The Stack

Amplitude is a product intelligence, a.k.a product analytics platform. Founded in 2012, the company has grown to be one of the leading platforms of its kind. That’s largely in part because of their product-led growth strategy. A strategy that works uniquely well given what its platform is.

In this engaging podcast episode, we plunge headfirst into the complex and intriguing universe of product analytics, with none other than Justin Bauer, the esteemed Chief Product Officer at Amplitude, as our guide. Justin reveals the often-overlooked intricacies involved in comprehending customer journeys and behaviors and the role of North Start Metrics.

The challenge lies not just in mapping out these journeys but in identifying the key patterns, understanding the drivers behind the behaviors, and then translating these insights into effective strategies for business growth. He emphasizes that revenue generation should not be the ultimate goal but a natural consequence of delivering superior value to customers.

Main takeaways:

• Amplitude has evolved from a product analytics tool to a comprehensive digital analytics suite, including a recently launched Customer Data Platform (CDP).
• Having a North Star metric is crucial, as it reflects the aggregate value delivered to customers, and revenue should be a function of this value.
• Understanding customer journeys and behaviors is key for business growth. Tools like Amplitude can help analyze these behaviors and improve activation and engagement.
• Reverse ETLs extract data from your warehouse, transform it, and load it into a third-party system, making the data operational and enabling users to leverage any piece of data from any tool.
• Building a successful growth stack involves the importance of measurement and closing the loop to understand if messaging is effective and partnering with a vendor who takes an open ecosystem approach.

Top Tools

• Amplitude – A real-time, event-based analytics tool focused on improving product conversion, engagement, and retention by visualizing customer journeys.
• HighTouch – A Data Activation platform that syncs data from data warehouses to business tools, facilitating customer data exploration without engineering effort.
• dbt (data build tool) – A command-line tool empowering analysts and engineers to transform data in warehouses using SQL, handling the Transform in ETL.
• Snowflake – A cloud-based data platform offering data storage, processing, and analytics, supporting a wide range of workloads across major cloud platforms.
• Intercom – A customer engagement platform enabling real-time interactions between businesses and customers through various communication channels.
• AppCues – A user onboarding platform assisting in creating personalized in-app experiences and collecting customer feedback without developer involvement.
• Google Sheets – A web-based application for real-time creation, modification, and sharing of spreadsheets, part of Google’s free office suite.
• Datadog – A monitoring and analytics tool for IT and DevOps teams, providing observability and real-time security monitoring for cloud-scale applications.

Join us as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack. You’ll hear from real experts how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine, and take your sales to the next level.

Secret Double Octopus was founded in 2015. The company jumped onto the growing demand for enterprise-level passwordless authentication. In 2020 they raised $15 million in the Series B funding round, and by 2021, they were named best in class for their category by the AITE Group. Their growth has been fast, so in 2021 they also brought on Horacio Zambrano as CMO to help scale the business accordingly. Horacio has launched multiple cybersecurity start-ups and has led marketing teams up to Series C. One of Horacio’s big strategies is to collect and utilize intent data. His team then ties that data into a coordinated outreach strategy from SDRs and nurtures those leads for the long game. He tells us all about the stack he’s built to collect and use that data, and he also shares the different strategies he uses to keep a functional stack in times of growth.

Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack.  You’ll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

Mighty Networks is home to over one million online communities. That means their tool is helping nearly one million brands and companies utilize community marketing to grow and drive revenue. At the heart of Mighty’s growth is their own tool. They’ve focused on speed to learning to grow their client success. It also means building a stack that works for their internal team that doesn’t sacrifice client or user experience. That’s what Jane Stecyk balances every day as the SVP of Marketing. Jane’s initial education was in library science, but after dipping her toes into content marketing, she fully dived into marketing as a career. She joins the show to share her stack and strategies for community building and engagement and how they utilize speed to learning. She’ll also tell us why they use the OODA loop to inform their experimentation framework and the stack they're using to in the process.

Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack.  You’ll hear from real experts how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

Paddle’s work to offload tax agony from SaaS companies hasn’t gone unnoticed. They’ve earned over 3000 clients globally and have stacked up some impressive revenue processed numbers. Their CMO Andrew Davies is looking to continue building their brand up as a must-have payment solution. Andrew loves tools, but he also knows he’s not always the best person for the job when it comes to using them and deciding which ones to use. That falls on the users themselves. His style is to listen to his team and consistently learn from them and everyone else around him to build a stack that works effectively and efficiently for everyone. He also likes to keep things fun and creative, for instance, producing a documentary about how to build a SaaS company. In this episode, he joins to share his team-leading and RevOps strategies, how and why he’s using so much qualitative data and a lot more.

Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack.  You’ll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

In August of 2021, Seismic made a big move and acquired Lessonly for $170 million dollars. Lessonly was and continues to be a teaching and enablement service, now operating under the Seismic umbrella. One of the big gains Seismic got from that acquisition was perhaps Kyle Lacy himself, who had formerly been the CMO of Lessonly. Kyle believes strongly in the power of enablement. He explained that if you’re not enabling your team, you’re not utilizing all of your tools and resources to the best of your abilities. He tells us more about how he’s utilizing his stack to create a fully optimized stack. His other big belief is putting the customer experience first. No matter how good a tool is, if it doesn’t provide the best experience possible for the customer, you may need to rethink having it in your stack. He shares all that and more.

Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack.  You’ll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

ClickBank has been around since 1998 and serves over 6 million clients worldwide. In its nearly 25 years existence, they’ve honed in on what tools and strategies make its platform a success. Spud Rule is overseeing these strategies. He’s spent over a decade in marketing, founding his own company and working with major brands such as Cabela’s. Now he’s the Director of Marketing at ClickBank. ClickBank’s marketplace provides brands with affiliates to market their products. On the reverse of that, this also means they provide affiliates with brands. To keep up with the demand on both sides, the company has developed a unique strategy to move clients through a pipeline, internally developing high-quality affiliates for brands. They do this through their own platform, and by developing courses on Thinkific. Spud joins the show to explain more about how that works, the tools they use to make it work, and more.

Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack. You’ll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

Jon Miller doesn’t believe in the marketing-generated pipeline. He says every sale, no matter the origin, has been touched by marketing. Jon brings that philosophy to his role as CMO of Demandbase. Demandbase is a martech giant that offers a suite of account-based marketing tools. Jon’s emphasis on the marketing strategy demands an impressive stack, and today he joins to share what that stack is and how it works.

Milestone has been around for almost 25 years now, but their age hasn’t slowed them down at all. They’ve been consecutively recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley. Like Milestone, VP of Marketing Erik Newton also has a deep history in the industry. In this episode, he joins to share his SEO and marketing strategies along with the tools that help him implement them.

Erik’s career began at Netscape. He moved on to work for companies such as mp3.com, Netflix and BrightEdge. He’s stayed current with the trends for over two decades and now he uses his expertise to push Milestone ahead of the curve. One of the strategies he uses with his team is unique UTMs for individual sales rep emails. That way, he can get more specific data when analyzing direct traffic to his site and parse out what works and what doesn’t during the outreach phase. Outside of strategies and his stack, Erik also has a wealth of marketing jokes. Like this one: Why do white hat SEOs like farmers’ markets? Lots of organic content. He’s got more of those to share.

Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack.  You’ll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

This week we turn to a martech powerhouse to learn the best strategies for building a stack from the best. Collibra is a data intelligence leader with a multi-use platform that’s used around the globe. Justin Sharaf is their VP of Marketing Operations. He’s brought his rich experience to Collibra to help build a killer stack to drive revenue and now he joins us to share his tips and tricks.

Justin has spent over 15 years working with martech at industry giants like LogMeIn and Jahia, so he’s had a lot of time to hone his craft. When working on a stack, his starting point is always best-in-breed. While it may seem like an easy route to go with a suite system, he says by doing so, you’re limiting your stack’s potential.  He also explains why he builds in 25% overlap between everyone on his team, why he’s such a proponent of dry-runs, and a whole lot more.

Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack.  You’ll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

Plannuh is a marketing performance planning platform.  It's a system for building, managing and optimizing marketing plans and it’s another SaaS tool that’s killing the spreadsheet.  We catch up with CEO and Founder Peter Mahoney; he’s an absolute powerhouse marketer with incredible experience and knowledge on all things martech. He got his start at IBM and spent over a decade at Nuance Communications before founding Plannuh.  

Peter has amazing insights into the stack’s security vulnerabilities.  Every company should be aware that the biggest threat to the security of your organization is the marketer.  You should consider only buying tools for your stack that are ISO or Soc 2 certified; but as we’ll discuss even these certifications have their limitations.  We’ll talk about the importance of specialists for complex implementations and why so many companies end up using only 10% of the capacity of a given tool. We’ll also hear how AI can enrich the predictive power of your stack, and why Peter thinks this will be one of the biggest technology trends we’ll see in coming years. 

Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack.  You’ll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.