Month: October 2025

From Narrow ICP to Broad Adoption: Customer Empathy That Fueled Webflow’s PMF

I recently sat down with “Bryant Chou”, co-founder and founding CTO of Webflow, a no-code visual web design platform built with freelance designers and developers in mind. We discussed how a sharp initial focus and deep customer empathy paved the way for expansion into a far broader market — and what that journey teaches about product-market fit.

Today, Webflow is valued at over $4 billion and has millions of users all over the world. More than 200,000 freelancers, agencies, small businesses and enterprises use Webflow to help design and power their websites at businesses large and small.

But Webflow didn’t always market to such a wide customer base. In our conversation, Bryant rewinds the clock to Webflow’s early days — when it was just a co-founder team of three building a better tool to design a website.

We explore why the Webflow co-founding team had such a strong conviction that designers were their ICP, and why they took much longer to launch than other folks in their Y Combinator cohort. He also explains how Webflow wrangled their viral launch on Hacker News into a sustainable revenue and shares his root cause analysis framework for collecting customer feedback.

On the surface, Webflow’s path to product-market fit seems incredibly smooth. But as Bryant tells it, there were plenty of bumps in the road — and he’s got tons of advice for early-stage founders that are finding their footing.

What resonated most with me was the discipline to start with a narrow ICP and earn the right to expand. Customer empathy wasn’t a slogan — it was the operating system. By obsessing over the designer workflow and outcomes, the team drove crisp product discovery, clear problem statements, and a roadmap that compounded into broader market relevance. That’s the unlock: depth before breadth.

Their go-to-market choices also underline a powerful principle of founder-led GTM: move slower at first to move faster later. Taking longer to launch than other folks in their Y Combinator cohort was a strategic trade — prioritizing quality, credibility with the core user, and a coherent onboarding path. Momentum from a launch matters, but only if the product can convert that attention into activation, retention, and sustainable revenue.

The “viral launch on Hacker News” was a spark, not a strategy. The meaningful lift came from translating that spike into durable usage through onboarding clarity, education, and community. I’ve seen the same dynamic repeatedly — channels create discovery, but product value creates habit. If your ICP receives unmistakable value on first run, you’ve turned a moment into a motion.

I also appreciated the rigor behind their root cause analysis framework for collecting customer feedback. In my practice, we mirror this by tying every request to a specific job-to-be-done, measuring frequency and impact, and validating the existing workaround. That structure keeps us from shipping surface-level features and instead solving the underlying problem that advances product-market fit.

For leaders navigating early-stage ambiguity, the lesson is clear: empathy is the fastest route to evidence. Anchor on a specific ICP, instrument discovery with uncomfortable honesty, and earn expansion by repeatedly delivering outcomes for your earliest, most demanding users. Do that, and widening your addressable market becomes a natural consequence — not a gamble.

October 21, 2025
Decentralized Community Masterclass: Bottom‑Up Growth, Creator Partnerships, First Hires

I recently sat down with Ben Lang, Head of Community at Notion, to unpack how a decentralized, bottom‑up community can power durable, compounding growth. In my day-to-day leading product, I’ve seen community-led growth move markets—hearing the detailed playbook behind it brought the strategy into sharp focus for operators and founders alike.

Since joining the company in 2019, Ben has had his hand in several high-impact projects at Notion that has grown its tight-knit community of passionate Notion evangelists into millions of users today.

But before he was doing this as a full-time job, Ben was already spreading his love for Notion in his free time as a voracious product user. After discovering the tool on Product Hunt, he became obsessed. He got on the company’s radar after launching his own Notion template gallery on Product Hunt and joined as one of the first 15 employees.

In our conversation today, we focus on the nuts and bolts of building a global community that drives user growth. Ben shares tactical advice on: Tackling community organically from the bottom-up, and why you shouldn’t go top-down; What companies are best suited to a centralized vs. decentralized community approach; Partnering with YouTubers and other creators; His advice to founders on finding your own first community hire.

Here’s my biggest takeaway on the bottom-up vs. top-down decision: bottom-up wins trust before it asks for anything. When you enable passionate users to teach, build, and share—then get out of their way—you unlock authentic advocacy that no paid campaign can replicate. Practically, this looks like community-led onboarding (templates, live office hours, and user-run meetups), lightweight governance (clear brand and safety guardrails), and a creator toolkit (assets, sample briefs, and success stories) that fuels developer evangelism and product discovery without stifling creativity.

On centralized vs. decentralized approaches, fit matters. Centralized communities shine when your product is compliance-heavy, your ICP requires curated expertise, or you need consistent, high-signal feedback loops. Decentralized communities thrive when your value compounds through remixing and sharing—think modular templates, integrations, and a vibrant ecosystem of product creators. My operating rule: start centralized for quality and learning, then progressively decentralize as playbooks harden and local leaders emerge. Instrument the handoff with clear roles, lightweight certifications, and community health metrics (activation, contribution velocity, and sentiment).

Creator partnerships—especially with YouTubers and niche educators—act as force multipliers. Treat creators like product partners, not channels: co-develop curricula, share early product roadmaps where appropriate, and equip them with data-backed talking points and reusable assets. Build a transparent value exchange (rev share, affiliate programs, early feature access), define success upfront (reach, engagement, and downstream activation), and keep content evergreen with updates tied to releases. The result is a repeatable growth loop that blends PLG, social proof, and zero to one B2B marketing.

For founders hiring the first community leader, optimize for a builder-operator hybrid: someone who has shipped programs, written docs, hosted events, and can close the loop from insight to iteration. Look for evidence of creator empathy, editorial judgment, lightweight product instincts, and the ability to scale through systems (templates, playbooks, and tooling). Define outcomes, not activities: measure community-led pipeline, activation lift, retention improvements, and the velocity of high-quality user feedback feeding product management leadership.

The throughline is simple: community is a product. Design it with the same rigor—clear ICPs, onboarding, retention hooks, and feedback loops—and it becomes a durable moat. Whether you lean centralized or decentralized, start bottom-up, enable your best users, and let creators help you tell the story the market actually wants to hear.

October 21, 2025
From Doubt to Dominance: Vanta’s Bold Bet on Startup Security and Product-Market Fit

I’m drawn to product stories where conviction outruns consensus, and few examples illustrate that better than Christina Cacioppo and the journey behind Vanta. As a product leader, I pay close attention to the early decisions that compound into category leadership, especially in B2B SaaS and founder-led GTM.

Vanta is the leading automated security and compliance platform, with thousands of businesses relying on the product to get compliant (and to stay that way).

After toying with some initial ideas, like a voice assistant for biologists, Christina started building Vanta to solve a problem that didn’t really exist at the time. The company started out in 2018 by trying to get SOC-2 security compliance for startups — but at the time, startups didn’t even really need to have SOC-2s.

But Christina and her team saw the writing on the wall and that security was going to shoot up on the priority list for even the earliest-stage companies, and kept building even when plenty of smart people told them it was a bad idea.

From a product-market fit standpoint, this is a masterclass in sensing a rising constraint before it becomes urgent. Betting early on SOC-2 compliance for startups signaled a strong thesis about where the market was headed and created a durable wedge into startup security. That’s the kind of proactive product discovery and strategic foresight I try to instill in teams.

It’s a gamble that paid off. After going through Y Combinator, the team nabbed some truly incredible early customers, including Segment, Front and Lattice.

Founder-led sales often bridge the gap between problem insight and market traction. Watching this arc—from zero selling experience to big-time enterprise deals—reinforces a truth I’ve seen repeatedly: intimate problem ownership beats polished sales scripts in the early innings.

She also pulls back the curtain on some of Vanta’s more unconventional moves, like waiting until they acquired hundreds of customers to build a proper website and instead relying almost exclusively on word-of-mouth to grow the business. Christina also shares her thinking behind the fundraising strategy, in which Vanta operated at cash flow break-even for years before going out to raise its Series A.

These choices map to a disciplined product management playbook: prioritize trust and outcomes, validate retention before scaling top-of-funnel, and use cash flow break-even to preserve strategic optionality. In practice, that’s how you earn leverage with both customers and capital—and it’s a powerful way to de-risk growth while accelerating product-market fit.

If you’re building in B2B SaaS, the takeaways are clear: anticipate regulatory and buyer shifts, compound credibility with early lighthouse customers, encourage word-of-mouth growth by over-delivering on the core job-to-be-done, and let fundraising serve the strategy—not define it. In my experience, this is how category winners are made.

October 21, 2025
How I Evaluate Talent Like a Pro: Lessons from Nadia Singer, Figma’s Chief People Officer

I recently sat down with Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer at Figma, to unpack what separates good interviewers from truly remarkable talent evaluators. As I reflect on my own hiring philosophy in product management leadership, her approach sharpened my lens for identifying signal over noise, eliminating bias, and scaling culture with intention.

Nadia joined Figma in 2020 and has seen explosive growth in her own career alongside the collaborative design platform’s. Before Figma, Singer was a talent expert who has hired hundreds of talented folks at places like Quora, Facebook and Google.

In our discussion, we dove into the patterns that consistently predict excellence. What resonated most was a simple yet powerful idea from her recruiter playbook: study how a candidate reaches an answer, rather than what they say. I’ve found this especially impactful when hiring PMs and cross-functional leaders. Rather than celebrating the “right” conclusion, I push candidates to narrate their reasoning, make trade-offs explicit, and surface assumptions—revealing structured thinking, customer empathy, and learning velocity.

To operationalize this, I ask candidates to walk me through ambiguous product decisions: Which constraints did you prioritize and why? Where did you seek disconfirming evidence? How did you iterate when new data emerged? I’m listening for clarity of problem framing, the ability to quantify impact, and the rigor of decision-making under uncertainty. The outcome matters, but the method matters more.

We also explored tactics interviewers can use to avoid pattern matching and other biases. In my teams, that starts with a role scorecard that defines the core competencies up front (not resume proxies), structured interviews with consistent prompts, and independent scoring before any debrief. I’m deliberate about diverse panels, rotating interviewers to reduce shared blind spots, and separating signal (evidence-backed behaviors) from story (polish, pedigree, or charisma). In debriefs, the most senior voice speaks last, we anchor on evidence tied to the scorecard, and we explicitly call out potential biases when they appear.

Another theme was learning from early missteps in recruiting. I’ve made many of the common mistakes: over-indexing on pedigree instead of proof of outcomes, letting hypotheticals outweigh real-world execution, asking leading questions that telegraph the “desired” answer, and failing to define success criteria before meeting candidates. The fix is discipline: better prompts, deeper follow-ups (“tell me about a time…” with measurable results), consistent rubrics, and a higher bar for reference checks that validate how someone collaborates under pressure.

Finally, we discussed ways that Figma tweaked its approach to culture so it could scale alongside the company. My takeaway: culture scales when it’s operationalized. Codify a few non-negotiable principles, translate them into observable behaviors, and weave them into hiring rubrics, onboarding, performance management, and rituals like product reviews. As the organization grows, refine language—without diluting standards—so new teams can apply the same principles to different contexts.

If you lead hiring for product or adjacent functions, here’s the throughline I’m taking forward: raise the bar on reasoning, not rhetoric; design interviews that produce comparable evidence; and treat culture as a living operating system, not a poster. That’s how you consistently spot high-agency, high-learning talent—and build teams that compound value over time.

October 21, 2025
Build a High‑Velocity PLG Growth Engine: Measurable Tactics from Notion and Slack

I gravitate toward conversations that blend analytical rigor with genuine customer empathy. In my role leading product, I’m constantly looking for repeatable ways to operationalize product-led growth and transform word-of-mouth into measurable business outcomes. That’s why I was eager to study how Notion approaches growth in practice, and what I learned aligns closely with the systems we build to scale sustainable, metrics-driven growth.
Rachel Hepworth, Head of Marketing at Notion.
Rachel currently runs growth marketing at Notion, and sees her job as bringing process and control to all of Notion’s different marketing channels. Before joining Notion, Rachel launched the first growth marketing team at Slack, laying down the tracks for a well-oiled go-to-market strategy that could be measured easily.
Much like Slack, Notion has made a name for itself largely through customer love and a powerful word-of-mouth recommendation engine. As a metrics-focused marketer, Rachel opens up her playbook on how she lassos that kind of word-of-mouth growth and the analytical approach she has toward acquiring and retaining customers.
Here’s how I translate those lessons into a practical, product-led growth playbook you can put to work.
First, high-speed feedback cycles are non-negotiable. In a PLG environment, learning velocity compounds. I instrument experiments end-to-end (from top-of-funnel through activation and retention), ship in small batches, and review impact daily. Rapid iteration across acquisition creatives, onboarding flows, and in-product prompts turns anecdote into evidence and evidence into compounding gains. The flywheel is simple: ship, measure, learn, repeat—faster than your competitors.
Second, identify early indicators of which sign-ups are most likely to convert to paid customers. I score intent using a blend of source quality, setup depth, activation milestones, and collaboration signals. Think about actions like completing a core “aha” workflow, inviting teammates, or integrating with a critical tool—these leading indicators help forecast conversion far better than lagging metrics. With this in place, you can route high-intent cohorts into tailored onboarding, sales-assist, or customer education paths that lift conversion and retention.
Third, evolve your top-of-funnel metrics as the product and motion mature. Early on, breadth matters—optimize for qualified traffic and net-new sign-ups. As the engine matures, shift your focus to quality and efficiency: channel mix, activation rate, cost to acquire activated users, and downstream expansion signals. I treat metrics like a portfolio—retire vanity metrics, promote predictive ones, and ensure each KPI ladders to revenue, not just reach.
Finally, clarify how marketing, product, and sales co-own the funnel in a PLG company. Marketing leads demand generation, channel orchestration, and education that primes users for success. Product owns activation, in-product conversion, and expansion mechanics that turn usage into habit and habit into revenue. Sales (often sales-assist) engages where complexity, security, or procurement require a human touch. When each function owns a distinct stage—and the handoffs are instrumented—the go-to-market strategy becomes both scalable and measurable.
The throughline is simple: build a growth marketing engine that respects customer love and word-of-mouth while holding the bar on measurement. With fast feedback loops, predictive intent models, evolving top-of-funnel metrics, and crisp cross-functional ownership, product-led growth stops being a slogan and starts becoming your operating system.

October 21, 2025
Hypergrowth Leadership: My Takeaways from Claire Hughes Johnson on “learning organisms”

I’ve been reflecting on what it really takes to scale a product organization through hypergrowth, and I keep coming back to the discipline and mindset modeled by Claire Hughes Johnson. Her approach to operating at scale, executive hiring, and leadership development aligns closely with the highest standards of product management leadership.

Claire joined Stripe as its COO back in 2014 and, over the course of her nearly seven years in the company’s executive suite, she oversaw rapid growth as Stripe scaled from under 200 employees to over 7,000. Prior to Stripe, she spent 10 years at Google leading various high-impact business teams. That arc of operating experience sets the context for her new book, “Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building.”

One story that particularly resonates with me is the inside look at her lengthy, no-stone-unturned interview process with the Collison brothers for the COO role. I’ve learned that this level of rigor is not just about due diligence; it’s a signal of shared standards and cultural alignment. When I hire for critical roles, I mirror this depth: clarify the mandate, pressure-test values, and evaluate for the long arc of decision quality—not merely short-term execution.

Hiring exceptional talent demands systems thinking. Claire’s emphasis on doing reference checks the right way—structured, targeted, and focused on observed behaviors—maps to my own playbook. I’ve found executive hiring is hard because the signals are noisy, the roles are often ambiguous, and it’s tempting to over-index on brand or storytelling. The antidote is to define success as outcomes, not activities, and then assess candidates against those outcomes. This is where outcomes vs output OKRs become indispensable for preventing mis-hiring and aligning expectations.

Her personal backstory also underscores a foundational leadership trait: curiosity. The way her parents instilled deep curiosity and fierce independence at a very young age is more than biography—it’s a blueprint. In practice, it translates to cultivating an owner’s mindset across the org, which is crucial for anyone navigating an IC to manager transition and for leaders who must empower teams without micromanaging.

I also appreciate her belief that all high-performers are “learning organisms.” I’ve seen the best product leaders systematize learning with deliberate feedback loops, postmortems, and explicit mechanisms to turn insight into action. In product discovery, this shows up as rapid cycles of hypothesis, experiment, and synthesis—creating a culture where learning velocity compounds just as reliably as revenue can.

This is why I recommend “Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building” to operators who want pragmatic tools, not just abstractions. For complementary perspective, the book she recommended from Fred Kofman titled “Conscious Business” pairs well with these themes of ownership, integrity, and clear commitments—essentials for leaders who manage complexity at scale.

If you’re looking to stay close to her work, you can follow Claire on Twitter at @chughesjohnson. I’ve found her ongoing reflections a useful calibration point for raising the bar on leadership systems, executive hiring, and operating rigor.

My key takeaway is simple but powerful: scale rewards clarity, discipline, and humility. Hiring is a product in itself. Culture is a system, not a slogan. And the leaders who keep compounding are the ones who choose to be “learning organisms,” building teams that do the same.

October 21, 2025
Validate Your Startup Idea Fast: My Early User Research Playbook for High-Quality Interviews

Early user research is the single highest-leverage activity I recommend to founders who want to validate an idea quickly and confidently. In my work leading product strategy, I’ve seen high-quality customer interviews compress months of guesswork into a few focused days, turning vague concepts into clear signals about product-market fit.
I often point founders to the practical wisdom from Jeanette Mellinger, whose approach aligns closely with how I guide teams through product discovery. Her lens on rigorous, respectful, and insight-rich conversations has shaped how I structure research plans, prepare teams, and synthesize findings into actionable decisions.
In this piece, I unpack the core pillars I rely on for early validation: The three-step framework for a thorough user-research process; The biggest mistakes she’s noticed after working with dozens of early-stage companies; and Specific advice for structuring an interview flow and crafting better questions that unlock essential insights. These simple, durable principles help founders avoid common pitfalls and focus on what truly matters: how customers behave, what they value, and where the product should go next.
On process, I guide teams to adopt The three-step framework for a thorough user-research process. While the tactics can vary by market, the intent is consistent: define the learning goals up front, prepare a tight interview plan, and commit to rapid synthesis. When founders do this well, they speed up discovery, reduce bias, and make sharper decisions about which problems are worth solving.
On mistakes, I see patterns repeat. The biggest mistakes she’s noticed after working with dozens of early-stage companies mirror what I encounter: pitching instead of listening, over-indexing on opinions instead of behaviors, asking leading questions, and trying to validate a solution rather than deeply understanding the problem. The antidote is discipline—stay curious, probe for real stories and workflows, and keep the conversation anchored in what customers actually do, not what they say they might do.
On interview craft, I lean on Specific advice for structuring an interview flow and crafting better questions that unlock essential insights. Start with context (role, goals, current workflows), move into concrete behaviors (last time they tried to solve the problem, tools used, success criteria), and finish with pain points and opportunities (workarounds, constraints, moments of friction). Use open-ended prompts, ask for specific recent examples, and consistently follow up with “what happened next?” and “how did you decide?” to surface the underlying mental models that should shape your product.
If you’re a founder running a founder-led GTM motion, this approach keeps you grounded in customer reality while accelerating product discovery. It also equips you to communicate insights clearly to your team, turning interviews into alignment and momentum. Over time, this rigor compounds—your roadmap becomes crisper, your experiments get smaller and faster, and your conviction grows with each conversation.
You can follow Jeanette on Twitter at @jnetmell. If these practices help you validate faster or avoid costly detours, share what you learned and what you’ll try next—I’d love to hear how your discovery work is evolving.

October 21, 2025
Mastering Product-Market Fit with the REV Model: My Battle-Tested Category Playbook

Product-market fit is measurable — and the REV (revenue, engagement and value) model is one of the most practical ways I’ve found to quantify it while aligning product, go-to-market, and category strategy.

I’m continually inspired by how Artem Kroupenev, VP of Strategy at Augury, operationalized this thinking to scale a new category. Augury is a leader in a category they helped to define known as “machine health.” The company sells products that combine hardware, AI, and SaaS within industrial manufacturing.

Artem joined the team at the very beginning of its journey and helped shape strategies for how the team measured product-market fit, go-to-market, and eventually, a strategy for designing a brand new market category they could compete in. Those lessons map closely to how I build and scale products today.

Here’s how I translate these ideas into a practical playbook you can apply right now: Augury’s storyboard-based approach to product vision, how to sell to a limited pool of customers, the REV (revenue, engagement and value) model for measuring product-market fit, and when founders should start exploring creating a new category to operate in.

Augury’s storyboard-based approach to product vision resonates with how I align teams and customers. I start with narrative storyboards that depict the current pain, the first “magic moment,” and the end-to-end value realization. These storyboards become a shared contract between product, sales, and customers — clarifying what must be true for adoption and value. They also drive ruthless prioritization: if a feature doesn’t move a storyboard frame closer to value realization, it waits.

When the market has a limited pool of customers, precision matters more than volume. I’ve found success by sequencing accounts into tight cohorts, running deep discovery with forward-deployed product teams, and setting explicit learning goals per cohort. Lighthouse wins matter, but only if they’re repeatable — so I anchor early deals to a clear “who/what/why” ideal customer profile and instrument the entire journey from pilot to expansion to prove repeatability.

The REV (revenue, engagement and value) model gives me a crisp, triangulated view of product-market fit. Revenue shows willingness to pay and expand (e.g., pilot-to-paid conversion, logo retention, net revenue retention). Engagement reveals product stickiness (depth, frequency, and breadth of usage; time-to-first-value; activation and expansion milestones). Value proves that outcomes are real (business impact metrics tied to the customer’s objectives, such as cost savings, yield improvement, or risk reduction). I don’t rely on a single metric; I set threshold targets for each dimension by cohort and track deltas over time to see whether the product is getting easier to sell, faster to adopt, and more valuable to customers.

I also treat REV as a lifecycle score. Early on, I’m comfortable with weaker revenue signals if engagement and value are strong and accelerating — that’s a prompt to invest in packaging, pricing, and sales enablement. Later, if revenue is strong but engagement lags, I pause new segments and sharpen onboarding, “aha” moments, and workflows until usage curves show healthy compounding. The point is to let each dimension guide the next set of investments.

On category creation, timing is everything. I only lean in when evidence shows the existing labels constrain the value story, the product reliably produces unique outcomes, and customers start using our language organically. That’s the moment to name the problem space, codify proof (case studies and benchmarks), rally an ecosystem, and publish a crisp narrative that explains what’s new, why it matters now, and how success is measured. Attempt it too early and you confuse buyers; do it once REV signals are strong, and you accelerate market pull.

If you’re leading in industrial manufacturing or building hardware–AI–SaaS solutions, these principles are especially vital: storyboard the vision to align complex stakeholders, sell with intent to a limited customer pool, and instrument the REV score to prove outcomes at every stage. Even in pure SaaS, the same playbook applies — the mechanics are different, but the signals of fit are universal.

My challenge to your team: within two weeks, storyboard your core value journey, define three to five REV metrics per lifecycle stage, and review them by cohort. You’ll not only see where product-market fit truly stands, but you’ll also know exactly what to do next — whether that’s sharpening onboarding, revisiting packaging, or laying the groundwork for a category you can own.

October 21, 2025
How a 3-Time Founding Team at Pilot Unlocked Product-Market Fit Faster—My Proven Playbook

I’m often asked how elite teams compress the journey to product-market fit. One story I keep returning to is Jessica McKellar, co-founder and CTO of Pilot, which is the largest accounting firm for startups. For the past six years, she’s built Pilot alongside her two co-founders, Waseem Daher and Jeff Arnold — and what makes this trio extraordinary is that they’ve stuck together across three startups.

As repeat founders, the team learned a ton from their first two ventures, K Splice and Zulip, and both netted some positive outcomes. Yet there were mistakes that prevented those products from becoming an outsized success. From a product management leadership perspective, I see a clear evolution in how they approached problem selection, product discovery, and go-to-market.

With Pilot, they prioritized picking an acute problem and a huge market to tackle. That simple but rigorous reframing matters: identify a customer segment with a painful, high-frequency workflow; quantify the market; and ensure a compelling “why now.” This is classic founder-led GTM discipline and the essence of practical product-market fit lessons.

They also embraced a deliberately tedious build process for v1: looking over Waseem and Jeff’s shoulders as they manually did the bookkeeping for early customers, while she wrote code alongside them. In my experience, this “do the job, then automate” approach functions like forward deployed engineers for founders — embed with the real workflow, capture edge cases, then translate that knowledge into the system of record.

Even going back to the earliest days, Pilot had some really strong product-market fit signals, with customers agreeing to pull out their credit card and pay for the product right away when it was just an idea on paper and eventually pulling the Pilot team into expanding their product suite. That willingness-to-pay signal, coupled with pull-based requests for adjacent capabilities, is exactly what I look for before scaling zero to one B2B marketing or hiring beyond the founding team.

My playbook from this story is straightforward: choose a narrowly defined, acute pain in a massive category; run founder-led discovery inside the customer’s workflow; ship code alongside the service until the workflow is reliable; price early to validate value; and align outcomes vs output OKRs so the team optimizes for customer impact, not feature volume. Do this, and you convert messy service learnings into a repeatable product engine.

Make no mistake about it — being a founder is incredibly difficult — but choosing the right problem to tackle can drastically smooth the path ahead of you. For product creators, that choice — and the discipline to live in the customer’s workflow early — is the difference between meandering and momentum.

October 21, 2025
Open-Source GTM Masterclass: Pricing, Packaging, and Paywalls with Grafana Labs’ COO

I sat down with Douglas Hanna, Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs. Grafana Labs is an observability stack built around Grafana, a leading open-source technology for dashboards and visualization.
Douglas is a seasoned revenue leader, previously leading operations and GTM strategy at Zendesk. At Grafana Labs, Douglas has been instrumental in scaling GTM at the open-source company — building up both team headcount and its revenue model.
In our conversation today, Douglas dives deep into the process of bringing products to market at an open-source company. That focus on disciplined go-to-market execution resonates with my own experience building product-led motions that respect the community while establishing clear, sustainable paths to revenue.
We explore the different facets of building and scaling a revenue model at an open-source company. Douglas opens up the GTM playbook at Grafana Labs sharing: I found these principles especially actionable for open source monetization, SaaS pricing, and zero to one B2B marketing.
“When to commercialize a feature vs. switch to a hosted version of a product” — In practice, I look for telltale signals: features that impose heavy operational burden (security, scale, multi-tenant reliability), generate significant infrastructure or support costs, or require advanced governance. That’s when a hosted version can deliver outsized value. For individual features inside the core, I favor commercialization only when the value metric is unambiguous and the user experience remains seamless for the community. The key is a clear migration path from self-managed to hosted, with pricing aligned to usage or outcomes.
“Tried and tested frameworks for pricing and packaging” — I anchor on a few staples: value metrics that correlate with customer outcomes, willingness-to-pay testing, and the 3C lens (customer, competition, company). For packaging, a tiered “good/better/best” model helps segment needs, while usage-based or consumption pricing can unlock elasticity for developer-led adoption. I’ve seen price fences (SSO, RBAC, advanced analytics, scale limits) work well when they map to enterprise readiness rather than core functionality.
“How Grafana Labs thinks about what to put behind a paywall” — I share the same philosophy: keep community-loved, foundational capabilities open to preserve trust and growth, and place enterprise-grade scale, compliance, and governance behind the paywall. This often includes SSO/SAML, audit logs, granular access controls, advanced alerting, longer retention, and premium SLAs. The litmus test is whether the paywalled capability primarily serves larger teams’ risk, reliability, and control requirements.
“How the GTM team was built over time” — The sequencing matters. Early on, lean into product-led growth with strong developer evangelism, documentation, and onboarding. As adoption accelerates, add sales-assist, solutions engineering, and forward deployed engineers to convert complex use cases. Over time, layer in customer success, pricing operations, and ecosystem partnerships. Hiring profiles evolve from generalists to specialists, but the connective tissue remains a tight loop between product, community, and revenue.
Throughout our discussion, I appreciated the rigor in tying pricing and packaging decisions to measurable value, while safeguarding the open-core experience. That balance is the difference between short-term monetization and durable category leadership in observability.
You can follow Douglas on Twitter at @douglashanna.
If you’re building or scaling an open-source business, these GTM patterns provide a pragmatic blueprint: lead with community, monetize enterprise needs, and align pricing to real-world usage. It’s a playbook that rewards trust, clarity, and iteration — and it’s one I’ve seen drive repeatable growth when executed with discipline.

October 21, 2025
Pulling Off the Zoom-In Pivot: Luminai’s Kesava on Focus, Sales Psychology, and Product-Market Fit

I recently sat down with Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, co-founder and CEO of Luminai, a B2B software tool that helps automate any manual process down to just one click. Coming from years of product leadership, I was immediately drawn to how a seemingly simple promise — one click — can reframe entire operating models and unlock product-market fit in B2B SaaS.

Dinakaran’s path into building software products is anything but conventional. A former Rubik’s Cube champion and back-to-back Hackathon winner, he brings a competitor’s precision and a builder’s curiosity to the craft. The founders stumbled on the idea for its automated “one-click” product by accident, at a corporate hackathon — the kind of serendipity I’ve seen repeatedly catalyze category-defining products when teams are close to customers and willing to ship fast.

Formerly called Digital Brain, Luminai is a Series A startup that’s raised nearly $20 million since its launch out of Y Combinator in 2020. That trajectory underscores a disciplined focus on value creation over vanity features — and the organizational courage to concentrate resources where customers feel the most impact.

In our conversation, we explore the psychology behind the sales process, why sales leaders should consider pitching straight to the CEO and Dinakaran’s decision to scrap hundreds of lines of written code to focus on building out their most beloved customer feature. That decision is a textbook zoom-in pivot — narrowing scope to amplify value — and it’s one of the hardest, yet most effective, moves a product leader can make in the search for product-market fit.

Zooming in is not just about cutting; it’s about conviction. When the data and customer narratives converge on a single, beloved capability, the right move is to double down. My playbook in these moments is simple: validate with qualitative signal (customer pull, urgency, and willingness to pay), quantify usage concentration (feature adoption depth, not breadth), and model the business impact (time-to-value, implementation friction, and sales cycle acceleration). If a feature materially compresses time-to-value and reduces change management, it deserves roadmap primacy.

We also dug into the psychology behind enterprise sales and why sales leaders should consider pitching straight to the CEO. In founder-led GTM, this tactic creates a high-bandwidth feedback loop: the economic buyer frames outcomes, we test narrative-market fit in real time, and we avoid the trap of selling “capabilities” instead of transformational results. In my experience, early alignment with the CEO sharpens qualification, shortens cycles, and forces clarity on the business case.

On the surface, Luminai may seem like just another B2B SaaS startup, but with nearly half the team comprising of former founders (seven of which are ex-YC founders), Luminai is a true example of how the co-founders can really make their mark on shaping their company on the path to product-market fit. That founder density matters — it accelerates product discovery, normalizes rapid iteration, and builds organizational muscle for decisive pivots like the zoom-in. The result is a culture that prizes customer outcomes over internal preferences.

My takeaway for product leaders: don’t wait for perfect certainty. If a single feature repeatedly earns love, compresses onboarding, and closes deals, earn the right to focus — even if it means scrapping code and saying no to adjacent asks. Pair that focus with founder-led GTM, pitch the true economic buyer, and measure success by outcomes, not output. That’s how teams move from zero to one in B2B and create durable, defensible product-market fit.

October 21, 2025
From IC to Manager: Proven Strategies to Avoid Pitfalls and Lead High-Impact Teams

The leap from individual contributor to manager looks straightforward on paper, yet it’s one of the trickiest transitions I’ve seen in high-growth environments. In my role at HighLevel, I’ve watched brilliant engineers stumble when the job changes from building the product to building the people who build the product. The difference isn’t incremental—it’s a complete shift in identity, incentives, and daily habits.

Most startups get it wrong because they promote for technical excellence and throughput, then keep the new manager doing their old job with “a little people stuff on the side.” That’s a recipe for burnout and underperformance. The first principle is simple: management is a different job. Success is no longer measured by your code, but by your team’s clarity, velocity, and outcomes.

Set expectations and goals with precision on day one. I establish a clear role charter, spell out decision rights, and align to outcomes vs output OKRs so the new manager understands what “great” looks like. We define a 30/60/90 plan that includes team health metrics, delivery goals, and collaboration routines with product and design. The aim isn’t to ship more tickets—it’s to reliably ship the right outcomes.

To turbocharge a team’s effectiveness, I focus on operating cadence and flow. That means crisp intake, visible priorities, lean WIP, tight feedback loops, and regular retros that drive real change. I remove systemic blockers, protect focus time, and make psychological safety a non-negotiable. When people feel safe, they surface risks early, challenge assumptions, and accelerate learning.

High-impact feedback is fast, frequent, kind, and specific. I coach managers to use situation–behavior–impact, to separate people from problems, and to balance reinforcing and redirecting feedback. Written summaries after key conversations prevent drift, while short feedback cycles create compounding growth. Recognition is not an afterthought—it’s a performance tool.

Going from peer to manager requires an explicit reset. I encourage managers to communicate the new expectations, re-establish boundaries, and commit to fairness over familiarity. This includes confidential 1:1s, transparent decision-making, and a clear stance on performance bars. Trust grows when people experience consistency, not when they hear platitudes.

Delaying action on low performance is one of the most costly leadership mistakes. It silently taxes your top performers, normalizes mediocrity, and corrodes culture. Diagnose if the issue is skill or will, offer targeted support with time-bound milestones, and be decisive. Managing someone out can be both humane and necessary—clarity and dignity can coexist.

For first-time managers, I use a simple playbook. In the first 30 days, run a listening tour and baseline the team’s delivery, quality, and morale. By day 60, implement the new operating cadence, align on outcomes vs output OKRs, and tighten cross-functional rituals. By day 90, complete career conversations, calibrate performance, and publish a team charter that codifies how you plan, build, and learn.

The throughline in all of this is ownership: own the outcomes, the culture, and the system. When you make the mindset shift from doing the work to enabling the work, you’ll find that the manager role is not a detour from impact—it’s a force multiplier. With clear expectations, disciplined execution, and courageous feedback, you’ll transform a promotion into a platform for sustained, compounding results.

October 21, 2025