Lenny's Evil Twin's Podcast

They invented a new category name. And history has a verdict on that move: 90% of tech companies that have gone public over the past five years positioned themselves in EXISTING markets, not new ones. Honen skipped straight to inventing the word "fluflommer." | Cornerstone OnDemand is hideous. It still owns the contract. | Honen is doing all the expensive market education work so that Microsoft Te...

Wave is 100% free with zero paywall. They have built a structurally identical retention death machine. | If a CSV was too low a bar, what happens when the bar is just... owning a Mac? | A monetization strategy where the customer pays a third party — Groq — and Wave collects exactly zero dollars from that transaction. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Lessons from going freemium: a decis...

Somebody looked at entrepreneurship and said "the hard part is the typing." | Manus cheerfully builds your "premium tinned fish storefront" with Lorem Ipsum descriptions and a hero image of a can of cat food, then tells you it's perfect. | Sample prompts are a band-aid on a broken leg. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for growing consumer subscr...

They built a corporate org chart for a dropshipping operation. | "Every action is visible and approvable" doesn't sound like automation, it sounds like a second job. | "Free to start" is a great hook — right up until the agent starts. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Why your AI product needs a different development lifecycle (Newsletter), What it feels like when you've found product-m...

Today's victim is Empromptu AI. They promise to "build your AI app AND train your custom model" — which is the startup equivalent of a restaurant advertising "we cook the food AND wash the dishes." Congratulations. You've described having a kitchen. | Jen Abel says early-stage enterprise ACV sweet spot is $50K to $100K for founder-led startups. But Empromptu is leading with "working features in 10...

Today's victim is InsForge — the "agent-native cloud infrastructure platform." They took every backend service a developer needs, bundled it into one platform, and then called it a new market category. Congratulations, you invented the cloud. Again. | Neighborrow had journalists writing love letters, users sending weekly fan emails, and startup competition wins — and zero people actually using the...

Congratulations: you built a conference room for robots, and charged humans to sit in it. | Where is the Vokal waitlist full of angry fans demanding a credit card link? | The product page reads like a merger between a pitch deck and a Wikipedia disambiguation page. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Positioning (Newsletter), How today's fastest-growing B2B businesses turned their early u...

They've essentially built a coworker nobody hired, who cannot be fired, and who will interrupt your Zoom call to update Salesforce in front of your client. | HeyGen's CEO said it plainly: "Building a cool AI demo doesn't mean we have a product that customers love and is useful." The novelty-driven acquisition leads to the phantom PMF churn cliff — and Mina's entire wow factor is watching an AI spe...

Congratulations — you spent how long building this, and the best pitch you landed on is "we're Google Photos, except Google Photos is bad"? | They built a product for the person who buys it and forgot to build a product for the person who approves the budget. | Clipto's positioning literally admits in the first sentence that someone has already done it before. Google did it. Clipto just... took th...

No code, no signup, no subscription. They've also decided "no revenue" while they were at it. | Their own website calls it an "App Workshop," which is just a polite word for homework. | At some point "truly yours" becomes "truly free forever and also we are bankrupt." Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers (Newsletter...

Autonomous agents handling your invoicing, your recruiting, your customer support. The cofounder that never sleeps, never asks for equity, and absolutely will invoice your best client for the wrong amount at 3am. | Tamar Yehoshua watched Glean users ask "what should my top priority be next week" when the system had zero context on their priorities. Now imagine that confusion, but the agent already...

Brew added a text box and called it a revolution. | They built a four-times-less-effective growth machine and put a gradient on it. | Brew starts at zero, which means they've scientifically optimized for maximum possible churn before a single email gets sent. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: How to make an impact in your first 90 days (Newsletter), What is good monthly churn (Newslette...

They didn't build a product; they built a buffet where every dish is lukewarm. | Unabyss just volunteered to be the Ask Jeeves of AI context management. | Typeform had one product and still got lost. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 2: Identify your super-specific who (Newsletter), Ecosystem is the next big growth channel (Newsletter)...

ModelHub can hit a thousand stars on GitHub and still have no idea which users actually needed it versus which ones just downloaded it because it was four megabytes. | Who does a local LLM developer send their menu bar app to — their models? The blobs in the HuggingFace cache don't have email addresses. | They've built the most developer-friendly tool in the world and then forgot the part where th...

Memdex's answer to "give the LLM everything" is "here are your ten most recent conversations, enjoy." | They're not landing and expanding, they're landing and evaporating. | Your product's own pitch explains why the free version is useless. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business (Newsletter), The Subscription Value Loop: A frame...

50,000 developers onboarded, 100,000 community members — and not a single revenue number anywhere on the site. The $1M ARR benchmark for top B2B companies is 1.5 years from first customer. You know what's conspicuously absent from TestSprite's homepage? The year they signed their first customer. | TestSprite is collecting compliments on the lobby while the hotel is empty. | They send a "fleet of p...

Category creation requires a specific enemy to defeat — HubSpot had outbound, Salesforce had spreadsheets. Tycoon's enemy is apparently "having employees," which describes every person on Earth who doesn't want employees. That's not a category, that's a demographic so wide it includes my dentist. | Managing a thousand AI agents in parallel sounds incredible in a demo and sounds like a support tick...

A startup called Cascade tried that same "horizontal toolkit for a specific buyer" pitch. Their conclusion? "Business analysts at midsize companies no longer faced the diversity of analytical problems they used to, which meant that more opinionated, targeted products could pick up what was left." StoreClaw is building the melting island. | StoreClaw's "connect in minutes" onboarding isn't a moat —...

Today's victim is PollyReach. You tell your AI "book me a table for 7pm" — and it calls the restaurant for you. Congratulations, you have automated the one phone task that already had OpenTable, Resy, and a free app called "your own fingers." | Consumer subscription apps have lower ARPU than B2B SaaS, they have a harder time expanding ARPU than almost any other model, and out of every consumer sub...

SocLeads is competing directly with Meta's own ad targeting and LinkedIn's own Sales Navigator. That's not a partnership, that's poaching. | Google Maps billing you for "any row, which may not include an email" is not a data product. That's a lottery ticket with a monthly subscription fee. | Congratulations, you've automated the part of sales that everyone already hates, and made it dependent on f...

Forty minutes. For one minute. That's a 40-to-1 suffering ratio. | You're activating a waiting room full of tire-kickers who want to play with a "swarm of AI directors" and will ghost you the second the free trial ends. | That is a churn machine wearing a creative brief as a disguise. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion (Newsletter), H...

Who looked at video production and thought, "you know what this needs? More steps"? | Loova is out here inventing "AI director" as a category, doing all the hard work of making that term mean something, so that when Meta ships Creator Studio Pro with a director mode, Loova becomes the footnote. | Loova is just a canvas sitting on top of Sora 2, Kling AI, Google Veo — models it doesn't own, didn't...

HasData's homepage lists Claude, ChatGPT, AI agents, data pipelines, AND CLI users as simultaneous targets. Geoffrey Moore's exact words: "You don't hold a match under a big log." HasData is currently holding one match under six logs. | PayPal dropped every other plan when they went all-in on eBay. HasData's homepage still proudly lists Zillow scrapers, Indeed scrapers, Google Maps scrapers, and e...

They picked the single demographic most allergic to paying for software and called it a go-to-market strategy. | Spellar has five AI model logos, 20-plus integrations, and zero evidence of a sales motion. The enterprise is going to get eaten, and they'll find out in the renewal email. | Congratulations — you spent how many engineering cycles to build a product whose entire value proposition is "we...

Ghost is simultaneously the best host for Minecraft AND Valheim AND Rust AND Palworld AND Counter-Strike. The lesson from a startup that didn't make it is explicit: "Horizontal products win if a specific audience encounters enough use cases that they want one tool to address them all." Gamers don't want one tool for all games — they want the best tool for their game. | Ghost hasn't chosen a bad pa...