Lenny Rachitsky recently crossed 1 million subscribers to his Substack newsletter, Lenny’s Newsletter.
And one million is not a typo.
If you’ve read Growth In Reverse long enough, you’ve probably either heard of Lenny or are subscribed to his newsletter.
But how exactly did he go from writing his first post on Medium, thinking no one would read it, to becoming one of the most trusted voices in the space?
Let’s break down how he did it, what growth levers worked best, and what we can all learn from his journey.
We went and broke this down on our podcast. You can watch it here:
Earning His Cred & Validating The Idea
Lenny was a product lead at Airbnb for seven years before leaving in 2019.
Upon leaving Airbnb, he had zero intention of building a newsletter business. But his plan was to build a business of his own. He wanted to take his knowledge and experience helping to grow a massive tech business like Airbnb, and transform that into a business of his own.
To synthesize all of the experience of the past 7 years at Airbnb, he wrote and published a Medium article called What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business.
That article now has 30k “Claps” (Medium’s equivalent to a “like”). But the positive response was a signal he was on to something.
Lenny’s Rise
In his recent post simply titled 1,000,000, Lenny shared a graph of his journey over the past 5 years.
He’s the first to admit he’s tried every growth strategy. But there’s one lever that has moved the needle more than anything.
“I’ve tried everything—paid ads, SEO, biz dev—and none of it really did a damn thing. Word of mouth was the biggest lever.” — Lenny Rachitsky
He mentions word of mouth often. And that’s because his entire growth engine was built on quality content people wanted to share.
I could go over all of the other levers Lenny has pulled to hit 1m subscribers, but he’s already shared the details in his posts.
So instead, I’m sharing what Dylan and I believe are the main over-arching themes of his growth story that any of us can apply to our newsletter journey.
1. Putting Heart & Soul Into Content
If I followed the classic advice of picking a narrow niche, I’d have focused on just product management. But I don’t care about product management that much. I’m interested in the wider space of building products, helping them grow, improving your career, and building startups. So I kept my focus areas broad and went where my interests took me.
— Lenny on hitting 1m subscribers
After 6 years… would Lenny still be publishing content if he was only writing about product management?
Probably not. And he admits it (see the quote above).
He didn’t trap himself by staying in a narrow niche of product management, which he didn’t “care about that much.” Instead, he was able to remain engaged and interested by stepping outside a product management box.
He wrote about things around building & growing products, improving your career, and startups.
I’ve done the same thing with Growth In Reverse. For the first ~18 months, I only published deep dives about newsletter creators who’d reached 50k subscribers. But I’ve since pivoted to the point where if someone has an interesting story to write about, it doesn’t matter if they haven’t hit 50k subscribers.
Why?
Because there is a balance between creating the content you want to create and doing something because you think other people still want that.
While I thought people only wanted to read the “big growth” stories, by actually talking to readers I realized they actually resonated more with the more attainable stories mixed in. So I made a slight change, and people enjoyed it.
It’s okay to pivot after a certain time, especially if the overarching theme is still relevant.
Lenny understood that early on, and it’s been one of the key reasons he’s persisted to 1m subscribers. And his content is better for it.
2. Stick-with-it-ness (for 5+ years)
Lenny’s first Medium article was so well-received, he kept writing.
He only ended up writing another six Medium articles.
After peers encouraged Lenny to start collecting email addresses, Lenny created a Substack account and began posting in August of 2019.
He never looked back: He posted every week, rain or shine. After doing so for 9 months, he launched a paid tier for his newsletter, which I detailed here.
Then…
He stuck with it for another 5 years.
He even added a podcast to his content mix (more on that shortly) in 2022 after his newsletter was humming along and approaching 100k subscribers.
One of the biggest reasons Lenny’s been able to be so prolific and consistent with his stick-with-it-ness?
He doesn’t do it all himself. Yes, he hires contractors and freelancers to help mostly with podcast-related things, but most importantly, he leans on other perspectives for content.
But in the grand scheme of things, it’s still just him as the only full-time employee.
3. Collaborations & Guest Posts
Early on Lenny realized he couldn’t consistently publish 52 fresh product management articles each year in perpetuity.
So he did 2 things:
- He branched outside of strictly talking about product management (as discussed earlier)
- He brought in guests to talk about their experiences in product management
Just like Lenny got his first 1,000 subscribers by writing guest posts, he now pays it forward by offering other voices in the product management and tech space the chance to share their writing with his readers.
You’ll see in the image above that the top 3 guest posts in Lenny’s “Growth” category are all from guest posts. Going further down that page, 8 of the Top 10 posts are from guest posts.
If you check out his other article categories, you’ll find the same pattern.
But Lenny doesn’t just let a guest write a post and blindly hit publish. Lenny has explained that he goes back and forth with the writer through 5-6 drafts to really refine the article.
Lenny still understands how important the quality of anything he publishes needs to be—whether his name is on the byline or not.
The Benefit?
Publishing guest posts gives Lenny a lot of valuable time back to do other things. Things like scheduling & recording the podcast, spending more time researching and writing his own articles, and a lot more no doubt.
This is just one point of leverage Lenny has figured out, helping him reach that 1m subscriber threshold.
4. Leverage Platforms and Their Network Effects
First off, what the heck are network effects?
Here’s a quick definition: the more people who join a system (or network), the more valuable it becomes for everyone in the system.
Substack’s Recommendations feature is a perfect example. The more people who recommend other newsletters, the faster they all grow. Most importantly, the faster the best stuff gets discovered and shared.
And boy, oh boy, was Lenny well-positioned to benefit from this new feature.
He had already gained a pretty massive following when recommendations launched. Remember, he got that far by showing up consistently with high quality content he was pouring his heart and soul into.
So when the feature went live, his newsletter was one of the most frequently recommended newsletters in Substack.
At this point, over 5,000 Substack newsletters are recommending his newsletter.
5. Share Your Work Publicly
Substack is a massive platform in 2025.
And you just saw how its network effects alone can impact newsletter growth.
That was not the case in 2019 when Lenny was getting started. Substack was a tech toddler just starting to gain traction.
But that’s where Lenny was publishing—and he wanted eyes on his words. He wanted more subscribers.
So instead of just hitting publish and hoping people would find them, he used social media. Lenny started turning his articles into Twitter tweets & threads.
Now, he wasn’t hyper-prolific, but he was posting regularly enough. The whole point is he was sharing them.
(Check out this Twitter thread that got some strong engagement 👇)
So now that Lenny has 1,000,000+ newsletter subscribers, he’s gonna chill with the social posting and promotion, right?
Obviously!
No way.
Lenny still posts regularly and promotes his articles, podcasts, and others’ work.
For example, see the post below that was posted a few weeks back that got 149k impressions on Twitter/X and a bunch of likes & RTs.
Execution Is Everything
“The ultimate growth hack is just good content. Build relationships. Stick with it.” — Chenell, GIR Podcast
It’s easy to look back at Lenny’s newsletter journey and say, “Right place, right time.”
But that obviously doesn’t give Lenny enough credit. Sure, he benefited from being one of the first product management newsletters on a growing platform. And he had the benefit of working at Airbnb and the foresight to write it.
And if you look closely, you’ll see Lenny’s built a product.
It’s meta, but it makes so much sense: Lenny took what he learned working as a product manager at Airbnb and turned his Substack into an extremely successful product. He has a variety of product offerings, and even charges a subscription.
Many are given opportunities but don’t seize them. Lenny fully seized his.
So yes: “Right place, right time—and right execution.”
