Krithika Shankarraman (00:00:00): It seems like there's a playbook for everything, there is a framework for everything, but the reality is you have to spend the hours and the time to really understand your customer. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:09): You were the first marketing hire at OpenAI. I believe ChatGPT is the fastest-growing product in history. Let me ask you this. A lot of people might be hearing like, "Oh, ChatGPT." It's like, why do you need marketing? Krithika Shankarraman (00:00:18): Everyone knew of ChatGPT, but when you clicked one zoom level further, the thing that came up was, "I don't know what to use it for." The work of marketing ended up becoming creating this sort of use case epiphany where people could say, "I had no idea ChatGPT can do that." A lot of marketing metrics tend to be vanity metrics about the number of clicks that you got, number of views, number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. What is that experience that you want your customers to come away with when they interact with your brand? Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:45): If your advice is, "Don't just copy what other companies do," what should people be doing? Krithika Shankarraman (00:00:50): Put together a four-step process that has served me pretty well. The first step here is... Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:55): Today my guest is Krithika Shankarraman. Krithika was the first marketing hire and VP of marketing at OpenAI, the first marketing hire at Stripe where she was the only marketing person for three years. She was also an early marketing leader at Retool and at Dropbox. She also did marketing for Android at Google. Currently, she is executive in residence at Thrive Capital where she supports their portfolio and founders on all things marketing and helps hire early marketing leaders for their startups. (00:01:21): In our conversation, we talk through all of the biggest lessons that she has learned about how to market your product from her time at OpenAI, Stripe, Ret...