Ov | Build

While we ramp up the next season of BUILD, over the next few weeks you can enjoy two new podcast mini series.   This first series is the PLG 123. Each week OpenView partner Blake Bartlett dives into 3 browser tabs of the latest news and updates in the world of product led growth and asks what's next for the world of SaaS. Find the links mentioned in each episode in the description below, and follow Blake Bartlett on LinkedIn to get the PLG 123 in video format as soon as it's live.   

Let’s take a run back through some of our favorite clips...

While Season 7 has come to a close, we’re back with a special bonus episode! When businesses are building out their product-led strategy, when and how does marketing come into play? OV Partner, Devon McDonald, sat down with Helen Min, former Head of Marketing at Plaid, live at INBOUND to discuss this question and the importance of investing in marketing (particularly product marketing) early on in a business’ journey. Helen also touches upon marketing to developers (hint: invest in your community) and the best advice she’s received from mentors.

The final episode of Season 7 features Tope Awotona, Founder & CEO of Calendly. He shares how they balance feedback with such an expansive user base, why he felt like he had an unfair advantage in the scheduling space and why they provide support even for free users.

This episode features Vlad Magdalin, Co-founder & CEO of Webflow, a business that took four tries to get off the ground. Find out how they think about creating a product that's applicable to as many people as possible and why adding incremental value is more important than shipping a perfect product.

Abhinav Asthana is the Co-founder & CEO of Postman, a collaborative environment for API development that has scaled to more than 7 million users. Abhinav shares how they balance empathy and data, and how a product led growth approach leads to fundamentally better products.

Liat Bycel is the VP of Customer Engagement at Airtable. She shares how they made the decision to bring all customer-facing teams under one roof and how that decision has furthered their growth and made the customer experience more cohesive.

This episode of BUILD features Alex Marinos, Founder & CEO of one of the newest members of the OV portfolio, balena. Find out how they pivoted to a product led growth strategy and the solution they built to minimize pain for employees as a distributed team.

Pendo was founded on three main principles: delivering an incredible product, putting customers first and creating a culture that attracts the best people possible. Todd Olson, Founder & CEO, shares exactly how they've executed on each principle and how the product empowers customers to deliver amazing experiences to their users.

Eugenio Pace is the Co-founder & CEO of Auth0. Fundamentally, their product answers two questions: Are you who you say you are, and what can you do? Find out how they've managed to answer these questions in a way that gives users the flexibility to tailor the solution to their specific needs with the simplicity to scale.

On this episode, Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder & CEO of GitLab, shares their top three values and how they came to be. Find out why they're so public about how the company operates and Sid's perspective on why values shouldn't be universally positive. You'll also get a sense of what they do to ship more features every month than some competitors do in a full year.

This episode features Ashik Ahmed, CEO, CTO and Co-founder of OV portfolio company, Deputy. Find out how product led growth fueled their expansion into more than 100 countries and how flying inspired him to believe in this model. You'll also find out how their growth team operates and the best business advice he's ever received.

Alex MacCaw is the Co-founder, CEO and office DJ for Clearbit. Find out how he learned to love management, the most difficult period he went through as a CEO and their biggest competitive advantage as a company (spoiler: it has to do with their people).

JumpCloud is an OpenView portfolio company that's focused on building the next generation of directory services. Rajat Bhargava, Co-founder and CEO, shares what they value most as a company and the two things he looks for when building a new business.

Our 2019 Expansion SaaS Benchmarks are live! This year we surveyed over 500 companies, ranging from pre-revenue to $150M+ ARR with nearly half of respondents coming from outside the U.S. On this episode, OV’s Kyle Poyar and Sean Fanning along with NetSuite’s Tom Kelly, share the findings and some advice for founders. Follow along at www.saasbenchmarks.com.

Season 7 of BUILD focuses on the design principles and practices behind market leading product led growth companies. We're kicking it off with the CEO and Co-Founder of Zapier, Wade Foster. Find out why Wade puts such a strong emphasis on the customer and how Zapier has managed to scale quickly with capital efficiency.

For the final episode of Season 6, Kyle caught up with Simon-Kucher Partner, Josh Bloom. He explains the inspiration behind the firm's book, 'Monetizing Innovation,' the concept of developing a product around the price and the most important question founders should be asking customers. He also breaks down the trends he expects to see in the next year.

We're bringing OV Partner Liz Cain back to the podcast for the third time. On this episode, she and Kyle dive into their experiences with pricing and product led growth. Learn about some of the most common pricing mistakes they see and why they were both hesitant about PLG initially, but came around in a big way.

Lindsay Bayuk (VP of Product Marketing) and Porntepp Ungvichian (VP, Head of Strategy & Business Operations) are the B2B SaaS leaders behind Pluralsight's pricing overhaul. They went public last year, serve 70% of Fortune 500 companies and have customers in over 150 countries. Get ready for some serious note-taking on how they built a process around pricing changes and the importance of having the right infrastructure to make it all happen.

John Kelly is the Head of Global Revenue at Hired and has been in the enterprise software space for over 25 years. On this episode, John gets into how and why Hired changed their pricing model from pay as you go to subscription. Learn how they knew the switch would work, the trickiest customers to convince and how the change impacted their growth.