In 2022, Lenny Rachitsky decided to try a new venture: Lenny’s Podcast.
The now 42-year-old had founded a successful newsletter about product management, Lenny’s Newsletter, in 2019. Rachitsky was making a good living writing one post per week and working 10 to 20 hours on each, and wasn’t sure he wanted to take on another project. But another podcast host convinced him to give it a try.
Lenny’s Podcast quickly found an audience. He now posts two episodes per week interviewing experts in the field of product management and brings in more than $500,000 per year. That’s on top of the more than $500,000 he already brings in from the newsletter.
For anyone looking to get their own similar projects off the ground, “the main thing I’ve learned about being successful in this path is all that really matters is quality and consistency,” he says.
Here’s why.
Solve problems and ‘people will listen, read, subscribe’
When it comes to quality, for Rachitsky, “the way I think about it is [what] problem are you solving for people,” he says.
People face all sorts of problems: They want to excel at their jobs. They want to earn more money. They want to improve their cooking or learn how to be better parents. “And if you can solve those problems for people better than what’s out there, people will listen, read, subscribe, share, all those sorts of things.”
Some of Rachitsky’s most popular posts of all time include how to influence people, which product managers need to do in their jobs, how to get better at product strategy, how to strengthen your communication skills and how to structure your pitch to leaders.
“If you’re not solving people’s problems well enough,” he says, “you’re not going to succeed.”
‘There’s just endless interesting people to talk to’
Then there’s consistency. Rachitsky plans to stick to his once-a-week newsletter post and twice-a-week podcast episodes. He finds there’s no dearth of content for him to keep up this pace.
Having worked as a product manager and engineer for more than a decade and accrued a great deal of know-how about how to do the job, “I find that I have endless things I could write about,” he says. He has a running list of topics that’s usually about 15 items long.
The same is true with his podcast. “There’s just endless interesting people to talk to and learn from,” he says. “And I have this long list I keep of people I want to bring on the podcast that just keeps growing.”
That’s what’s helped keep both of his projects going and what he believes keeps people coming back. “Most of the success in this world, in my opinion,” he says, “is the combination of high quality over and over and over again.”
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