Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto) is a B2B SaaS advisor and GP at Hypergrowth Partners. He explains how he sets up experimentation budget rules to empower risk-taking.
“One thing, for example, that I'm doing now is if you have an experiment and you have an idea, you want to try it out. It's well-framed. You've done the research, you understand, you have a gut feeling, but you have a way to measure it. As long as it's less than take, you can just try it and do it without approval.”
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More from Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto)
Disclosure
Gontovnikas built CEO deepfake technology for personalized outbound sales emails
“You can even, and we've created this, you can even create deep fakes of CEOs telling you something on a video, on an email, even though it's not really the CEO.”
Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto)Feb 14, 2024▶ 1:05:50Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto): The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprises | E1115 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Gonto: Fire employees who fail without learning, but protect those who iterate
“When somebody fails at something. You do not give them shits. It's more about how you learned anything. If they haven't learned anything, you can fire them. But if they learned something, that means that at least they can iterate.”
Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto)Feb 14, 2024▶ 5:09Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto): The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprises | E1115 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Gonto: Leaders should hire at least one smart direct report they dislike
“On the people that report to me, I always try to get at least one person that I don't like, because if I don't like them, but they are smart and they can get shit done, I will hate everything they say, but I will put my thoughts into believing them, trying to …”
Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto)Feb 14, 2024▶ 1:01:31Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto): The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprises | E1115 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Gonto: Startups should never hire growth roles before product-market fit
“I would never hire somebody for growth before product market fit. I think that before product market fit, it's the job of the founder to get to see if there's product market fit. If the founder can't do what needs to be done to find product market fits, I thin…”
Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto)Feb 14, 2024▶ 17:21Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto): The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprises | E1115 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Gonto: Traditional SDR outreach to developer users never works
“Like if you are doing a product for developers and you have an SDR reach out, it's never going to work out. The developer doesn't want to talk to that.”
Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto)Feb 14, 2024▶ 24:49Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto): The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprises | E1115 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Gonto: Drive Freemium Upgrades by Withholding Key Features From Tier Clusters
“Once you see that, what I typically try to do is each of those clusters is one of the plans, but I always remove one or two features that are very useful from one cluster and move it to the next as an excuse for people on like, okay, I start to use the product…”
Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto)Feb 14, 2024▶ 26:05Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto): The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprises | E1115 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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