Grow & Tell

Nico Dato, CMO of Entrata, shares lessons from growing Podium from a single-product review platform to a nine-figure, multi-product lead gen platform.When Nico Dato joined Podium in 2015, they were a single-product review tool for SMBs with under $1m in revenue.Over a 7-year period, Nico helped grow Podium to a multi-product lead conversion platform with over $100m in revenue. For those counting at home, that's 100x growth.In today’s episode, Alex and Nico discuss:How Podium grew primarily through webinars and industry tradeshowsThe two most important relationships for every marketing leader (spoiler: it's Product and Sales)Why MQLs are a deceptive metricPlanning Entrata's massive user conferenceWhy you shouldn’t sleep on Utah as a tech hub

Marie Gassée, Head of Go-to-market at Column, shares her rich experience leading growth at Box and Confluent. She delves into the art of building effective self-serve programs, recounting her journey from launching Box's product-led motion to marketing to open-source users at Confluent. Marie emphasizes the importance of data-driven strategies and product engagement in scaling growth. She also reflects on navigating the dynamics of startups versus corporate environments, offering valuable lessons on career growth and innovation in fintech.

Joseph Schmitt, VP of Success at UpKeep, shares his learn-by-doing approach to growing Customer Success teams. Joseph Schmitt is exactly the type of growth story we like to tell—from a few perspectives.He’s had a surprisingly fast personal career arc from entry-level support to senior Customer Success leader and also helped grow two startup customer success teams from the ground up.On today’s show, Joseph and Alex chat about:Transitioning from entry-level support to management & senior leadershipJoining UpKeep as their first CS hireHiring and retaining UpKeep’s CS team for the past 6 yearsStructuring UpKeep’s CS teamsWorking with a non-tech-savvy customer baseAdvice for early CS hires

Peep Laja, co-founder of Wynter, CXL, and Speero, shares lessons from bootstrapping multi-million-dollar businesses from scratch. Plus, he shares messaging lessons from Wynter.Peep Laja is an expert at bootstrapping companies.He started by turning his in-house marketing experience into a consultancy…He took that consultancy and scaled it into an agency…He used the profits from his agency to bootstrap an e-learning business…And then he took the profits from his elearning business to bootstrap a SaaS company.In today’s episode, Peep and I discuss:The founding stories behind his three companiesAdvice for company positioning and messagingWhy he moves upmarket as fast as possibleWynter’s growth and marketing strategy

Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of Atrium and author of Founding Sales, shares sales advice for startup founders. They discuss pivoting startups, democratizing sales metrics, datafication of sales, and building a sales community. The conversation also covers the evolution of sales processes, community marketing, navigating product development for revenue teams, and the consolidation of sales tech.

Former Head of Marketing at Notion, Camille Ricketts, shares insights on positioning Notion as a broad product, building an engaged community, partnering with influencers, infusing emotion into marketing strategy, and advice for community-led growth.

Gillian Heltai, Chief Customer Officer at Lattice, shares her experience in building customer experience programs at Lattice, Talkdesk, and comScore.As Gillian puts it, she worked in customer success long before anyone called it customer success.Since then, she's helped build successful CX programs at comScore, Talkdesk, and now Lattice.On today's episode, Alex and Gillian discuss:Growing from entry-level analyst to Senior VP at comScoreGoing on a customer listening tour at Talkdesk to create a new onboarding program for upmarket customersJoining Lattice after its Series CHow Lattice structures its CX teamsAdvice for onboarding, health scoring, renewals, and more

Marketing leader Maya Spivak shares what went into launching successful brand campaigns at Wealthfront and Segment.What goes into creating a tech brand that not only stands out but deeply resonates with its audience?Maya Spivak, an experienced brand and marketing expert, joins us in this episode to share her experience building TV and billboard campaigns for Wealthfront and Segment.In today's episode, Alex and Maya discuss:Wealthfront's transformation and branding challengesTech-driven investing trust and the role of launch videosThe strategy behind Wealthfront’s 35 commercialsMaya’s B2B marketing journey with SegmentEvolving brands, user conferences, and billboard advertising insights

Ben Solari, VP of Sales at Jellyfish, shares sales advice for taking technical products to market.If you’re not super technical, sales is a great way to get your foot in the door in the startup world. That’s how Alex (our host) got started at Yelp before eventually founding Dock.But what happens when you have to sell a very technical product to a very technical audience?Ben Solari joins us in this episode to talk about leading sales teams at DataRobot and Jellyfish—two products aimed at engineering leaders.Alex and Ben discuss:The benefits of being a seller with an equities trading backgroundHow Ben learned to sell technical productsDataRobot and Jellyfish's early sales strategiesScaling DataRobot's sales team to 30 account executivesJellyfish's top-down sales pitchCollaborating with marketing

Alexa Grabell, Founder of Pocus, shares the company's founding story, plus lots of product-led growth advice for go-to-market teams.Pocus has ridden the PLG wave, earning $23 million in funding and landing big-name SaaS customers like Webflow, Loom, and Miro only two years since its founding.In today’s episode, Alex and Alexa discuss:The backstory behind Pocus's foundingPocus's approach to fundraisingThe role of sales in a product-led motionWhen PLG companies should hire their first sales repWhy Pocus isn't a product-led company themselvesAnd a bunch of other PLG best practicesEven if you’re not in PLG, there’s tons of gold sales and go-to-market advice in this episode. It was only 3 years ago that Alexa Grabell was working in a sales operations role at Dataminr. She realized how much-untapped value was sitting in product and customer data.After going back to school to complete an MBA at Stanford in 2021, Alexa co-founded Pocus—a revenue data platform that helps go-to-market teams surface insights from their product usage data.Through building Pocus, Alexa has become one of the leading voices in product-led growth (PLG) and product-led sales.