Lenny's Evil Twin's Podcast

Propane — Leonard wouldn't ship this 24.06.2026

Propane is pitching four products to one product manager on day one. That's not a system of record, that's an orientation week with no graduation date. | Propane just spent its runway writing the textbook so someone else can ace the exam. | They collect context, they run collaboration, they do roadmapping, AND they hand off to coding agents. Congratulations, you've built a product that does four jobs and excels at the job of explaining itself. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase) (Podcast), How to determine your activation metric (Newsletter), How to win in consumer subscription (Newsletter), Positioning (Newsletter), GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies (Newsletter), Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market (Podcast)

Bluerails — Leonard wouldn't ship this 23.06.2026

Bluerails invented "agentic economy rails" and now has to spend every dollar teaching the world what that phrase means before a single agent pays for a croissant. Congrats, they're the next Myspace. | Bluerails has zero proven agent buyers AND zero proven merchant sellers — that's not a compliant marketplace, that's a velvet rope around an empty room with a $119/month cover charge. | When your customer can't feel excited, you don't have PMF — you have a support ticket. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Positioning (Newsletter), GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies (Newsletter), A guide for finding product-market fit in B2B (Newsletter)

Skybridge — Leonard wouldn't ship this 22.06.2026

Downloads are not builders. 500,000 downloads and the headline metric they're proud of is "dozens of apps in the stores." Dozens! That's the conversion rate of a vending machine nobody installed in a hallway nobody walks down. | Skybridge is Ask Jeeves. Congratulations, you invented MCP Apps — enjoy watching Microsoft ship "MCP Apps, but in Azure" in 18 months. | The category has to become real before any of Quai's math matters. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Why marketplaces fail (Newsletter), Positioning (Newsletter)

Novu Connect — Leonard wouldn't ship this 15.06.2026

Two minutes. They printed that on the website. With confidence. | Novu Connect is general-purpose agent infrastructure. OpenAI is coming for their lunch, their dinner, and their leftovers. | Their homepage literally says "Pick one. Or all of them." That's not a strategy, that's a dare. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies (Newsletter), Aishwarya Naresh Reganti + Kiriti Badam (Podcast), The Transition: Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product (Newsletter)

Slashy — Leonard wouldn't ship this 14.06.2026

Founders are out here paying $25 a month so a robot can sound like them, which raises the question: if the robot sounds like you, writes for you, and replies for you, what exactly are you doing in this relationship? | Slashy's reason to switch is "our AI learns your vibe." Robinhood came after Fidelity by being cheaper. What's Slashy's move against Gmail — being vibes-ier? | They're asking the most time-starved people on earth to do homework before the product works. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Positioning (Newsletter), Counterintuitive advice for building AI products (Newsletter), Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business (Newsletter)

Cakeword — Leonard wouldn't ship this 13.06.2026

A four-year-old has a negative K-factor. They're not inviting anyone. They can't type. | The Pinterest graph works because Pinterest sees every pin. Cakeword's graph stops at the front door. | Parents will open that paywall and put their wallet away faster than their kid can snap a banana. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: How to win in consumer subscription (Newsletter), Lessons on building a viral consumer app: The story of Saturn (Newsletter)

Firma.dev — Leonard wouldn't ship this 12.06.2026

Three cents. You send a wedding invitation with more financial conviction than this product charges for a legally binding contract. | Firma.dev's "100x refund" math at three cents an envelope is adorable right now — run it back when they're processing real volume. | The enterprise deals that actually fund a company require exactly the sales cycle they built their whole identity around hating. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield (Podcast)

Bond — Leonard wouldn't ship this 11.06.2026

Bond's "executive" ICP could be 40 million people. That's not a target audience, that's a census. | Bond's marquee social proof is one testimonial from the CEO of Infinity Constellation — a company I cannot find. Elena Verna puts it plainly: ten customers isn't data, that's a Google Sheet. You don't build a retention thesis on a G-sheet. | Bond is promising more autonomy than the company that invented the most capable AI on the planet is willing to ship. That is the kill shot. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: What is good retention? (Newsletter)

Publora — Leonard would ship this 10.06.2026

Today's victim is Publora. One REST API call to post to ten social platforms. Ten. LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, AND Telegram — because apparently the MVP was "connect everything humans have ever posted to." | Publora's free tier is a welcome mat for exactly those people — the ones who are long on time-to-value and short on credit cards. | That's not a landing page, that's an obstacle course at the finish line. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market (Podcast), Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business (Newsletter), The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for growing consumer subscription businesses (Newsletter)

VC Boom — Leonard wouldn't ship this 09.06.2026

An 8-year VC built this. Eight years in venture capital and the best idea he had was... a mail merge with a confidence score. | Workday hits 95% 12-month retention. Salesforce hits 90%. VC Boom doesn't even have a retention number because there's no recurring relationship to retain. | The pricing page says "$297 one-time" with a Spring launch price that "increases July 1." Today is June 9, 2026. That deadline expired a year ago and it's still on the website. The urgency is fake, the scarcity is fake, and the "moat" is fake — three fakes for the price of one. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Product-led marketing (Newsletter), What is good retention? (Newsletter), Pricing your SaaS product (Newsletter), How to determine your activation metric (Newsletter)

Honen — Leonard wouldn't ship this 08.06.2026

They invented a new category name. And history has a verdict on that move: 90% of tech companies that have gone public over the past five years positioned themselves in EXISTING markets, not new ones. Honen skipped straight to inventing the word "fluflommer." | Cornerstone OnDemand is hideous. It still owns the contract. | Honen is doing all the expensive market education work so that Microsoft Teams Learning or Google Workspace Courses can roll it up as a free feature update in 2027. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Positioning (Newsletter), Scaling your B2B growth engine (Newsletter)

Wave — Leonard wouldn't ship this 07.06.2026

Wave is 100% free with zero paywall. They have built a structurally identical retention death machine. | If a CSV was too low a bar, what happens when the bar is just... owning a Mac? | A monetization strategy where the customer pays a third party — Groq — and Wave collects exactly zero dollars from that transaction. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business (Newsletter)

Manus — Leonard wouldn't ship this 06.06.2026

Somebody looked at entrepreneurship and said "the hard part is the typing." | Manus cheerfully builds your "premium tinned fish storefront" with Lorem Ipsum descriptions and a hero image of a can of cat food, then tells you it's perfect. | Sample prompts are a band-aid on a broken leg. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for growing consumer subscription businesses (Newsletter), The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder) (Podcast), Counterintuitive advice for building AI products (Newsletter), Aishwarya Naresh Reganti + Kiriti Badam (Podcast), Summary: The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) (Newsletter)

SellerClaw — Leonard wouldn't ship this 05.06.2026

They built a corporate org chart for a dropshipping operation. | "Every action is visible and approvable" doesn't sound like automation, it sounds like a second job. | "Free to start" is a great hook — right up until the agent starts. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Why your AI product needs a different development lifecycle (Newsletter), What it feels like when you've found product-market fit (Newsletter), Aishwarya Naresh Reganti + Kiriti Badam (Podcast), Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more (Podcast)

Empromptu AI — Leonard wouldn't ship this 04.06.2026

Today's victim is Empromptu AI. They promise to "build your AI app AND train your custom model" — which is the startup equivalent of a restaurant advertising "we cook the food AND wash the dishes." Congratulations. You've described having a kitchen. | Jen Abel says early-stage enterprise ACV sweet spot is $50K to $100K for founder-led startups. But Empromptu is leading with "working features in 10 days, full production in 30." That's not an enterprise pitch, that's a Fiverr gig with SOC 2 compliance bolted on. | Empromptu's entire positioning is "zero AI engineers hired, zero vendor lock-in" — that's a cost-cutting argument, not a value-creation argument, and you cannot build a sales team on razor-thin margin messaging. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Differentiating your product (Newsletter), The Transition: Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product (Newsletter)

InsForge — Leonard wouldn't ship this 03.06.2026

Today's victim is InsForge — the "agent-native cloud infrastructure platform." They took every backend service a developer needs, bundled it into one platform, and then called it a new market category. Congratulations, you invented the cloud. Again. | Neighborrow had journalists writing love letters, users sending weekly fan emails, and startup competition wins — and zero people actually using the service. The founders themselves said it: "We were great in theory but not in practice." Read those InsForge testimonials again — every single one says "I tried it and it was good." Not one says "we replaced our infra stack with it and hit production." | InsForge is a late entrant paying 2026 prices to acquire developers who already have AWS, Supabase, Railway, and Render bookmarked. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Positioning (Newsletter), The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for growing consumer subscription businesses (Newsletter), 10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell) (Podcast), The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft (Podcast), Why marketplaces fail (Newsletter)

Vokal — Leonard wouldn't ship this 02.06.2026

Congratulations: you built a conference room for robots, and charged humans to sit in it. | Where is the Vokal waitlist full of angry fans demanding a credit card link? | The product page reads like a merger between a pitch deck and a Wikipedia disambiguation page. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: Positioning (Newsletter), How today's fastest-growing B2B businesses turned their early users into paying customers – Issue 36 (Newsletter), GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies (Newsletter)

Mina — Leonard wouldn't ship this 01.06.2026

They've essentially built a coworker nobody hired, who cannot be fired, and who will interrupt your Zoom call to update Salesforce in front of your client. | HeyGen's CEO said it plainly: "Building a cool AI demo doesn't mean we have a product that customers love and is useful." The novelty-driven acquisition leads to the phantom PMF churn cliff — and Mina's entire wow factor is watching an AI speak on a call. The second that stops being a party trick, what's left? | Mina's killer feature is an AI that speaks up at the right moment. The right moment is exactly what the technology cannot reliably detect yet. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies (Newsletter), Counterintuitive advice for building AI products (Newsletter), Elena Verna 4.0 (Podcast), Al Engineering 101 with Chip Huyen (Nvidia, Stanford, Netflix) (Podcast)

Clipto — Leonard wouldn't ship this 31.05.2026

Congratulations — you spent how long building this, and the best pitch you landed on is "we're Google Photos, except Google Photos is bad"? | They built a product for the person who buys it and forgot to build a product for the person who approves the budget. | Clipto's positioning literally admits in the first sentence that someone has already done it before. Google did it. Clipto just... took the cloud part out. Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: GTM motions of 30 B2B SaaS companies (Newsletter), What is good free-to-paid conversion (Newsletter), A guide for finding product-market fit in B2B (Newsletter)

Wandesk — Leonard would ship this 30.05.2026

No code, no signup, no subscription. They've also decided "no revenue" while they were at it. | Their own website calls it an "App Workshop," which is just a polite word for homework. | At some point "truly yours" becomes "truly free forever and also we are bankrupt." Sources from Lenny's Newsletter and Podcast: How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers (Newsletter), Counterintuitive advice for building AI products (Newsletter), Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business (Newsletter), The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for growing consumer subscription businesses (Newsletter)