have a SOC two, there's a good chance you won't even get a seat at the table.

获取SOC 2报告可能是一个巨大的负担，尤其是对初创公司而言。它耗时、繁琐且昂贵。Vanta应运而生。超过3000家快速成长的公司使用Vanta自动化SOC 2相关工作中高达90%的部分。Vanta可以让你在几周而不是几个月内准备好安全审计，所需时间不到通常所需时间的三分之一。

Getting a SOC two report can be a huge burden, especially for startups. It's time consuming, tedious, and expensive. Enter Vanta. Over 3,000 fast growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC two. Vanta can get you ready for security audits in weeks instead of months, less than a third of the time that it usually takes.

限时优惠，Lenny播客的听众可以获得Vanta的1000美元折扣。只需访问vanta.com/leni，即vanta.com/leni，了解更多信息并领取你的折扣。今天就行动起来。另外我想提一下我学到的一件事，我感到非常幸运能早期加入Substack并看着这个平台发展壮大，尤其是通过这个推荐功能，我现在真的会定期收到人们的询问。嘿。

For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Just go to vanta.com/leni, that's vanta.com/leni to learn more and to claim your discount. Get started today. Something else I'll mention that I've learned to do is I feel so fortunate being early on Substack and having this thing grow so much, especially from this recommendation feature that I'm I'm actually getting pings from people regularly now. Hey.

你能推荐我的新闻通讯吗？这在Substack上现在是一个非常好的增长技巧，试图让拥有大量订阅者的人推荐你。所以我现在的做法是，我想尽可能地分享资源。所以我轮流推荐不同的新闻通讯。我帮助它们获得，比如说，一千个订阅者，然后转向下一个，前提是我喜欢它们。

Can you recommend my newsletter? It's like a really good growth hack on Substack right now to try to get someone a lot of subscribers to recommend you. So my system right now is I wanna share the wealth as much as I can. So I rotate through different newsletters. I help get them, say, a thousand subscribers and then move on to the next one, assuming I like them.

这可不是随便什么垃圾内容。然后我就可以与许多不同的通讯分享这些资源，为大家提供一个平台，因为我现在有了这个平台，而且效果一直非常好。

It's not just any random shit. And then so I can share the wealth with a lot of different newsletters and give people a platform because I have this platform now, and that's been working really well.

Substack界的罗宾汉。

The Robin Hood of Substasher.

是的。而且我会收到所有这些私信，推荐人选，如果我无法做到的话，我很抱歉。所以你提到克里斯担心这个行不通，这很有趣。他说的这个要被采纳需要经历很多步骤，这一点说得非常到位。

Yeah. And I'm gonna get all these DMs to recommend people if I'm unable to. I'm sorry. So you talked about how Chris was worried that this would not work, and that's interesting. And his point of there's so many steps that have to happen for this to be adopted is such a good one.

根据我的经验，让用户做任何事情都非常困难——让他们点击一些按钮、填写内容，这种方式很少奏效。所以看到它真的成功了很酷。我记得这是早期测试版的一部分，我发现整个推出方式非常周到：先让一小群用户和作者试用，观察效果和影响，看看是否存在负面影响。关于这次推出过程，你能分享些什么经验教训吗？

In my experience, getting users to do anything is so hard to get them to click some buttons and fill things out. It's like rarely works. And it's cool that it really did work. And I think it was part of the early beta, and I found that it was a really thoughtful approach to how it was all rolled out, where there's like a small group of users and writers that tried it out, see how it went, see what the impact was, see if there's any negative impact. Is there anything you could share by just the way this was rolled out that learned about how to do this sort of thing?

我们有一个运营原则，正如我提到的，我们正在经历一次转型，学习如何成为产品驱动型公司，如何更快更好地发布产品等。在我们正在尝试构建的运营手册中，有一个原则叫做'与作者共建，与读者共建'。现在回想起来，这几乎是'让读者做主，让作者做主'的子原则。如果你非常重视这一点，该如何负责任地打造产品？一种方法就是设定一个强硬默认规则：每当我们要对Substack的核心运作方式进行重大改变时，都要以让作者参与进来的方式进行。

One of our sort of operating principles I mentioned that we're going through this one time transition of figuring out how to become a product driven company and how to ship products faster, better, etcetera. And one of the principles, I guess, in in this playbook that we're trying to write is we call it build with writers, build with readers. In some ways now that think about it, it's almost like a sub principle of the put readers in charge, put writers in charge. How do you build product responsibly if you care deeply about that? One way to do it would be to almost as a strong default, anytime we're going to make a fundamental change to how Substack works, do it in a way where we bring writers along.

在这个案例中，这仍然是一个可选功能，并没有改变所有人使用Substack的方式。但我们认为这可能是一个足够重大的改变，所以我们没有直接向所有人推出，也没有在仪表盘里放个小对话框说'嘿，大家现在都来做这个吧'。而是先联系了10位可能对此感兴趣的作者，先简单模拟展示这个功能可能的样子，收集一些反馈。

And in this case, this is still an optional thing. This isn't changing how Substack works for everyone. But this is, we think, a potentially profound enough thing that the way we did this was not just roll it out for everyone, put a little dialogue in the dashboard that says, hey, everyone, now go do this thing. It was like, hey, why don't we call up 10 writers who we think might be interested in this? It's not that hard to just mock up what this could look like, get some feedback.

我觉得很多产品团队都会这样做。但可能很多团队在获得良好反馈后就会说'好的，我们直接开发上线吧'。而我们不同，我们只是进行了一个小规模试点。你和几位其他作者非常慷慨地抽出时间，与我们详细讨论了你们希望这个功能如何运作以及你们的需求。

And this is the kind of thing that I think a lot of product teams would do. But then maybe a lot of product teams would be like, Okay, got good feedback. Let's just build the thing, ship the thing. Instead, we just ran a little pilot. And you and a few other writers were gracious enough to lend your time and talk us through how you would see this working and what you would want.

我们现在实际上建立了一个叫做'产品实验室'的东西，我对此非常兴奋。我想你也是其中一员，希望我们确实邀请了你。

We actually have now we've set up something called the product lab, which I'm really excited about. I think you're a part of it. I hope we asked you.

是的。我很好奇这一切会如何发展。

Yeah. I'm curious to see where this all goes.

是的。所以这只是一个邀请制的小组，大约有100位作者，我们知道他们有兴趣站在Substack发展的最前沿。我们特别投入了大量资源开发帮助作者成长的工具。现在有了这个小实验室，我们可以拿'向作者推荐'这样的功能来快速获取反馈，确保我们永远不会在没有经过这一步的情况下就直接向所有人推出新功能。建立这样的基础设施真的非常有用。而且通常最终首日上线的功能，与我们最初设想的往往会有很大不同。

Yeah. And so this is just an invite only little group of 100 or so writers that we know are interested in being on the bleeding edge of what Subsect is becoming and specifically offer we're investing a lot in just tools to help writers grow. And now we've got this little lab where we can take a feature like recommendations to writers and get quick feedback and ensure that we're never just rolling something out to everyone without going through this step first. It's just been super helpful to have a bit of this infrastructure in place. And often the thing that we end up shipping on day one tends to be pretty different from what we had in mind before we went through this process.

是的。我经历过很多这样的体验，结果总是非常顺利。我也经历过一些功能最终毫无进展，然后他们就放弃了。我们会继续前进，不再尝试这个东西。是的。

Yeah. I've been through a a bunch of those experiences, and it always goes super well. I've been through a few features that just didn't go anywhere, and then they nope. We're gonna move on and not try this thing. Yeah.

说到Substack，还有一点总是浮现在脑海，就是它经常出现在新闻中。Substack在记者中是一个非常热门的话题，从

Something else that always comes to mind with Substack is it's often in the news. Substack is a very popular topic amongst reporters from a

产品写手喜欢谈论写手。

product writers like to talk about writers.

没错。尤其是一个可能有一天会颠覆他们，或者他们的朋友已经转向并可能因此嫉妒的平台。我很好奇，作为产品领导者，你如何处理负面报道、愤怒的关注之类的事情，如何让大家保持专注、保持动力。你们会讨论这些事情吗？还是就，嗯，你怎么处理那些冒出来的事情，比如，天啊，还要让大家保持兴奋？

That's right. Especially a platform that might disrupt them someday or their friends have gone on to and they're maybe jealous about. I'm curious as a product leader, how you deal with bad press, angry attention, things like that, just keeping people focused, keeping people motivated. Do you discuss stuff? Do you just like, yeah, how do you approach stuff that comes out like, man, and keep people excited?

这里的关键就在于从噪音中分辨出信号。当我仔细想想，博客圈、媒体圈里的那些议论，其实很少会真正影响到我们的日常工作。当然也不是完全没有。对吧？比如，有时确实会出现一些最终发酵的事情，或者人们谈论的事情，我们真的应该认真对待，看看那可能会如何影响我们的策略。

The whole thing here is just like parsing out the signal from the noise. There's very little chatter in the blogosphere, media sphere that would actually impact our day to day when I think about it. And that's it's not zero. Right? Like, sometimes there'll be something that ends up blowing up or that people are talking about that we should really take seriously and see how that might impact our strategy.

但我要说，关于Substack的议论，大概90%最终可能只会分散我们产品团队的注意力，他们归根结底应该专注于执行愿景。也许我的脸皮变厚了，是因为在Facebook工作的那几年——实际上，我刚加入Facebook时，媒体上的报道普遍相当乐观，但我们确实也经历了几个不同的阶段。而且很多我自己在Facebook参与的工作，最终也经常被媒体大量负面报道。你慢慢就学会了埋头苦干，持续交付。归根结底，这才是最重要的。

But I'd say 90% of the chatter about Substack is going to probably ultimately just be a distraction to our product team at the end of the day that should just be focused on executing on the vision. And maybe my skin got thickened from working at Facebook during a bunch of years that actually, when I started Facebook, generally things were quite rosy in the press, but we certainly went through a bunch of different phases. And a lot of the stuff that I worked on myself at Facebook ended up getting talked about a ton in the press negatively most of the time. You kind of just learn to just keep your heads down and keep shipping. And ultimately, that's all that matters.

而且我认为Substack……我为我们内部文化目前正在形成的方式感到自豪。我们倾向于不被分心。

And I think Substack is I feel proud of the way that I think our culture is internally being formed right now. We tend to not get distracted.

看起来确实如此。我很好奇您对Substack作为产品的长期发展有何看法。您对哪些方面感到兴奋？未来的发展方向是什么？

Seems to be the case. I'm curious where you see Substack going as a product long term. What are you excited about? Where are things heading?

或许我可以分两部分回答这个问题。一部分是从写作者视角，另一部分是从读者视角——正如我提到的，后者对我们来说相对较新。从写作者角度看，我认为互联网写作的黄金时代才刚刚开始。正如我之前所说，在互联网整个历史中，支持优质内容的经济模式一直相当糟糕。在Substack早期，我们看到了几缕曙光，比如Matt Taibi或Bill Bishop等早期作者，他们都是非常成熟的作家，显然被低估了价值，而现在他们来到Substack后真正实现了自己的价值。

Maybe I'll answer that in two parts. One from like a writer centric lens and one from a reader centric lens, which I mentioned is a bit of a newer thing for us. You know, from a writer centric lens, I really think that we're just starting into this golden era of what it might mean to be a writer on the Internet. Like I mentioned before, the economic model for supporting great writing on the Internet has been generally pretty terrible for, like, the entirety of the Internet's history. And in the early days of Substack, there was a couple of these glimmers of hope where you'd have people like Matt Taibi or Bill Bishop, some of the early writers on Substack that were really well established writers who were clearly just being undervalued and now could come to Substack and and see their true value.

这非常棒，看到这些真的很令人振奋。但在过去一年左右，甚至最近几个月，出现了许多有趣的成功案例——来自那些甚至不认为自己是作家的人，更不用说像Matt Taibi那样的知名作家了。这些人能够谋生，甚至发家致富，只需要创作优质内容，而不需要数百万的观众量，也不需要参与其他平台的注意力争夺战，只需让相对较少的人高度认可其价值并愿意付费。这是一种全新模式。因此，展望未来一两年写作者生态的发展，我们的重点将是让创建Substack和起步变得简单得多。

And that was awesome. That was really cool to see. But in the last year or so, even in the last few months, I think there's been so many really interesting success stories now from writers who might not even consider themselves writers, let alone well established writers like Matt Taibi or someone like that. People who are able to make a living, maybe even make a fortune just doing great work and not needing to have millions and millions of viewers or play the attention games of other networks, but just do really high quality work and have a relatively small number of people value it highly enough to pay for And that's like a new thing. And so when I see the next one to two years play out for the writer side of the equation, a lot of what we're gonna try to do is just make it much simpler to get started, to have your substack.

无论你在哪里拥有受众，Substack可能永远不会是你受众最多的平台，但它绝对应该成为你最有价值受众的归属地，是他们获取你最优质作品的地方。我们现在看到很多有趣的成功案例：有些人拥有大量Instagram粉丝、YouTube订阅者或Twitter关注者，他们开始将Substack作为大本营，用来积累他们真正拥有的高价值受众——通过获取邮箱地址，随时可导出数据，而我们则提供简单工具帮助他们交付最佳作品。可能是文章、播客或视频。我们还在投入开发一些非常有趣的社区功能。

If you have an audience anywhere, a substack's never gonna be the place where you have the biggest audience probably, but it certainly should be the place where your most valuable audience comes home to, where they get your best work. And we're seeing a lot of really interesting success rates now of people that might have a big Instagram following or YouTube following and certainly Twitter following. We're able to kind of use Substack now as this home base, this place to try to accumulate their most valuable audience that they own in the sense that they get their email address, they can export them at any time and just build really simple tools to just help them deliver their best work. Could be writing, could be a podcast, could be video. We're investing a lot in some really interesting community features as well.

邮件通讯就大错特错了。你之前跟我提过上个月在全球举办了30场见面会之类的？没错。这个运营节奏令人印象深刻。看到这样的发展，以及平台如何支持这类社区行为，正是让我感到兴奋的重要方向。

You're a great example of this. To call Lenny's newsletter simply a newsletter would be hilariously wrong at this point. You do you think you mentioned to me you had 30 meetups around the world last month or something like that. That's right. It's an impressive run rate of And I think seeing that unfold and seeing how the platform can support that type of community behavior as well is a big thing that I'm excited about.

再说说读者端。我认为互联网可能正进入另一个潜在的黄金时代——从消费者体验角度。不再只是刷着几个大同小异的信息流，观看随机人群的随机视频（不是说这不好或应该消失，我自己也经常刷手机看各种视频），而是能有一个去处：那里孕育着最优质的文化内容，你对所见内容和允许进入这个空间的人拥有极高控制权。

Just more. On the reader side, I think maybe to segue into that, I think we're again entering this little potential golden age of the internet for how you experience it as a consumer, where instead of just having a handful of feeds that are basically the same, that you could just scroll through and consume videos of random people doing random things. Not to say that's bad and that should go away. I do my fair share of just scrolling through my phone and watching random videos too. But it'd be kind of nice to have another place you could go to as well where the best culture is being made and you have an extreme degree of control over what you see and who you choose to kind of let into that space.

你可能不会每天在那里花费两小时，这没关系。但它可能会成为你的首选之地，因为所有最优质的内容都在那里，你最好的社区也栖息于此。我们认为Substack的演进方向不是新型社交媒体，而是成为你如何度过最宝贵时间的真正替代选择。我们刚刚推出了iPhone应用。

And you might not spend two hours a day in there and that's fine. But it might be the first place you go because it's where all the best stuff is. And it's where your best communities are gonna live too. And we kinda see Substack evolving not as some like new type of social media, but true alternative to how you might spend that most valuable slice of your time. And we just launched an iPhone app.

我想，大概是六个月前开始的，进展非常顺利。我们很快就要推出安卓应用了。同时我们也在大力推动阅读体验的改进。我认为一两年后，这会变得截然不同且更加出色。

I guess, it's been six months ago, and it's going really well. And we're gonna launch an Android app very shortly. And we're pushing really hard on on this reader experience as well. And I think it'll be radically different and much better one or two years from now too.

有趣的是，我看到的优质内容中，来自Substack的比例越来越高。我认为这对你们来说是个很酷的趋势。对于正在考虑创办新闻通讯或加入Substack的写作者，你有什么建议、技巧或指导可以给那些想进入Substack世界的人？

It's been interesting to see a growing percentage of the great content that I come across be on Substack. And so I think that's a cool trend for y'all. For writers that are thinking about starting a newsletter, thinking about joining Substack, what sorts of advice, tips, guidance do you have for folks that are thinking about getting into the Substack world?

我的第一条建议就是直接开始，看看会发生什么。开始做，想办法开始收集订阅者，在某个地方放上链接。写一两篇文章。如果你不太擅长写作，可以尝试发布视频或录制音频，做成一个小播客。基本上就是先开始，看看反响如何，看看外界对你所说的内容可能有什么兴趣，特别是如果你在其他平台上已经有一定粉丝基础的话。

My first piece of advice would be to just start it and see what happens. Start it, have a way to start gathering subscribers, Put a link to it somewhere. Write one or two things. And if you're not much of a writer, try posting a video or recording some audio and turn it into a little podcast. Just start, basically, and see what happens and see what kind of interest there might be out there for what you have to say, especially if you already have a following on other platforms as well.

我认为，如果你的全部粉丝都锁定在一个平台上，而你无法确定性地触达这些人，当然也无法以某种方式变现，那么在当前的互联网时代，这种处境是很脆弱的。所以我会说，直接开始吧。这应该非常简单。去substack.com，点击“开始你的Substack”按钮，看看会发生什么。

I think that there's a real risk that if your entire following is locked into one platform where you don't have a ton of control over your ability to reach those people deterministically and certainly to monetize that in some way that it seems like it's a tenuous place to be in the current age of the internet. And so I'd say just start. It should be really easy. Go to subsect.com, press the start your subsect button, and see what happens.

这个建议可能让人听起来觉得，‘哦，是啊，这不算真正的建议’。但我要说，这正是我所做的，也正是我走到今天这一步的方式。我完全没有想过把这当作一生的事业，或者为我写的东西收费。那太疯狂了。

That advice may sound people like, oh, yeah. That's that's not actual advice. But I will say that is exactly what I did, and that's exactly how I got to what I do now. I had zero intention of ever doing this as a life or, like, charging for writing that I'm writing. That's crazy.

仅仅因为Substack存在，并且让我免费尝试。你知道，你注册，然后开始。我的新闻通讯叫‘Lenny的新闻通讯’，因为那是我注册时的默认推荐，因为我告诉他我的名字是Lenny。就像是，‘Lenny的新闻通讯’。我只是因为没有计划做这个，所以就注册了，想在这里试着写点博客。

And just the fact that Substack existed and let me try stuff out for free. You know, you sign up, you start Like my newsletter, it's called Lenny's newsletter because that was like the default recommendation when I signed up because I told him my name is Lenny. It's like, Lenny's newsletter. And I just because I had no plan to do this. It was just like, let me just sign up and try blogging here for a little bit.

而这条小路径，想想Chris和Hamish以及创始人们如何规划用户旅程，设想一个人如何从从不写作到全职投入的过程。我觉得我完全经历了那个过程。如果他们甚至有过这样的设想：我注册只是为了试试，开始持续写作，进展顺利，然后考虑收费，最后推出付费计划。

And that little path and think about Chris and Hamish and the founders mapping out a user journey of the vision of how somebody onboards to Substack to go from never writing to like doing it full time. And I feel like I went through that Exactly. If they even had that were like, I sign up just to try it out. I start writing consistently, it starts going well. Then I think about charging, and then I launched the paid plan.

然后一切进展顺利，规模持续扩大。接着我就全职投入其中了。这正是我所经历的道路。如果没有那些神奇功能的组合——比如简单的博客、新闻通讯、收集邮箱，以及未来可能的变现途径——我绝对不会走上这条路。

And then that goes well, and it keeps growing. And then I do it full time. That's exactly what I went down. And there's no world where I would have done this if not for those magical combination of features of just like a really simple blog and newsletter and collecting emails, and maybe monetizing down the road.

是的，听到这些真是太棒了。

Yeah, that's amazing to hear.

没错。所以我认为'即刻开始'的建议非常精准。先尝试看看是否适合你。不过我要说，创办新闻通讯很容易。

Yeah. So I think that just start advice is really spot on. Just try it out. See if it's something you wanna do. I will say it's easy to start a newsletter.

但坚持办下去很难。而坚持才是最重要的部分，就像宋飞传里那个经典片段说的——坚持才是关键。

It's hard to continue a newsletter. And the continuing is is the most important part as Seinfeld would say in that clip rings a bell.

关于这一点我还想说，我对Substack未来在产品层面能让这件事变得更容易（同时不降低体验质量）感到非常兴奋。我们可以做很多事情：自动向读者推送内容，实现多种功能。回到发现机制的问题——确实有很多看似有效的方案，但它们最终可能会毁掉Substack的本质，产生各种恶劣的二次效应，破坏'让作者主导、让读者主导'的核心承诺。

I will say though to that point too, that I'm really excited for what Substack can do in the product to make that easier in a way that doesn't cheapen the experience. So there's a bunch of things we could do to We could automatically post stuff to your readers. We could do a lot of things. Going back to the, how do we do discovery? There's a bunch of things that would probably just work, but they would eventually kill what substack is or have all these nasty second order effects and ruin this promise of putting writers in charge, putting readers in charge.

我真的很期待。实际上我把你的Substack视为先锋典范，你将其打造成不仅是一个蓬勃发展的读者社区，更是创作者和贡献者的聚集地。有优秀人才来做客座文章，有播客节目，还有线下聚会。

I'm really excited. I actually view your Substack as a vanguard, as a very kind of leading edge example of this, you have turned your Substack into this, not just this thriving community of readers, but also of contributors and creators. You've got these amazing people coming and doing guest posts. You've got the podcast going. You've got these meetups.

我认为你在很多方面减轻了持续创作的压力——如果每天都要写长文并终身坚持，那将非常困难，肯定会让持续创作难以为继。不是说现在很容易，我知道你付出的艰辛。但我相信Substack能做得更多，将这个生态系统转化为能量通道，让你这样的创作者更像领域的引领者和策展人，在持续为受众提供价值的同时，不必事事亲力亲为。

You've, I think, a lot of ways, alleviated the burden of how hard it would be to just be writing a long form thing every day and doing that for the rest of your life, that would be really hard. That would make it certainly much harder to keep going. And not to say that it's easy now. I know how hard it is to do what you do. But I think Substack can do more to turn this ecosystem into a to funnel this energy into ways for people like you to feel more like a leader of a space and a curator in a lot of ways and still deliver this really valuable service to your audience without having to do all the work yourself.

我认为我们还能做更多来支持这类事情。

And I think we can do a lot more to support that kind of thing.

关于你正在考虑的具体方向以及可能实现的内容，有什么可以分享的吗？

Is there anything you could share about what sorts of things you're thinking there and what might be possible?

让我想想。客座文章目前效果非常好。我们有很多想法可以让客座文章变得更重要。目前客座文章的运作方式有点像专栏文章，就像邀请某人在你的Substack上写篇文章。

Let's see. Guest posts are working really well. And I'll say that we have a bunch of ideas for how to make guest posts a much bigger thing. Right now, the way guest posts work, kind of like an op ed or something. Like you invite someone to come and just write a post on your Substack.

在不涉及具体细节和透露产品团队正在开发内容的前提下，我认为我们还能做更多改进，让用户感觉有一群人能更灵活地为你的Substack贡献内容，为读者创造价值。我之前稍微提过我们正在开发的社区功能，目前正在试运行一个很受欢迎的功能——我们将其视为Substack后院的酒馆，读者可以在此交流闲聊，作者仍然掌握主导权，设定空间氛围和规则规范，同时为订阅者创造参与互动的空间。这两个领域是我们当前重点投入的方向。

I think there's much more we can do without getting into some of the specifics and scooping the product team that we're working on that I think could make it feel more like you've got a bunch of people who are somewhat more fluidly able to contribute to your substack and deliver value to your audience. And I've teased this community stuff that we're working on a little bit, but we're piloting a feature right now that's been working really well where writers can get a little bit of like a we kind of view it as like the pub at the back of your substack where people can hang out and chat and the writer is still in control and kind of sets the tone and sets the rules and norms for the space, but can create space for their subscribers to participate and hang out themselves too. Those are two areas that we're investing in a fair bit right now.

我想可能有人建议过——我也建议你们关注下OpenAI辅助写作。我试用过Jasper这个产品，还有Copy AI之类的工具，只需要输入文章标题，它就能生成相当不错的段落摘要。它们还有智能自动补全功能，边输入边智能推荐后续内容。这太神奇了，会是个很酷的功能。

Something that I imagine somebody suggested that I'd suggest you all look into a little bit is OpenAI assisted writing. I was playing with this product that is called Jasper, and there's also, like, Copy AI, where it just I put in the title of the post I was about to write, and it just generated, like, a pretty good paragraph summary of what it could have been. And they have this whole feature where you just start typing, and it auto completes things smartly. So That's crazy. That would be cool.

不知道你们是否想往这个方向发展，但这确实

I don't know if you wanna go there, but it's pretty

像是个有趣的复杂议题。我们确实讨论过是否要更改默认出版物设置。你知道原本默认名称就是'Lenny's newsletter'，初始默认logo可能是个红色方块之类的东西。如果能用DALL·E生成出版物logo服务应该会非常酷。

like an interesting can of worms. Right. Interesting can did talk about whether we should change our default publication. You know how your default name was just like Lenny's newsletter, and we probably gave you a little red square or something as your default publication logo originally, that a DALL E generated publication logo service would be pretty cool.

那会很棒。就算不为别的，只为获取灵感，我也会很喜欢。回到有人开始做Substack的话题。我们刚才谈到了建议，核心建议就是先开始，看看你是否喜欢。很重要的一点是，你之后还想继续做下去吗？

That would be cool. Like, if nothing else, just for ideas, but I would love that. Coming back to the idea of someone starting a Substack. So we talked about advice, which is like, the core advice, just start and see how you like it. A big part of this is, like, do you wanna keep doing this?

因为再说一次，开始容易，坚持难。而且你可能会意识到，我给自己创造了一份我不喜欢的工作。所以这是他们需要深思的。但另一方面，嗯。你觉得人们在刚开始使用Substack时常犯哪些错误，是你建议他们尽量避免的？

Because, again, it's easy to start, hard to keep going. And, also, you may realize, I've created this job for myself I don't like. So that's something they should be thoughtful about. But on the flip side Mhmm. Do you see any common mistakes people make when they're starting on Substack that you suggest they try to avoid?

有件事挺有意思的，我认为我们的产品有很大改进空间，那就是人们点击“开始你的Substack”按钮时，显然会有不同层次的目的。有些人可能进来就想，这将成为我的全职工作，我想让它成功。我不仅想成为全职作家，还想在Substack上建立一个媒体帝国。

One thing that's kinda interesting here that I think we have a big opportunity to improve in the product is that there's gonna be obviously varying levels of intent that people have when they hit that start your Substack button. Some people might come in being like, this is gonna be my full time job. I wanna make this work. I I wanna not just be a full time writer. I I wanna build like a media empire on Substack.

对吧？现在确实有这样的例子。你可以想象我们 onboarding 和设置流程的一个版本是专门为“媒体帝国”打造的。你也可以想象另一个版本，就是让我只写点东西，别让我做所有这些决定。

Right? There's certainly examples of that happening now. And you can imagine a version of our onboarding and setup flow that's like the media empire version of it. You can also imagine the version that's just, let me just write one thing. Don't make me make all these decisions.

我只想先参与进来。总的来说，人们可能犯的一个错误是——我或许可以反过来讲个轶事，这和我前几天和Chris聊天时听到的有关，他说他费了很大劲才说服你开通付费功能。如果我说错了请纠正，但……对吧？是这样吗？

I just wanna get in the game. I think that in general, a mistake that people might make is I'll maybe flip it back, an anecdote related to what I heard from Chris when I was chatting with him the other day that he had to convince you pretty hard to like turn on payments at all. Correct me if this is some spreading misinformation, but Right. Is that right?

是的。还有Hamish也是，尤其是在我能休息多久的问题上。他总是建议我说，你可以休息得比你想象的更频繁，因为我觉得我一周都不能停。所以，是的，这两条建议都对。没错。

Yeah. And Hamish to, especially on how often I can take a break. He's always given me advice of you can take a break more often than you think, because I feel like I can never not do a week. So, yeah, both those pieces of advice. Yeah.

我花了些时间才想通。也许我可以为此收费，然后或许就能偶尔休息几周了。

Took me a while to get over. Maybe I could charge for this and then maybe it could take some weeks off.

对。对。我觉得这里有一个普遍适用的建议，可能是我对'常见陷阱是什么'这个问题的答案，那就是人们非常担心观众会如何看待他们，并最终担心自己的价值，对吧？我该每周三次向人们的收件箱发送新闻简报吗？这样会不会太频繁？

Right. Right. I think there's like a generalizable piece of advice here that might be the my answer to the question of what's a common pitfall, which is people are really worried about how their audience will perceive them and really ultimately their own worth, right? Should I send a newsletter three times a week into people's inbox? Is that too much?

我该不该向任何人收费？这很疯狂吗？既然有人持续付费，我还能休假吗？如果我休两周暑假，这是否意味着服务不周？我认为在几乎所有这类情况下，你还能再想出五个类似的问题，读者们，尤其是那些订阅并付费给你的用户，其实相当宽容，他们真的在那里支持你，并希望你休假。

Should I ask anyone to pay me ever? Is that crazy? Am I allowed to take a vacation ever given that I've got people paying on an ongoing basis? And is that a bad service to provide if I'm taking a two week summer vacation? I think almost in all of those cases, and then you could imagine five more things like that, readers, especially the people that are subscribed to you who are paying you, are pretty forgiving and are really there to support you and want you to take that vacation.

而且可能还有更多人愿意为你付费，只是他们甚至不知道你的存在，如果知道的话完全愿意付费。所以回到那个光谱：我只是想写一篇博客文章？还是想建立一个媒体帝国？很多人可能还不知道。为自己打开可选性，看看会发生什么。

And there's probably more people who would want to pay for you that just don't even know about you, that would totally pay if they could. And so go back to that spectrum of, I just trying to write a blog post? Am I trying to start a media empire? It's kind of like many people won't know yet. Just open up optionality for yourself and see what happens.

也许不要太担心你的观众会怎么想。我认为这可能是Substack与Twitter、Instagram等平台的一个不同之处。订阅这个动作相当有分量。它就像一个成本高昂的信号。对吧？

And maybe don't be too worried about what your audience might think. And I think that maybe is one difference between Substack than something like Twitter, Instagram or something. Subscribe as an action is pretty heavyweight. It's like a costly signal. Right?

这不像在Twitter上随便点关注按钮那么容易。如果有人订阅了你，他们某种程度上是授予你进入他们大脑的权利。这可能是我用一种书呆子的方式看待它，对吧？所以这意味着不仅仅是，我允许你每周写一次长文，而且，嘿，你觉得还有其他人可能有什么有趣的话要说？很酷。

It's not as easy as just mashing the follow button on a bunch of accounts on Twitter or something like that. If someone is subscribed to you, they're kind of granting you right access to their brain. This may be the way I view it in a nerdy sense, right? And so what that means is not just like, I'll let you write your one long form thing once a week, but hey, you've got this other person that you think might have something interesting to say? Cool.

让我知道。我为此而来。我认为作者们基本上低估了这一点。

Let me know. I'm here for it. And I think writers underestimate that, basically.

也许我要补充三点，给那些正在考虑'我该不该试试这个？'的人。第一，当我加入Substack时，我已经觉得太晚了，而这是三年前。我当时想，不，太晚了。

Maybe three things I'll add to this just for folks that are thinking about, should I try this out? Should I not? One, when I joined Substack, I already felt like it was too late, and this was three years ago. I was like, no. It's too late.

大家现在都已经有了自己的大型新闻简报。我觉得我根本不可能造成任何影响。而且我认为人们现在有这种感觉，但我觉得这也不是真的。我认为机会其实非常多。

Everyone's already got their big newsletters. There's no way I'm gonna make any sort of dent. And I think people feel that now, and I think it's also not true. I think there's so much opportunity.

100%同意。

100%.

第二点，当我达到一千个付费订阅者时——这个目标感觉非常可行——我的收入大约达到了10万美元，这正好印证了凯文·凯利的一千个铁杆粉丝理论。没错。当时的感觉就像是，哇，我真的可以靠一千个铁杆粉丝谋生了。最令人惊讶的是，只需要这么一小群真正关心你所做之事的人，你就能赚到这么多钱。

Two, when I got to a thousand paid subscribers, which feels very doable, I was making around a 100 k, which is exactly I think it was Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans. Like Yep. It was exactly like, oh, wow. I could make a living with a thousand true fans for real. And it's shocking how much you could make with so few people that really care about what you're doing.

所以想想看，有没有你感兴趣的细分领域或某个主题，你能找到一千个人愿意每月付你10美元，然后你就能赚到——嗯。

So think about is there like a niche or something you're excited about that you can find a thousand people to pay you $10 a month and you'll make Mhmm.

我觉得现在最酷的地方在于，有了Substack和网络效应，如果有1000个人愿意每月付你10美元，那很可能会有2000、5000甚至10000个人。

What's what's cool about that, I think, now with Substack and with the network effect is, like, if there's a thousand people who are gonna pay you $10 a month, there's probably two thousand and five thousand and ten thousand.

这正是发生在我身上的情况。我当时想，如果能赚到10万美元——是的，天啊，我就满足了。然后它就一直增长。

Exactly what happened to me. I'm like, if I hit a 100 k Yeah. Holy moly. I'm good. And then it just kept growing.

所以完全正确。是的，你会觉得这些东西的市场价值巨大。然后——没错。最后一点可能是，我花了九个月时间每周免费创作，才达到一个我觉得可以继续做下去的阶段。

So that's exactly right. Yeah. Like, you think there's a value in the, like, the markets for these things are huge. And then Yeah. The last point maybe is it took me nine months of doing it every week for free to get to a point where I felt like I can keep doing this.

我很享受做这件事。人们持续认可它的价值，于是我决定开启付费模式。所以最初这是一个非常缓慢而稳定的过程。不要指望它会突然爆红。只需每周坚持做下去。

I enjoy doing this. People continue to value it, Where I decided to turn on paid. So it's a very slow and steady thing initially. Don't expect it to just blow up. Just do it every week.

看看效果如何。看看你是否喜欢。看看人们是否喜欢。如果他们喜欢，就继续做。如果不喜欢，你可以停止。

See how it goes. See if you like it. See people like it. And if they do, keep going. If not, you can stop.

就像我推出新闻通讯时发推文说的：我只是想试试这个东西。完全不知道它会走向何方。让我们尝试一下。所以刚开始时不必把赌注设得太高。

Like, when I launched my newsletter, I tweeted, I'm just gonna experiment this thing. No no idea where it's gonna go. Let's try it out. So you don't have to set the stakes high when you're starting out.

是的。我觉得完全正确。你提到了凯文·凯利的1000个铁杆粉丝理论，这已经成为互联网上经典的文章。我最喜欢的凯文·凯利博客文章——这是我第二喜欢的。我最喜欢的是他写的一篇名为《你并不晚》的文章，你大概能想象他说了什么，但这是一个非常有说服力的论证，正好契合你提到的观点——显然他当时不是在说Substack。

Yeah. I think that's exactly right. You mentioned Kevin Kelly's 1,000 true fans, which has become this, like, canonical piece of writing on the Internet now. My favorite Kevin Kelly blog post that's my second favorite. My first favorite is a post that he wrote called you are not late, which is exactly what you you can probably picture what he says, but it's such a compelling, persuasive argument for the thing that you mentioned, which is like, obviously, he wasn't talking about Substack in his post.

但他谈论的是互联网，以及从宏观角度来看，我们有多么幸运——我甚至不记得他是什么时候写的。可能大概是十年前吧。但当时确实有很多人觉得，哦，Facebook和谷歌已经称霸，互联网已经定型了。我真希望自己是在那个时代成长起来的。

But he was talking about the internet and how, in the grand scheme of things, how lucky we are to I don't even know when he wrote it. Maybe it was probably ten years ago at this point. But certainly, at a time where a lot of people were feeling, oh, Facebook and Google and the Internet's done. The battles have been won. And I wish I was I wish I was coming of age.

我真希望自己是2004年从哈佛毕业之类的。但这种想法大错特错。就互联网的发展进程而言，我们还处于非常早期的阶段。我认为现在能以任何方式参与其中，塑造互联网未来十到二十年的发展轨迹，是极其有趣的，因为我们并不晚。

I wish I had graduated from Harvard in 2004 or something. And it's just so wrong. We are so early when it comes to how the internet will play out that I think getting to work on that in any capacity right now, getting to shape how the internet is gonna play out over the next ten, twenty years is so fun because we are not late.

说得对。我知道马克·安德森也提到过这一点，当他八十年代搬到硅谷时，人们都说：一切都结束了，为时已晚。

Hear. Hear. I I know Mark Andreessen mentioned this too when he moved to Silicon Valley in the eighties. He's it's all over. It's too late.

我错过了科技行业的淘金热，而那仅仅是个开始。好了，我们现在进入一个非常激动人心的快问快答环节，我会快速问你一堆问题。想到什么就说什么。可以吗？

I missed the gold rush of tech, and it was just the beginning. Well, we've reached our a very exciting lightning round where I'm just gonna ask you a bunch of questions real quick. Share whatever comes up. Sound good?

当然，开始吧。

Sure. Let's do it.

你最常推荐给别人的两三本书是什么？

What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?

我想推荐一些与互联网、软件或科技完全无关，但对我作为软件产品人职业生涯最具启发性和指导意义的书，这些是关于建筑和城市规划的书。我觉得这个领域如此迷人的原因是，几千年来，人们一直在探索如何建造帮助人们互动的空间，以及打造宜居的良好环境。而按照凯文·凯利的说法，我们在互联网和数字领域做这件事才不过眨眼一瞬间。有一本特别的书，作者是建筑师克里斯托弗·亚历山大，很遗憾他今年初刚去世。这本书是他在七十年代写的。

I will plug some books that have nothing to do with the Internet or software or tech, but have been the most informative or instructive books for me, I think, in my career as a product person working on software, which are books about architecture and urban planning. And the reason why I find this field so fascinating is because for thousands of years, people have been figuring out how to build spaces that help people interact with each other and build good spaces to occupy. And we've only been doing this for going back to the Kevin Kelly thing, for basically the blink of an eye on the internet and in the digital realm. There's one book particular by an architect named Christopher Alexander who sadly just passed away earlier this year. He wrote this book in the seventies.

这本书叫《建筑的水恒之道》。这是我推荐最多人的书。我甚至会批量购买，然后直接送人。这本书的基本前提是，在七十年代，我们刚刚经历了美国几十年大规模生产千篇一律的郊区住宅开发。他的观点是，我们基本上已经偏离了正轨。

It's called The Timeless Way of Building. And this is the book that I recommend to the most people. Have like I I buy it in bulk and I just like give it away to people. And the the basic premise of the book is that in the seventies, we had just gone through a couple of decades of just mass produced cookie cutter suburban house development in The US. And his premise was like, we've basically just lost the plot on this.

没人喜欢住在这些房子里。如果你想想为什么这些房子住起来感觉都不好，那是因为现在建房子的人有史以来第一次和住在房子里的人不是同一批人。是那些开发商、房地产公司大规模生产这些房子。但几千年来，我们已经弄清楚了什么才是好房子。那时建房子的人就是住在里面的人，他们懂这个。

No one likes living in these houses. And if you think about why these houses all feel bad to live in, it's because the people building the houses now for the first time ever are different than the people living in the house. It's these, like, developers, these real estate developers, these big companies mass producing these houses. But for thousands of years, we've figured out what makes a good house. And the people building the house or the people living in it, and they get that.

但现在激励结构改变了，一切都乱套了。我认为这与互联网有一个非常有趣的相似之处，特别是过去十年左右的发展，那些构建我们所在空间的人 operating under a very complicated incentive structure，这导致了次优的用户体验。这就是我们在 Substack 致力于解决的问题，也是我觉得现在很有趣的工作方向。如果你也在做类似的事情，我强烈推荐克里斯托弗·亚历山大的《建筑的水恒之道》。

But now the incentive structure got changed and it messed everything up. And I think there's a really interesting parallel there with the Internet, specifically how the last decade or so has played out where the people building the spaces that we occupy are operating under a very complicated incentive structure, and it's leading to these suboptimal user experiences. And this is what we work on at Substack. This is what I think is fun to work on right now. And if you're working on something like this, I would highly recommend the timeless way of building by Christopher Alexander.

太棒了。我们一定会把这个收录到节目笔记里。说到推荐功能，你最推荐的两三个Substack是什么？

Awesome. We're gonna include that in the show notes for sure. What are two or three substacks that you recommend most speaking of recommendation features?

我刚才还在想这个问题，因为我确实不常在Substack上写作。所以我没用过推荐功能，但除了Lenny之外我还会推荐谁呢？我可以分享几个随机例子，可能再次跳出科技产品领域。有个叫Daryl Cooper的人，他在Substack上有个播客叫Martyrmaid Podcast，我最近深入迷上了。这个很难描述。

I was just thinking about this because I don't write on substack certainly frequently. And so I don't use the recommendations feature, but who would I recommend if I did besides Lenny, of course? I'll share a couple of random examples, maybe, again, outside of maybe the tech product world. There's this guy named Daryl Cooper who has a podcast on Substack called the Martyrmaid Podcast that I've gone super deep into lately. And it's hard to describe.

他基本上会选一个主题，然后做出你能找到的关于这个主题的最佳解释，因为他会投入疯狂的时间——可能每个主题花上万小时——去彻底搞清楚这个故事。他最近在做美国劳工运动的系列，听起来可能是个无聊的话题，但他真是个了不起的讲故事的人。我觉得他也是个好例子，这只有当他找到那1000个真爱粉时才真正可行，那些人就是愿意为此付费。

He basically takes a topic and he will produce the single best explanation of that topic you will ever find because he'll spend an insane amount, probably ten thousand hours per topic figuring out, getting to the bottom of this story. So he recently did this amazing he's doing a series right now in, like, the labor movement in America. And it sounds like boring topic maybe, but he's just such an amazing storyteller. And he's, I think, a good example too. This could only really work if he had found if he finds his thousand true fans as people who are just like, yeah, I'll just pay for this.

这肯定是个很糟糕的广告业务。他发布频率不高但很稳定，但内容质量极高。这就是Martyrmaid播客。既然我知道这应该是快速问答环节而我花太多时间了，另外两个我快速提一下：Colin Molloy是我最喜欢的音乐人之一，他是Decemberists乐队的主唱。

It would be a very bad advertising business for sure. He publishes pretty infrequently and consistently, but it's just like the highest quality stuff. That's the Martyrmaid podcast. And since I know it's supposed to be a lightning round and I spent too much time on that, the two others that I'll just quickly throw out there, Colin Molloy is one of my favorite musicians. He's the lead singer of the Decemberists.

他目前在Substack上做得很酷，分享很多巡演中有趣的幕后内容，发布音频和视频。非常棒。如果你是Decemberists的粉丝，我强烈推荐。还有一个，让我想想。

He's doing a really cool thing on the sub sec right now of just a lot of interesting behind the scenes stuff on tour, publishing audio and video. It's been really good. If you're a fan of the Decemberists, I highly recommend. And one more. Let's see.

我最近对Ethan Strauss特别感兴趣。他写了一个叫The House of Strauss的Substack。他是个篮球作家，但我觉得这是个很酷的例子，他现在有了订阅者，可以写任何他想写的东西。他写的话题范围很广，而且总是非常引人入胜。

I've been really excited about Ethan Strauss lately. He writes a subsect called The House of Strauss. He's a basketball writer, but I think it's a cool example of, like, he just has subscribers now. He can write about whatever he wants. And he writes about a wide range of topics, and they're always really fascinating.

我很喜欢看到这样的事情发生在Substack上，总的来说也是如此。

And I love to see that kind of thing happen on Substack and in general.

这倒提醒我了。卡里姆·古尔·贾巴尔刚刚在他的Substack上推荐了我的通讯。

That just reminded me. Karim Gul Jabbar just recommended my newsletter in his Substack.

哦，天哪。恭喜啊。这是怎么

Oh, man. Congrats. How does that Oh

我的天。

my god.

这简直就是人生成就啊。

That must be like a life achievement right there.

是啊。简直难以置信。恭喜。谢谢你。

Yeah. Like, what the hell? Congrats. Thank you.

他是个很棒的作家。

He's a great writer.

我不知道他是否读过。我不确定。我不知道发生了什么。但我很喜欢。顺便说一句，他的Substack真的很棒。

I don't know if he reads it. I don't know. I I don't know what's going on. I love it. He he has got a great substack, by the way.

我觉得是的。你只需要谷歌搜索Cream Abdul Jabbar的Substack就能找到。关于推荐功能，我刚才在想，要不要特别感谢一下开发团队？比如，我团队里的

I think it's Yeah. I think you just Google cream Abdul Jabbar substack. You'll find it. On the recommendation feature, was just thinking, you wanna shout out the folks that built it? Like, the team I

非常乐意。

would love to.

那就开始吧。

Let's do it.

是的。人员太多了，最终成了全公司的协作成果。但我们团队的产品经理Dane Rathbone特别值得一提，我认为他是我们构建方式的主要推动者，就像你提到的深入方向。他对此非常支持。设计团队的Gabriel负责设计，还有许多工程师参与了开发。

Yeah. It's too many. It was it ended up being a company wide effort, but the product manager on my team, Dane Rathbone, was specifically, I think, the spearhead behind the way that we built it, like you mentioned, that we went into. He was a really big proponent for that. And Gabriel on our design team designed it, and many engineers worked on it.

很难一一感谢所有人，但我要特别提到我们团队的Dane，因为他确保我们以最终需要的方式构建了这个功能，使其得以成功运作。

And it'll be hard to shout them all out, but I'd shout out Dane on my team because he ensured that we built it in the way that we ultimately needed to build it for it to work.

谢谢Dane和Gabriel。最后两个问题：你最近有没有特别喜欢的电影或电视剧？

Thank you, Dane and Gabriel. Two final questions. Do you have any favorite recent movies or TV shows that you watched that you love?

有的。我刚刚看完《为全人类》最新一季，非常喜欢。

Yeah. I just finished the latest season of For All Mankind and loved it.

哦，太好了。

Oh, good.

是啊。你都看完了吗？

Yeah. Did you watch it all?

是的。天哪。那真是...没错。最后几集，你简直坐立不安，紧张得要命。

Yes. Oh my god. That is Yeah. The last couple episodes, you're sitting on the edge of your seat.

我觉得这一季，每一集都像是一部独立的电影之类的。整部剧开头节奏确实比较慢。我认为第一季有点拖沓。当我推荐给别人时，我会说，坚持看下去就好。但他们真的找到了自己的节奏。

I feel like in this season, every episode was like its own standalone movie or something. Like, it really it started slow the whole show. I think the first season was a bit slow. When I recommended to people, I'm like, just power through it. But they really found their groove.

我...我对下一季超级期待。

I'm I'm stoked for the next season.

我也是。最后一个问题，你在面试别人时，最喜欢问的一个问题是什么？

Same. And final question, what's a favorite interview question you like to ask folks when you're interviewing them?

这个问题我很难回答，因为我发现，考虑到候选人的背景和经验可能非常多样，并没有一个问题能真正让我得到我想要的信号。如果你来自Facebook这类大公司，或者来自初创公司，我可能需要问不同的问题才能获得我想要的信号。所以也许我会这样回答：如今，尤其是对Substack来说，我试图获取的信号是什么？我认为，对于一个早期快速发展的初创公司——我们谈了很多这有多么不同——我们真的只需要那些能够克服万难去实现宏大目标的人。

I have a tough time answering this question because I have found that there's not one question that will get me the signal I actually want given how diverse the candidates experiences might be in their context. If you're coming from a Facebook type place or coming from a startup, I might need to ask different questions in order to get the signal I want. So maybe I'll answer it in that way, which is these days, especially for Substack, what is the signal that I'm trying to get? And I think really for the early stage, fast growing startup that's we talked so much about how different that is. We kinda just need people who can run through walls to accomplish big goals.

也许在某种程度上，坚韧、耐力和驱动力是我会想到的词汇。我发现很难用一个问题来获取这种信号。我们需要根据那个人的背景来定制问题。

And maybe grit and endurance in some ways and drive are like the words I would throw out there. I find it's really hard to have one question that will get that signal. We need to tailor it to that person's background.

好的。我接受这个元答案。Satya，非常感谢你来到这里。正如我所说，SlipStack对我而言意义非凡，我真的很感谢你花时间深入探讨了许多一直萦绕在我心头的问题，我相信这对其他很多人也会有所帮助。最后两个问题。

Alright. I'll accept that meta answer. Satya, thank you so much for being here. As I've shared, SlipStack is very near and dear to my heart, and I'm really thankful that you spent time to dig into a lot of these things that have been on my mind, and I imagine will be helpful to a lot of other people. Two final questions.

如果大家想联系你、了解更多信息，可以在哪里找到你？你们在招聘吗？还有，听众如何能对你有所帮助？

Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more? Are you all hiring? Then how can listeners be useful to you?

首先，Lenny，感谢你成为如此出色的Substack榜样。正如你可以想象的，我们内部经常与你交流，你对公司和我们的产品团队帮助巨大。所以能来参加这个播客节目，继续做你正在做的事情，真是莫大的荣幸。你可以在所有社交媒体平台上找到我。我必须承认，我在这些平台上不是很活跃。

First of thank you, Lenny, for being such an amazing Substack example setter. We talk to you all the time, as you can imagine, internally, and you've been so helpful to the company and to our product team. So it's been a real honor to get to come onto the pod and keep doing what you're doing. You can find me on all the various social media platforms. I'm not super active on them, I must admit.

但可能Twitter是我花时间最多的地方，用户名就是SachinManga，我的名字和姓氏。我想顺便提一下我们Substack正在招聘的一个职位，是一个数据岗位，一个高级数据职位，偏向产品和增长分析，这是我们在这个职位上寻找的具体类型。如果你正在听这个播客，并且觉得这可能适合你，我很乐意聊聊。我的邮箱地址，不知道是否会分享出来，但就是我的名字Sachin，加上@substack.com。

But maybe Twitter would be the one where I spend the most time, which is just SachinManga. My first name and last name is my handle. And I'll make one plug for a role that we're hiring for right now at Substack, which is a data role, a senior data role with kind of a product and growth analytics bent would be the specific sort of archetype we're looking for in this role. And if you are listening to the pod and feel like that might be you, I'd love to chat. And I think my email address too, don't if it would get shared, but it's just Sachin, my first name, at Substack Inc dot com.

所以随时欢迎给我发邮件。

So feel free to send me a note anytime.

太棒了。我们会把这个信息放在节目说明里。听起来你们可能基于那个职位在开发一些很酷的分析功能。我对此感到兴奋。太棒了，老兄。

Awesome. We'll include that in the show notes. Sounds like y'all are building some cool analytics features maybe based on that role. I'm excited for that. And awesome, man.

感谢您的到来。

Thank you for being here.

这是我的荣幸。非常感谢您的邀请。

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

非常感谢您的收听。如果您觉得本期内容有价值，可以在苹果播客、Spotify或您喜欢的播客应用中订阅我们的节目。同时，请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，这将帮助其他听众发现这个播客。您可以在lenny'spodcast.com上找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于本节目的信息。下期节目再见。

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenny'spodcast.com. See you in the next episode.