Engineering Founders

Shifting from founder-led sales to repeatable GTM, differentiating on responsiveness/customer support & the art vs. science of product building w/ Stephen Whitworth @ incident.io

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ABOUT STEPHEN WHITWORTH

Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of incident.io, where they're building incident management tooling that's so good, people will break things on purpose. A software engineer by training, he previously led engineering teams at Monzo, and co-founded Ravelin, a fraud detection startup.

ABOUT INCIDENT.IO

Incident.io provides a platform to help you better respond to and learn from incidents. Helping you seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish.

This episode is brought to you by Clipboard Health

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

SHOW NOTES:
  • The early days of incident.io (2:45)
  • Transitioning from working on incident.io part-time to full-time (5:32)
  • Tactics that helped the co-founder team decide on incident.io over other ideas (8:21)
  • How incident.io received 750 demo requests right away (11:07)
  • incident.io’s product-market fit cheat code & identifying internal PMF (12:24)
  • How incident.io landed major logo companies like Netflix, Airbnb & Etsy (14:32)
  • Strategies to differentiate yourself from competitors in the B2B space & why execution and responsiveness can beat technological advantage (17:30)
  • Stephen’s perspective on “inflicting software” on people & how that changes your product, org & GTM strategy downstream (21:14)
  • Enterprise sales insights that surprised Stephen (23:56)
  • Why GTM is infinitely harder than product & how founders can start to scale themselves out of sales activities (27:21)
  • What incident.io’s GTM team looks like now (32:12)
  • Differentiating in B2B enterprise on customer support & the strategic role of support at incident.io (34:20)
  • Why a culture of responsiveness and support can be your hidden advantage (37:03)
  • Rapid fire questions (39:26)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
  • Billion Dollar Whale - Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history.
This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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Engineering FoundersBy The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)