Scale or Die

All week, I’ve been telling our team, “The Board Man gets paid!” I love that quote. But what does it mean? Kawhi Leonard is an NBA player that just took the Toronto Raptors to the Finals and won the world championship, knocking off Golden State.

He’s a total freak, and I read an amazing article this week breaking down who he is and how he operates. It has inspired the heck out of me, and I pulled 6 hilarious stories out of it to share with you to inspire you and your team to greatness. Kawhi is a Board Man. Let’s all be Board People.

Are funnels dead? David McClure's famous AARRR funnel framework has been the guide book for growth strategies for years — the problem is McClure's funnel framework is nearly 11 years old!

Are loops and flywheels the new thing? Making the transition from thinking about growth strategies from funnels to loops and flywheels could be the key to drive growth for your business in 2019 and the years to come.

Listen to Brian Balfour, Founder/CEO of Reforge, talk about his experience with growth VP of Growth @ Hubspot. Then we'll cover his journey along the way to scale his new growth masterclass business. Learn from Brian's extensive knowledge gained from countless hours studying 100s of SaaS companies.

Customer.io is a SaaS product that allows companies to create, manage, and send all of their messages between their apps & their customers. The software solves a common headache by providing a no-code-required solution for product teams — one in which you can pipe in events from platforms like Segment and then drag and drop automated email messages.

Since their launch in 2012, Customer.io has grown rapidly — to 41 employees and more than 1200+ customers ranging from SaaS to lot and beyond!

In our conversation with Colin Nederkoorn, the CEO & co-founder of Customer.io, we’ll cover the origin story and how he powered early growth through directly talking to customers. Then, we’ll dive into why word of mouth has been such a powerful growth method for their brand. Finally, our conversation dives into how Colin is approaching the development of paid & partner marketing, fundraising, brand, and remote culture.

If there’s a company that knows the playbook for Growth, it very well might be Hubspot. In just 13 years, they’ve scaled to one of the biggest names in marketing & sales and joined the ranks of successful tech IPOs. Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing and Growth, is charged with three of the most important parts of Hubspot’s flywheel: acquisition for the Sales product, the Freemium funnel, and the global web strategy. In his career, he’s worked for some of the biggest names in SaaS including Salesforce and Marketo. Plus, he’s helped many startups implement the strategies that power larger businesses.

In this episode, we’ll talk through how startups differ from scaleups, the inbound growth engine that has powered Hubspot’s success, why the funnel is dead, and the reasons more companies should invest in Customer Success.

Building great product is everything. Get it right, you'll win beyond your wildest dreams. Get it wrong, and life is painful. I've done both in the last few years. One thing that's been a huge learning lesson as we've built Proof has been how to structure and run our product teams. We've iterated on this cycle quite frequently, and after a lot of failures, we've figured out some great systems to build product quickly and effectively. As a customer-obsessed company, we also have put systems into to place that makes us focus on our customers every day. In this episode, we'll cover everything product — from how we structure our teams to our philosophies on building great, customer-focused software.

Casey Armstrong is the CMO at Shipbob, an end-to-end fulfillment solution that brings the same 2-day shipping you know and love from Amazon to a wider array of businesses. Previously, Casey was the VP of Marketing at BigCommerce, an eCommerce platform with over 50,000 SMB clients. He has consistently acquired millions in net ARR, managed millions in spend, and driven billions of organic pageviews. In short, he knows how to grow a business.

Our interview takes a deep dive into the BigCommerce funnel, covers why marketing is symbiotic with other parts of the business, and talks about why partnerships have been critical to his success. As a leader in the B2B marketing world, Casey also provides great insights on how to think about building out a marketing team. During our interview, he was in the early stages of building out his team after his arrival at ShipBob and he walks us through his mindset.

At this year's Traffic & Conversion Summit in San Diego, Dave sat down with Garrett Holmes, Director of Content at Digital Marketer to discuss Proof's growth to date. This episode includes their full conversation — covering everything from our transition from agency to SaaS to how we used two strategic advisors to power viral growth. The episode is raw, conversational, and full of life lessons from our company's journey. Hope you enjoy!

Dave is an avid reader — powering through about a book per week. In this episode, he'll chime in with his favorite reads from the last year and how they've affected his thinking at Proof. Plus, as a special treat, he'll share his 3 least favorite reads, so you don't have to waste your time.

Liking Founder Friday? Have an idea for a topic you'd like us to cover? Tweet at Dave — or shoot him an email at [email protected] & tell us!

Instapage started in 2012 as a SaaS solution for easily creating landing pages at scale. Today, they are a company of 170 employees with 4 global offices, 15k customers, and a whole host of offerings to help advertisers increase conversions through post-click experiences. Tyson Quick, CEO and Founder of Instapage, has been critical to the success of the business. In this conversation, he talks with Dave about the origin of Instapage and how he grew the company into a leading name in SaaS.

Our conversation turned more interesting and actionable as he specifically discussed the strategy he used to shift towards Enterprise customers. These high-value customers have been insanely powerful for revenue growth and the long-term outlook of the business. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

In this episode, Dave is joined by Ben Johnson, the wizard behind Proof's content to discuss the launch of this very show. They'll talk through the concept of the show, the goal of Scale or Die, the equipment we use to film, how we book guests, our production process, our editing cycle, our launch strategy, and the methods we've used to scale the show.

If you've ever thought of producing your own podcast — or if you're just curious why we do this every week — this show has all of your answers.