2025-07-13 19:02:43
Brex—The banking solution for startups
Paragon—Ship every SaaS integration your customers want
Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky are the co-creators of the Design Sprint (the famous five-day product innovation process) and authors of the bestselling book Sprint. After decades of working with over 300 startups in the earliest stages, they discovered that most startups fail not because they can’t build, but because they build the wrong thing. The very beginning of a startup is your highest-leverage moment, and most teams waste months or years by skipping a few critical early questions. Jake and John developed the Foundation Sprint to help startups validate ideas and compress months of work into just two days.
What you’ll learn:
1. The step-by-step Foundation Sprint process that compresses three or four months of validation into two days—including templates you can use immediately
2. Why differentiation is the #1 predictor of startup success (with the 2x2 framework that you can use with your team)
3. The three fundamental questions every founder should answer before writing a line of code
4. The “note and vote” technique that eliminates groupthink and gets honest answers from your colleagues
5. The seven “magic lenses” for choosing between multiple product ideas
6. The biggest mistake engineers make when building with AI tools
7. The paradox of speed: why “building nothing first” can get you to product-market fit faster
• X: https://twitter.com/jakek
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-knapp/
• Website: https://jakeknapp.com/
• X: https://twitter.com/jazer
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnzeratsky/
• Website: https://johnzeratsky.com/
(00:00) Introduction to Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
(04:41) Origins of the Design Sprint
(11:06) The Foundation Sprint process
(14:40) Phase one: The basics
(16:57) Case study: Latchet
(28:50) Phase two: Differentiation
(36:24) The importance of differentiation
(40:15) Thoughts on price differentiation
(43:37) Case study: Mellow
(46:04) Custom differentiators
(49:30) The mini manifesto
(52:02) Phase three: Approach to the project
(54:50) Magic lenses activity
(01:02:39) Prototyping and testing
(01:10:00) Real-world examples and success stories
(01:15:15) Motivation behind The Foundation Sprint
(01:17:15) The outcome of the sprint: The founding hypothesis
(01:19:28) The Design Sprint
(01:28:19) The role of AI in prototyping
(01:36:50) Final thoughts and resources
• Introducing the Foundation Sprint: From the creators of the Design Sprint: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/introducing-the-foundation-sprint
• Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (authors of Sprint and Make Time, co-founders of Character Capital): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/making-time-for-what-matters-jake
• Eli Blee-Goldman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eli-blee-goldman/
• Character Capital: https://www.character.vc/
• Character Labs: https://www.character.vc/labs
• Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/
• Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/
• Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/naming-expert-david-placek
• Sonos: https://www.sonos.com/
• Vercel: https://vercel.com/
• Windsurf: https://windsurf.com/
• April Dunford on product positioning, segmentation, and optimizing your sales process: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/april-dunford-on-product-positioning
• Positioning: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/positioning
• 10 things we know to be true: https://about.google/company-info/philosophy/
• Gandalf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandalf
• Frodo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frodo_Baggins
• Mordor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordor
• 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/35-years-of-product-design-wisdom-bob-baxley
• The Primal Mark: How the Beginning Shapes the End in the Development of Creative Ideas: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/primal-mark-how-beginning-shapes-end-development-creative-ideas
• Base44: https://base44.com/
• Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-base44-bootstrapped-startup-success-story-maor-shlomo
• Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/
• Blue Bottle Coffee: https://bluebottlecoffee.com
• Reclaim: https://reclaim.ai/
• The official Foundation Sprint + Design Sprint template: https://www.character.vc/miro-template
• Rippling: https://www.rippling.com/
• Latchet: https://latchet.com/
• Mellow: http://getmellow.com/
• AxionOrbital: https://axionorbital.space/
• Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days: https://www.amazon.com/Sprint-audiobook/dp/B019R2DQIY
• Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Time-Focus-Matters-Every/dp/0525572422
• Click: How to Make What People Want: https://www.amazon.com/Click-Make-What-People-Want/dp/1668072114
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
2025-07-13 01:00:52
👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of ✨ Community Wisdom ✨ a subscriber-only email, delivered every Saturday, highlighting the most helpful conversations in our members-only Slack community.
2025-07-12 01:09:33
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Ben Erez is a former PM at Meta, the first PM at three different startups, and now a full-time interview coach and educator. In this episode, Ben shares the five-part framework he developed after studying dozens of mock interviews, interviewing 50+ candidates at Facebook, and coaching hundreds of PMs through their job searches. It’s designed to help you master one of the most misunderstood stages of the PM interview loop: the product sense interview.
In this episode, you’ll learn
Ben’s five-part framework for acing product sense interviews
How to set assumptions and lead with structure
How to define a clear mission that guides every decision
A process for segmenting users and developing strong personas
How to map user journeys and surface high-impact problems
A method for brainstorming, prioritizing, and scoping solutions
Lessons from mock-examples (Claude, Meta, and Netflix)
Common pitfalls to avoid, and how to practice effectively
References
AI Practice Copilot for Product Sense & Analytical Thinking Interviews
The Definitive Guide to Mastering Analytical Thinking Interviews
Follow Lenny: Twitter/X | LinkedIn | Podcast
Follow Ben: Twitter/X | LinkedIn | Newsletter
About
Welcome to Lenny’s Reads, where every week you’ll find a fresh audio version of my newsletter about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career, read to you by the soothing voice of Lennybot.
2025-07-08 20:30:48
👋 Welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lenny’s Podcast | How I AI | Lennybot | Lenny’s Reads | Courses | Swag
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Everyone’s talking about vibe coding, and how important it is to get your hands dirty by using the latest AI tools. But what are people building? And are these products useful, like for real? The answer is a resounding yes.
I asked on X, LinkedIn, and my subscriber Slack community: What’s a product or tool you vibe coded that you actually use regularly in your work or life? And what tool/platform did you use to build it?
The response was overwhelming: Within 24 hours, I got over 1,000 enthusiastic replies, ranging from a buzzer app that automatically answers apartment deliveries, to a hyper-personalized greeting card generator, to a workplace accomplishments tracker, to a daily newsletter to help you learn a new language, to the perfect playlist curator for your next festival road trip. Your stories opened up my mind to what’s possible, and even inspired me to vibe code a few new tools for myself, including this sweet YouTube thumbnail preview tool, a tool to help me craft tweets for my podcast clips, and the beginnings of a tracker of the most mentioned books by podcast guests (data isn’t real yet).
To nudge you forward on your own vibe-coding journey, I’ve pulled together over 50 of my favorite examples from everything you shared.
As you’re reading through this list and wondering what to do, try opening up one of the AI tools (or a few at a time) and simply describe what you want in plain English, as if you were talking to a remote engineer. Then, iterate by describing what you want to change about what you see, as if you’re speaking with a remote engineer. You’ll be surprised by how far you’ll get.
Cursor, Claude Code, Replit, and Lovable were your favorite vibe-coding tools, followed by v0, Bolt, and ChatGPT. Honorable mentions to Gemini, n8n, Zapier Agent, Warp, and Windsurf.
Almost no examples are alike. Everyone is solving their own hyper-specific problem (e.g. group drafting app for your multi-sports fantasy league), or exploring a random idea they (or their kids) suggested (e.g. a cats and sushi browser-based video game). Welcome to the era of n-of-1 personalized software.
You’re creating a lot of Chrome extensions. This makes sense—we spend most of our time in the browser.
Even though you’re solving your own problem, many of the products end up being used by tens/hundreds/thousands of other people. Excellent sign!
Women are vibe-coding like crazy. The male-female ratio in the responses is more balanced than in most tech conversations. Another excellent sign!
Thank you to all 1,000+ of you who shared your stories 🙏
“I built CarbScan to help manage my son’s diabetes and blood glucose levels with faster carb counting. I used Replit. Has become a daily go-to.” [Check it out]
“Every time I put on new eyelashes, I take a picture and record the styles and method used.” [Check it out]
“I vibe coded this with Lovable and use it myself every single day. It’s grown to 85K users in total in nine months. Weather apps had too much clutter for simple daily clothing decisions.” [Check it out]
“I built a stupidly specific workout app for myself. It’s pretty gross and not for anyone else, but I love it. I was chatting with Claude about switching up my program, and I was about to ask it to format it into a table when I realized, ‘Wait, I’m in Claude and it can make Artifacts.’ Finally I ended up dumping the code into v0 to get it deployed.”
“I built a web app using Lovable, Supabase, and Cursor where you can upload photos of your fridge/pantry/receipts (or use voice) to detect ingredients you have at home, save to ‘inventory,’ and generate recipes using AI.
It factors in the user’s set dietary preferences and input of how strict/flexible recipes should be with using what you have in inventory vs. things you need to buy. It also auto-generates a shopping list for ingredients you need to buy for selected recipes.” [Check it out]
“Flowbound is an app that gives me games/exercises to do when I find myself procrastinating on something (which is often).” [Check it out]
“I (and users from all across the U.S.) use Paddles.ai to track and analyze my pickleball matches. Vibe coded and deployed on Replit.” [Check it out]
“I have no coding background and vibe coded this as my first app with Cursor/Xcode + SwiftUI. It helps you taper off high nicotine usage. It’s sticky until you’re ready to quit. Took a month to launch. Recently redesigned from scratch in a couple days.” [Check it out]
“I built Storypot entirely on Replit for my kid. Other kids and parents also seem to like it. We and 60-odd families use it frequently.” [Check it out]
“I built a simple app using Claude Code to help my kids figure out expense planning and saving when in college. Great value add considering it’s a tough topic for parents to make teenagers focus/lean toward.” [Check it out]
“I built Timeless Memories with Lovable, which is pretty insane to think such a complex app can be built with that. And all my friends have used it already.
I also built a logo animator with Bolt that uses the GSAP library to animate our logo in cool ways, for different onboarding experiences.” [Check it out]
“I’m a new dad, and while waiting for the little one to arrive, I started tinkering around with Lovable. I built My Baby Logger over two weekends. Tracks feedings, sleep, diapers, and meds. It’s been helpful for us.” [Check it out]
“I built a chores app for my kids. It’s my first iOS app! I started with v0 but quickly moved off it and started using Claude to help me through areas where I got stuck.” [Check it out]
“I built this for parents, and now I use it every night. It’s a bedtime storytelling ritual that turns your daily emotions into personalized stories for your child. You reflect, drop a ‘pebble’ or plant a ‘story seed,’ and the app creates a calming, age-appropriate story shaped by what’s on your heart. I built it solo in Bolt + Supabase, and what started as a side project became my nightly parenting ritual.” [Check it out]
“I vibe coded an AI greeting card generator, and send everyone I know these hyper-personalised cards.” [Check it out]
“It checks my calendar each morning, identifies who I’m meeting with, and compiles everything I need to show up prepared.” [Here’s how to build it]
“I use this daily at work.” [Check it out]
“A Chrome extension that adds my availability to emails in natural, human-style language. It also analyzes suggested times from others, picks the best one, and books the meeting. İt learns my meeting habits to recommend the most suitable slots.
Then, a Slack app for team scheduling that uses the same core algorithm. It learns everyone’s preferences and finds the best time when I type something like Schedule a 45-minute call with Mary and Jane this week. Or Schedule a focus time for me today. I need 2 hours. Both were built with Replit.”
“I built a time tracking app with Warp.dev. All done in a day.” [Check it out]
“I built a Gmail add-on that doesn’t let my inbox hijack my day or steal my attention. I use it every day. It holds my inbound email and delivers it to my inbox on a schedule I set (e.g. 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.) but still lets important emails through right away if they match certain VIP keywords (e.g. verification code), VIP domains (e.g. my-kid’s-school.org), or VIP email addresses (e.g. [email protected]). Built with Gemini.”
2025-07-07 19:03:18
Paragon—Ship every SaaS integration your customers want
Notion—The best AI tools for work
Hiten Shah is a serial founder who has started several analytics and security companies, including Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. The latest one, Nira, was acquired by Dropbox in 2024. In this episode, he shares how he turns ChatGPT from a simple chatbot into a personal workplace coach, sales strategist, and productivity multiplier.
What you’ll learn:
How to create AI versions of your boss by loading operating manuals and personality tests into ChatGPT projects
A simple approach for turning sales frameworks into customized discovery call scripts for any product
Why context is everything—and how to load ChatGPT with the right information before asking for outputs
The “show it what great looks like” technique that dramatically improves AI responses
How to build a personal AI coach using your own personality assessments and communication style
Why you should use temporary sessions for random queries to keep your main ChatGPT memory clean
Blog: https://hitenism.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hnshah/
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
(00:00) Introduction to Hiten
(02:55) Why Hiten primarily uses ChatGPT
(04:12) The importance of context and memory management
(07:58) Demo: Creating “What Would Morgan Do” project
(13:30) Using personality types to improve AI coaching
(16:20) Building a personal operating system in ChatGPT
(20:55) Mixing structured frameworks and personal context
(23:20) Demo: Winning by Design sales framework implementation
(30:00) Creating discovery call scripts
(31:44) Using ChatGPT’s deep research feature to understand Claire’s leadership style
(36:30) Lightning round and final thoughts
• ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/
• Claude: https://claude.ai/
• Hiten's Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j15hoR3qZLQMJuW-mtfYFyhXM0CpYHQkZJuUgqHBsZs/edit?tab=t.0
• Winning by Design: https://winningbydesign.com/
• Enneagram: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/
• Human Design: https://humandesign.tools/
• Myers-Briggs: https://www.myersbriggs.org/
• DISC: https://www.discprofile.com/
• Lex: https://lex.page/
• The Lean Startup: https://theleanstartup.com/
• Sean Ellis score: https://pmfsurvey.com/
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2025-07-06 19:02:35
Sauce—Turn customer pain into product revenue
Dscout—The UX platform to capture insights at every stage: from ideation to production
Contentsquare—Create better digital experiences
Maor Shlomo is the founder of Base44, an AI-powered app builder that he bootstrapped to an over $80 million acquisition by Wix in just six months. As a solo founder (with severe ADHD), he hit $1 million ARR just three weeks after launch and grew the product to more than 400,000 users, all while navigating two wars in Israel and never raising a dollar of outside funding.
What you’ll learn:
The growth playbook that took Base44 from three friends to 400,000 users without spending any money on marketing
How he hasn’t written a single line of front-end code in three months—and how to structure your code repository to make it easier for AI to write your code
His AI productivity stack that allowed him to compete against heavily funded competitors
Why being a solo founder in AI might be the ultimate advantage (and the wedding story that almost killed the business)
The story of signing the $80M acquisition deal while war broke out with Iran
How to identify when to sell vs. stay independent (and why Maor chose acquisition despite being highly profitable)
The counterintuitive product decision that tripled activation by removing a “helpful” feature
How building in public on LinkedIn drove more growth than any paid channel
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maor-shlomo-1088b4144/
(00:00) Introduction to Maor and Base44
(08:16) The origin story: how Base44 came to be
(14:55) Bootstrapping and solo founding: challenges and insights
(22:52) Productivity hacks and tech stack for solo founders
(27:23) How to get started using Base44
(28:47) Thoughts on raising money
(34:05) Distribution in the age of AI
(36:09) Ambition and goals
(40:05) Growth strategies: from first users to thousands
(51:32) Building in public
(57:42) The solo founder journey
(01:00:23) Community support
(01:03:23) Hackathons and partnerships
(01:06:42) The importance of velocity in product development
(01:08:20) Technical stack and infrastructure insights
(01:15:24) Activation lessons
(01:18:19) The acquisition journey with Wix
(01:25:14) Final thoughts and advice for founders
• Base44: https://base44.com/
• Retool: https://retool.com/
• Tzofim: https://www.israelscouts.org/
• Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/
• RescueTime: https://www.rescuetime.com/
• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/
• Wix: https://www.wix.com/
• The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-rise-of-cursor-michael-truell
• Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (CEO and co-founder): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-lovable-anton-osika
• Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons
• Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-product-replit-amjad-masad
• Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/everyones-an-engineer-now-guillermo-rauch
• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com
• Yoav Orlev on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoav-orlev-4a044b72
• WhatsApp: https://www.whatsapp.com/
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/
• Google: https://about.google/
• MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/
• Deloitte: https://www.deloitte.com/
• Render: Render.com
• Claude 4: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4
• Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/app
• Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.