Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more

0:00Before he came on, I asked on Twitter, what should I ask to have go to? And the most recurring theme actually had to do with AI. How do you think all these new AI companies build brands to distinguish and differentiate themselves? AI very soon is going to stop being a feature. The same way electricity is not a feature. What AI companies and all companies need to do is say, what's in this for the user? What promise do I want to make? A difficult promise, a remarkable promise. And then how do I keep it? You wrote a new book. But you basically talk about how a great strategy has tension at the center of it.

0:31Tension is at the heart of every art form and every innovation. What we do when we launch a new product, we say we have this thing that can do X. And now the person is imagining what their life might be like if that were true. If they fall in love with that possibility, now there's tension. Did you tell the truth? Is it going to work for them? There's the section that stuck out to me, these kind of four insights. That basically determine what your life is going to be like outside of actually building a product. For a product person, these are the critical choices. And you probably have glossed over them.

1:11Today, my guest is Seth Goden. Seth is an absolute legend. He's published 21 books, including 18 international bestsellers. He's been blogging every single day for almost 10 ,000 days in a row now. His writing and his advice have inspired me and so many people all over the world for the past few decades. He shares wisdom and advice around stuff that everyone can benefit from, including how ideas spread, when to quit, how to lead, how to stand out, and most of all how to change everything. In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth has founded several companies including Yo -Yo Dine and Squid -Doo.

1:49He also started the Alt NBA program. And as you'll hear in our conversation, he actually started his career as a product manager. In our conversation, Seth shares advice on how to know if you have good taste and how to build your taste, how to build a brand in an increasingly crowded world of AI startups and AI content, his thoughts on the Jaguar rebrand and also the Tesla Cyber Truck. We also delve into his new book, This Is Strategy, including why every great strategy has tension at its center, why you need to understand the systems within which you operate in order to build a great strategy, and how choosing your customers, your distribution strategy, and how you validate your idea will inform the product you build and the life that you live.

2:28We also talk about how he used Claude as a writing assistant in developing this new book. This episode is short and packed with insights, which I know is what you all love. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Seth Godin.

2:51Seth, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. What a treat Lenny. Thank you for having me. Lenny was my late mom's nickname, so it's good to see him out. That's so cool. I've never heard it used for a woman and every Lenny out there, I've met his wonderful. I imagine she is wonderful. First, I just want to say how honored I am to have you on this podcast. When I actually started this podcast, I was like, and I was listening to you on Tim Ferriss at that point. I was like, man, what if one day I get Seth, go ahead and on my podcast, how cool would that be? I've read so many of your books.

3:24I have a bunch of them in the bookshelf back there. I reference your stuff all the time. So thank you again for giving us. Thank you. It's a treat to talk to you. Today's episode is brought to you by DX. If you're an engineering leader or on a platform team, at some point your CEO will inevitably ask you for productivity metrics. But measuring engineering organizations is hard and we can all agree that simple metrics like the number of PRs or commits doesn't tell the full story. That's where DX comes in. DX is an engineering intelligence solution designed by leading researchers, including those behind the Dora and space frameworks.

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4:46Vanta's market leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1 ,000 off Vanta when you go to Vanta .com slash Lenny. That's V -A -M -T -A -D .com slash Lenny. I want to start by asking a question that one of your former colleagues suggested ask you, Wes Cowell, I imagine you remember Wes? Of course. Wes and I sat in the room just to two of us for years.

5:29So what she suggested asked you, and this question I love is she asked her, what did you learn most from Seth Godin working with him? And she immediately said it's helping her build better taste and increase her standards, having really high standards. So I want to ask you first of all, just how do you know if you have good taste in high standards and then how do you build good taste and higher standards? Great question. Thank you, Wes. I define good taste as knowing what other people want just before they do. So if you're the only person who wants peanut butter covered licorice, you're entitled to eat peanut butter covered licorice, but you don't have good taste because everyone else thinks that's weird.

6:12And people, whether they're jazz musicians or fabric designers, are seen as having good taste when they bring something to the world that the world didn't necessarily expect, but is glad to see. What do you find helps? So Wes learned from watching you that she realized like, okay, my standards are not nearly as high as they could be. Other than working with you, maybe that's the answer is work with people like you that have really high standards. Just what do you find is most helpful in helping people build taste and also just increase their standards? Standards, it's worth understanding what quality is.

6:50And the people who listen to this podcast know better than most. Quality is not luxury. Quality is not perfection. Quality means meeting spec. And if you meet spec, you're done. If you don't think the spec is good enough, make a better spec. But if you meet spec, you're done. And so what it means to have high standards is that you relentlessly improve the spec in service of the people you're working with and for. And what it doesn't mean is that you take something that meets spec and refuse to ship it because you're a perfectionist. That's hiding. And so what I learned at Spinnaker, where I had my first job, Wheel Job as a product manager, was this idea that we weren't there to make perfect for us.

7:35We were there to delight the person who was buying the software. And our standards were untouchable. We said, if that person, the one we're describing, is delighted with what we shipped, it's good. And if they're not, it doesn't matter what kind of excuses we have. This is the opposite of what most people in this job do, which is they say, how do I please my boss? And if you're just doing your job, then don't expect to get rewarded for more than just doing your job because we can find lots of people who can just do your job. Now, reminds me of one of your other really powerful pieces of advice about how no matter your job, this kind of a tangent, but I really stuck with me once I read you your advice here is no matter what job you have, you couldn't love it, enjoy it, be amazing at it, even if you're just like a waitress or whatever.

8:26You just talk through that because that's so powerful. Well, I think I got it from the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the idea is, there's no perfect job that a friend of mine, Tim, is a famous jazz saxophonist. And he's got a schlep from city to city, and he's got a play to half empty rooms, and he's got to deal with this and deal with this. So you're never going to have unlimited artistic freedom. But what we all have is the ability to understand where the boundaries of our work lie and go there. And if you're a barista and you've chosen to be a barista, maybe because it's the best thing you could get, well, you're not going to get the next hour over again.

9:09So what would it be like to be the best barista in the world for an hour? Would that be worth it for you? Because I've had menial jobs in food service, and I got to tell you, when the boss forces you to be mediocre and bored, there's no amount of money they can pay you to do that job. But if you're there and you have a chance to add the light to someone's day, you're doing that for you, not because you're getting paid. And you could totally tell these people in the world when you, you know, you go to barista that just couldn't tell, it's just loves your job. Like I know, imagine she knows this is not, you know, her career long -term, but she just embraces it and just has fun with it.

9:46There's so much power to that. Kind of about a different note. You mentioned that you're a product manager, which I did not know. That's amazing. So most of the people listening to this podcast are product managers. They're either product managers, founders, people that want to be founders, and then people that work with product managers. So first of all, I guess could you share that part of your life? Because I don't think people know that. So the origin story could take all day, but I'm not going to tell the whole thing. I'm going to tell the part that I thought was normal, that turned out to be the luckiest thing in the world.

10:14The summer is between the two years of business school is very important to establish your career arc. I got a job at Spinnaker software. Spinnaker invented educational computer games. I was the 30th employee. And the summer was spent doing assistant brand manager kind of stuff, going to meetings for the ad agency, writing copy. But at the end of the summer, they had a lovely going away party for me because I was flying back to California. And then at the end, the president and company, the chairman of the company, and the head of marketing, bring me into this segment and say, we have a secret project.

10:47We want you to work for us while you're at business school. And we're going to pay you almost nothing. Okay, what's the secret project? We're going to do computer adventure games with illustrations and music based on science fiction novels. And we've already acquired the work of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clark. Now, I had read every science fiction book in the Clearfield Public Library from Asimov to Zalazni. This was a dream come true. But they thought my job was going to be make the packaging and run the ads. And what I discovered, first of all, is that I couldn't really go back to business school.

11:22So I showed up hardly at all at Stanford and just, you know, took a lot of red eyes. But I discovered that the engineers, the development team, they had a lot of people vying for their time. And if I didn't figure out how to get them to give me way more than my fair share of development, I wasn't going to have any products to make next Christmas and then I was going to be out of a job. And so I started a newsletter internally. I was one of the first people in the world to have desktop publishing because I was a beta tester for the Mac. And in it, I would mention anybody in the engineering team who had worked on my project.

11:58And I would say something good about them. And then I would print it out and put it in every single person's in our office mailbox. And within three months, four months, partly because the project was really good. Fourty engineers were working for me. And no one was reporting to me. And so I became the de facto product manager. And that is when I learned marketing is the product. You don't make a product and then hand it to some marketing Yahoo and say, go put a logo on this. That the product we made and five in a row went gold, saved the company. Though product is why it worked. And so I was supposed to know how to code, but I didn't.

12:42But I could be in the room. And the last month, Radish I could bought how many units? Three thousand stores times five times five. A lot of units. And if we had missed a date, they were going to cancel the order in the company to go bankrupt. And the software wasn't even close to done. And we didn't have any source control like we do now. There was no cloud. So it was all in my head. So I did not leave the office. I'm not exaggerating this. I did not leave the office for the last 22 days. Slept for four hours a night upstairs. And if anyone had a question, I could tell them who to talk. That was so thrilling.

13:21It was so thrilling to make those decisions, to control this team, none of whom were in it for the money, to make something we were proud of. And then the stuff ships. Everyone else goes home to sleep for a month. But I am the project manager and the marketing guy. So I got to stay at work. And the next day, the phone rings. And it's Herbie Hancock on the phone. The great jazz musician. And Herbie says, the receptionist said, you're the person in charge of Fahrenheit 451. And I said, Herbie, I'm 24 years old, right? Herbie? And he went on and on about how he had stayed up all night to play it, and then he loved it.

14:00I love how much, how natural of a product manager you were in these things you shared. Or just thinking everyone deflecting credit and all these things. It's sign of a great PM. All these lines I wanted to ask, actually. So, European, early on, now you're obviously spent a lot of time marketing. I know you're saying there's obviously strong connections between the two. But is there anything you find that people building the product most often miss or misunderstand that just annoys you? Or do you think they need to hear? Maybe I got seven, but I'll try to do the top of my head. The first one is this.

14:32Empathy is not about kindness and empathy. It's not an option. This is something that you are making for other people. So the whole idea of RTFM, read the manual, I'm angry at you. If you're saying that to your customers, you made a mistake. They did not make a mistake. The second one is that the thing about projects is when you run out of time and you run out of money, the project is over. Don't run out of time. Don't run out of money. Good intentions are no reason for an extension. The professional doesn't ask for an extension because the professional understands that things you didn't expect are going to happen.

15:11That's part of the deal. And I guess the third one would be for software, particularly software as a service. If you don't build a network effect into what you are making, you are almost certainly going to fail. You cannot hope that Apple is going to pick you, promote you, and magically have you be successful. The question is, will this work better for my users if they tell other people about it? And if the answer is no, then why would they tell other people about it? And if they don't tell other people about it, no one's going to hear about it. But if the answer is yes, then your marketing problem is pretty much self.

15:50I feel like each of these is like its own book that we could talk through. And I want to come back to this last point and how it relates to the purple cow I want to spend a little time there. But first, I want to ask a marketing question. So before you came on, I asked on Twitter, what should I ask that go? And he's coming on my podcast. I got a lot of suggestions. The most recurring theme actually had to do with AI. Actually, the co -founder of Intercom asked this question and it kind of echoes what many people are wondering. So this question is, how do you think all these new AI companies build brands to distinguish and differentiate themselves in a world that's increasingly filled with AI companies, AI products, AI content?

16:26Well, the first question is what's a brand? Because it's not a logo. A brand is a promise. It's what do I expect from you? It's what I miss you if you were gone. And Hyatt Hotel has a logo. Nike has a brand. The way we know this is if Nike opened a hotel, we'd know what it would be like. But if Hyatt decided to make sneakers, we have no clue. They might be comfortable, but that's all we would know. And so if you want to build a brand, you got to stand for something and you got to say what you don't do. And the second thing is, AI very soon is going to stop being a feature. The same way electricity is not a feature.

17:06That lots and lots of things run on electricity, but they're not electricity companies. They just happen to use electricity. So what AI companies and all companies need to do is say, what's in this for the user? What promise do I want to make? A difficult promise, a remarkable promise. And then how do I keep it? So making absurd promises might work at the VC level, but it doesn't work when you're talking to consumers, because you can only break that promise one time. And so to wrap up the brand part, airlines don't have brands and airlines don't have loyalty. And the way we know this is that the only reason people stick with an airline is for the points, which is bribery.

17:49Loyalty is, would you pay extra to stick with this? And if you wouldn't pay extra, then the brand has no value. I love this phrase, make a promise and keep it. And the AI element basically makes it, that raises the bar because many more promises are being made, fewer promises are probably being kept. So the advice they're continuing making and ambitious promise, and then the key is actually deliver on that, and that's what builds your brand. Yeah, and you know, I have a very emotional connection to cloud .ai. I think they have a brand. ChatGPT's reputation with me is not good, because it regularly over promises and under delivers.

18:30And it does it without kindness or humility. Whereas, Claude, I don't know how they did it, at least in my experience, brings kindness and humility so when it doesn't know, it's very clear. And it's not lazy and it's not angry at me. And so, I happily pay extra for Claude, because it has a brand. Whereas, ChatGPT for me is just a tool that I use if I have other options. I love the Anthropics, slash Claude's billboards, or the ones without the drama. The AI company without the drama. I was going to say this at the end, but let's actually talk about it. So you mentioned somewhere that you actually used Claude to help you write this book and refine the book, which I think is going to increasingly happen.

19:15Could you share that process of how you develop, like, what did you do that might be helpful to people to help you write this book? Well, to be clear about my brand promise, because it's true, every word that has my name on it, I wrote. Every blog post, every book, I don't have a team. This is my whole staff, as me. What I did with Claude, and which I encouraged people to do in the book, is I would upload a list of four things and say, which, what did I miss? And it would suggest three things to complete the list. And often, they would be things I hadn't thought of. And then I could go right about that.

19:47Or I would upload a couple chapters, and I would say, what is it claims I'm making here that you don't think are sustainable, can be that I'm sustaining, right? And it became this patient editor that is so hard to find in the real world, because editors aren't paid enough, and given enough time to do their job right. And what I find is, if I have a sentence that doesn't sound enough like me, I can ask Claude to help me figure out why that's true. I love that tactic of using it to figure out what you missed. I feel like you agree with this. I find that most of it, when I write, part of it is, I'm putting an idea out there and want to see what I got wrong and what I missed.

20:36And I like that you can basically skip that step, and don't put it out, and just make the thing you put out actually better. Well, you know, the thing about blogging every day is at first, it felt like, how am I going to keep up? But once I could build a queue, because I didn't want my streak to end. How long does the streak at this point, by the way? Post number 10 ,000 comes out at the beginning of 2025. Oh my god, in a row. In a row. Some days there were two. But what I found as I got a little bit of a queue is that I would feel bad, because I had something to say, but I couldn't, because there was already one in the queue.

21:17So I shifted from, I have to write something too. I get to write something. And now, because I've taken the pressure off, I have time to rewrite it, because I don't have a shortage of ideas for tomorrow. I have extra one. This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the developer platform for building native, customer -facing integrations with third -party apps. Our native integrations on your product roadmap, whether it's to ingest context from your user's external data and documents, or to sync data and automate tasks across your user's other apps, integrations are mission -critical for B2B software products today.

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22:36That's useparaglenn .com. So let's talk about your book. You wrote a new book. It's called This is Strategy. I've been reading it over the past week, and I've been so into it that I actually left it at my mother -in -law's house. I don't have it with me. So it's called This is Strategy. It's about how to build strategy and develop a strategy. There's a lot to love about the book, but the section in the middle that is what most stuck out to me, that I want to spend a little time on, you have this four sequence of advice that I love. So I'm just going to read it real quick. Choose your customers, choose your future, choose your competition, and choose your future, choose the source of validation, and choose your future, choose your distribution, and you're also choosing your future.

23:22Can you just talk through these kind of four insights, these four steps, that basically determine what your product in life is going to be like outside of actually building the products. Yeah, and for a product person, these are the critical choices, and you probably have glossed over them. You have probably assumed it's a given, and you've sacrificed your agency over the four most important things you should be choosing. So the first one is picking your customers. If your motto is, you can pick anyone and wear anyone. If your hope is that you have to win SEO to get anything, you're not going to succeed.

24:02When you choose your smallest viable audience, what language they speak, how much money they have, what problem they're trying to solve, what their technical facility is, whether they're short tempered, whether they're kind, whether they're going to stick with you, you have chosen everything that's going to go into the product and what your future is going to be like. And so, you know, the humane pin people, whatever it was called, made a mistake when they picked their customers, because they showed up like they had a finished Apple Quality product, and they were trying to appeal to the kind of people that would buy on pre -order a finished Apple Quality product.

24:40And when they shipped something that wasn't that, and they knew it wasn't that, they're doomed. Whereas if you say, here we are in Product Hunt, we're only looking for 400 people, we're looking for people who like the Raspberry Pi, who wants to walk with this thing. Now, you can dance, and you can have all these other things happen because you picked a different customer. If you decide to be a wedding photographer in the Hamptons, well, you better expect to have some very spoiled, cranky, brides and grooms, and grooms and grooms and brides and brides that you have to deal with, because you picked your customers.

25:14Okay, so then the second one, which comes with that, is with your competition. Because if you're competing against Walmart, why are you surprised that they keep lowering their prices? That's what Walmart does, right? That way you decide which space that you're going to operate in, you've built an enormous set of boundaries around what you do. The third one is validation. If you are trying to please your boss, that's what you're going to do. If on the other hand, you can have one difficult conversation with your boss and say, can we agree that I'm not trying to match your taste? I'm trying to match the taste of these 400 people that we've agreed are our customers.