Lenny Distilled

Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product

October 05, 2025

Featuring: Albert Cheng (Head of Growth, Chess.com)

11 quotes · 10 insights

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Consumer subscription lacks B2B's natural advantages

User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 00:00:18

AI amplifies judgment, doesn't replace it

By the nature of having these AI tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked. And I think you see this in ChatGPT too, right? It's like just having a thing that you can converse with that you feel comfortable in makes a huge difference.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 00:18:03

Growth means moving users to value, not just metrics

Growth as the job is to connect users to the value of your product. Growth sometimes gets this reputation that it's just pure metrics hacking.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 00:00:00

High agency is the ultimate hiring criterion

I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Sometimes experience could be a crutch, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 00:00:54

Free tiers must show your full magic

What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing? All of a sudden, people were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool than they were before.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 00:00:31
Try to have your free product be a reflection of everything that your product can offer you. Obviously to an extent there's some costs involved with some of the paid features, but it generally will pay for itself if you're able to put your best foot forward.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 00:23:58

Meet users where they already are

As opposed to going against human intuition and trying to get them to share stuff that they otherwise wouldn't, lean into it more, actually grab the moments where users are already organically screenshotting and make those much, much, much better.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 01:04:06

Curiosity beats credentials

By the nature of having these AI tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked. And I think you see this in ChatGPT too, right? It's like just having a thing that you can converse with that you feel comfortable in makes a huge difference.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 00:18:03

60% week-1 retention or you don't have product-market fit

When you have your D one retention somewhere around the 30 or 40% mark, that's quite solid I think for a consumer app. If it's much lower than that, then sometimes I might question the intent of the user.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 00:29:42

Build systems, not one-offs

The system matters just as much as any given experiment, probably even more. I think starting with a growth model, so you have an understanding of how your company grows in the first place and which channels you're going to leverage is critical.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 01:01:30

Human behavior is predictably irrational—use it

80% of people that review their games actually do so after a win. And that's really counterintuitive to when we initially built the feature. We thought that people would want to use it after losses.
Albert ChengHead of Growth, Chess.com 00:11:34

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