Science of SaaS Startups Podcast with Conor Bronsdon - LinearB

Speaker A: Welcome to the Science of SaaS startups podcast where we talk with leaders across the world of tech startups. We'll be discussing revenue growth, leadership, funding acquisition, and, um, much more. This podcast is for Anyone at a SaaS startup, whether you're a new business hunter or founder. Make sure you tune in and enjoy the episode. Before we get into it, make sure you hit like and subscribe, and don't forget to comment your views below. The Science of SaaS Startups podcast is brought to you by Venatech, a sales recruiter for high growth SaaS startups. Um, sit back and enjoy the episode. Foreign.

Speaker B: And welcome to The Science of SaaS Startups podcast. Today I'm talking to Conor Bronston. Uh, Connor is the director of marketing at Linear B, uh, which is a, uh, software delivery management platform. Connor, welcome.

Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me, Ben. It's a pleasure to come on the show.

Speaker B: So, as also, as always, uh, we kick things off by just asking a few questions to help the audience get to know you a little bit. So, first question, um, what is your proudest achievement? Uh, in or out of work?

Speaker C: Ooh, proudest achievement. Uh, I mean, my out of work one's absolutely convincing my wife to marry me. Ah, that's a big win for me. But, um, as far as in work lately, I'm, uh, really proud of what we've done at LinearB, building up our dev interrupted podcast media brand. Uh, we have 17,000 software engineering leaders who now subscribe to this media brand who listen to our podcast every week. And we've done that completely organically, building it from, from nothing a couple years ago and are now really influencing our industry, um, and talking a lot about software engineering insights and, you know, how to deliver software on time. And, uh, it's been such a pleasure to build up. Uh, so, yeah, huge, hugely excited by that.

Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, a lot of hard work got into that. Um, obviously everybody out there should go and listen to that as well. Um, I'm sure they'll be able to learn a lot about what you guys are doing. So, next question. Um, what is the best piece of feedback that you've ever received?

Speaker C: Uh, the best piece of feedback I ever received is one that I still struggle with occasionally, and that was to listen first. I, um, think it is something where we get really excited about ideas and we want to share our insights. And so often that excitement can impact others in ways that we're not aware of. Um, we jump in without the right context. We destroy trust between us and our team members by overriding them just because we're excited on a topic. Um, and when you reverse that equation and start to listen first, um, you get more information and you make better decisions. You build trust, uh, with your team and with your peers. And really crucially, uh, you don't come off as a bit of an ass, uh, in Zoom meetings. And I, uh, occasionally will still do this. I'll get too excited about a topic. I'm like, oh, let's talk SaaS metrics. Uh, here's this idea I have, and every time I do it, I have to draw myself back. And I think it's something that we get really trained to do as we advance, uh, in our careers is, oh, I know this, Let me explain it. And we're doing a disservice to our teams when we don't listen first and understand where they're coming from and take the opportunities to coach instead.

Speaker B: A good business lesson, but also a good life lesson as well. I'm always trying to tell myself to kind of listen to the kids and not just kind of tell them what to do all the time, uh, because obviously they need to have their own voice as well. Um, so when was the last time that you tried something for the first time?

Speaker C: Uh, the last time I tried something for the first time,

Speaker B: I would say

Speaker C: a couple weeks ago. Um, I'm a big fan of kind of jumping in to experiment with new ideas. And I haven't spent much time coding in JavaScript and so I dove in and started, uh, to try to level up there, uh, a couple weeks ago.

Speaker B: So learning how to code, uh, well,

Speaker C: I know some Python and, um, Basic Java and a few other things. But, uh, trying to then translate that skill to other, uh, areas is one where I don't get to it enough day to day. So I have to spend time, uh, to level it up.

Speaker B: So, yeah, so that might be the answer to my next question as well, because the next one was going to be, if you could swap roles with anybody at the company for one day, who would it be and why?

Speaker C: Oh, man, uh, that's a tough one.

Speaker B: Um, software engineer or the CEO?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I think I would go engineer. Um, I mean, obviously our RICP are software engineering leaders and, um, I have great communications with them on our podcast every week. I have a. I'm really lucky to get to talk to them regularly and understand them from a leadership perspective. But, uh, I am a very bad developer and have never done it professionally outside of a couple of, you know, web pages. Uh, and I think spending more time on that would continue to deepen my understanding.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, great stuff. So if we um, jump into linear B, do you want to just kind of kick things off with an overview of what you're doing, the know the core mission and the problem you're trying to solve?

Speaker C: Absolutely. So our, our mission is to enable software engineering teams across the world to accelerate. And that means we're trying to solve this dual mandate that engineering teams have. One, deliver business results. You want your features to matter, that you want them to help impact customers. And, and we know today that all software or all companies are truly becoming software companies. It, it's so crucial that you engage on the level of, you know, making sure you have access to, to digital tools for your teams. And it's where uh, so much uh, of growth is coming from. And the second piece is efficiency. And you know, we're hearing this word a lot in turbulent economic times, but it's, it's necessary at all times within your software delivery process. It's really uh, easy to get lost and, and not be delivering features in the timely manner that you need to. So our goal is to help engineer leaders, uh, developers, engineering managers, every level of engineering organization be able to provide predictable software delivery to the rest of the company and to your customers. And we do that through our software delivery management solutions as part of our software engineering intelligence platform. And so what that means is essentially we uh, provide several different use cases or solutions. Um, so it starts kind of with like the visibility layer of goals and reporting for engineering leaders resource, uh, allocations so we can understand, you know, do I have too many devs working on this feature that's not that important or do I want more devs on this other project? Uh, and then we kind of dive into that like goals piece because obviously it's great to get visibility. Uh, you know, understanding what calories are going to your body is gonna help you make better decisions. But if you don't set goals around it, it's hard to hold yourself accountable. So we're big on how can you help coach your teams. How can you have goals that for improvement and key metrics, um, and then we uh, enable that through automation. So that's uh, programmable workflows. You uh, can use YAML, uh, to do this, which is one of the areas I'm trying to learn here. Last few months. Uh, so using YAML files to basically set out policy as code. So if I want, you know, all pieces of code that are of a particular security need to be reviewed by a particular person in that security team. I can program that in so that they automatically get routed there. Uh, just as one example. Or maybe I want to add contextual labels so that people when they're looking at someone else's code, have some idea of what's going on. Um, and there's huge opportunities here with like AI insights and stuff where it's stuff we're building into the platform. Uh, and the goal of all of this is to make delivery more predictable for software engineering teams so that we can deliver more value to the business. And uh, hopefully it'll also help developers themselves be happier because we're automating away a lot of the annoying stuff they have to do on their day to day.

Speaker B: Mhm. And obviously like SaaS or software is a hugely competitive landscape and your kind of niche is no different. You know, how do you kind of think about like your value proposition? Like what do you do that that's kind of different, you know, from everybody else? Mhm.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean SaaS is so broad that it's uh, it's hard to really focus in. And, and that's what we've tried to do is say look, we, we know that you know, CFOs get value out of some of the stuff we do, um, because we can better understand how engineering resources are being allocated. And see, do the right projects have uh, you know, the right resources, uh, on them, the right people. But our focus is purely on software engineering leaders. You know, if you're a VP of engineering at uh, a startup, if you're a, you know, a cto, if you're a director of engineering at a major enterprise, we can help your team whether with our free products like free DORA metrics, visibility, free automations, or our paid, which uh, gets a lot more extensive through our paid platform. Um, our, our goal is to help those leaders uh, performed better in their job, report better the rest of the organization and deliver more value to customers.

Speaker B: And you kind of touched very briefly earlier on kind uh, of data analytics and kind of m machine learning that you're kind of building into the platform. You know, what role do you see that those technologies playing in your product development?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's super exciting actually. We've been using machine learning for a long time. Uh, you know, we work with I believe about 4,000 engineering teams around the world now, maybe a little over that at this point. And because of that we process a lot of their data and so we're able to take that aggregate data and provide insights to teams where we say, okay, you know, based on the last 20 features you've delivered, we think this feature is off track. Um, that, that's coming up in your next release. Um, so maybe you need to adjust how you're, you're putting resources towards it or maybe it needs to be deprioritized. That's um, just like a very basic example. The, the more exciting ones that are coming m that we're starting to see that be enabled by, so pardon me, but be enabled by AI are things like um, one of the key sticking points in the software delivery process, uh, is that most code has to be reviewed, right? Like unless it's like a documentation change, it's all going to get reviewed and that's put into what's called a pull request or PR. And those PRs are not something devs are really excited to take up. Typically devs enjoy writing code. They enjoy uh, not necessarily reviewing other people's code. It's not most people's preferences. And often you kind of pulled out of a meeting or you're pulled out of your flow state or it's just like that little task that's like I, uh, gotta do this. But it's not something I'm excited about. And so we're not only are we providing contextual labeling, so for example, if it's uh, assisted by AI, let's say it's a GitHub copilot's being used to help write that code, we can label that so you can track it versus non AI assisted code. So you can see downstream effects and ROI and kind of track your program roi. Very exciting stuff. There's. But what's more exciting I think is the opportunity to say, okay, let's say we've seen a bunch of similar pieces of uh, code that have gone in through prs to this part of the code base. Um, based off of that, we can now give a suggestion using generative AI and say, hey, do you want to add this? Maybe this is the right comment. Here's the piece of context you're missing. Uh, maybe this isn't linked to a JIRA ticket. We can automatically help you set that up so you can actually track this code. And there's a ton of things that we can do there. And we're seeing some enterprises be really successful at this. So like Uber, for example, saved $10 million last year, um, in developer hours by automating some of the creation of these comments, um, as part of this review process. And we're really lucky and this is a huge differentiator for us over competitors that we have focused very early on these PRs, these atomic units of the software delivery lifecycle and said, okay, we're going to track these, we're going to have a massive database of these. We've, you know, have millions of these PRs that we have now processed. Let's be able to take these and put them as artifacts that we then train our generative AI model off of, uh, and start to generate code samples, generate suggestions and speed things up. Um, we're not going to compete with the copilots, we're going to assist them. We're uh, selling picks and shovels to help, you know, move the software delivery forward. And I think there's so much opportunity there. Plus there's a ton of stuff around AI insights because we work with so many teams. As I mentioned, I give that example of hey, maybe this product's off track but there's so much more we could do there. We're starting to suggest, hey, we see this metric is below what we see for comparable companies, um, within your industry. Let's say you're a fintech company and maybe you're not moving things through security compliance process as rapidly as other folks in the industry are. We can suggest here are ways to either automate parts of the process or provide improvement goals that you can now coach your devs on. Um, so there's so much opportunity there and I think we're just scratching the surface.

Speaker B: Yeah, like you say it's a kind of massively rapidly, uh, kind of developing space at the moment, but just switching up to kind of think about the kind of startup life more broadly. So uh, linear Bs raised about $70 million so far in total. Uh, kind of closing their series B last year or 2022. Sorry. Thinking about your career journey, what moments do you feel kind of shaped the kind of pivotal moments in your career and you know, how do you think they kind of set you up for working in a kind uh, of an early stage startup?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a great question because I'm really enjoying that process of scaling from that early series A now through series B towards our series C, um, you know, heading past that 10 million ARR mark getting kind of build and I think there's so much exciting stuff happening for us as an industry and um, as a company that it's very much a learning experience uh, to kind of go through that every time you hit this kind of Dunbar's number around 100 people and new challenges come in. Uh, but it's true at 20 people, at 40 people. And I have honestly leaned into startups from a young age. Um, I started my career kind of in political activism around technology. Um, and so some of my very first formative experiences when I was in college, right after college, were uh, helping lead startup, uh, political action committees and campaigns, uh, that were targeting, uh, topics related to tech like data privacy, net neutrality. And I learned so much in that formative experience. It really gave me a taste of these startups. And I went off and ended up working at Microsoft for several years, working with other Fortune 500 companies. And I realized I missed that. So it's been great to jump back in and say, hey, I'm having a chance to kind of take on the energy again. And now to have the chance to say, okay, we're scaling to that next level. We're not fortunate 500 yet, but we're scaling towards that exit. And um, I just love that process of change. I think change management is such a important skill for leaders and continuing to build trust in your team, scale your team, uh, it's a ton of fun.

Speaker B: And how do you think about building a brand in, in that kind of early stage company? Because obviously you're not going to have the budgets of a Microsoft or a, you know, a larger company. You know, you have to make less, do more. Um, you know, how do you think about kind of making that name for yourself in, you know, what's always going to be a crowded market. Yeah.

Speaker C: So we did it a couple ways here at Linear B. So I mentioned our podcast Dev Interrupted, that um, was one of our early investments, something where we were able to take, you know, 60 to 90 minutes of our COO's time and he's a former VP of engineering himself to interview an engineering leader, uh, and have amazing content that we can take both to video, to audio, repurpose it for blogs, for emails, for LinkedIn. That was a great part of our, uh, content funnel that we set up really early. And that flywheel effect has been extremely positive for us. As I mentioned, it's organically growing at 17,000 subscribers in this very dedicated niche for software engineering leaders, which is, ah, awesome value for us. Um, so I think finding your content niche to start from is great. Uh, love what Venner is doing here around executive recruitment and how you are leveraging the podcast to kind of support that. So we've thought very similarly around that. Uh, I would also say that getting your execs out in front of people is so crucial. So there are plenty of them who are doing it now. But if your CEO isn't posting on LinkedIn, assuming that's where you're in B2B and that's kind of where your target audience is, I think you have something to improve on because it is such a wonderful way for early stage companies to start making some noise without having to invest in like extremely expensive PR teams. Um, if you can get some insights from your CEO, help them craft posts, maybe share video content from a podcast or you know, from a workshop that they, they delivered and helping leverage their brand to build your company brand and engage with these like key leaders is an awesome way to do it. And this is particularly true if your, your CEO, one of your other co founders has the same background as people you're targeting, which is, is pretty common. Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay, and you mentioned, um, a kind of data and analytics played quite an important role in the, the linear B platform. But how do you think about them with regards to kind of marketing strategies and kind of company? Is that something you lean on heavily or are you kind of just looking to do something different to what, what everybody else is doing?

Speaker C: Yeah, so we, we invested pretty early in this concept of demand generation, saying look, we're going to accept that there's uh, a dark funnel element. That's why we invested a podcast, which is hard to track ROI from. And a lot of the pieces of content we built out early, uh, because we felt like it was one of the key ways to differentiate ourselves within our category was that brand that, you know, trust that we build with leaders and thought leadership. Uh, and we've seen downstream fantastic impacts for that, but it's hard to really track that. And I know in B2B in particular we have this obsession with, you know, uh, multifactor. I'm so sorry, my, the train is less of station for me on this one here. Uh, but on um, multifactor attribution, I should say, um, hopefully you can add to that. Uh, but attribution is something where I think we sometimes over rely on it because we've gotten so good at it in some key areas. Uh, that said, we do have a classic hybrid funnel of okay, transactional sales that come in from kind of our dark funnel activities here where people jump right into, uh, hey, I want to get on our free product, they want to take a demo versus also classic folks who are coming in as initial traffic from SEO or paid ad, something else, taking an action to become an mql, moving to sal, talking to a bdr, uh, be, you know, scheduling A demo and kind of moving down through the classic funnel. And we have basically leveraged a hybrid funnel to look at both areas and said, look, we want to invest in these, I'll call them like brand activities that are, you know, driving thought leadership, have a halo effect and kind of increase our conversion throughout the funnel, increase the trust that we have with engineering leaders in the community and give us content to leverage to, to spread it. But we're also doing kind of classic ads funnel as well. So, um, I'm a big believer in getting data and visibility, but I think there are a lot of leaders who have a tendency to over rely on it at times. Um, and I don't have a great answer for where is the line. Uh, there's a lot of people who are doing incredible thought leadership on this. Chris Walker talks a lot about, uh, one side of this on LinkedIn. There's others like Hockey Stack who are thinking about it, uh, from a deeper attribution model level. And I think there's discussions to be had. But, um, in my opinion, I think anyone who says one way to do it is the right way, uh, is probably not fine tuning enough to their specific icp, their specific company needs. And so I'm a big fan of, you know, spend time on both demand generation and demand capture activities, uh, and tune that based off of how your company needs are being met and in

Speaker B: terms of your career, like how much of a role has kind of mentorship, uh, played in that? Is that something that you've kind of benefited from or feel you haven't needed? And is that something you do now, like with other folks?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think mentorship is something I value a lot. Particularly, um, early in my career, um, I spent a lot of time, you know, seeking advice. Uh, now I think there's a really incredible thing happening for people who are kind of starting out in their career today, which is there are so many online resources to get, I'll call it like mass mentorship, um, and to, you know, understand SaaS metrics from incredible substacks that write all about it. To listen to podcasts like these and hear from, from leaders. And I highly recommend everyone does that. I certainly do that. Um, I find a lot of joy too in one on one mentorship with people that I've worked with in my career, you know, advising past interns of mine, talking to people who have now moved on to other companies and advising them on their strategy. And I love to do that, honestly. Uh, it's something I wish I spent more time doing, uh, than even I do now.

Speaker B: And in terms of kind of the future of the software industry, you know, it's changed massively in the last kind of 12 to 18 months. As you know, the funding landscape has obviously changed hugely during that time. And companies have had to really kind of reassess how they're hiring people, you know, their own kind of budgets. You know, how do you see kind of marketing, you know, this year in 2024, um, but also, you know, next year, how are we going to adapt to, uh, the changes which are going to come?

Speaker C: Yeah, I, I know this is an overused word at this point, but efficiency is kind of like the watchword for any VC you talk to. They're like, oh, how efficient is your funnel? So I mean, if you weren't thinking about what's my sales efficiency number, what's my, you know, long term CAC number? What's our CAC payback period? These are things you definitely should be thinking about. Uh, as a, you know, director of marketing, a cmo, a VP of marketing. And what I'd say is I, I would focus on a couple of efficiency numbers to guide how you think about your investments for the next year or two. And for me, I would think about one CAC payback, uh, so customer acquisition cost payback. And uh, I would think about that holistically and really trying to make sure that you are spending time in the right channels. Um, and the second one would be that sales efficiency number, um, and trying to make sure that your entire go to market motion is hitting the stride it needs to. Because from what I'm hearing, talking to VCs and um, board members, that is a crucial thing that they're looking at. Like, yes, we want you to keep growing, but if you are growing in an efficient manner, the funding you are going to get in your next round is not what you're going to want. And it's going to be a lot harder to get the multiple you want when you try to, you know, sell the company or ipo. So those are the things I would be thinking about. I think they're also really great because if you have a great sales function number, if you are acquiring customers at the, at the right cost level, you have an opportunity to extend your Runway substantially. Um, just like we've done, you know, we are, you know, still multiple years of Runway left. Um, off of our series raise. We were conservative about hiring initially because we saw where the market was going and uh, it's really given us space to make strategic decisions and decide if we want to, you know, turn up a knob and invest more in an area or how we want to approach things. So the more efficient you can be with your dollars, uh, the better.

Speaker B: Okay, great. And in terms of kind, uh, of team building and culture. So two questions really. So one, what do you look for as being the most critical factors in people bringing into the team? And two, what should somebody kind of ask themselves when they're thinking maybe they've worked in a slightly larger company before? Am I going to be cut out for this kind of startup experience?

Speaker C: Yeah, I'll start with the individual piece. Um, the thing that you should consider is how do you function with autonomy and are you excited by problem solving? Because if you're someone who, you know, the thing that has maybe frustrated you at this larger company is you're like, I want to be more impactful, I want to solve more problems. I want to be kind of freed up to do that. You will be empowered to do that. At a startup, particularly earlier the stages, people want you to solve problems, they, they get really excited by that. You get rewarded by that. Um, if that's something that fires you up and you want to dive into it, great. But if you just want to kind of go through the motions, check boxes, you know, gradually work through, uh, your process, it might, might not be the right fit. So you have to be someone who's excited about the autonomy and impact you can have and wants to go solve those problems. And on the leadership side, um, I really think about my team as a few different factors. One, it's like, what's the level of trust we've built? I think that's like such a crucial piece because if I'm going to give you a less autonomy, I'm going to give you all this capacity to solve problems. We have to have built trust. It has to be a two way thing. You have to trust me that I'm helping guide you in the right direction. I have to be transparent enough to give you the context you need or else you're going to hair off and work on the wrong problems. And I have to have the trust in you to say, oh yes, let me give you resources, let me give you autonomy, let me let you, you know, go run with it. Um, so I think that's a crucial thing we need to consider and the other two pieces around it that, you know, we have to think about it with hiring is strategy and execution. Um, are we taking the right approach? Is this person lined up with the direction of the company? Um, and I'll say frankly, like, I've made hires where, uh, you know, maybe it worked for 18 months and then the company strategy has changed because we've now gone through a new fundraising round and we're having to specialize more. Maybe that person isn't the right fit. And uh, if I was going to look at like a mistakes I've made, I would say, hey, sometimes you have to make the decision to let that person move on and manage them out sooner. Um, because not everyone is the right choice for a startup. At the Series A stage, Series B stage, Series C stage, people will, you know, move themselves out of your team. But you also need to be thinking about that because, uh, the needs of the company change so rapidly. When you're in this kind of iterative process and you're finding product market fit and then you're scaling really rapidly, um, and then the execution piece is huge. If you're not an executor, uh, I don't want you on my team, um, not at this stage. Uh, I know that there's a need for full time professional leaders as you get the series C stage and beyond. But right now everyone has to be able to both execute and lead if they want to really come into this role. So what I'm looking for right now, people who are excited about executing have that desire for autonomy, um, that we can build trust. They want to go problem solve and then can I scale them to be leaders at the next level? Because yes, in a couple years I'm going to want to have three people reporting that person, ideally because they'll have domain expertise, they'll have knowledge of how to approach things. And so that's where I think it's important to invest in training and trust building with your team. And it's something we're definitely doing right now.

Speaker B: Great stuff. Okay, well, I, uh, really appreciate you, uh, coming on today, Connor, and thank you for joining us. As I mentioned earlier, everybody should go and check out, um, Connor's own podcast, the uh, Dev Interrupted, which I guess they can find on the kind of usual podcast channels. Um, if people want to get in touch and discuss Linear B, what's the kind of best channel of reaching out to do that?

Speaker C: I'll say my email, honestly. Connorinearb IO that's Connor with one N, no E. Feel free to personally reach out, um, or just jump onto LinearB IO and uh, click any of the buttons. We'll find a way to talk to you.

Speaker B: Great stuff. Okay, appreciate your time. Thanks Connor.

Speaker C: Thanks so much for having me Ben

Speaker A: thank you for listening to The Science of SaaS Startups podcast. If you enjoyed it, please hit like and subscribe. And don't forget to comment below. The podcast is brought to you by Venatech, a sales recruiter for high growth SaaS startups. Get in touch with Ben Jackson if you're looking for a new role or to add sales talent to your team.

Speaker C: Sam.