Make money doing the work you believe in
Today Lenny Rachitsky’s weekly newsletter, simply titled Lenny’s Newsletter—”A weekly advice column about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career”—is one of the top five on the Substack platform. According to his signup page, he is approaching a boggling 500,000 subscribers. He also hosts a top 20 tech podcast, manages a popular job board, and maintains a buzzy community on Slack.
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Lenny’s Newsletter started, as these things often do, by accident. Rachitsky, 41, had moved to the U.S. with his family from Ukraine at age 6, bouncing between California and Canada. A software engineer, he eventually founded a company that he sold to Airbnb, which hired him on. But burned out after his long tenure, he left.
Before he could even figure out what he might do next, he found himself answering email queries from founders asking for advice. Rachitsky decided he’d float a newsletter and see if anyone bit. His first issue was about how to kick-start and scale a business, with counsel from 20 founders and early employees.
People liked it—a lot. “I found that maybe I had things I could share that people would find useful,” he says. “And I just kept down that road.”