Everything Albert Cheng said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Losing a first game on Chess.com reduces new user retention by 10%
“Less than a third of those users actually win their first game. And when you lose a game, user retention is 10% worse than when you win a game.”
Cheng: Doing PR before product validation creates risky sunk-cost commitments
“PR has had this time and place but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want the thing is quite risky. It can lead to a lot of sunk cost once you get it out because you're just, you know, you need to see it through. You want to…”
Cheng details Chess.com's internal AI tooling stack across functions
“The PMs are mostly using vZero. The designers love Figma, so they're using Figma Make. The engineers are using a combination of tools right now. So Cursor, Cloud Code, GitHub Copilot. Marketing teams use all sorts of tools for translation, subtitles, you know,…”
Cheng: Over 90% of Grammarly users are on the free tier
“The Grammarly is a freemium business model, which means that over 90% of our users are on the free service and the rest of it pay for subscriptions essentially.”
Cheng: Chess.com active users are ~80% existing, with new and resurrected users equal
“I think probably eighties percent of our Daily or weekly active users. I mean, I'll check the numbers, but something like that would be like a current user or an existing user, and then a new and a like reactivated or resurrected user. Those are actually about…”
Cheng: Chess.com combines chess engines and LLMs for Game Review feature
“So behind the scenes, we're running chess engines to basically spit out evaluations for every move that you make. And then we translate that and make that approachable to the user using, you know, their native language and plain approachable style. And even wi…”
Cheng: Atlassian report shows 40% of product teams do not experiment
“I just read this Alassian
state of product report.
And it was like, 40% of product teams, like basically don't run experimentation at all.”
Cheng: Over 75% of new Chess.com users are beginners
“Over 75% of our new users, they classify themselves as like, I'm completely new to chess or I'm a beginner.”
LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER