Product-Led Growth & AI Assisted Go-to-Market Strategy with Dave Boyce - Hyperdrive Minds Podcast 33

Speaker A: What are some of the most common mistakes you see like sales and marketing teams make when they first try to align like a go to market strategy?

Speaker B: Well, the game has changed. Definitely a big SaaS guy. In the heart of my career a lot of growth was driven by higher onboard train. You know, hit the phones, hit the email, like you know, aggressively outbound prospect. Like we're going to grow by just hiring like hungry kind of meat eating sellers. And there are a lot of companies that were built that way. In parallel. There was another kind of growth path that was more automated. Like these are companies like atlassian, ah, Dropbox, docuSign. When I moved from Boston to Silicon Valley, I found they were all playing that game that was product led growth. Meaning I'm not going to hire a bunch of salespeople, I'm going to hire my product to do the selling for me. And they were architecting that kind of go to market motion really deliberately and programming it right into the product. So free trial goes to an upgrade, goes to an enterprise license and then I bring a salesperson in to kind of scale that into a big six or seven figure contract completely opposite of what was working for like the Salesforces and VMWares of the world.

Speaker A: How do you define product led growth?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's lots of definitions but you know one that I like, product led growth is when the product itself does the selling, onboarding, monetization instead of having to hire a bunch of humans to do it. But you flip that so that that's like from the seller standpoint when you flip that and you think, well how do we experience product led growth? As a buyer it's self service. Can I educate myself? Can I get my hands on the product myself? Can I succeed with the product myself? Can I learn how to implement and scale and get value and then even at some point upgrade, if you can enable that for me, then it moves faster for you, it moves better for me. And then if I ever want help, and this is where it gets tricky, maybe I do raise my hand and say, okay, I got certain amount of the way on my own and I like it. But Blake, I could use some help now. Cause I want to adopt it across my whole company. How would I structure that? That would be a sales assist. But product led growth can provide a really, really reliable foundational, kind of go to market basis. On top of which we can add salespeople. And we see that uh, happening all over the world. There's 40 companies now, Blake, that are public, that built their companies based on product led growth the way we defined it. And there is not a single salesperson I know, Blake, who works for a PLG company who would ever go back.

Speaker A: You are listening to hyperdrive minds podcast revenue generating strategies for sales and marketing. This job is a desk, a phone,

Speaker B: a chair, and your ass. I'm gonna let you on a little

Speaker A: secret about these telephones.

Speaker B: They're not gonna dial themselves.

Speaker A: Building a revenue engine is hard. Don't do it alone. Each episode features a top leader in sales and marketing, sharing specific revenue generating strategies that you can implement today.

Speaker B: I want you to deal with your problems by becoming rich.

Speaker A: Steal their strategies, get their results. Sitting out there waiting to give you their money. Are you gonna take it? Subscribe today and let's kick your revenue into hyperdrive. Welcome back to the hyperdrive minds podcast. Dave Boyce. How are you, sir?

Speaker B: Blake, so good to be with you. Love the background. It's amazing. I feel like I've, like, stepped into another dimension.

Speaker A: Yeah. May the force be with you, sir. Got a little Star wars museum up in here.

Speaker B: I like it.

Speaker A: Like your background too. What is that? Is that a, uh, some kind of chalkboard or something?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a chalkboard. I wrote the name of my book up there. Um, ah, uh, I got like a. I don't know, I've got doodles up there. Friends will doodle when they come over or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker A: Nice, nice. Yeah. I want to talk about your book, but, yeah, thanks for coming on the show. I was excited to chat with you and I was looking at your background on LinkedIn, and man, it looks like everything you touch turns into gold.

Speaker B: Oh, wow. So I guess I, uh, I guess I'm getting away with something on LinkedIn. Yeah, it turns out I'm really old, so there's things in there that, you know, you kind of chapters you skip over and, uh. And it still looks like a full picture.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, tell us the story of your background.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I'm just a kid from Oklahoma. Public school kid from Oklahoma who had ambition and no direction and just tried to figure out, like, um, where's a good fit. I know all of us try to do that. Like, I thought I wanted to be a dentist because the only people I knew with money were dentists. And I was like, nah, that's not. I'm not doing that.

Speaker A: My dad tried to get me to be a dentist. I didn't listen to him, Right?

Speaker B: And then everyone said, yeah, you're good at math. You should be an engineer. Cool. I tried that for a While I liked the subject matter, I didn't jive with the people to my left and right. Just wasn't my crowd. And then, uh, I was like, maybe I'll be a lawyer. Oops. No, not a lawyer. So, you know, just figure this stuff out as you go. Blake and I eventually decided through a lot of iterations that, um, I'm really kind of at heart, I'm an entrepreneur. I like building, I like inventing. If you give me free time, I'm going to be ideating. And so then I just went down a path of kind of serial entrepreneurship and helped build and sell a few different companies. Some of them, we got away with our lives and that's about it. Some of them we had, you know, a decent, you know, outcome. And, um, but every single one of them is an adventure, you know, and that's what I'm drawn to.

Speaker A: Nice. Yeah. So your resume is insane. You've been like, a C level exec at four unicorn companies. So is there like a common thread or like a secret playbook that you saw work across all four of those rocket ships?

Speaker B: Courage. Courage would be one. Trust yourself. Trust your instincts. Trust what you hear and what you see. You know, don't get talked into things. Trust, you know, what you know, you know, what feels right, and then you go trust yourself. You make a bet on something that you think feels right, and you make a bet on yourself. And then once you're there, it really, really. Blake, it's not about you. It's about the mission and it's about the team. So as I, um, early on it was about the mission, but it was about me, like, it's the mission and me, like, I'm gonna bet on myself and, uh, I'm gonna be the most awesome, and I'm gonna show up the best. And that's great for a while when you're earlier in your career, but then at some point, it's about the mission and it' like, and the bet that I'm placing on myself is that I'll be able to bring the best out of the people that are around me. Like, if I. If people are better for having. For spending time in the room with me, then that. Then I can multiply kind of my impact by 5, 10, 20, 50, and just help people be the best version of themselves, and then they'll go do that, pay that forward. Too. So that, that is. That was a real turning point for me, Blake, when I got to a certain point is like, if I can help people be the best version of themselves and we can aim and everything can be aimed at the mission. We can make something happen.

Speaker A: Very cool. Yeah, yeah. It's not, it's not a very teachable skill. You either have that or you don't. So yeah, you were gifted man, but you specialize in go to market strategy. So what are some of the most common mistakes you see like sales and marketing teams make when they first try to align like a go to market strategy?

Speaker B: Well, the game has changed. I launched my career in the late 90s and um, you know, we went through the dot com bubble, we went through the cloud, we went, you know, mobile was in there. I was never a big mobile guy, definitely a big SaaS guy. And a lot of that kind of in the heart of my career a lot of growth was driven by higher onboard train. You know, hit the phones, hit the email, like, you know, aggressively outbound prospect. Like we're going to grow by just hiring like hungry, kind of meat eating, you know, sellers. And there are a lot of companies that were built that way. In parallel, there was another kind of growth path that was more automated. Like these are companies like Atlassian, Dropbox, DocuSign. When I moved from Boston to Silicon Valley, I found they, they were all playing that game that was product led growth. Meaning I'm not going to hire a bunch of salespeople, I'm going to hire my product to do the selling for me. And they were architecting that kind of go to market motion really deliberately and programming it right into the product. So free trial goes to an upgrade, goes to an enterprise license and then I bring a salesperson in to kind of scale that into a big six or seven figure contract completely opposite of what was working for like the Salesforces and VMWares of the world. All of that to say, is there a common thread of mistakes? If there is, I would say it is greed. Like I'm trying to build GTM and I get distracted by what the VCs tell me, what the investors tell me. Like hey, we need you to hit a certain number. Oh well, let me race to hit that number and I'll cut some corners along the way and I'll build something that's not scalable. But at least I'll hit the number and I'll raise the next round. Or let me race to go get my quota and I'll cut some corners along the way. Like the customers I'm selling aren't exactly the right customers. I haven't exactly kind of made a good match with my service but that's okay. The renewal is somebody else's problem. Whenever I get stuck into like a greed mindset, I, I do stuff that's suboptimal and then the whole thing like grinds to a halt. When all that catches up to me. What I really want to do is be deliberate about architecting very careful growth and then just building it out one layer at a time and making it scalable.

Speaker A: How do you define product LED growth?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's lots of defin, but you know, one that I like is product led growth is when the product itself does the selling onboarding and monetization instead of having to hire a bunch of humans to do it. But you flip that so that, that's like from the seller standpoint when you flip that and you think, well, how do we experience product LED growth as a buyer? It's self service. It's like, hey, can I educate myself? Can I get my hands on the product myself? Can I succeed with the product myself? Can I learn how to implement and scale and get value and then even at some point upgrade and by myself, like if you can enable that for me, then it moves faster for you, it moves better for me. And then if I ever want help, and this is where it gets tricky, maybe I do raise my hand and say, okay, I got certain amount of the way on my own and I like it. But Blake, I could use some help now because I want to adopt it across my whole company. How do, how would I structure that? That would be a sales assist. But product led growth can provide a really, really reliable foundational, kind of go to market basis. On top of which we can add salespeople. And we see that happening all over the world.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Looking back to the last three platforms that I actually bought, they were all free trials. You know, I just register your account. All right, my, here's my Google it automated it. Now I'm signed in, I'm off to the races and find uh, out I like it and then I buy it. So uh, that's, that's the new way to go. Right?

Speaker B: And whenever I describe that to people, just friends or like maybe people not in the industry, I describe that they say the same thing. Yeah, yeah, okay. And then they're like. And that's how they get you. But if you do it right, if these platforms did it right, you probably felt okay about your upgrade because you probably got a lot of value from the product even before you had to pay. And so by the time you have to pay, you're like, okay, that makes sense. Like I should probably start paying at some point.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a no brainer. It's like, oh yeah, definitely. I can fit this in the budget. I love it.

Speaker B: There you go.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So what does that mean for sales though? Like a VP of sales at a product led growth using that strategy, like, when do they come into play?

Speaker B: Well, your job changes a lot. Sales is still important. And you know this scenario that we described where impact is already being delivered and then sales shows up either because someone raised their hand or because some signal out of the usage throws a flag for a salesperson to say, now might be a good time to go and engage Blake. You know, he's, he's been succeeding for three months on this thing. His usage is expanding. It might be a good time to give him a call. He might be a manager of a team or inside of a big company that could use more impact. So now would be a good time. Now when the salesperson shows up, she doesn't say, what can I sell you? Or what can I talk you into? Or can I introduce you to my product? No, the product's already been introduced. So her job now is how can I help you? Like, I see you're succeeding. Congratulations on that. I don't know if you were aware of this set, uh, of capabilities. I see you haven't been in there. You might. There may be some more stuff to do here or I don't know if you were aware that we have enterprise security or enterprise reporting or permissions, but there's a whole other gear here, Blake. And you work at a big company. Like, if there's anything I can do to help you scale, um, just let me know. So you show up with a real generosity mindset and there is not a single salesperson I know, Blake, who works for a PLG company who would ever go back.

Speaker A: Well, it's gotta be much easier because, uh, the guard's already down, right? You don't have to convince them of anything. They're already bought in. So yeah, as soon as the salesperson comes knocking, if you don't have like a free trial, you know, you're just trying to like, mind, you know, F them into buying something. It's like, man, that's the worst. Your guard goes up and you probably already decided no before you even get the pitch. And yeah, it's a much easier way to go. So I can see why a lot of companies are going that route. But like, in the companies that you've been a part of that have sold. So you've helped them transition to that traditional sales led model to like the product led growth model. How does the strategy change whenever that happens?

Speaker B: It's super difficult. What you just described is maybe the hardest thing to do. And it's one of the reasons I wrote um, the book is because I, because we all know that 99.9% of the companies on the planet weren't built from the ground up as product led growth. You know, like most companies that exist were built sales led. Got it. You know, like that's the way kind of business traditionally has happened. But if you see this wave of self service coming and it's been coming for a while, you know, you know, when E commerce was entered the picture, all of a sudden we could buy things without talking to a salesperson. Okay, cool. Then that went to, you know, software. We could subscribe to things. Okay, cool. And then I went to mobile. It was like right in our hands. Okay, cool. And that, that ball is just rolling as software gets easier and easier to understand and more and more services are delivered digitally. Okay, got it. So, so now I built my company one way, but I have a trend that is trending another way. How do I add in product led growth? It is difficult. So one of the things I did with the book is I went and studied three companies, many companies, but three made it through as case studies who added product led growth after they were already at a, at scale at at least a hundred million in revenue. One of those is HubSpot. They're known as a PLG darling now, but they weren't in the beginning. One of those is Unity software. That's the gaming platform, that kind of the underlying platform that a lot of game development companies use. And um, the third one is MongoDB. So all these were over 100 million in revenue and then had to go add it in. And then what it looks like is a mindset shift. And then once you get that mindset shift, there's a shift in the way you organ you organize. So you're actually going to kind of form a small team called a growth team and they're going to go work on taking friction out of the acquisition and activation process systematically. But they're not going to be beholden to the marketing team that they used to be on or the engineering team that they used to be on, or the product team that they used to be on, which is on, you know, two week or four week or six week sprint cycles. You put a small group of those people together that can control marketing, engineering and product. And they just run on rapid cycles and iterate their way towards streamlining. And the third thing, so number one is mindset. Number two is talent. You gotta organize your talent in a certain way. I know speaking your language here. But we want best and brightest small team that can iterate fast. And the third is timeline. Like you gotta give yourself some time. Like you gotta this big kind of tanker ship that can only be sold and implemented, you know, with, with like battalions of humans. Okay. And now I want it to go fast and be able to sell itself and install itself. I need a little time to iterate my way into that. And by a little time I mean like one to three years. Like I'm, yeah, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go knock this stuff down. I'm gonna get the rough edges off. I'm, I might not even start with acquisition. I might start with something simple like a renewal. Like hey, you already have a contract. You've already configured my solution. Now you want to do year two of the contract. Why do I need to get on the phone with you? Why don't you just click yes. So build that little simple workflow in, test it, make sure that it works for 70% of your customers. Handhold 30%, let 70% self serve. Boom. I've just proved to myself I can do something self service. Cool. Then I go from there to maybe expansion. Then I go from there maybe to acquisition. And so I'm going to slowly kind of work on each of the facets of the company and turn it into or of the product and turn it into a self service proposition.

Speaker A: So it takes a while. Yeah. So I also saw you took uh, inside sales from like one million to over a hundred million in ARR. So the go to market strategy kind of had to evolve. Can you walk us through those inflection points and how sales and marketing strategy had to change at each of those stages?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a common story. And um, we did not do everything right at inside Sales. I'm guessing anyone you have on this show will say the same thing about whatever they've done. Like oh my gosh, you zoom way out and you're like uh, ah, it looked pretty good for a while. Like that's amazing. You run and then you zoom um in. You're like woo, that doesn't look so great. Like why did you make those decisions? But the key is that each phase of growth has a certain set of priorities. So 0 to 1 is all about product, market fit. 1 to 10 is all about finding a go to market fit. Like, what is the motion? Is it product led growth? Is it sales led growth? Is it inbound? Is it outbound? I'm going to figure that out. I'm going to get the unit economics right. Once I get to 10, then it's all about scaling and I got to have infrastructure and place that allows me to scale once I get to 50. Boy, that is really about organizational kind of architecture. Like having having the right pieces of the machine in place and the right humans in place and everybody knows what they're doing and they're operating within like a uh, defined system. Because 50 and above is just all about scaling. And so each of those is a very different phase. Like you need different sets of talent, different mindsets. Um, you almost have to reset your systems a couple of times along the way too, because you need a different level of precision. And often you'll like people that are better at one phase or the other. Like, here's someone who's really good at zero to one, but do not ask her to run a $20 million company. Like, that's not her gig. Okay, cool. Here's someone that's really good at 50 and above, but do not ask him to show up at 0 to 1. He's like, he doesn't even know how to spell PMF, you know, and that's fine. You know, we're all good at what we're good at.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. And the world is niching down more and more and it makes it like really hard for job seekers. I know, because they applying to jobs and you know, they think they're the perfect match. But it's like, well, wait a minute, you didn't do the 50 to 100. You did the, you know, the 10 to 30. You know, uh, that's not what we're looking for. And it's like, what are you talking about?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: But yeah, I guess it is a different skill set.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, on that front, if you don't mind just double clicking there, the, the way you articulated it right there, which I'm, I hear all the time, this is not you speaking, this is a, you know, a, um, hiring manager speaking. I think it's lazy. Like, like what I really want to know is not what's on your resume, but what are you good at? Like what are your skills? So like whether or not you've ever done 50 to 100, I should be able to assess whether you have the skills to do 50 to 1. Hundred and in fact, if I can assess that without you having to have done it before. But I know what skills it takes and I can assess it. There's arbitrage there. Then I can hire the person who's super well suited for that, who hasn't had the job before, and I can pay her 70% of what I'd have to pay, you know, or even 50% of what I'd have to pay someone for whom it's their third go around and uh, they may actually even be tired. I love hiring ascendant talent and I love assessing them on, um, on their capability, not their resume.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, I wish more hiring managers would take that approach. Right, so you've hired hundreds of people across sales and marketing roles. Uh, what are like the top three qualities that you look for in top performing? Like revenue generating talent?

Speaker B: I'm going to get abstract, um, and then we can get to revenue specific. But I hiring framework that's really, really benefited me. Like I think I have a 70% hit rate and anyone who's not in, you're in my business might say 70%. What, like 30% of the people you hire don't work out. I'm like, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's, that's pretty bad. So I call it high octane hiring. The o C is at the beginning just to make a word. It doesn't stand for anything. But the t and the a and the ne actually stand for something. So T is talent. I look for 99th percentile talent. I want to find someone who's done, who's performed, who's achie achieved at a 99th percentile level on something. I don't care if it's Star wars memorabilia collection or the international crocheting contest, or it can be, um, breeding and showing horses. You can be a chess grandmaster, you can be a junior Olympics kind of level competitor in athletics. But I want to see that you've achieved something. Like you've pushed yourself, you've gotten knocked down, you've stood back up, you've been coached, and you've prevailed in something something. Because that person will not settle for second best. So 99th percentile talent. The second thing the A stands for action. I want to see bias for action. So I can find a lot of people who got straight A's. Like they know exactly what to do when they're told to do it. They know how to show up and follow orders. Okay, got it. How about the person who doesn't have to have orders, who can actually direct herself. So I want to see something in your background that says that you have been willing to, I don't know, found a company, found a non profit, found a club, you know, adopt a kid, invest uh, in real date, go take uh, a year off and, and go volunteer in the Peace Corps, do something that nobody asked you to do and, and kind of be self guided. So bias for action, not waiting around for orders. So talent action. And the last thing is the hardest. But I'll tell you how I test for it if we have a couple minutes. The last thing the ne is no ego. So now I find someone who's 99th percentile talented and has a bias for action and I want them to have no ego. Like that's really tough. So what I generally do, depending on the role, this is where we get to role specific. So if it's sales, if it's a salesperson, I'm going to give that person an exercise. I'm going to have them perform that exercise live and then I'm going to give them feedback on how they did and then I'm going to see how they respond to that feedback. Generally I like having like two or three people. This would be like a final interview stage. So let's say if it were a salesperson, hey, I'm going to give you an account that you're prospecting into. I'm going to have you prepare and then show up, let's say on a call, like we're doing a zoom call and run a discussion. Discovery call. I'll play the role of the, whatever, the cfo, she'll play the role of the head of operations and he'll play the role of whatever, the head of field or something. Okay, cool. Now you're going to do a discovery call with us. So you're going to have to manage us as stakeholders. You have to run your process. You're going to do whatever you would do. Boom. Cut scene. Now we're going to have you turn off your camera and go on mute. And we're going to talk about what we saw that we liked, what we didn't like. You're going to watch us take notes. It's going to be on your screen. Then we're going to pull you back on and we're going to say, all right, how did we do? Three types of reactions. Well, that was really, really, that was really good. If I would have had more time, you know, I would have, you know, it's kind of, you know, it's difficult to know in These situations, you know, what's really real and what's. Okay. Great. So thank you for your excuses. Got it. Second one would be like, man, that was the best thing ever. Thank you so much. I learned so much. Uh, you know what? You know, what do we do next? Like, okay, got it. You're really enthusiastic, and, uh, you're trying to, you know, gloss us up. Got it. The third one is the one we're looking for, which is. Okay, I. That was a rare opportunity to get feedback. You said following. Can I just click in on that and learn a little bit more? Because you said I should have picked up on your objection, and I should have handled it a little differently. Can you tell me how you would do it? That's curiosity. That's no ego. That's what we're looking for. Um, and you can test on that for roles in design, for roles in engineering, for roles in analytics, for roles in finance. The exercise is different, but the structure is the same.

Speaker A: Interesting. All right. Yeah, I've never broken it down that way. I'll start looking for that. You gave me some pointers there on how to screen people.

Speaker B: People.

Speaker A: Do you think that there'll be a point in time where AI can do that better than humans can?

Speaker B: A lot of it. A lot of it. I mean, I want to look you in the eyes if I'm the hiring manager, and I just want to get a feel for who you are. But, boy, could AI kind of test your technical capabilities, like your domain expertise. Could it test you for ability better than kind of what's on your resume? Um, yeah, I think it could. I don't. What. You're in the business. What do you think?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm afraid that it can. There was a study that came out. It was a study of, like, 30,000 interviews. I, uh, think it was done another country like Philippines, but, you know, they gave a set to humans and another set of candidates to AI, and they found a lot better results in terms of candidate success and candidate retention as high as, you know, 10 to 15% better results by the AIs conducting interviews, which is crazy to me, so it's a little scary, I'll be honest.

Speaker B: Yeah. It might be saying something about human interviewers, too. You know, we. We introduce a lot of bias, unintentionally. Oh, you look like me. Oh, you sound like me. Oh, you worked at a company like me. Oh, like you came from a place like me, therefore, you know, blah, blah, blah. Or you don't look those things or sound those things. Or have that background, therefore, blah, blah, blah, we gotta get behind that to the real skills evaluation and the real fit assessment. And I bet AI could screen some of that bias out.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it, I mean, it definitely can. It can be trained to, uh, ignore all bias. Right. Even, uh, based on the data that, you know, trained on. But let's Talk more about AI. So your headline on LinkedIn is AI assisted go to market. So what are some of the new tools and strategies you're, you know, you've seen, uh, emerging that help with go to market?

Speaker B: Well, just like we said, AIs can probably perform some recruiting tasks or at least screening tasks. M better than humans. The same thing is true for go to market tasks. And the easiest ones, the easiest, the sexiest ones, the ones that everyone thought were gonna like, you know, jump right to the top immediately are like, um, you know, a sales development rep. Like, I'm gonna screen and qualify a candidate, I'm gonna have a conversation with a prospect, I'm gonna figure out if they're a real qualified, uh, prospect, and then I'm gonna schedule an appointment with a salesperson to go engage with them. Some of that's working and some of it's not. Some of it falls into the uncanny valley where, like, I don't wanna talk to a creepy robot. I, like, I'm happy to get my hands on the product, or I'm happy to talk, made me talk to a creepy robot. But there's some other stuff. So some of it is working, Blake. But there's some other stuff that, um, that doesn't fall into that uncanny valley. Like, like we've trained AI to do a really good job at, at email exchange. Like really good. And, and you've seen it on, you know, the general LLMs through a chat interface. But that can also. That same experience can be delivered by email. So I send in an email, I get an email back, I email back, I get another email back, I'm having a conversation. I think it's a human. It's not, it's a bot. And it's helping questions and it's helping lead me down the funnel that actually really works. And then there's some back office stuff, um, that's not necessarily customer facing. So imagine that I'm a human and it's my job to show up and say, how do I help? Okay, cool. Where do I get reps? How do I practice? Nobody likes role playing, especially in front of your peers or in front of your boss. But what if I could role play with a Robot and kind of practice objection handling and practice discovery questions and practice stakeholder, um, management. So some of this stuff can be kind of synthesized where I get better at my job without having to embarrass myself in front of a live human. And then I can show up prepared as if, you know, practice day, game day, you know, and then there's some stuff all the way in the back office. Just automation of stuff I don't like to do, like fill out fields in the CRM or do research on my account or even make a call on my forecast or for a manager, make a call on all of my, uh, um, people's forecasts. AI can do a lot of that stuff without buying us. And AI doesn't get tired. And so we can streamline a lot of that back office stuff too.

Speaker A: Yeah. I've heard some case studies of folks actually getting hired or getting recruited and hired, and it was through a text bot that they didn't know wasn't a human. I think once the person got hired, the case study I'm talking about, they actually wanted to think the AI they were interviewing with or coordinating with the whole time. And the company had to admit, hey, that's actually not a real person. Like, that was an AI you've been chatting it up with. Then they were shocked. Right. So I've seen mixed reviews, uh, from candidates. If you make them speak to an AI, uh, for the first interview I've seen kind of, it's about a 50% dropout rate.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: From candidates. They just don't want to participate.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So that's one of the downsides. But I think the younger generation prefers it more. They see it as lower pressure rather than speaking to a human. That's strange to me. But, you know, I'm 41 years old, so, so I'm not, you know, if I'm 21, I don't know, maybe I would.

Speaker B: But it might depend on the job too. But at some point, I always recommend, um, to young professionals that you insist that you meet the hiring manager. Like the actual person who you're going to work for. Sometimes a recruiter or even more often, HR will kind of run the process. And now you're saying, well, maybe it's not even a human version of that. Maybe it's AI, like, okay, fine, but insist that you meet the, like the hiring manager, the person you're going to be working with for and the people you're going to be working with, because that's one of the main determinants of whether you're going to succeed in this job is who you're working with.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Most important. Yeah. I would hate to see a process that didn't involve the people you'd be working with.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: You definitely want to know who you're working for and the team, so. Uh, yeah, for sure. But AI can do a lot, man. I keep waiting for my kids to come home with like a personal AI teacher on their tax tablet.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I'm taking this class. You know, the school, they don't need teachers anymore. I've got my AI right here.

Speaker B: It's gonna happen. Tutor first and then maybe a teacher. For sure.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure, man. Scary and crazy. Well, let's talk about your book. You authored a book on product LED growth called Freemium.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I need to read that. Steal some of your magic there. But what's a couple of trade secrets from that book that you can share?

Speaker B: Well, you know, we start by kind of outlining how we got here. Like some of the trends we were talking about the trend towards self service, the trends towards simplification, the trend towards automated gtm. And there's, you know, there's a bunch of companies who showed us the way. You think of Dropbox, Docusign, Canva, Twilio, Atlassian. These are all. There's 40 companies now, Blake, that are public that built their companies based on product led growth. The way we define, find it. Okay. Like 40, you know, and Atlassian is a $45 billion company. It's sort of. Sort of hard to ignore. So how do we get there? That's kind of like, you know, what are the trends? That. That's kind of how the book starts out. So now we have your attention. Okay, got it. Now how is it done? Like, let's click in because no one. This is the book no one had written yet. How is it done? Like, show me the framework, show me the model, show me the method, methodology. And how do you organize and kind of go build that? That's part two of the book. And then it's like, hey, then we acknowledge, like we said earlier, hey, what if I didn't build my company that way and I'm not a startup? How do I retrofit? Okay, let's go look at how companies have done that. And then let's look at some hybrid models, because maybe I can't be self service new customer acquisition, but maybe I can be self service like we said before renewal or something else. So we looked at a range of hybrid models for the 99% of companies on the planet who didn't start out that way. And then we go look at kind of where is it going to go from here. Like, how does it go? Bey software? Like, you think we do some really cool case studies, like with a real estate company. Like, wait, how does real estate, that's literally like bricks and mortar. Like how can that be product LED growth? Well, you'd be surprised. Um, or tractor company. We go study John Deere. Like, how can John Deere, that's a half a million dollar piece of equipment. Like, how can that be plg? Well, you'd be surprised. They're wiring up, they're embedding software, they're building loops in. And so some of these principles are going to really permeate. And now, Blake, when we get into the era of AI, some of the things that were previously unsellable or unconfigurable or uninstallable without human assistance are suddenly sellable and configurable and installable. Because I can have robot assistance, you know, like a pseudo human can help me through the complexity. So I think it's a wild, wild future. And we just walk through that whole journey. And wherever you are in the journey, there's a place in this book for you to click in and kind of get some ideas.

Speaker A: Huh. Okay. Do you have an example of how a hardware company adopted PLG model?

Speaker B: Totally a bunch. I think the John Deere one is the most interesting. You know, half a million dollar piece of equipment, minimum, sometimes more a combine. How is that plg? Well, you're not going to buy the tractor. There are actually companies that will lease you tractors. Okay, that's great. But, but in the John Deere case, they're outfitted. The newest tractors are outfitted with computer vision and precision spraying equipment and soil, uh, sampling equipment. So now the computer vision is, uh, is literally scanning. That's a weed, that's a plant. Okay, cool. So spray a, uh, weed killer on the weed, spray fertilizer on the plant, and if it sees, uh, pests, spray pesticide there, like literally so it doesn't have to waste. It can precision spray, it can sample, um, soil and monitor kind of where it is on the long lat and monitor, uh, weather conditions. It can make adjustments to ongoing irrigation schedules. It can make adjustments to fertilizer formulation. It can send all that stuff upstream for replenishment cycles of seed varieties and fertilizer varieties. So farming becomes like a very highly tech. And the PLG part of it is all the supplies that come into the farm. It's not the tractor itself. It's all the fertilizer and pesticide and, um, and seeds that come into the farm that get automatically reordered and automatically reconfigured based on the feedback loop.

Speaker A: Interesting. Okay, so you have to have the equipment first, and it's the software features that offer a trial period to get you hooked and then they're in. Right. So, okay, that makes sense.

Speaker B: Yeah. Peloton the same way with your bike, MRI and kind of heavy, uh, equipment, actually, just like your H VAC equipment too, is monitoring things and, and suggesting when you got to replace a UV light or a filter or order a service, it's going to be more and more that way. Our refrigerators are going to reorder stuff for us. Our cars are already talking to us. There's a whole bunch of stuff that, you know, once, once it's tracking kind of what we're doing, then it can start setting up the replenishment or the cycles or the service.

Speaker A: Well, when you have a PLG company company, you become a lot more dependent on the marketing team versus the sales team. So what are some of the metrics that, uh, you know, VP of marketing should become obsessed with? Uh, versus, like a more traditional model?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good question, Blake. So the interesting part of this is that the product, like the, the product leader gets introduced into the revenue team. Like it used to be marketing, handoff to sales. Got it. And products over there kind of in the back room, the windowless backroom, you know, so. But now product is actually, you know, inserting into that chain. And now marketing and product are working really closely together. Because marketing isn't just about getting a hand raiser or a qualified lead. Marketing's about getting a start, like a new account start in the product. And you almost can't tell where marketing stops and where product starts because like you said, you know, when you describe your free trials earlier, whose win was that free trial start? Was it marketings or was it products? It's kind of both. Like, the marketing team had to get you right up there and you almost didn't know when you left the website and you started into the product because they made it so seamless. So marketing's getting the new starts then. Product is all about usage. Like, they need to get you to first impact, and then they need to get you to recurring impact. And they're going to measure things like this is product. Now they're going to measure things like daily, weekly, and monthly active usership. And they want to make sure that you stay engaged. So there is a handout handoff. It's, it's right around account creation, but it's not from marketing to sales. It's from marketing to product. And then the sales handoff is later. Usually once you've started to achieve impact with the product and shown patterns that make you an attractive prospect for sales.

Speaker A: That's a way, that's the way to go, man. Much easier way to go about it for sure. So I, I see your book being very popular. Back to like sales drawing from your time managing 300 million million in quotas. Like how do you recommend a VP of Sales structure their sales team once they've implemented the plg?

Speaker B: Well, it's, you know, it's not going to be a uh, wholesale switchover. Right. We're going to evolve our way into this. But the thing I could do right now as a sales leader, the thing I can do right now is start to adopt the first principles of plg. Maybe not the mechanics, maybe not the kind of specifics. You know, maybe I still do have a big of battleship size product that needs, you know, lots of sales and configuration. Got it. But the way these PLG products are built are on three first principles. The first one is empathy. Second one is generosity. And the third one is metrics. When I have no human in the room, I really, really have to meet the customer where she is. That means I gotta understand her. That means I gotta know how she measures progress. And that's an empathy thing. Like a real really. Because there's no one there to like you said to talk her into it. So I need empathy. Well, what about my big battleship company? I can also show up with empathy if I'm a salesperson. Like we're just two humans, right? Like just we're two humans. You're trying to do your job. I'm trying to do my job. How can I help? Like, let me, let me figure out kind of what your situation is, what your pain is and then let me see if I, if I got something that can help you. And once I do understand it, then the second thing is generosity. It's not to say can you afford it? Because if you can, then I'll take the next meeting. Otherwise I won't take the next meeting. Like that's that a weird stance? It's like, I think we could be helpful. Let me see, let me show you something. Let's see if we could be helpful. I'm going to lead with like generosity. And then the third thing is more of a PLG thing, which is metrics, because I need to have metrics. If I'm going to measure a go to market motion where no humans are involved, that's my feedback loop. But in sales, you know, we're just going to, we're also going to measure our funnel, but we've always done that. But it's the empathy and generosity and the customer centricity kind of the customer impact. If I can put that. If I were leading a big sales team, I would get them all, all to think about situation, pain and impact. That displays the same first principles as plg, namely empathy and generosity. So I'm going to train them to show up in a certain way. How can I help not what can I sell you? How can I understand your situation and pain? How can I match it with some impact? You know, let me, let, let me be a fellow human and see if we can make something happen that'll make your life better. That's a great way to show up. Yeah.

Speaker A: I wonder how staffing companies are gonna start adopting the, uh, PLG model. It's probably gonna start with this, a AI recruiting process. This platform that, you know, company can use it and it's free for your first two hires.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And then, you know, you. So try it out for your first two hires. If you like it now, we're going to charge the fee, but I see that as.

Speaker B: Or you get X percent of the way down the funnel. Like, we'll qualify to like second round. And then, and then if you want human intervention, like if you want a Blake Williams to really take those candidates. Candidates and run them through a kind of a human interaction that's. I don't know. I'm just making this up. But there's different ways to skin it, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Let's start it. It's your new startup. Let's do this. Let's do this right now.

Speaker B: I like it. Um, someone will.

Speaker A: No, yeah, I know it's coming. I'm very afraid of that for my own career.

Speaker B: Yeah. If you're on the right side of it though, like the AI literate and, but, and you're a curious guy and you're asking all the right questions like you will be on the right side. There'll be way many laggards that'll be way behind you. So you're on the cutting edge. You'll. You'll benefit from all this disruption.

Speaker A: Thanks. It's yet to be seen, right? Uh, one of the things that companies probably worry about by adopting the PLG model Because things are so self service. Might be afraid. Hey, if it's easy on, it's easy off too, right? So what impact does PLG have on customer churn?

Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen churn mostly related to price. So low price, it's easy on, easy off. So one of the things that PLG companies. Well, PLG companies think about this all the time, Blake. Like it's, um. And the main thing we're optimizing for is usage retention. So hey, I got you to first impact during your first session. Amazing Check. Did you ever come back, like once you published your first design or once you issued your first payroll, or once, you know, whatever that thing is, did you ever come back? We're really worried about that because if we can have you back and back again and back again, then that bec. You know, we call that habit. That's kind of like stickiness or habit, which means, you know, I'm likely to keep you. But m. Maybe somebody else shows up and they have a fancier widget and it's the same price and it's easy on. So I just ditch you and move over there. So what I really do want to do over time is build in things like integrations, integrations to the other systems that you use, integrations to your processes. Any amount of kind of configuration that you've done that you don't want to lose. So we think hard about that. And once I'm a big enough footprint inside of a company with enough kind of habit built around it, enough integrations and enough kind of configuration built in, it becomes harder and harder to. To extract. It's a real issue, but we fight it head on.

Speaker A: You got to make it as sticky as you can, right? Once you've integrated it, it's like companies don't want to get away from it. Then it's like, well, we've done all this work. It comes to sunk cost fallacy. But interesting. Well, so the B2B SaaS game has gotten incredibly crowded and competitive. Um, so if you were a V2B, a VP of sales or marketing starting today at like a $10 million ARR company, where would 80% of your time?

Speaker B: If I'm just on this revenue acquisition side, right. Sales or marketing? It's a hard question to answer in the abstract. Specifics matter. But, um, I'll give you a generic answer. I really care about ideal customer profile like targeting. Now, I need to have the right skills to deal with the right customers. But if I don't have the right customers, my team's gonna be wasting a lot of cycles. You know, if my ideal customer is a VP of HR for an agribusiness in North America, and I'm wasting cycles with VPs of H for accounting firms or for construction companies or for banks, like, great. Could it do it? Yeah. Could it solve their problem? Yeah. Is it ideal for them? No. So how much more effort do I have to kind of spend and then how much less likely are they going to be to renew after a year of experience if they're a bank versus an agribusiness? If I can get everything in my funnel to be agribusiness, then that's like, that's a self reinforcing thing. My product was designed for it. I'm going to close better, I'm going to retain better. So I really like icp. If you said, is there one thing I would focus on? It would be that it's hard to

Speaker A: get right because it's hard to turn down business.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Your ICP to, you know, be determined by where your business is coming from. Well, if it's coming from, um, someone you didn't expect, it's like, well, I guess we're this now, right? You know, let's, let's go this route. This is where the money's coming from. So it's really hard to determine. Really hard up, uh, front. Very hard. Especially when you're trying to make some, make some moolah.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, the bigger you get, the more you scale, the more patterns you see. And then the question is, can I keep my salespeople's plate full of high ICP fit prospects? And if I can, then they don't need to be distracted by this or that. If I can't, then what are, what else are they supposed to do? How are they going to kind of hit their quota? They got to go sell to the bank and to the pharmacy because you didn't give them enough high ACP accounts.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, AI is definitely recommended to me. I talk to Gemini all the time and yeah, hey, what can I do to grow my business today? And you know, it keeps telling me, you got to need niche down. You know, you got to focus on like I used to be focused on sales, marketing, engineering, cyber security.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And it was like, that's not an icp, man. That's everything. Like, you gotta pick, like, pick one, like you place VP of sales and that's it. And I was like, well, what about. I like marketing too. It's like, all right, well, two. But that's it, you know, uh, it's really hard to do, though, because if I were to get, like, a software engineering role today, would I turn it down? Heck, no, I wouldn't. I still work on it. It's kind of taking whatever I can get right now in this market because the economy's a little bit. A little bit crazy, a little bit tough. Think back to the toughest year that you've had while scaling one of your companies. Like, what was the challenge and what were some of the lessons that you learned?

Speaker B: I learned the most when things are the hardest. Um, and I think that's what you're implying with the question. So I had a company, um, where I raised. This is a brand new startup, kind of from. From scratch. Brand new startup. I had raised $2 million from friends and family, kind of, you know, angel money. But people I knew, like, people I knew. And based on that and based on some initial success in our market, I went and hired and I had a team of, call it 10 people, including a couple people I would consider very good friends. So now we're burning through that $2 million. We're. We're living the dream. We're living in, uh, you know, we're operating out of Palo Alto, California, sharing offices with Groupon. It's pretty cool. Like, everything, uh, you know, and also, I'm watching my bank account go, like, go like this while I'm paying pay payroll, and I'm watching my customer count kind of go like this. But it's not catching up. So it's tough, Blake. Like, it's tough. And I know you've been there. I know a lot of people listening have been there. I flew out to Boston to. I think I was probably doing some fundraising stuff, and I sat down with a friend of mine who's also an entrepreneur, and he was like, um, all right, Dave, so how much time do you have left? And I was like, well, like, two months. And he's like, oh, you're good. He's like, you're still positive numbers. I've been negative two months before. I'm like, what? Like, that's the mindset shift. Like, I'm worried about laying off these 10 people because I only got two months of payroll left. And he's like, oh, you're totally good. Um, like, you're not even in the negatives yet. And I just shifted that mindset. And then I just kind of went out there and kept fundraising. There's more to this story, but you know, what I learned is the sun always comes up tomorrow. It always Comes up tomorrow. Even if I had to shut down, which I didn't, the next day, I would still be me. I'd still have the experiences I have, I'd still have the talents I have, I'd still have the relationships I have, and I could still go do something amazing, no different than yesterday. So just don't catastrophize stuff. Just keep your head in the game and, you know, you'll be able to be amazing.

Speaker A: That's good advice for me, too, because I get. I go through lulls, right? I get a hot client, couple job orders, I'm off to the races. Things are great, I fill those jobs, and now we're at, uh, nothing, right? And feels like the sky is falling, so just got to keep your head on straight, right? Keep, keep, uh, at it. Keep grinding. Small wins every day compound. Right?

Speaker B: That is true. That is true. And you're still you. Like, everybody wants to work with you, so why wouldn't that be true after those two jobs, uh, wrapped up? Of course it's true.

Speaker A: Yeah, I know, right? The economy is just a little crazy right now, and there's so many. You know, the layoffs are fueling a high volume of job applicants, so companies feel empowered. They don't really need a headhunter because, uh, they've got so many applicants and candidates coming in ends. It's hard to find job orders right now.

Speaker B: So send them to me, man. I. I don't mean that literally, but from the hiring manager side, I can tell you, like, my success rate with inbound candidates is so low.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Compared to, like, a directed search for the right person who probably is still employed and probably needs to have an active conversation to even consider taking an interview, that person is probably better for my job than the six people lined up at my door.

Speaker A: Preach. Preach. I, uh, talk about that all the time. Yeah, I don't know if it's even worth posting jobs anymore, because you get a thousand applicants, two thousand applicants, and you go through them all, and it's like, man, you interview the good ones and only to be disappointed because the good ones were only. They only look good because they were, like, engineered their resume with AI.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's probably right. Yeah.

Speaker A: I've been disappointed so many times. So you got a head hunt?

Speaker B: Hey, man.

Speaker A: Uh, well, hey, just, uh, I'd saw on LinkedIn that you had 43,000 followers, which is awesome. Uh, I've got like 27,000, but it doesn't count because I'm a recruiter, right? So I probably connected with most of those people on my own, instead of them finding me and following me. So what does your content strategy look like?

Speaker B: Well, I just try to be genuine. I don't know that I have a strategy. I stay in two lanes. One is around career strategy. We've talked a little bit about this and just kind of finding your fit and making good decisions for you. Because I think when you find you're fit, you're the best version of yourself. You're happy. And happiness has gravity and it attracts all sorts of opportunity, not the other way around. So solve for fit and happiness first. That's kind of one of my swim lanes. The other swim lane is all around the stuff we're talking about. Uh, AI led growth, product LED growth, go to market. But I just try to be genuine. Like, I'll write a legit kind of thought and research piece once in a while, but I'll also just put stuff out there that just gets you thinking. I'll test some of my thoughts on LinkedIn. I do have a. I do have a substack where, uh, I've got my. Both of those, uh, threads going. And then one of them turned into a book. Right. Like. Like we did a. I did a bunch of work on product LED growth. It started snowballing. We people liked it. I launched my substack and it turned into a book. I hope to turn the other one into a book as well.

Speaker A: Congrats, man. It's hard to write a book. So, yeah, you, uh, you've. You've been there, done that. Now you get the T shirt.

Speaker B: Three and a half years. Three and a half years. It was real work.

Speaker A: I bet. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to do the research pieces.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, you know what I've always found about content is the moment you try to something out that's serious, the engagement's very low. But then you put something out that's the dumbest thing you came up with in five seconds, and you just put it up and it goes buck wild. And, uh, that just. The funny clips are. That's what gets the engagement. Yeah, it's really counterintuitive.

Speaker B: Yeah. People are great at that. I'm not great at that. I know that I have way less engagement because of it. That's fine. I am who I am. Like, I'll have a smaller audience and we'll be tight.

Speaker A: There you go. Well, do you have anything you want to leave with the audience before we end it?

Speaker B: My number one thing is courage. You are. You are m. Most definitely more competent than you are confident, most definitely. So find the thing that really kind of lights you up and gives you energy and that you're actually good at and lean into that thing. You don't have to be good at everything, but you are good at something. You're the best in the world at something. You're way better than me at something. You're way better than Blake at something. Figure that thing out and then just channel as much courage as you can to put that out into the world. That's what the world needs. Whatever that is, that's what we all need from you. And that is. And that's where you'll be your best self. And, um, the sun's going to come up every day no matter what, whether you get, uh, accepted or rejected. But you put your best stuff out there and. And the world's gonna. The world's gonna find you for who you are. And I just love watching people kind of lean into the best versions of themselves. It's amazing. So just go out and be amazing.

Speaker A: There you have it, folks. Well, where can people find you, Dave?

Speaker B: Well, uh, Dave Boyce, substack.com. that's my substack. You can find me on LinkedIn. I would love if, you know, if you're interested in any of this AI and uh, product LED growth stuff, I'd love for you to check out freemium, that's on Amazon or anywhere you buy books, uh, Barnes and Noble, Target, wherever, your Waterstones, if you're in the uk. But it's super easy on Amazon and I'd love to see out there.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, you've been a great guest, man. I've learned quite a bit here. So, uh, fun talking with you and all the success. To you, sir.

Speaker B: Thank you, brother. You too.