Live From SaaStr Annual 2021: Stage B Legends - Monday

Dropbox Rachel Wallen.

Thank you.

It is so great to be here today at SaaStr, seeing all of you, IRL, 3D, all the things. I'm really excited to talk to you today.

I'm going to walk through 7 lessons, hard-earned lessons that I've learned in what I call product-led scaling. It's kind of what happens after product-led growth. And I'll talk to you a little bit about my experience at TalkDesk, a little bit my experience at LiveRamp and now at Dropbox. But first, I want to tell you a quick story.

So that's me.

And this is what I call my pandemic hobby. I really enjoy stand-up paddleboarding. And I'm stand-up paddleboarding in what is called the Saison Slough. Try saying that like 3 times fast.

It's impossible.

And what is unique about the Suisun Slough is that it is a freshwater body. But I'll just kind of place it for you. It is sitting kind of near Benicia. So for those of you who aren't Bay Area natives, the Bay Area is surrounded by water. This is something I learned over time from Chicago. And the Suisun Slough— meets the Grizzly Bay, which is a saltwater body, which meets the Carquinez Strait, which meets San Pablo Bay, and eventually the San Francisco Bay. Those are all saltwater bodies. And what's unique about the water in the Seussan Slough is it's what's called brackish water. Now that sounds really gross, but really all it is is a unique ecological phenomena where saltwater and freshwater meet. And virtually nothing actually survives. There. But as I was like paddling around and kind of looking around, I noticed these little turtles swimming around. And those turtles got there because some parent was like at a fairground and some kid won a turtle. And, you know, the parent wasn't so happy. They dropped that turtle into the stream. And the turtles, you know, this is how turtles have survived for the last 20 million years. But what is unique about the Sisal Slough is that there are climate scientists at the University of California at Davis who believe that turtles hold the key to potentially understanding global warming. These turtles have managed to thrive in an environment that literally nothing else is able to live in. And that's a little bit like— Product-led scaling.

What's unique about product-led scaling is you're dealing with, you know, most companies, like what I call the product-led grown-ups.

How many of you actually work for one of these product-led grown-ups? Raise your hand. Okay, we've got like a few of you in the audience. So what's unique about product-led grown-ups is that they have managed to take a product-led motion and marry it with some kind of sales assist or sales-led motion. Now, what I think is interesting about this, you know, working at one of the product-led grown-ups, is it seems so straightforward. You know, I work for the original product-led growth company, Dropbox, and being on the inside, you start to realize, you know, you actually kind of need both motions. You need to find a way that both motions work together. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. How to actually navigate your way through the product-led maze. Now, I have worked at a wide variety of different types of companies at different stages. I worked at Talkdesk, which is one of Jason's favorite investments. It's one of the latest decacorns. I worked there when we were going from $1 million in ARR to around $50 million in ARR. I ran product. Then I went to LiveRamp. I ran product at LiveRamp. For those of you who don't know LiveRamp, it is in the paid media marketing space. It's a public company. And we help marketers take their CRM and then go and target on the—

sorry, on paid media. And then, of course, you all know Dropbox. I joined Dropbox about a year ago, and we're kind of in that, we're still in that maze. And so first, the first lesson that I'd like to share is what I call improving your customer's customer's CSAT. So what does that mean? Well, I like to kind of start this with a story. So I joined Talkdesk, and about a month in, I was about to fly to Portugal. Portugal is where most of the development team was at the time. I was about to get on the plane, and Tiago, our CEO, calls me and says, "You're not going to Portugal right now. You're going to Atlanta. We had an outage last night for 2 minutes, and you're going to go and talk to our largest customer," which was the Weather Channel at the time. So I get on the plane, and I fly to Atlanta. I get there and the Weather Channel, how many of you have ever watched the Weather Channel? Okay, everyone, probably everyone. That's actually not what the Weather Channel is for the most part. That's not where they make most of their money. They make most of their money powering the weather app on your iPhone. They power also what are kind of like Bloomberg terminals inside of airplanes. And when TalkDesk went out for 2 minutes, pilots were actually trying to call down to the weather channel into the— what I would only describe as like— I've never been on the floor of NASA, but it's almost like a NASA control center. And when TalkDesk went out, the pilots weren't able to say, oh, should I fly through this fog or fly around it? And so we really— that was kind of like the first lesson that hit me where I was like, oh my God, we're actually not building for our customer, we're building for their customer who is paying them. And we are one of these mission-critical systems. And so we really made it our mission in those early days to make it super easy for agents to self-serve onboard themselves. We made it easy. You know, we, we called it, I, I think this is like the dirty little secret of all SaaS. It's on the front page of every single webpage. It's the hero. So ours at the time was called Create a Call Center in 5 Minutes. Guess what? No one is creating a call center in 5 minutes, but it made it seem easy. It made it seem accessible so that anyone could do it themselves. And so at that time, we also did something really unique. We started doing— it doesn't sound crazy right now, but at the time we started doing SMS CSAT and making it super easy to collect data that way. We also allowed— and this is kind of one of the unique things. I'll give credit to our designer. I think this is like a design hackathon. We actually gave the agents the ability to say, this is how happy my customer was at the end of the call. So we very intentionally started laying the groundwork for being really a data asset. And so lesson number 1, improve your customers' customers' CSAT. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] So here we are. TalkDesk has survived going from $1 million to $10 million, which as many of you out there know, it's not easy. And now we're at the point where we're like, okay, let's put our foot on the gas. How do we actually like 10x this thing? And as we looked around at what options we had, we had something like 20 different integrations that were actually driving revenue. And really all that mattered was one of those integrations, and it was Salesforce. And the reason why it mattered is something that every single time our customers kind of hit a certain level in their own growth, they graduated off of whatever ticketing system they were using onto Salesforce. And we saw this pattern happen over and over and over again. And why was that interesting? Because Salesforce is notorious. It's hard to actually navigate your way through that ecosystem. And what we did that was different— well, first, we got to know the product team at Salesforce really well. We would go out to beers with them on a regular basis. But what we learned was we kind of treated them almost as our customer. And we started to learn about the customer journey across companies. And we really started to focus on, how do we actually land with a product-led partnership? So we built the first kind of onboarding flow directly through Salesforce so that the sales engineers at Salesforce could create a call center in 5 minutes on Salesforce. This is the first time that happened. And so really starting to think about, OK, What part— which customer are you solving this for? And how do you actually create a product-led partnership, not just a product-led product? And so we really kind of crafted this motion and then also started to expand into outbound sales. So we went from, you know, these are the use cases on the, the bottom. We went from call center in 5 minutes. Now you can actually like add outbound sales. And oh, by the way, now we're actually starting to land mid-market accounts on a more regular basis. Land with product-led partnerships. Next. Now we're at the point where things are going crazy. We're adding more and more customers. We're also losing customers. And we don't always know exactly why we're losing customers. But we see customers graduating off of us onto the Five9, the Genesys of the world. And we realized we actually, we can't build fast enough. So, you know, our kind of white lie at the time was intelligent contact center. We had one AI engineer at the company, but we really wanted to be this AI-powered call center. So how do you do that? You actually launch a platform yourself. And so what we did was we built a product product-led platform ourselves. We were looking at Heroku and Salesforce for inspiration. Highly recommend going through the Heroku flows to see how they allow you to add licenses. We require that every single partner that wanted to be in the Talkdesk ecosystem set up a trial themselves. So this was kind of unheard of in this industry where these sales cycles took 3 to 6 to 9 months. And we were saying, no, actually, any admin or any supervisor can go and add a trial themselves. We also launched a wall-to-wall workflow, added a desk phone at this point so that we can start to creep our way into enterprise. And ultimately, we identified a target where we ended up acquiring one of the analytics platforms. So you can kind of start to see there's a lot of different ways that product-led motions can get layered into a sales-led motion. So let's switch gears a little bit. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my time at LiveRamp. So I helped LiveRamp shift from about $100 million and grow into about a $400 million business. And what was unique about LiveRamp is we were really truly sales-led. We're really focused on mid-market. And we're also kind of in a pickle. LiveRamp is, for those of you who don't know, as I mentioned, you take your CRM, you run it through LiveRamp, and then we basically maintained a cookie graph so that you could go and target anywhere on the web. But what we had learned is that Google was getting rid of cookies. So we were like, oh, something, I can't stay on stage. And what we did next was kind of look around our business and say, OK, what is resistant to cookies? And what we realized is that our TV business was really focused on— it was growing like crazy. And we saw this little partner called Data Plus Math. That was kind of like trying to get— they were getting more customers than we were in the TV space, which is crazy. And what they had done was kind of build their own data asset. They were able to, in a matter of days, get somebody up and running doing television measurement. This is like unheard of at the time. And so I think this is the fastest acquisition I've ever been part of. We acquired them in, I think, 3 weeks. All of a sudden, we had a product-led motion that was driving a bunch of our sales-led motions at LiveRamp. Really think about and look at your business when your back is against the wall. Think about, well, is there somebody I could go and acquire that would actually give me that product-led motion? Again, understand your customers, do something about it. We weren't quite ready to do something about it. That by making this acquisition, we were going down that path. So here I am. I'd been there for 6, 8 months. And I went and met one of our customers. And I was in a boutique retailer in Minnesota. And this retailer— you know, really wanted to have us meet with their data science team. And I was like, well, we've got all these out-of-the-box solutions and you guys are already buying this from us. So why would we go and meet with them? They're like, no, no, no, trust us. So we sit down with their data science team and the data science team says, that's great. You took like a load off of us by giving us access to these insights, but we just kind of want the data. We were like, I don't know. This is licensed in a particular way. And what we realized was there's a huge opportunity in the analytics space that was being unmet. And we were able to go and build a product-led motion for the data scientists. We were able to create a closed-loop environment where we put the data in. Data scientists were able to use the tools they were already used to. Like GCP and BigQuery. And we created something that we called the safe haven, where your data goes in, but your data never comes out. We were able to use our own IP to create this new environment. But then we— what was unique about it and why I call it a product-led motion is data scientists were creating analytics and publishing them to the marketers, publishing them to the sales team, publishing them all across the organization. So really think about it. If you're working for a sales-led company, what are ways that I can actually use product-led techniques to expand within the organization I've already landed? All right, so here we are to where I am today. How many of you in the audience have a Dropbox account?

All right.

So this is probably one of the first companies that I'm talking about that you've heard of.

Awesome.

So Dropbox, as I mentioned, one of the first true product-led growth companies. I remember 2010, I sent an email to about 50 people saying, hey, do you want 2 gigs of space? A lot back then. And I think I collected maybe 15 gigs for myself off of that growth hack. So one of the original value props for Dropbox was really around storage. But when I joined Dropbox a year ago, storage is commoditized. Storage is kind of like, we have to have it, but that's not the reason why people use us.

and so I was really trying to wrap my head around this as I joined Dropbox.

I went and I sat down with 30 customers being like, well, why do you use Dropbox if you also pay for Google, or you also pay for Microsoft, or you also pay for whatever? And what I learned, I think it was one of those things you kind of have to come in as an outsider and really have beginner brain to something, the reason why people were buying us was completely— it was like slightly different. They were buying us because we made it easy to share content outside of Dropbox. And what was unique about that is Dropbox, like the original reason why people use us, was you have an iPhone and you have a PC and you wanna access all your files between those two. Well, now it kind of shifted. A PC and I'm sharing a file with you and my client is on a Mac, and I want to make sure they can actually open it. So somewhere along the way, our value proposition had completely shifted, but we had kind of like growth hacked our way from— Dropbox was the fastest company to go from $0 to $1 billion. We were not the fastest company to go from $1 billion to $2 billion. But what was interesting about it is, you know, it was like kind of a straightforward path to a billion. But a billion to $2 billion was not straightforward. We tried to go to mid-market with a sales assist motion. We tried to go to enterprise with a sales-led motion. We tried to add a new company. We bought HelloSign. But really, ultimately, people are, you know, our value prop had evolved, not completely changed. This year, one of the things that we've really been focusing on, our website doesn't say it just works, but internally that's kind of like our motto. It just better work. We really focus on how do we really just start to improve our funnel health and really go back to the basics, improve retention, pull out some of the growth hacks. It's really hard to pull out growth hacks once you put them in. And just— I call it giving before you get. Really focusing on that basic first user experience. So as you start to come into a new company, think about where they are in their trajectory. And really try to put on that beginner brain. Or even with yourself, why are your customers using you? What has changed in the market, and how do you continue to lean into that change? So evolve towards value from virality. And finally, so we found our next wave to ride. And it wasn't the easiest thing when I started. It wasn't obvious. But what's unique about Dropbox is that maybe this is not unique about Dropbox, but I think during COVID everything changed, including our most engaged users' workflows. So our most engaged users are solo creatives, freelancers, creative teams, people using big files. They're using big videos, and it's like The Chainsmokers sharing content. Or whatever. So what's unique about Dropbox is we have all these amazing creators on our platform. And we're in this just completely different environment now, where we are able to actually tie together workflows, simplify things. But the other thing that's unique is we're in this era transitioning from the file to the cloud, and what we believe is the next era for Dropbox is one organized place for all of your content. So the last thing I'll leave you with is if you're building for everybody, sometimes you end up building for nobody. So make sure you understand who your best users are at scale. So last three, kind of wrap up here. Make sure that you understand how your product-led motion is evolving, you're kind of paying attention to those transitions because those transition points are where the opportunity sits. Make sure you don't try to box product-led anything into anywhere. And then finally, figure out how to marry your sales motion with your product-led motion so that you can survive, thrive, and evolve like the turtles. Thank you so much.

And now, please welcome co-founder and general partner at Kraft Ventures, David Sachs. Alright, great to be with all of you today. Can, can you guys hear me in the back? Okay, okay, good, awesome. Today I thought I would see where's the screen here. Oh, there we go. Sorry, could we go back one? I already messed it up. Okay, back one. All right, today I'm going to talk to you about the SaaS org chart, um, based on a Substack by that name. And it's really about, you know, what a typical Series A org looks like at the Series A, Series B, and Series C stage. And that's not to say that, you know, it has to look perfectly like this, but I find it— that it's helpful. I get into a lot of conversations with founders right after they've raised their Series A round or a Series B or C round. And the conversation always turns to, well, what, you know, who do we need to hire? What are we missing? And that's what this presentation is about. Typically, a Series A company is around 50 employees. That doesn't mean you're at 50 at the time you raise a Series A round. It's usually what, that's the target. That's where you're trying to get to. Most of the companies when we, you know, write a Series A term sheet they're in the, I'd say, 10 to 20 employee range, and they're looking to sort of roughly double, you know, in size over the next, say, 6 months. Series B, again, that's more of a target, about 125 employees. Series C, about 400. By the way, how many people here are founders or employees of— I'm trying to understand, like, what stage you're at. If you're pre-Series A, raise your hand. Okay, a lot. Okay, if you have raised a Series A but not yet a B, raise your hand. Okay, and if you've raised a B but not yet a C? Okay, and if you're Series C or beyond, raise your hand. Okay, so it's mostly people who are in this like pre-Series A or pre-Series B timeframe, so I'll try to focus on those. Just some sort of handy rules of thumb in terms of number of employees, you know, one heuristic to think about is the number of employees per ARR for a company. It's a useful rule of thumb. We know based on publicly available data that, that at IPO, the, the average sort of SaaS company at IPO has about 1,000 employees and about $100 million of ARR. So that ends up being about $100,000 of ARR per employee, and we can kind of work backwards from there. So as you go earlier, the amount of ARR per employee shrinks because obviously as a company scales up, it should be becoming more efficient. You should be getting more operating leverage. What you'll typically see is at the Series A, you know, you'll have, like I said, about 40 to 50 employees, around $1 million of ARR. That works out to about $20,000 to $25,000 of ARR per employee. Series B, you know, historically Series B stage SaaS companies had about $5 million of ARR. Again, about 100, 125 employees, that'd be $40,000 to $50,000 of ARR per employee. Series C, you know, might be at $20 million of ARR, 400 employees, that'd be about $50,000 to $66,000 of ARR per employee. These ratios are always moving around. Right now it's a pretty frothy environment, we're seeing a lot of Series As get done at say half a million of ARR. And so that's gonna imply less ARR per employee. But this gives you some idea of like whether your employee headcount, your total headcount is somewhat sane relative to other SaaS benchmarks. Some other ratios I think are just helpful as a rule of thumb as you scale. About 10% of your organization should be G&A, about 40% R&D, and 50% sales and marketing. You can see that on either a sort of a dollar cost basis or on a headcount basis. Either way, that should roughly work. For every 5 or 10, somewhere between 5 and 10 employees, you do need a manager. Like a really lean organization would have, say, one manager for every 8 to 10 employees. And, you know, a sort of a less lean organization might have one manager for every 5 reports. If you're seeing stuff like having one manager for every 2 reports, you have created way too many lines in your organization. Doesn't make sense. Some other ratios to keep in mind: we typically see if you have an SDR team game. It doesn't make sense for all SaaS companies, but if it makes sense for you, about 1 SDR for every 2 AEs. Uh, for every 10 AEs, you're going to need a headcount for sales operations. Uh, that's the sales ops, does stuff like set up your Salesforce instance or work out territories and comp plans. So for every 10 AEs, you're going to need a sort of an overhead headcount. You're going to need 1 PM roughly for every 5 to 8 developers, and then, you know, about 1 DevOps head for every 15 developers, 1 designer for every, I'd say, 5 to 8 developers. And then, you know, as your organization gets into that Series C and you've got, you know, teams with large numbers of designers, like 10 designers, you can start getting to super specialized roles, like even like a user research person. You might have that for every 10 designers. So those are some handy rules of thumb to help you scale. And let me just kind of jump into what I think like a typical 40 to 50 person SaaS Series A stage org looks like. And again, you don't have to look exactly like this, but the idea here is just to kind of— if you don't have one of these functions, you might want to kind of ask yourself why. Is that deliberate? Are we different than any other SaaS company, or have we just just not thought to hire this role yet. So, you know, on the R&D side, you've got the CTO's organization, typically the CTO co-founder, and you've got the product organization. CTO, you're gonna have some frontend engineers, some backend engineers working on the website. You're gonna have some, a couple of mobile engineers doing the client applications. You're gonna have, you know, at least one engineer doing core services or platforms. This is kind of APIs. You'll probably have, at this stage, by about 50 employees, you're gonna have an engineer working on analytics and also DevOps in your infrastructure. Product, I'm a big fan of having a head of product who reports directly to the founder CEO. I think it's an important way, typically, you know, most SaaS founders these days are product founders, and I think it's important for them to stay involved in the product And the way I always saw it was that the product managers were kind of like my hands when I was CEO running these companies. So I think it's important for the product organization, even though it's very small, to report directly to the founder CEO. Sometimes I see it tucked under the CTO, and obviously that can work too, but I feel like it's a better way for the founder to stay involved in the product and get leverage to have this report directly to them. Head of product, you'll have 1 or 2 PMs. Like I mentioned before, you want to have 1 PM for every 5 to 10 developers. And you're going to have, by this point, by about a 50-person org, you're going to have a couple of designers. And again, that same sort of ratio. In that 5 to 10 developer range, you're going to need a designer. Then we move over to sales and marketing. You're going to want to have a head of sales. By this point, you're gonna have about a dozen people in your sales organization. Um, it's amazing how early segmentation starts. Um, you're gonna have AEs for enterprise, AEs for mid-market, AEs for SMB. This is for most SaaS companies. What SMB, mid-market, or enterprise means in your market might be different, but typically it just means small, medium, and large size customers. Uh, the, the reason why you're gonna wanna have that segmentation is because you know, the SMB sales are going to be high velocity, fewer, fewer calls.

The—

it's going to be typically a lower, lower commission, lower quota, less experienced sales rep. On the other extreme, enterprise are the more complicated sales, bigger ACVs. You're going to need a more experienced AE to typically work them. And if you have the same AEs working everywhere from super small to super large deals, the gear switching becomes very difficult. So you'll end up segmenting very quickly and having AEs who focus on either sort of small, medium, and large. Uh, you'll have SDRs. The job of the SDR is essentially filter the leads. Uh, you can have either inbound or outbound SDRs. Inbound, they're filtering leads that come inbound to the sales team. Outbound means that they themselves are creating the leads. That doesn't work in every SaaS company, uh, so you want to be careful about that. Sales ops, like I mentioned, you now have a large enough team that the head of sales is going to need some support just to basically maintain your Salesforce instance, to get the, the plans all set up, the territories. Those are going to be changing every quarter. You're probably going to want to start doing a sales kickoff. You may want to start doing training. You're starting to develop the need for some real, I'd say, like overhead and infrastructure in order to make these AEs successful. You can't just hire like 5 new AEs and expect them to become successful without having any support whatsoever. Um, and you might need a sales engineer as well. So what a sales engineer does is they're a resource that gets pulled into a sales conversation by an AE to deal with highly technical parts of the conversation. So if you have a SaaS product that's a highly technical product, or let's say there's security concerns, what you want to do is have the AE pull in that sales engineer at a critical moment in the conversation so that the AE doesn't have to be an expert on every technical aspect of your— on every technical aspect of your product. And, you know, one of the things that comes up all the time with founders when they're first building their sales team is they ask, should I be hiring for a salesperson who has proven sales skills but doesn't know my market, doesn't know what we're building specifically, or do I hire the person who's got incredible domain expertise, incredible domain knowledge, but has never done sales before? They always make the mistake of choosing the domain expert. I would say you should almost always choose the sales expert. A good salesperson, a good AE, will learn your product, will learn your market. That's what they've done their whole careers. Trying to teach somebody who's never done sales before, who just happens to understand your market, how to do sales— that is a much harder lift. I mean, sales talent is very much wired into people's personalities. It's not something that can necessarily be, be taught at some late stage of their career. So back to the point of having a sales engineer, one of the ways that you compensate for the fact that your AEs are not necessarily technically technical masters about every aspect of what you're building, is you actually do have some highly technical people on the sales team who get pulled into those conversations. Shifting gears, you know, once you have enough customers to generate $1 million of ARR, you're going to want to make sure those customers are successful. You're going to want to retain them. That's where the customer success management team comes in. And once again, you're going to want to— if your sales team is segmented, your CSM team should be segmented as well. You're going to have a CSM who focuses on enterprise. You're going to have a CSM who focuses on mid-market. For SMB, typically it doesn't pencil to have, um, to have, uh, CSM specifically for super small accounts. So what you're going to do instead is have a pooled model of customer support, and you're going to have a couple of customer support reps. And then if your product requires— if it's difficult to implement at all, and a lot of SaaS products are not completely self-explanatory and self-implementing, you're probably gonna wanna start building an implementation, uh, team. And we might call those people solutions engineers. And again, they're an important part of, um, getting a newly signed customer to be correctly onboarded, and then they're gonna hand off the relationship to a CSM. Shifting over to marketing, we've got a head of marketing. We're gonna have a couple, one or two demand gen marketers. Marketers. They're focused typically on paid campaigns. They're running a lot of experiments. I tend to think of these people as being highly quantitative because they're running a lot of tests. And that, that's sort of like what I call the math section of the SAT. There's, there's also the, the verbal section where you've got product marketing posting release notes, blogs, customer case studies. You're going to have a sales enablement marketer whose job is to create all collateral to make the sales team effective. And that person could live under sales, but I tend to think of it as a marketing role. And then finally, I'm a big fan of doing events and building your community as early as possible, even having a head at the Series A stage. And then finally, we've got the pure overhead, which is, you know, which I tend to lump under finance. You've got the sort of an FP&A analyst. They're building the financial model for your business. You've got an accountant, you've got an HR person, there's gonna be some miscellaneous ops person, and then recruiting. I'm a big fan, if you know you're gonna be hiring a lot of roles, I'm a big fan of bringing recruiting in-house. It's fine to also use outside agencies, especially for retained searches, but you know, if you bring recruiting in-house, you get a dedicated resource who understands your culture, and if you know you're gonna be, you know, You're at 40 employees on your way to a Series B with 125. Why not bring them in-house so that, you know, they're building your company culture in the way that you want? One thing you'll notice here is that I've called the heads of a lot of these departments head of sales as opposed to VP of sales or chief revenue officer. The reason for that, I find this works with a lot of my Series A companies, is they're not sure if that person is their long-term CRO, for example. And so by calling somebody head of, you actually give yourself a little bit of wiggle room. As we'll see with Series B and Series C, Series B, you know, you're building an exec team. These people will be VPs. And by the time you get to Series C, these people are going to be C-level officers. But at this point, they could be VPs. They could be C-levels. You're not quite sure. Sure yet. That's the reason for the ambiguity. So this is what your typical 50-person SaaS org would look like. You know, what I find at the time that we make a Series A investment is that the technology organization looks pretty much like this, because in order to get off the ground, they've had to have, you know, a dozen people building the product. They are starting to have one or two AEs, hiring a VP of Sales or the head of sales. Sales is an almost universal need in the Series A companies we invest in. Maybe they've got one person doing CSM, but they're starting to scramble and realize, wait a second, we signed all these customers and we don't have any— we don't really have a team of people to make them successful. There might be like one person doing the marketing, but they haven't subdivided those roles yet. And then, you know, like HR and recruiting are almost like an afterthought. So those are the areas that we tend to see that the hiring needs to happen ASAP. OK, so now we get to more of a Series B. You're at, say, $5 million of ARR. You're not necessarily at 125 employees yet. Maybe you're at like 50 or 60, like the previous chart. What are you hiring to now? And you're going to start building your exec team. So the founder CEO should have— real executives, VPs or higher, reporting to them. You're going to have a CTO, you're going to have a VP of Product, you're going to have a VP of Sales, a VP of Marketing, and a VP of Finance. Maybe some of these people are C-levels. Maybe instead of a VP of Finance, you have a CFO. Maybe in a VP of Sales, you have a CRO. But I wouldn't necessarily guarantee those titles yet unless you know that that person really can scale scale to a 400-person org like we'll see next. Um, the other big theme in building for the Series B is that all of those IC roles I showed you on the previous slide now become teams. And this is really the big change. And just going from 50 to 125 employees, it's remarkable how in order to do that, every single function that used to just be one IC now becomes a team of people. And that means that one of the big things you're doing at this sort of Series B stage is building out your mid-level management, which simply didn't exist at the Series A stage. So let me give you some examples. So in R&D, we're gonna go from roughly 12 headcount to about 40. And if you look under the CTO, we're now gonna have a web team, we're gonna have a team of client apps, we're gonna have a team for platform or core services. We're gonna introduce a new QA function you might not have had And maybe all the developers were doing their own QA before. Now we're actually going to have a dedicated QA function. I think that can be— again, you get to a higher level of scale, you can afford that. And you're going to have an infrastructure team. You're going to have a security team. You're going to have analytics. You're going to have IT. Generally speaking, all these teams are now going to have managers. So before, it was just some— you had web engineers. You had engineers working on the mobile apps. You had some engineers working on the APIs. But now you actually have teams. Teams of those people. And certainly with like, if you have 14, you know, web engineers, you can certainly afford to have a director there. If you have 6 mobile engineers, you should have someone leading that team. So all of a sudden you have a lot more mid-level management. And, and this is where I think you— the, the rubber kind of meets the road in scaling is how are you going to now fill those roles. You can either promote from within or you can hire from the outside. You want to do both. Is, is the answer. I am a big fan of promoting from within whenever possible. You probably want at least 50% of these management roles to be promotions when they can be. But if they can't, because you simply don't have someone who can manage the team, then you gotta look outside. That actually is— that's a lot of recruiting that you have to do. Product organization, you're now up to something like 5 product managers, you're up to 5 designers, You're definitely going to need, you know, a strong VP of product for that. Maybe that person, if you know they're, they're the long-term head of product, maybe you give them the chief product officer title. But you're going to now going to need a strong product leader who the CEO can delegate to. Before, even at the Series A stage, the founder CEO is probably running product in a very hands-on way. Now it's a little different. Now they've got too much to to do, they're gonna need a VP of product. And the most important thing about this head of product is that they see eye to eye with the founder, they have the same product instincts as the founder, and they also have to be good at project management, because a lot of what a VP of product does is just make the trains run on time. It's hard to find somebody who is creatively aligned with the founder, but also is just very good executionally at making everything run. Sales and marketing, you're going to see a big increase in the size of these organizations. You're going from roughly, say, 27 to 60. Once again, the big theme is that you're going from a handful of ICs to a team. Uh, so for example, you're now going to have 5 enterprise AEs. That's like a whole team. You're going to have roughly 4 mid-market AEs, 4 SMB AEs. And by the way, it have to look exactly like this, okay? I got these numbers out of— I actually went back and looked at my org chart for Yammer, and that's where I got these numbers. And then I sort of like— I then adjusted the numbers based on what I'm seeing at our portfolio companies to kind of take off the idiosyncratic rough edges. So this is roughly what I would see at a company that sells to all three segments, but doesn't have to look exactly like this. For example, you know, you probably— it's probably a little too early to hire a director of mid-market and a director of SMB. You could have one director for those 8 AEs. So, you know, you have a lot of flexibility here, but you are going to need it by this point. A director of enterprise sales, you're going to need a director of probably mid-market SMB. It might be time to hire a specialist who just focuses on renewals. You're going to have an SDR team. If there's like 6 of those people, they're going to need some sort of manager. And now you're going to have, you know, Sales Ops, given the size of the sales team, there's not just going to be one sort of overhead role, there's going to be a few. CSM, similarly, uh, that organization's now blown up to around 19 people. You're going to have, um, half a dozen CSMs for Enterprise, 5 for SMB and Mid-Market. The, the implementation team has gone from an IC to an actual team, and you're going to now actually have a customer support org as well, and you're going to be looking for a customer support leader. So again, going from, you know, one customer support rep to, say, 4, and you're now looking for someone who's actually run a customer support department before. That's the big change going from Series A to Series B. Similarly, the, the, the marketing organization, you might have now a CMO, you've got a product marketing team, you've got a lead gen team, you've got a sales enablement team, and you got a brand marketing team. These are all very different kinds of marketing. You know, back at the seed or Series A stage, again, you may have just had one or two marketing people who kind of wore a lot of hats and did everything. Now you're getting into some specialization. And then G&A, it should— this is largely overhead, so you want to keep this pretty lean. I've got it going from about 6 to 13 in a 125-person org. So you've got a couple people doing FP&A, financial planning and analysis. That is becoming a much more important function because your payroll has gone up a lot, you're burning a lot more money, you need to make sure you're planning that correctly. You now have a controller. A controller is a fancy term for head accountant. So you've gone from, you know, one IC accountant to actually having a controller for the company. They have a couple of accountants under them. They're doing stuff like invoicing and billing, making sure that they're actually collecting on your customer contracts. You now have a recruiting team, and you now have— you actually need a director of HR. All right, so now we get to Series C. 400 employees, you're getting pretty, pretty big company at this point. Again, you're at about $20 to $30 million of ARR. And by this point, the big themes of building the Series C team are that by this point you should be settling in on your long-term C-level organization. So hopefully you've still got your CTO co-founder, but now your VP of product has graduated to a chief product officer. Your VP of sales has graduated to a chief revenue officer, or we call this chief customer officer, same thing. You now have a CMO, you have a CFO, and so your VPs from the Series A or Series B either need to level up into the C-level skill set, which really requires them to manage, you know, several times as many people, or you've maybe layered them, you know, and that's a choice, that's a decision you're gonna have to make as a CEO. These are the types of decisions that come up all the time as you move from Series B to Series C. You now have in the company, you now have a whole category of executive that didn't exist before, which is a VP who's managing a pretty large team, but doesn't report directly to the CEO. They're reporting to one of these C-levels. You can now afford a lot more specialized roles. You may be thinking about international expansion. In fact, you probably have gone international by this point. And then the other option that you have is, at this level of scale, you can think about acquiring companies, mainly acquihires. But you actually have the bandwidth, you've got the personnel to be able to absorb sort of a small acquisition in Aqua Hire. And so it's something— certainly not something you have to do, but if you thought it was strategic for you, it's now an option. So looking at the, the R&D organization, I mean, it's scaled pretty substantially from 51 to 137. By this point, you're absolutely going to need a VP of Engineering. This is somebody who helps the CTO with the actual managing of the organization. You know, it's pretty commonly the case that the co-founder or CTO is chosen because of their technical chops and vision. They may not have the management experience to run a 100-person organization. You're gonna need to supplement this with a more experienced engineering manager. The teams themselves are the same, they've just gotten bigger, and you're now going to need a lot more mid-level management. Same thing over in the product organization, you're probably gonna need a director of product management, you're gonna need a director of design, but you can also afford some super specialized roles like people who are doing user research, even like a dedicated copywriter. You can start to do things like that. Sales and marketing. So this organization's gotten really big, right? Because as you scaled from, say, $5 million to $20 million of ARR, and next year you probably you want to do $50 million plus of ARR, your sales and marketing organization, especially sales, has gotten really big. And so you're now going to need not just a CRO who manages all of it, you're going to need a VP of enterprise sales, you're going to need a VP for mid-market sales, VP for SMB, you're going to need, um, uh, an SDR director. I mean, you could easily have 20, 25 SDRs on the team. You're going to need a very substantial director of VP of SDR. Um, you're going to need a VP of sales ops, not just a handful of sales. You actually need someone who can run the sales ops team. That, that function's become pretty large. And then the other thing you're going to have by now is training. You know, with this many sales reps and the rate at which you're hiring, uh, and the need to do a sales kickoff at the beginning of every quarter, you're going to need an entire training organization just to keep these people up to speed on all the changes happening in the product, um, and, uh, acculturating all the new hires. You also probably by now have hired a VP of Biz Dev, someone to do partnerships. That doesn't need to be a big team. You just want someone pretty high power doing it with, with a couple of, um, assistants. And then we move over to CSM. I mean, similarly, this has become a very big team. We have the, the same segmentation, but you're definitely gonna need a director of enterprise CSM, director of mid-market, customer support's gotten a lot bigger. They're gonna need their own trainers. And we move over to marketing. You're gonna need a VP of corporate marketing for the first time. That's become a pretty big team. You're gonna have a couple people doing PR. You're gonna have 1 or 2 people doing AR, which is analyst relationships. I think this is actually kind of an underappreciated role for, if you're at $20 million of ARR, if you're at the Series C stage, you really wanna be trying to convince the market that you're the category leader. And so having, you know, a couple of specialized heads who do nothing but interact with analysts can be helpful. You're gonna be doing events, you're gonna be doing community, you're probably gonna have an entire creative team. And then you've still got those other, you know, the old marketing functions, product marketing, demand gen, sales enablement, but they're all gonna have directors now. And then finally, you can see this last box on the right that's in yellow is international. So one of the things that we did around this time at my company is we actually opened an office in London. It was for our EMEA team, and we decided to go cross-functional there. So we actually had a GM for EMEA, and within that organization we had enterprise sales, SMB and mid-market sales, we had SDRs, we had CSMs, we had sales and solutions engineers. We let them have their own recruiting team and given them their own ops headcount so they could manage pretty self-sufficiently. And this allowed— we didn't do a ton of development out there. Product remained centralized back home. But this was a great way to enable the international team just to go out and sort of conquer Europe, have all the roles they needed, so they didn't have to be dependent back on the mothership. So that was another thing that we did. We had about 60 60 people under our GM in Europe. And then G&A, by this point you should have a general counsel, you should have a VP of FP&A, not just an analyst, but you actually need pretty high-powered VP of FP&A. And then you want to have a VP of people, again, somebody pretty high-powered in the HR role. So that's pretty much it. I mean, I think the overall frame here, as you think about it, is if you're raising money for a Series A, what you're really doing is building an org of ICs. You kind of want to make sure that you've got an IC covering all the major functions. You're probably going to, in addition to the founders, you're probably going to have 4 or 5 real managers or leaders. It's mostly an org of ICs, and it's an organization of a lot of generalists. You're really just trying to cover all the bases. By the time you get to the Series B, it's really an organization of teams. All of those IC roles have now become teams, and the big challenge is going to be staffing up mid-level management. And then by the time you get to the Series C, it's really, uh, an organization of functional areas where you're going to have real executives. You want to have C-levels reporting to the CEO, and you're going to want to have VPs under them. So it's— you're really going to be focused on building up an organization of executives. So with that, Thank you very much.

You.

Please welcome CRO at Notion, Olivia Nottebaum.

Hi everyone, nice to see you all. Wonderful to be in person on this gorgeous day. My name is Olivia Nottebaum and I am the CRO of Notion. I actually just joined Notion 4 months ago. I feel very grateful to be able to be part of the team, and I chose this topic because this is truly a mmmatic of Notion, the topic of community and how you lead growth through community. So let's dive in. Okay, who knows what this app is? Yes, TikTok. Okay, who has ever bought enterprise software based on something you've seen in this app, or your child has shown you in this app? No one. Okay, the gauntlet is thrown. I will try to weave this into why people think about buying enterprise software based on things they see on this OK, so growth is a really important topic. It's actually one I've been thinking about for quite some time now, both what are the drivers of growth and how do you build for growth. And back in 2014, I co-wrote an article called Grow Fast or Die Slow. So that you don't actually all have to read the article, I'll tell you the 4 findings of it. The first is that growth is paramount. What does that mean? It means that companies who are growing at over 60% as they hit $100 million in ARR are valued 5 times more than companies that are growing just a little less than that, say at 20 to 60% as they hit $100 million ARR. What else did we find? We found that growth predicts success. So companies who are growing over 60% as they hit $100 million ARR are 8 times more likely to ever make it to a billion in ARR. And what else did we find? We found growth is super hard to maintain. So those companies that were pacing at 60% growth as they hit $100 million in ARR, only 15% of them were able to maintain that growth as they punched through to a billion dollars. And finally, growth matters way more than margin. I think we all know this by now. In 2014, it was pretty insightful. Insightful, not so insightful now. But actually, as it turns out, the markets don't really value profit. They really care about growth. OK. So this is Silicon Valley, TV episode at the time. The episode was actually titled Grow Fast or Die Slow. And here you see the founders and their expression when they realize the gauntlet that they now need to go through. So let's take a look at the numbers. Here, what do you see? There are about 20,000 active SaaS companies today, startups pre-IPO. Then you see there are about 1,000 public companies that are SaaS companies that are about $150 million in ARR. And this is actually not to scale, but imagine the 50 is very much smaller than the 1,000. There are only about 50 companies that have made it to a billion publicly. And then there are only about 10 that have ever made it to $10 billion. To 5 billion. So if you've ever wondered, why does growth matter? This is a perfect example of the gauntlet these companies have had to go through as they drive towards growth. All right. So I would posit that there are 3 types of growth. One is top-down, the other is bottom-up, and wave 3 is community-led. And that is the topic that I want to talk to you about today. So to review, the first wave. You sold to a set of decision makers. They made a decision about the SaaS software. They pushed it down and people at the company used it. This was not a bad model, by the way. This is how SAP and Salesforce made it all the way up and over to the $5 billion mark. And if you remember that list, the majority of the companies who got to $5 billion actually got there this way. But then in about 2010, we saw a shift. This was more about the usability of the product. What was it like to use it day to day? Did it scale across the company? And what were the users saying about whether they actually wanted to use it at work? Slack is a perfect example of this. And interestingly, executives listen. They listen and made decisions based on what people were telling them. But the third wave is the wave that I wanna talk to you about today. This is the 100-foot wave. For surfers, this is the wave in Nazaré, Portugal. And for SaaS entrepreneurs, this is the wave you wanna catch. And I think this wave is the wave that's led and driven by community. So the question is, what is it that gives strength to this wave? Well, I would say it's a number of things that are coming together all at the same time. The first is agency. People have even more agency than they did in 2010. To decide what is it that they want to use at work. Especially, I would say, in the hybrid distributed model that we're in today, truly teams want to make sure that people in their teams are using the thing that really keeps them in flow and makes them productive. The other is influencers and social media. Don't think I need to expand on it. It's very present in our reality today. The third are review sites. So it used to be that analysts would call a couple of the chief decision makers, decide whether you were in the upper right-hand quadrant or not, publish their analyst report, and that was that. It's very different now. Review sites are all about users telling us, what is it like to use it? What is the actual experience? And it's crowdsourced, and it's put in these review sites. And the fourth element is the surround sound of user content. Someone uses your product, they make a video about it, They post it, and it's out in the wild. And then the fifth is this shared communication channels. And this is what compounds the previous one. But of course, we all know it. It's YouTube. It's TikTok. It's Slack channels, and it's Facebook groups. These are all coming together to give this enormous power to this wave that is the community-led wave for product-led companies. OK, so I would also like to posit that community is a force that should power every stage of the funnel, not just the top of the funnel as one would think, but actually should really shine in the middle of the funnel and really also have real impact in the bottom of the funnel and expansion. Okay, so I think we all know that if you make 10 posts about how amazing your product is, it pales in comparison to a raw video that someone posts on Instagram about your product. Whether good or bad. So let's get into it. Raising awareness. Okay, you're small, you're early, you're a startup. There's so much you wanna do to raise awareness. There's all that posts that you wanna put up, the blogs you wanna make so that SEO takes hold and really takes off. There are events you wanna do, there's paid media you wanna do. But at the end of the day, you feel like you're running out of time and you're running out of Who all has been there? Yes. And if that's the route you take, you will definitely burn out. So what do you do? You turn to the world around you and you find other people to tell your story. And you find who those people are and who are passionate about your story and you help them tell it in the way that they want to tell your story. What are the passions they have? What is the journey they want to be on? And how do they wanna be part of your own journey itself? Let's get into it. So early on, Notion, uh, was lucky enough to have someone truly magnificent called Camille Ricketts join, and she was employee number one in marketing, and she is a truly, uh, wonderful person who connects with people, and she saw that there were a couple of people on Twitter who were very, very vocal about how wonderful Notion was. And she saw this and she realized, okay, this is our community. What do we need to do to embrace these people and bring them in? And she quickly hired someone named Ben Lang, who at the time was running a Notion fan site that was getting 80,000 hits per month, all about Notion. So she had this brilliant idea of, why don't I hire Ben? And Ben in his own right is tremendous. And so what they decided to do was create to create a very simple aggregation of the ambassadors out there. This was early, this was scrappy. Frankly, it was an experiment. And they came from all over the globe. And what they realized was there was simple ways to make these people feel connected, connected to Notion. And what they did was they hosted AMAs. So Ivan and Simon and others were there answering their questions. They gave them access to funds if they wanted to throw events, if they wanted to secure venues. They gave them early access to features, and they asked for their feedback and said, what is it that we can do better with our product? You see here, this is an early group in Seoul, and this is another group in Paris, France. As I mentioned, building that community is a full-time job. So Camille brought on Ben Lang early on. He in turn brought on— Francisco Cruz Mendoza, who is our full-time community manager. And he knows each of our ambassadors, of which we have over 200, over 23 countries. And he gets to know them, gets to know their passions, really deeply understands what they're there for and why they're on this journey with us. As I mentioned, the people leading the company are right at the forefront of it all. So in the early days, Ivan, our co-founder and CEO, and Akshay, our COO, were on their way to Singapore and decided, hey, why don't we reach out and tell people that we're going to be there, that we want to hear from them? And even though it was only 8 hours away, about 20 people showed up in the driving rain and got together to give input on what could be done better with the product, what they love, what they didn't love. And this was all about the love of building, what they had created in this case in Notion, and how they wanted to share it with Ivan and Akshay and others in the community. So today there are about 145,000 in our subreddit, and this is something that is moderated— not— we don't pay for the moderators, but are actually moderated by two of our ambassadors. And this is a true testimony to the community that's been building over time. Also, that small photograph that I showed of folks in Korea, that is now 34,000 people in our Korea Facebook group. And the way that we were able to harness that is pretty impressive. Last year we announced that we are localizing in Korea and we had no one full-time on the ground. And yet people from this group hosted media interviews, did site sessions, answered Q&A, and there were even a couple people that led a session that had 8,000 attendees about how to use Notion. So truly an extension of leveraging our community. We weren't even really there on the ground in a permanent way. And I'm going to bring it back to TikTok. So another interesting and important community for us is students. So let's take a look at how they think about this.

If you struggle with being productive during school and don't really like using your planner, then keep watching this video. So basically what you're going to do is you're going to go to this website called notion.com. You can sign up for free, and this website is literally a golden ticket to being productive in school, guys. You can make a to-do list, make notes for class, and literally do everything on this website. You can even make your own template, to-do list, and plan out.

Okay, so you get the idea. That community is equally as important to us. Those are folks to fall in love with the product and take that product wherever they go. Okay, so I mentioned that it's all about really grasping onto those individuals and going where they wanna go. What we've observed is that people tend to wanna either build a platform or they wanna build a business. And here you see we provide them tools to actually build a business on Notion. And more tangibly, here you see Marie Poulin, and she is someone who when we met she only had 100 Twitter followers. Today she has 22,000 Twitter followers, and she's able to sell out classes on how to use Notion. Truly a gift back to the community, but also terrific to see that she's able to monetize this. And actually, this is what she does for a living. Okay, so we got through the top of the funnel. We're driving awareness through community, and now we want to think about how do you create that community pull to really drive the conversion. Because at the end of the day, if people come to your site, they check out your site, and they don't find it useful, they're gonna churn and they're probably never gonna come back. So how do you make sure they get value out of the product quickly? Again, we turn to community. Yes, we provide guides and tutorials and we create content and we create videos, but frankly there's really only so much our small scrappy team can do. And so where do we turn We turn out to the community. We were not the first ones to do this. Google did this early on. They crowdsourced questions that people had for how you use Google, and they did it very effectively. However, in today's day and age, this takes a different form. You need to encourage your community members to actually make those videos where they're creating the education on your behalf. They get the joy out of it. They understand the message is being carried. Carried more broadly, and there's true impact. Here you see August Bradley. He had 6 followers on YouTube when we first met him. He now has 42,000 followers on YouTube. And he just sold out a masterclass on Notion and has so far made $200,000 just on that 2-week course. Pretty amazing. And then finally, this is kind of like the final step, which is teaching the teachers how to teach. So this is how do you empower and enable some people to teach others how to use your product. And this is really the final step. OK, so another angle on this is customer stories. And of course, you all know what it's like to make customer stories. You can only make so many. You feel like, oh, I wish I could make 200, but really I can only put 8 on my website. And so here again, community can have true impact. What we decided to do was actually put templates on our website so that users could quickly get into the flow of the product and immediately understand how they could use it, how they could find the usability quickly, and how that product was gonna work for them. So here you see some of the templates, but we were also very careful not to put everything for free. We felt it was really, really important to allow people to to monetize beautiful, beautiful templates that they had just had so much fun with and put a lot of work into. And what really formed was a marketplace. And this is not one that we control. This is not one that we manage. In fact, it comes up and has different places over the internet, different marketplaces. And this is good because it guarantees more discovery. And really people just take advantage of the beautiful templates on here. In fact, there's one that Janelle Loy created, the Newsletter OS, and so far she's put it on there and just got— recently I found that she has made $34,000 on this template alone. And that's great. We want that. We want our community to be compensated for the fun and the love and the work that they put into really talking about our product and making beautiful creations from our product. Okay, the final stage in the funnel, driving upgrade and extension. Expansion. So here you are, you have users, they're in the door, but now the question is, how do I get more users in that same company or in that same team? Or depending on the structure of your product, maybe you have another product where there is even more value and you want to make sure that they go up until that other product and realize the value there. This is usually where incumbents have an advantage. Usually they have thousands thousands of salespeople, they have thousands of customer success folks. I was at Google Cloud, we definitely had thousands of them. But now you're at a startup and that's not your reality. And so how do you actually use your community to extend into that part of the funnel where you desperately need them as well? How do you have your community be an extension of your customer success team or even an extension of your sales force? So let's dive in. So here what we see, what we did is we actually pulled together the group of people that had organically raised up and decided to build businesses on Notion. They've decided to be Notion consultants. They've decided to help companies really get the most out of this product. And, and this is something where we don't actually take a cut of it. In fact, we just grouped them together and created a directory of consultants so that if you're a user, you can easily access who these folks are. And they're across many, many different countries. And frankly, they do a much better job than we could ever do in terms of being responsive, being able to answer questions in language, and really understanding the nuances and the intricacies of what those businesses are dealing with in the local places that they're facing their challenges. And so again, this has just been— a wonderful extension of our customer success team. And in fact, we still use our customer success team, but we really keep it quite small, and we've been using it only for enterprise customers. And so this enables us to get the help out to our customer base, but also in a way that's very extensible. Okay, so what's the final element? Well, we all wish we could be at the teams or in the teams using our product. We wish we could be there when they hit that wall. We wish we could be there to answer their questions. Because again, finding value out of the use case is really all that matters in a product-led company. And so what did we find? We found that typically there were 1 or 2 people in these teams and in these companies that just deeply loved the product, really, really knew the product, and could be our voice into these bigger and broader teams. And so here again, the team did a great job of saying, okay, what can we provide for these champions? First, they've actually created a community of champions. So champions from different companies who are all working on Notion come together and they exchange, exchange ideas and they exchange best practices. But they're also given access, as I mentioned before, to thought leaders like Michael Manapat, who's our head of engineering, like Ivan, like Simon, like Akshay, and able to ask questions directly of them about what are they thinking about the product, what are they thinking should come next, all of these that really make them feel like they can truly represent Notion within their companies themselves. Okay, so to recap, there are 3 stages of the funnel, and each of them is conducive to community-led growth. In the first stage, you can leverage the community to drive awareness. You can identify who to tell the story, and then you can make sure that you help them tell it in the way that they want it to be told. And go with them on that journey. What are their passions? What are the things they care about? How can you really understand all it is that they want to do and be part of that, not try to constrain it or constrict it in any way? The second is about finding that distribution network. As I mentioned, often people either want to build a platform or they want to build a business on your product-led company. And so how do you lean into that? How do you help them extend that? And how do you bring in the community to help them be successful in the path that they're on? And then finally, in the bottom of the funnel, don't draw a bright line between your your small startup team and the community around you. Let them be part of your team. Don't write rules as to how the community should engage. Make it as fluid as possible. It has truly been beautiful to see how our customer success team engages so fluidly with the champions in each of these companies and the consultants that are out there really helping us advocate and create value for the product. So I would say that everyone's on a different journey. Everyone's on a different stage, and you need to choose the community that's right for you and resonates with the journey you're on. And there's a simple way to think about this, and I think about it in two dimensions. The first is, who is your audience? Are you selling to B2C and SMBs, or are you selling to enterprises? The second dimension is, where are you on that journey? Are you post-product market fit, or are you earlier in that journey and you're still trying to figure it out? And it might potentially be the case that you're a hybrid and part of your company has figured out product market fit, but there's an act 2 in your company that's still figuring it out. But I would posit that for each of these places, there's different types of community that you can leverage. So if you are focused more on B2C and SMB and you're early in that product phase, truly leverage the focus groups and help, help them understand what you're trying to accomplish and then listen and take that input. If you are product-market fit, seems like it's on a roll, but you're still more on that B2C SMB stage, well then I would really advocate for ambassadors and creators. We've found this to be tremendously helpful and are just so grateful for the community of ambassadors that are out there globally. If you're thinking about, okay, now I want to pivot and turn towards large enterprises, but I'm still a little early days and I really need input, well, that's where customer advisory boards and the community that comes with them can be so, so valuable. I know we're turning to this now as we're starting to form the customer advisory boards at Notion. And then finally, if you're at product-market fit and you're thinking about large enterprises, consultants and champions can can be huge, huge levers to really drive impact in how you want to grow and drive your business. Okay, so lessons from the road. I would say that an amazing product is really important for product-led companies. It's the thing that people want to use and get excited about. I would also say that You need community to win. And so how do you think about building up that community and driving that third wave of growth for your company? Remember to align your interests with the goals of your community, to remember and understand what is it that they want to do and go with them on that journey. And really think about and be close to the personal goals of those early, early adopters. Again, build in those distribution networks to drive enthusiasm and inspiration, and that community will give back as well. And then empower your community to serve your customers. You don't need to monetize it, actually, if your community is being the consultant or your community is selling the template. The benefit of that far outweighs any cut that you might take as a company early on, when really what matters is market share and adoption. And fourth, and fifth, don't try to own or regulate your community engagement. Don't ask people to behave in a certain way or follow strict policies. In fact, one of the things I love is that Notion lets anyone use our brand and make any swag they want. And so that's great. That's wonderful. People are using all sorts of different swag all over the world that has Notion on it, created by ambassadors and community groups all around the world. And the sixth is stay scrappy. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Experiment, lean in, try things. If they don't work, that's okay. And finally, be grateful to the community. It's really amazing when people spend the time to get deep into the product, to fall in love with the product, and then decide to turn out to the world and tell your story for you. And for that, we are immensely grateful. And it's just a testimony to the power of community overall that can drive this impressive, impressive growth. So thank you for your time today, and I hope you enjoy the rest of SaaStr.