How the best do it

Teardowns of what specific companies actually did, and the judgment calls great operators make.

What founders use for how the best do it, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

  1. Video · Reading of the memo The Founders' List: Slack's Internal Memo 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' (Famous Memos) Stewart Butterfield
  2. Video · Podcast episode 76. How Slack is Generating $600MM With a Bottom-Up Approach w/ Kevin Egan at Slack Kevin Egan
  3. Video · About 1 hr 21 min Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (ex-COO of Stripe) Claire Hughes Johnson
  4. Six questions you can run against your own org today, with the real Stripe artifacts behind them: the operating principles, the... First Round Review Article · About 10 min read To Grow Faster, Hit Pause, and Ask These Questions from Stripe's COO First Round Review
  5. Where the widely copied Working with Claire guide comes from, plus her two document planning hierarchy of multi-year charters... High Growth Handbook Article · About 15 min read Decision-Making and Managing Executives: An Interview with Claire Hughes Johnson Elad Gil
  6. Podcast · 26 min S6E1 - Product Led Growth ft. Ruchin Kulkarni, Co-founder of Toplyne.io Ruchin Kulkarni
  7. Video · 51 min Sridhar Vembu (Founder & CEO, Zoho) | Ask Me Anything Session | Inc42 Sridhar Vembu

The questions

GTM teardowns 16

How named companies actually got their first customers, and what they changed to scale.

How did Freshworks sell to the US from Chennai without a US sales team? 5 → How did Zoho build a global GTM engine without ever raising money? 4 → What did Postman do differently to get developers to adopt before it ever sold anything? 5 → How did BrowserStack get its first millions in revenue almost entirely on word of mouth? 6 → How did Zerodha become India's largest broker with no ads and no sales team? 5 → All 16 questions in GTM teardowns →
How great operators think 16

The mental models, the judgment calls, and the non-obvious moves behind good go-to-market.

What did Slack's "We don't sell saddles here" memo actually change about how they sold? 5 → What does April Dunford say most teams get wrong about positioning? 3 → What does Gong's call data actually say top sellers do differently in discovery? 3 → When should you add a sales team on top of a self serve product, and how do you avoid breaking it? 4 → When does a founder stop selling personally, and why do the best ones hire two reps instead of one? 4 → All 16 questions in How great operators think →
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