Instacart

Lenny's Podcast · Aug 28

How 80,000 companies build with AI: Products as organisms and the death of org charts | Asha Sharma

Handles a billion items updating 3,000 times every minute and won on reliability and scale. It has 600,000 shoppers, and Sharma was formerly its COO.

Lenny's Podcast · Aug 9

Inside ChatGPT: The fastest growing product in history | Nick Turley (OpenAI)

Turley was a product leader there during the pandemic, where he learned to hustle after earlier taking his sweet time.

Lenny's Podcast · Jul 11

Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)

Instacart signed up for Stripe with a Gmail address and went on to deliver food during Covid, showing nobody knows what a small founder will build.

Lenny's Podcast · May 26

Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YT, IG, FB)

Bangaly was VP of Product there and calls it his worst job fit, since his systems vision clashed with the company's operations needs. Reordering took seven or eight clicks though 90% of an order repeats after five orders, and the real job was Taco Tuesday.

Tips

• Dogfood your own product in a fresh account as a new user▶ 56:20A new Gmail account on YouTube gives a clearly worse experience, since search relies on watch history.
• Make reordering easy to drive retention in repeat-purchase products▶ 1:00:59After five orders at Instacart, 90% of a user's order was the same.
• Talk to people who left a company before joining it▶ 1:29:15He calls his time at Instacart his worst job fit.

Lenny's Podcast · Jun 25

Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor)

Used monthly active orders as its North Star, rallying 300-plus growth people around it, with finance translating team metrics like app load time into that unit. Activation was three orders in the first month, and it kept a permanent ad holdout and built its own A/B testing tools.

Tips

• Build a translation layer that converts every team's metric into one North Star▶ 34:45At Instacart the North Star was monthly active orders across 300+ growth people; at Ramp it was dollars of SQL pipeline.
• Define activation as a specific set of early actions▶ 45:35At Ramp, completing four events in the first 30 days gives a high likelihood of being activated and successful.
• Use long-term holdouts to measure the cumulative impact of each team's work▶ 38:10
• Buy off-the-shelf tools and only build what is proprietary or strategic▶ 59:50Mutiny personalization had material impact and let Ramp scale website experimentation.

Lenny's Podcast · Oct 9

Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier

It famously lost money on every order early on. It fits convenience stores better than traditional retail, because both are high frequency and speed matters.

Tips

• Define marketplace liquidity as a customer-facing metric and focus on it first▶ 29:23Instacart and Uber famously lost money on every order or ride early on, so unit economics need to be understood but liquidity comes first.
• Prioritize marketplace expansion by adjacency and network effect, not market size▶ 43:25