Ben Williams
Founder & CEO, DevTune.ai. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
operatorexecutivefounderauthor@semanticben ↗LinkedIn ↗plgeek.com ↗
Ben Williams is a product and growth leader known for building product-led growth systems at developer platforms like Snyk and CloudBees. He currently advises B2B startups, publishes The Product-Led Geek newsletter, and serves as CEO of DevTune.ai.
1shows
2appearances
27statements
4resolved
3supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
11said about them ↓ Everything Ben Williams said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Developer tool adoption requires integrating directly into workflows to protect flow
“Flow is just this incredibly important concept for developers and you want to strive to keep them in that flow for as long as possible. So the GitHub kind of pull requests are a great example of that. Someone can sign up for Snyk and they could theoretically b…”
Embedding growth marketers within product teams will become the industry norm
“I've actually learned to my surprise that inclusion of growth marketers in the product teams is not all that common. And I personally think there's just a lot of opportunity being missed there. And I expect that to start to become the norm rather than the exce…”
Snyk's ungated sidecar code scanner drove massive user acquisition and activation
“The team went on to build out a functional sidecar product that Allowed users to basically try sneak without needing to sign up by simply pasting their code in for us to scan and giving them some results there and then. So, you know, we saw really great result…”
Growth experimentation generates organizational learnings rather than delivering immediate outcomes
“And if you think about experimentation, It's not about delivering outcomes. It's about generating learnings that the organization can leverage effectively to deliver outcomes.”
Product-led customer cohorts generate significantly higher net revenue retention at Snyk
“And what's, what's fascinating there is that the product driven cohort contribute a relatively greater amount to net retention.”
Developers prioritize deep ecosystem features over broad multi-language support
“A JavaScript developer just won't care if you support Golang or Rust, but will absolutely care if a key feature like automated package upgrades just isn't available for their ecosystem.”
Williams: Product-led founders must intentionally design early acquisition loops into the product
“So if your acquisition strategy is product led, then understanding and being intentional about your early acquisition growth loops, I think is an essential founder's responsibility. Dedicating time there to design those loops into the product. It's key.”
Snyk was the first to integrate security scanning with automated pull requests
“First of all, that, that integration in terms of connecting your code with security scanning like that was a first of a kind integration. Like no one had done that before.”
Snyk made its developer security education content completely free and public
“All the traditional solutions you need to sign up, you need to pay to get access beyond more than a couple, but these were just, they're all out there in the public domain.”
Developers wield software buying influence regardless of who holds the budget
“What was always true though, even back then was the influencing power of developers, regardless of where the buying center was.”
Effective growth engineers happily discard code and embrace imperfection
“The devs that really thrive in a growth context are the ones that are motivated by moving quickly, iterating to create measurable impact. They're not attached to their work. They embrace imperfection as part of the process. They happily discard their code, the…”
Ben Williams: Vision statements must describe end states without mentioning products or solutions
“The vision is the Nirvana state that you aim to enable for your users and customers in five to 10 years. It's something that could equally be enabled by your competitors if you don't execute effectively or efficiently or quickly enough. You can always prefix a…”
Assigning growth to core product teams without new processes usually fails
“Teams in growth need to work differently in some ways from R and D teams working on core product, assuming otherwise, and just giving growth responsibility to an existing team without working with them. To implement appropriate ways of working, I think it's a …”
Loop-based models are the most effective way to articulate growth strategy
“The best way I've found to articulate a growth strategy that fulfills the promise of usefully guiding the team's execution. It's the loop based model we forge as specific kind of documentation that, that I think is great around that. Being able to identify the…”
Early-stage startups must invest in behavioral data tracking to define activation
“But the reason I say invest early here is that to remember that it also takes time to accrue enough data that you can learn about and make some key decisions around retention, for example, or so that you have enough data to run regressions on, be able to infor…”
Team-level impact and learnings reviews are the most important growth meetings
“And if I had to pick one meeting that is the most important in the growth team, it would be this.”
Snyk structures core product teams by function and growth teams by outcome
“So most of the org is functional ownership based. There are a lot of really complex domains in the core product. So having that localized knowledge is important to be able to kind of own and run the code that team ship. The growth teams on the other hand are s…”
Snyk reached an $8.6B valuation post-Series F with over 2,000 customers
“Last valuation after our Series F was at 8.6 billion. We're securing the software of millions of developers now, well over 2000 paying customers, now around 1300 people, of which around 500 in R&D, with nearly 70 folks in our product org.”
The average modern software application is at least 75% open-source
“The average software application today is at least 75% of open source libraries and components.”
Snyk acquired its first 100 users directly through the Node.js community
“The first hundred or so users really just came from the founders engaging with the Node.js community and the interest that drove.”
Snyk acquired roughly 5,000 free users before attempting to monetize
“I think we probably had maybe around 5000 free users before there were any attempts at monetization.”
Snyk Advisor programmatically generates hundreds of thousands of package pages for SEO
“There are hundreds of thousands of these package pages, but they're just automatically being generated continuously.”
Snyk's initial self-serve monetization completely failed to convert large enterprise customers
“But the first self-serve monetization efforts only really saw traction with individual developers paying a hundred dollars a month or purchases in larger companies. They just didn't happen as everyone had hoped.”
Snyk's Growth Platform team feeds product usage data to go-to-market teams
“Product led sales is a really important motion for us. And so taking the knowledge we have, the insight we have around behavior With the users and their teams and their companies within the product and making that available to the GTM teams outside in smart wa…”
The other half of the tape: Ben Williams's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 11 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 10Christine Itwaru 1
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Lenny's Podcast 11
2023 11 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ben's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founder & CEO, DevTune.ai | 2 | 27 | 75% 3/4 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |