Lenny's Evil Twin's Podcast

AI Co-Builder promises to build business apps that actually work. They charge you to describe what you need and get a broken app in return — it's like paying a restaurant to cook you food that's still frozen in the middle. | Dan Shipper runs a company with 100% AI-written code and explicitly states that conventional SaaS apps are impossible for non-technical users beyond demos. These people litera...

Today's victim is Spotify. A music streaming service so desperate to justify its existence, it's literally being used as Google's guinea pig for alternative billing because their margins are too pathetic to afford normal app store fees. | With Spotify's notoriously thin margins paying most revenue to record labels, their contribution margin per customer is so anemic that their customer acquisition...

Today's victim is Zoom. "One platform to connect" — because apparently video calls weren't enough, so they decided to add chat, docs, phone systems, contact centers, AI assistants, and probably a coffee machine. They've become the startup equivalent of a Swiss Army knife designed by a committee that never met. | When building horizontal products, "when you try to do something for everyone, you don...

A screen recording tool that somehow convinced millions of people they need to film themselves explaining what a three-sentence email could handle. | Enterprise sales for people who want to avoid talking to other people? That's like selling hearing aids at a death metal concert. | Their homepage brags about "millions of people across 400,000 companies" — which sounds impressive until you realize t...

They take forever to ship anything while claiming it's for "safety," which is just slow development wearing a lab coat. | Anthropic takes years between model releases and still can't consistently beat GPT-4. | Meanwhile, they're bragging about helping a Mars rover drive four hundred meters like they invented interplanetary navigation. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: What is good reten...

Today's victim is Superhuman — the company that looked at Gmail and thought "what this needs is a $30 monthly subscription and the complexity of NASA mission control." | They're literally choosing the churn-maximizing payment structure while calling themselves productivity experts. | Despite claiming "AI that works everywhere," they're still a glorified email client with zero switching costs. Sour...

They've built a design tool that's so collaborative, your entire design team can watch you screw up in real time. Nothing says "healthy workplace culture" like live-editing someone else's mockup while they're still working on it. | Welcome to the plateau, Figma. | Figma's building a beautiful house on a foundation of quicksand. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Scaling your B2B growth e...

They promise "free, fun, effective" learning, but their mascot literally threatens you with death memes when you skip a lesson. | They had to steal tricks from FarmVille to make people care about conjugating French verbs — that's not product-market fit, that's digital manipulation. | When your growth engine breaks, you're left with an owl making threats to teenagers. Sources from Lenny's Newslette...

They're billing themselves as purpose-built for modern teams, which is startup speak for "we couldn't compete with Jira so we added chatbots." | Linear's expensive AI-powered features risk becoming another underutilized enterprise tool that developers ignore while they go back to their trusted workflows. | You cannot cross the chasm of product-led growth because enterprise buyers need serious hand...

They turned workplace chat into a notification casino where every ping is a slot machine pull. Now they want to add Slackbot AI to coordinate your work — because what busy professionals really need is a robot scheduling their existential dread. | They're charging enterprises for AI that can't think while teams average 43 apps already. Forty-three! They built a digital filing cabinet with a chatbot...

Today's victim is Notion — the AI workspace that works for you, as long as "working" means replacing forty-seven different tools with one tool that does all forty-seven things poorly. | Notion brags about penetrating 62% of Fortune 100 but conspicuously avoids mentioning their own retention rates. | Their pricing calculator shows $4,080 in annual savings, implying high price points — but they stil...