How great operators think

What did Slack's "We don't sell saddles here" memo actually change about how they sold? Stewart Butterfield sent the memo to the Tiny Speck team on 31 July 2013, two weeks before Slack's preview release, and published it later. Its arg... How the best do it 5 resources → What does April Dunford say most teams get wrong about positioning? Dunford's core claim, after working with over 300 technology companies, is that positioning is not a tagline, not branding, and not messaging. It i... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → What does Gong's call data actually say top sellers do differently in discovery? Gong analysed over 519,000 B2B sales calls and found that success peaks when a rep asks roughly 11 to 14 targeted questions on a discovery call, an... Doing the work 3 resources → When should you add a sales team on top of a self serve product, and how do you avoid breaking it? Elena Verna's rule is that most companies do this too soon and for the wrong reasons. The signals that sales will actually help are an average orde... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → When does a founder stop selling personally, and why do the best ones hire two reps instead of one? Jason Lemkin's marker is that the founder closes the first batch themselves, roughly the first ten customers, because if you have not done it you w... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Why do the best operators settle pricing before the product is finished? Madhavan Ramanujam's position, from Simon-Kucher and Monetizing Innovation, is that willingness to pay is a product design input, not a launch deci... How the best do it 3 resources → What did Claire Hughes Johnson learn about scaling a go to market org, taking Stripe from under 200 people to over 7,000? Claire Hughes Johnson was COO of Stripe from 2014 to 2021 and had spent a decade at Google before that running business and sales teams. Her argume... How the best do it 5 resources → What do Indian SaaS operators say it actually takes to win US customers while building from India? The recurring advice is that global is a starting position, not a later phase. Manav Garg built Eka out of India when SaaS was not yet a word and h... How the best do it 4 resources → What does Emily Kramer say your first marketing hire must already be able to do? Emily Kramer, who led marketing at Asana and Carta and now runs MKT1, names the number one mistake as hiring someone with too many firsts. She scor... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Why do operators like Nithin Kamath and Sridhar Vembu refuse to buy growth? Nithin Kamath states it as a freedom rather than a sacrifice: it is a good place to be when you do not have to look at customers in terms of acquis... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → Why does Elena Verna say a growth model needs replacing roughly every 18 months? Elena Verna, who has run growth at Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey, thinks in loops rather than funnels: a funnel is linear and spends it... Doing the work 4 resources → Why does Krish Subramanian call your price the strongest lead filter you have? Krish Subramanian built Chargebee out of Chennai and is unusually candid that they got pricing wrong four times before it worked. A freemium tier o... Doing the work 4 resources → How does Mark Roberge turn sales hiring into a data problem instead of a gut call? Mark Roberge was an MIT engineer who became HubSpot's CRO, and he treats hiring as the one input that determines everything downstream. His screen ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Why does Manav Garg say an India based company should be more profitable than a US one? Manav Garg built Eka Software selling commodity trading software to global enterprises, then co-founded SaaSBoomi and Together Fund, and he refuses... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → Why do the best operators design a category instead of competing inside one? Christopher Lochhead, who co-wrote Play Bigger, argues that markets are winner take most: the category leader, what he calls the category king, com... How the best do it 4 resources → Why does Sajith Pai say India is three markets, and what does that do to your GTM? Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures writes the Indus Valley report, and his India1, India2, India3 framing exists because treating India as one market qui... How the best do it 3 resources →