18 resources from Lenny's Newsletter we point people to, and the questions each answers.
📰 Newsletter
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Instead of theorising about PLG versus sales-led, it lays out what 30 real companies actually did, segment by segment. It is the fastest way to find the two or three companies whose shape matches yours.
It orders the seven ways early customers actually arrive (network, cold outbound, investors, community, content, press, launch) by how much trust each one starts with, which is the missing map for a first-time seller. Built from interviews with founders at Figma, Notion, Databricks and Slack rather than theory.
Sorts content strategy into five distinct models (who makes it, what it optimises for) so you can choose one deliberately instead of drifting. Includes how HubSpot, Ahrefs, Intercom and Webflow staffed and funded theirs.
Campbell ran pricing research at ProfitWell across thousands of companies, and his sequence (value metric, then segments, then experiments) is the one to follow. The line worth memorising: get the value metric right and you can get a lot of the rest wrong.
A three step method (brainstorm milestones, regress against retention, then experiment to prove causation) with worked examples from six companies. The third step is the one most teams skip.
Hila Qu built PLG at GitLab and scaled Acorns, and this is the rare free piece that maps the sales-led funnel against the product-led one side by side so you can see exactly which stage you are actually changing.
Kazanjy is blunt that almost every bottom-up company eventually adds sales, so the only questions are when and how. He covers the sequencing, the data plumbing, and the mistakes, including delegating the first sales conversations too early.
Benchmarks from 500 plus products: 34 percent average, 36 percent for SaaS. If you have ever wondered whether your number is bad or normal, this is the answer, and it is free.
Built from interviews with 12 growth leaders, and it argues hard against the thing most founders want to do, which is hire a Head of Growth as a shortcut. Hire the builder, match them to your bottleneck.
This is the bit most positioning writing skips: how weak positioning shows up as sales pain, including the 40 percent of B2B deals lost to no decision. If you need to convince a founder or a sales leader that PMM is not a nice to have, the loss to status quo number is the argument.
Graphite's Ethan Smith has run this for real clients, so the advice is specific: landing pages, YouTube and genuine Reddit participation move the needle, help-center content is the underused asset, and AI-written pages underperform. Also the source of the claim that ChatGPT traffic converts around six times better than Google.
Shopify's performance marketing lead on channel order (Google search first, LinkedIn reserved for tight B2B targeting because of cost), team structure and incrementality. The rare paid conversation that is not selling you an agency.
The structured counterweight to the two case studies: when community is worth investing in at all, the SPACES framework for tying it to a business goal, who to hire, and the advice to start with 10 to 50 founding members instead of launching to everyone.
Four actual research methods (Van Westendorp, Becker-DeGroot-Marschak, Gabor-Granger, discrete choice) explained well enough to run one yourself, with templates. This is the answer to "how do I find willingness to pay without asking people what they would pay".
Concrete plays with named examples: Zapier's 70,000 programmatic pages, Airtable's template library, Figma's free editor. This is what marketing looks like when the product is the channel.
The benchmark study everyone quotes: good and great net revenue retention by business type, built from 20 growth experts plus real public company numbers. It stops the 'is 105 percent good' argument in one page.
Deals with the four places positioning work actually stalls, including teams that cannot agree on their competitive alternatives. Useful once you have tried positioning and it went nowhere.
Names the six channels B2B companies actually grow on and shows how top companies weight them, which is the frame you need when one channel stalls. Also the useful reminder that organic inbound dominating usually means product-market fit, not clever marketing.
