BUILD with Blake Bartlett

In this episode we hear from Brian Rothenberg, a Partner at the early stage venture capital firm, Defy. Brian was at Eventbrite for over 6 years from startup through IPO generating $300M revenue and nearly $3B market cap while serving as VP of Growth and running a $100M+ revenue line as GM. Blake and Brian discussed how Eventbrite’s growth model created a viral loop that led to massive success, how to go about building a distribution advantage and the biggest pitfalls of people who haven’t done this and how founders can go from siloed to a cross functional approach.

All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.

In this episode we hear from Christine Itwaru, the Director of Product Ops at Pendo. Today she unpacks the role of Product Ops and how it came into popularity, when, why and how to incorporate a Product Ops role into your team, and Christine’s prediction of where the Product Ops movement and community will be 5 years from now. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.

In this episode we hear from Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at Hubspot. Kipp shares how a self-service journey fundamentally changes B2B marketing, his view that anyone (including C-level executives) can introduce a new self-service tool to a team, and Hubspots secret to collaboration between marketing and growth. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.

Jay Simons, Atlassian’s President for the last 12 years, joined the company in 2008 when the company was already a product-led success making an estimated $150 million in revenue that year. Now in 2020, Atlassian’s revenue guidance is more than 10X that number at nearly $1.6 billion dollars. Jay has helped lead and grow their product led growth efforts and has created a truly epic revenue engine.

In today’s episode we unpack Atlassian’s secret to creating compounding customer value, how Atlassian uses pricing as a competitive advantage, and the role of human champions in a self-serve customer journey. That and more on this episode of the BUILD podcast.

In this episode Airtable’s Co-Founder and CEO Howie Liu unpacks the hype and substance of the low-code/no-code movement, the challenges of building a mass market platform with a hugely diverse customer base and how to nail a self-serve strategy in the enterprise. All of that and more in this episode of the OV BUILD podcast.

In this episode we hear from Wes Bush, founder of the Product Led Institute, author of “Product Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself” and fellow PLG enthusiast. Blake and Wes discuss the importance of customer empathy, how to get started with product led growth and why building great products is a lot like bowling. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.

In today’s episode hear from Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer at MongoDB. As Chief Product Officer, Sahir is responsible for product management, growth marketing/operations, and go-to-market strategy across the MongoDB portfolio. During his time there he’s grown the cloud business from zero to over $150 million annually. In this episode Sahir shares how you go from individual adoption to org-wide adoption, MongoDB’s philosophy for monetizing open source software, and how they scaled their open source product using both bottoms up and top down sales motions. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.

Datadog is known for being the essential monitoring platform for cloud applications. Alex Rosemblat (VP of Marketing) explains how Datadog generates over half a billion in revenue annually by going both bottoms up with individual developers, as well as top down with technology executives simultaneously in their go-to-market strategy. Blake and Alex also unpack how to decide which leads get human attention, what team owns success metrics in a PLG model, and the best way to cross promote your product. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.

We all know and love HubSpot. In this episode we hear from Kieran Flanagan who is the VP of Marketing AND Growth at Hubspot. Blake and Kieran discuss the importance of Ops roles in a product-led model, the shift occurring today in B2B marketing, and how cross-functional teams are the org design secret to success in product led growth. All of that and more on this episode of BUILD.

If you listened to the first intro episode you know why we’re here, to figure out the new customer journey and what that means for PLG and SaaS. Today we hear from Dave Grow, President and COO at Lucidchart. Lucidchart is now a household name in productivity software, enabling over 20 million users to think, work and communicate visually. Since he joined Dave has helped lead Lucid to more than $100M in ARR (annual recurring revenue) and $1B valuation.

On this episode of BUILD we discuss the concept of growth, what role each department plays in the product-led engine, and the shifting buyer persona found in a self-serve model.