Lenny's Podcast has a problem, and it's not quality.
It's that one show can't cover everything. Lenny interviews the best product and growth people on the planet, but his guests mostly built inside VC-backed companies with big teams and bigger budgets. If you're a founder doing $8K MRR from your kitchen table, half the advice needs translation.
I listen to founder podcasts for a living (I host one, more on that in a second), so I went through my feed and pulled the 8 shows I actually queue up between Lenny episodes. Some scratch the same tactical product itch. Some fill the gap Lenny deliberately leaves open: founders sharing their real revenue numbers.
Here's the list, ranked.
What makes Lenny's Podcast so hard to replace
Quick baseline, because "like Lenny's" means something specific.
Lenny Rachitsky was a product lead at Airbnb before he started writing. The newsletter passed 1.2 million subscribers, and the podcast that grew out of it became the #1 product and growth show in the world, a top 10 tech podcast overall.
Three things make it work:
- Guest selection. Lenny's stated policy is to skip the famous CEOs and find the operators a few levels down who actually built the thing. That's why you hear tactics, not war stories.
- Concrete over abstract. Every episode chases frameworks you can use Monday morning, like how to run growth reviews or when to hire your first PM.
- Prep. He reads everything a guest ever wrote before they sit down. You can hear it in the follow-up questions.
The gap? Revenue reality for small teams. Product advice from someone who scaled Duolingo is gold, but it assumes you already have users, funding, and a team. The shows below keep the tactical bar and add what Lenny doesn't cover: the $0 to $100K MRR trench warfare, with real numbers.
1. Profitable Founder Podcast
Full disclosure: this one's mine. But the logic holds.
Lenny asks product leaders how they scaled products inside companies like Airbnb and Duolingo. I ask bootstrapped SaaS founders how they got from $0 to $25K/month with no funding and no team.
Every week I interview a founder making between $100K and $10M a year, and I push them to share the numbers everyone else hides: MRR, churn, exact acquisition channels, what they pay themselves.
42 episodes and counting. Recent ones: a founder at $25K/month with a bootstrapped CRM, one making $3.5M/year with a LinkedIn AI agent, another who sold his $800K/year agency to go all-in on SaaS.
I started it because I was that founder. I was stuck under $20K/month for months, paid $13,000 for a mastermind (stupid decision, right? Except it worked), and hit $75K/month six months later. The single biggest unlock was hearing exactly how founders one step ahead of me did it. This show is that, recorded.
If Lenny is your product curriculum, this is your revenue curriculum.
Listen to Profitable Founder →
2. The SaaS Podcast
Omer Khan has been doing one thing for 12 years: getting a SaaS founder on the mic and walking through exactly how they grew.
491 founder interviews. That's not a typo. He's covered every platform shift since 2013, and the format survived all of them because it's built on specifics: the numbers, the mistakes, and what they'd do differently.
Where Lenny optimizes for product craft, Omer optimizes for the founder journey. A typical episode: how a bootstrapped SaaS hit $250K ARR in its first year, or how a founder closed a global enterprise deal before the product existed.
Best for: SaaS founders who want the Lenny level of tactical depth, applied to companies at their stage.
3. Startups For the Rest of Us
The original bootstrapped SaaS podcast. Rob Walling has shipped over 800 episodes since 2010, and the show has passed 15 million downloads.
Rob isn't a journalist interviewing founders. He built and sold Drip, started MicroConf, and runs TinySeed, an accelerator for bootstrappers. So when he answers listener questions about pricing, churn, or whether it's finally time to quit your job, it's pattern-matching across hundreds of companies he's funded or advised.
The listener Q&A format is the closest thing bootstrapping has to Lenny's "ask the expert" energy. You send in your messy real situation, Rob gives you a straight answer.
Best for: SaaS founders who want a mentor in their ears every week. (How tf do you even get a mentor otherwise?)
4. In Depth by First Round
First Round Review is the best-edited publication in startups, and In Depth is its podcast. The tagline says it plainly: going deeper on the advice startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies, and themselves.
Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, interviews the operators behind companies like Notion, Figma, and Vanta. Same guest philosophy as Lenny: skip the famous face, find the person who did the work.
Episodes lean on management and company building more than growth tactics. Hiring exec number one, running your first real planning cycle, firing someone you like.
Best for: the moment your product starts working and your new problem is people.
5. My First Million
Shaan Puri and Sam Parr brainstorm business ideas every week, and it's the most fun show on this list.
Sam sold The Hustle to HubSpot. Shaan sold his company to Twitch. They're past the point of needing anything from you, which is exactly why the show works: they say the quiet parts out loud, share revenue numbers from their own portfolios, and break down weird businesses making millions (vending machines, newsletters, egg cartons, whatever).
Don't expect Lenny-style frameworks here. It's an idea machine. I've stolen at least three marketing angles from random MFM segments.
If this one hooks you, I ranked 8 podcasts like My First Million too.
Best for: refilling your idea tank when building gets monotonous.
6. The Twenty Minute VC
Harry Stebbings started 20VC from his bedroom in 2015, at 18, with a mic and zero connections. 1,481 episodes later he runs his own $400M fund and the biggest independent VC media brand in the world.
Ignore the name. Episodes now run over an hour, and the best ones aren't even with VCs: Daniel Ek on Spotify's early days, Reid Hoffman on network effects, Frank Slootman on running Snowflake like a machine.
Why it's on a list for Lenny listeners: same interview intensity, same prep obsession, pointed at capital and company-scaling instead of product. Even as a bootstrapper who'll never raise, I listen to understand how funded competitors think.
Best for: founder interviews at the biggest possible scale, and knowing your enemy (no shade, some of my best friends raised).
7. Invest Like the Best
Patrick O'Shaughnessy has run Invest Like the Best weekly since 2016, and it holds a 4.7 rating from over 2,300 reviews for a reason.
On paper it's an investing show. In practice it's the deepest business-thinking feed you can subscribe to. Recent guest: Ben Thompson of Stratechery on Big Tech and the AI boom. The archive has founders, fund managers, and operators explaining how they see markets.
This is the show I put on when I want to zoom out. Lenny teaches you to build the product. Patrick's guests teach you to understand the game the product is being played in.
Best for: strategy brain food. Long walks, not commutes.
8. Product Thinking
Melissa Perri wrote Escaping the Build Trap, the book half of Lenny's guests quote, and her weekly show is the most direct product-management substitute on this list.
The format alternates between interviews with product leaders and "Dear Melissa" episodes where she answers listener questions about product strategy, org design, and leveling up as a product person.
It's narrower than Lenny (pure product, no growth or career detours) but that's the appeal when you're deep in a product problem and don't want a 90-minute journey to get one answer.
Best for: solo founders doing their own product management, which is all of us.
How I'd actually use this list
Nobody needs 8 more subscriptions. Here's the honest triage:
- Building a bootstrapped SaaS → Profitable Founder + Startups For the Rest of Us. Revenue talk at your stage, weekly.
- Deep in product work → Product Thinking + In Depth. Pure craft.
- Need energy and ideas → My First Million.
- Zooming out on strategy → Invest Like the Best, one episode a week, full attention.
The rest rotate in when a specific guest hits my feed. If you want the broader map beyond Lenny-adjacent shows, I keep a running list of the best podcasts for SaaS founders too.
FAQ
What podcast is most similar to Lenny's Podcast?
Product Thinking with Melissa Perri is the closest match on pure product management: weekly, tactical, and focused on frameworks you can apply immediately. If what you love about Lenny is the operator interviews more than the product focus, In Depth by First Round is the better pick, with the same "find the person who did the work" guest philosophy.
Is Lenny's Podcast good for bootstrapped founders?
Yes, with a caveat. The product and growth frameworks translate to any stage, but most guests built with venture funding and big teams, so budget-heavy tactics need adapting. Pair it with a show like Profitable Founder or Startups For the Rest of Us, where every guest is at the revenue stage you're actually in.
How often does Lenny's Podcast publish?
Roughly weekly, with occasional bonus episodes. Each episode also goes out to his newsletter list of over 1.2 million subscribers, which is why guests bring their A game. The back catalog is deep enough that most people binge by topic instead of following the release schedule.
What should I listen to if I want business stories instead of product advice?
Go narrative. My First Million for ideas and founder banter, or Acquired for full company histories told over 3-hour episodes. I broke down the best options in 8 podcasts like Acquired.
One more thing
Podcasts got me from stuck to $75K/month faster than any course. But listening has a ceiling.
The real unlock was getting the founders from my earbuds into an actual room where I could ask about my numbers. That's why every week I sit down with a bootstrapped SaaS founder making $100K to $10M a year and make them open the books.
