The first post Lenny wrote online in 2019 was on Medium. He had recently left Airbnb and wanted to remember the top things he learned while working there.
He said he didn’t think anything of it – but apparently, a lot of other people did.
This post got 29,000 “claps” which are similar to likes.
The CEO of Airbnb shared it with the entire company in an email.
Lenny was planning on starting a company, not building a newsletter. He wrote a few more articles on Medium, and those did pretty well also.
But his friend, Andrew Chen, told him that it’s rare to find something you love doing, that the market also loves.
He told Lenny to double down on it.
Lenny stopped writing on Medium and started his own newsletter to share his ideas.
He went back to all of those posts and added a line at the bottom letting people know about his newsletter.
That got him his first 100 or so subscribers.
He was able to use the audience that Medium was able to provide him to move people over and kickstart his email list.
Nowadays, I don’t think Medium sends you the same amount of traffic like they used to, but
That same friend, Andrew Chen, had his own website and newsletter. Lenny was telling him about an idea he had for an article, and Andrew really enjoyed it.
Andrew loved the idea for the post, and told Lenny he should publish that on his site as a guest post instead.
Lenny agreed.
