Be someone's favorite, not everyone's second choice

Try to be someone's favorite. Don't try to be everyone's okay podcast. I remember Tim Ferris was saying... he's like, 'I did an episode about how to make violins or something. And he's like, I was so fascinated about this. 80% of people were like, what is this episode? But 20% of people thought it was one of the best episodes I'd done that year.'

I prefer a more passionate customer base and work from there, just because I think your biggest competition when you're really innovating is just being irrelevant.

Generally, the more narrow you are... the easier it is to build a great solution for those people, because now you can actually hone in the product experience, the messaging, and everything to serve exactly those people.

When you choose your smallest viable audience, what language they speak, how much money they have, what problem they're trying to solve, what their technical facility is, whether they're short-tempered, whether they're kind, whether they're going to stick with you, you have chosen everything that's going to go into the product and what your future is going to be like.

"Lenny" refers to Lenny Rachitsky, the interviewer. "Playing to play" means competing without a clear strategy to win distinctively.

You'll know you're playing to play if you're not aiming to, and accomplishing, having either an offer where Lenny walks into the store, whatever kind of store it is, and says to the person in the store, I want that brand.