The Ledger, every show

“10 years of experience selling a product like mine to a customer like mine. And there's tremendous research that shows that that mindset correlates with lack of success, like doesn't work out.”

“I think there's a decent chance that whatever you're working on as a startup, as a use case, as a problem, It might be irrelevant. It might be like it's 1997, and you're working on a client server, on premise piece of software, and you're about to get the rug …”

“More wealth is generated in startups in non-VC backed startups than VC backed startups.”

“Just like today the public markets in B to B are dominated by the SaaS attackers, I predict in the next decade the PLG attackers will dominate the public markets for the categories that it's in.”

“I have a lot of situations where I had a rep that was in there for three or four months, and we weren't sure, and they weren't hitting it, but we gave it a shot, and seven months in, they were toward the top, and they stayed there.”

“Some of them say that over half of their engineering resources are not spent developing features that a consumer will ever experience. They're spent making experimentation easy.”

“A lot of these startups I see in PLG, almost all of them actually, put their growth teams in marketing, and I think that's an opportunity because all of the best-in-class ones put their growth team in product.”

“Eight was the highest a hit in February of 2008. Throughout 2008, it was mostly between three and four, which is terrible. I mean, even at three or four, that's 40 to 50% a year churn. It's really bad.”

“So I would say by year five, we were probably like. 50% inbound, 30% channel, 20% outbound.”

“Salesforce.com was an early investor in our Series D, believe it or not, and actually became a big channel partner for us over time, about 10% of our customers before we became competitive.”

“The acquisition of data becomes an important function probably within the business development domain. Cause we don't have any data.”

“I remember when we were doing this at HubSpot for the CRM product, we looked at it and we're like, oh my gosh, to acquire a free user for our CRM, it cost us a 120 dollars each user. For a free product. So we focused on that, and we did 17 experiments in a mon…”

“The only time they had churn was March of 2020 because of that craziness. And ever since then, and every time before then, they had no churn because of that hybrid hardware-software combination.”

“HubSpot. We caught this late at like ten million in revenue. Our churn was not good, and we ran 50 permutations and found out that if our customers use five or more features in the platform in the first two months, the retention rate is like 97%, and if they d…”

“Eight months later, it was looking good. We probably were doing two and a half million at that point. We had, you know 10, 12 reps. But churn was eight percent a month.”

“And churn dropped by like 70% in six months.”

“So what we essentially did was reorganize the company by our buyer persona. So we destroyed the marketing team, sales team, services team seating, and sat people by small businesses, mid-market, and enterprise.”

“At that point now we've acquired between Brian and I, we've probably acquired like 40 customers. We're probably at like a couple 100,000 in ARR”

“It was, I think a hundred percent of our customers came inbound for the first two or three years.”

“The average rep to manager ratio in inside sales is eight to one.”

“The industry average is 30%.”

“On a monthly basis, we had a full day meeting where each one of those leadership teams came in for an hour and presented to the mini board. And the mini board was our CEO, our CFO, our head of sales, our CMO, you know, and we were the ones asking them, hey, wh…”

“I called her two weeks ago, and I said, let's make a list of the 10 mistakes that we've made separately, and compare notes, and both of us had the same number one.”