Lenny Rachitsky has started some successful ventures in his life.

The 42-year-old founded his newsletter, Lenny’s Newsletter, about product management in 2019. It now boasts more than 570,000 subscribers and brings in more than $500,000 per year. He writes one post a week and works on each for 10 to 20 hours.

In 2022, Rachitsky started Lenny’s Podcast. He releases two episodes per week and interviews leaders in the product management space to get concrete, actionable advice about their work. He’s hired a producer to help with components like audio engineering and puts in just four to five hours per week on it altogether.

Lenny’s Podcast now brings in more than $500,000 per year as well.  

For anyone keen to find success with their own personal ventures, especially if they’re based on helping people grow and develop in a given field, Rachitsky has one piece of advice: Gain some experience in that field first.

“A lot of people start tweeting all this advice before they’ve actually done anything and have any advice to share,” he says. Without that experience and deep know-how on the subject, your advice could end up superficial at best and wrong and even harmful at worst.

“Nobody needs that,” he says.

Rachitsky worked in product management and software engineering for more than a decade before he started writing about it. He accrued years of knowledge and started his newsletter with dozens of ideas about how to help people. It tackles problems like planning projects, meetings, organizational design and so on.

You have to “do the work for a long time first” before you can start giving advice about it, he says, “at least five years of doing the job, ideally 10 years, ideally longer to actually build real experience and have something new to contribute.”

“My advice is just stop tweeting and do the work.”

CNBC