Driving Fast Growth in B2B Companies with Casey Winters and Naomi Ionita | Greymatter

Hello everyone. I'm Casey Winters, Growth Advisor in residence at Greylock. At Greylock, we're always trying to learn from practitioners about how to solve real problems for startups. Now we're bringing these practitioners into grey matter to jam on how we solve real problems so others can learn as well. This week I'm excited to welcome Naomi Ionetta. Naomi, why don't you introduce yourself?

Thanks for having me, Casey. So I've been working in tech for about 11 years, heavy focus on product and most recently I focused on product growth across retention and monetization. This includes building full stack growth teams and really growth cultures from scratch across B2B and B2C companies, starting with Evernote. I joined Evernote in 2011. We had about 10 million users back then and I later started the growth team where using user research and experimentation brought more of a user and data driven approach to product development. There's we scaled the business to over 100 million users until I decided to leave to join an opportunity at a company called Invoice2go. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Invoice to Go is the easiest way for a small business to send an invoice and get paid. We have over a quarter of a million paying subscribers who send more than $2 billion in invoice volume a month. So this is a true painkiller product that solves a very specific pain point and there's a willingness to pay for that. When I joined Invoice2Go, I had the privilege of embedding growth into the business from an even earlier stage than I'd Evernote. This included building teams across data engineering, analytics, product design, user research, and building out all the processes and tools across the company to really help us scale.

Cool. This week we're going to talk about how to drive fast growth in B2B businesses. Historically, there's been a clear divide in terms of how to grow consumer startups and B2B startups. Your consumer business leverages product driven growth initiatives like Virality in the case of Snapchat, or SEO in the case of Yelp. Whereas if you're B2B, you just rely on sales. But we've seen a bunch of B2B startups grow quickly more recently by using something that looks more like a consumer playbook or by blending the two approaches. Recent IPOs such as Atlassian or Twilio are great examples of reaching IPO level without sales. And there's also been these fast growing startups like Dropbox or Slack, growing in what looks like a more Consumer oriented approach as well. There's actually been a lot of terms used to describe this trend. The consumerization of IT business, bizumer as well as many others. I don't think any of them sound that cool to be honest. But today we're going to talk about what's the right way to grow these types of businesses and some of the unique challenges you face over time. So talking about these types of businesses, you've had a lot of experience here with Evernote and Invoice to Go. What do you think created these types of trends where these businesses are growing fast, kind of in a totally different way, not using sales and growing faster than maybe a sales driven approach would allow?

It's a really good question. A few trends that I've seen. One is really leveraging the product driven growth that you described. When you think back to Evernote and Dropbox, their early days, it was all about using in a personal context. It was me capturing my meeting notes, it was me managing my files. It then emerged into a collaborative use case where I wanted to share that content across teams. This was going to be my centralized knowledge management for my company. So by starting with the end customer, these businesses created a groundswell. You had this bottom up kind of grassroots way of saying all these employees were already using these products. They could create a lot of demand up to the corporate level and kind of a land and expand strategy.

Did corporations like that? Like when Evernote started being used in corporations where you know the IT people upset, like how do they feel about that not having control?

As soon as you shift the conversation from targeting end customer to targeting a business, it opens up questions around security, permissioning, user authentication, centralized billing. It really changes the roadmap and how you think about a product offering for enterprise and who's the decision maker around whether those products could be used within product driven growth. To be successful though, it's not just about being an easy to use product. It has to be dead simple in the flow of inviting others. Really rich collaboration. Slack's an example of a company that's done this really well. I mean taking advantage of Google Sign in and SSO is a way to make it really easy to invite your colleagues into a flow and really get that virality going.

Yeah.

Another trend I've seen, and this really hits close to home at Invoice to Go is by being mobile first and leveraging distribution via app stores. So the long tail micro SMB. Think of this as one to five employees. They've been neglected for a long time in this B2B conversation, you just couldn't justify having a sales team calling a sole proprietor who has a landscaping business. And frankly, these guys don't have time to sit around and deal with long sales cycles. I mean, these guys want a quick solution and by going to the app store and searching for the word invoice, they're going to get that point solution that solves exactly the problem they have and, and the willingness to pay right then and there. Another trend is offering free trials and lower price plans. So by being free or freemium, these small businesses have a chance to try a product out first before committing to paying. And they also can tie kind of price to value. This is pretty important because I think a lot of enterprise software is over featured. It's complex and, and it typically offers way more than what the small business needs. By offering these point solutions, SMBs feel more, it feels more fair. They're finding something that solves exactly their problem and they can pay for it. And the economics just don't justify a sales org because this price point tends to be far lower than enterprise products.

Yeah. Do you think there was a growth in small businesses that could pay or do you think they were just never considered because there wasn't a way to reach them at scale prior to mobile or prior to kind of the invention of the freemium model?

I think it was just hard to reach them. Yeah, there's a willingness to pay. When you think of a tool that drives their business day in and day out, our customers tell us, I manage my business with Invoice2Go. Yeah, this is something that they're in all day, every day.

Yeah. So it almost seems like freemium offered. If you read the Clayton Christensen classic disruptor strategy, it offered like, hey, target a lower end customer compared to an enterprise, give them a much more singular value proposition and you actually grow much faster and then consume the enterprise as well. I didn't really think of this trend as like a model of Clayton Christensen, but it seems to play out that way. And I like that you mentioned kind of the collaboration skill set, tool set for these companies. You see a lot of them are winning and growing fast by being used with other people. And as I think about working, starting my career last decade, there weren't a lot of those tools that you kind of used with other people. And sharing wasn't something that you did really outside of email. And now there's all these other tools that allow that. And those are a lot of the fast growing tools we see.

Definitely. And with freemium I think it's also not a universal strategy. I think it's something people are quick to gravitate towards because they've seen some successes there. But your product better be very viral. It better reduce your paid acquisition spend and you better leave enough value in the paid version of your product or else people are never going to upgrade.

Right. So related to freemium, one of the areas that comes up when I talk to a lot of B2B founders in the Greylock portfolio is, is how to decide if they should be doing a free trial, should they be doing freemium, what length should it be, should they ask for credit card info up front or not? And given that you have a lot of experience here and you think it's one of the drivers of these types of businesses, what are your thoughts? Is there some sort of universal approach that makes the most sense for all businesses?

Yeah, this is a big debate. I think free trial is really successful when it's a painkiller product, when you really understand the value you're going to get from it. With invoice to go, if you need to send an invoice and the product can onboard you, you can get that invoice out to your customer in under three minutes. You might be willing to pay right then and there. But for more horizontal products, I go back to my Evernote days. It was more of a vitamin. It took a longer time for people to find that habit forming use case that really worked for them. And so having that freemium model really helped prolong that cycle and give people more chance to really drive adoption, become addicted and then ultimately pay. Regarding credit cards up front, I think it's a big deterrent for customers. We've really trained the market to expect a free trial or a freemium product. So it's pretty high friction to offer that at the beginning of the funnel. I think one challenge for products that are free offer a freemium or a free trial is when the cost to support these free users is higher than the benefit you get in conversion by increasing the top of the funnel dramatically. There's other things you can do rather than charging up front, like thinking about the cost basis of supporting those trial users. One example is reducing your customer support costs. Maybe there's just a different SLA or different support channels that you offer to these trial free users.

Yep. So I like this comparison you made between Invoice2go and Evernote being paid painkillers versus vitamins Invoice2go, it seems like people really understood the problem they needed. They were pretty clear that Invoice2Go was solving it. So they're willing to pay up front, in which case, yeah, you should take the money. Right. Whereas Evernote and Dropbox and a bunch of other examples, you get into it and you really want to make someone understand the value and get hooked on the value, and then it's very easy to monetize. But if you try to monetize before they understand the value, then everyone kind of bails. I feel like Dropbox had a really great version of that, which is they were able to understand exactly how many files you put into Dropbox before it became indispensable. And then it's like, okay, you can't any more files unless you start paying. And you're like, well, this is indispensable to me, so of course I'm going to pay. Whereas with Evernote, I felt like I got to a point where I was definitely hooked, but still not paying for the product. How did you think about that timing where it made sense to sell someone on buying Evernote versus using it for free? Because I know you took more of a feature based approach than a this amount of usage is free and then it becomes paid. Kind of like Dropbox did.

Yeah, I think Dropbox did a great job of using storage as their currency. It was very clear from first usage what you were paying for and why you needed to keep paying at certain thresholds. Evernote used a dual strategy. There was. Storage was actually one of the reasons why people would upgrade to premium. Higher storage quota. But there are also a whole series of premium features as well. I think it is one example where the freemium version was just too good. I think people definitely stuck around their whole lifetime with the product without paying a dime. But one way to think about it is what are the features that really create value? And can we predict when somebody is going to appreciate that value? When it's going to be kind of a front door into converting during their usage of the product. Those are the more binary features. Storage being more of a natural escalator people tend to graduate into over time. And that one's a bit more straightforward.

Yeah, makes sense. But the reverse is not that great either. Right. If you're really good at converting people up front and then not delivering value, then all you set up is a churn problem, which means it's way harder to get those people back in. So erring on the side of not monetizing in the early days and making sure people get value seems like the better approach than monetizing. Really quickly and then those people being unhappy and then getting them impossible for them to try it again at some point?

Yeah, there's no gaming here. I mean, the truth comes out. If you're charging people and they don't feel like it's fair, or they didn't understand what they were paying for, or they don't see the value, it's just going to result in cancellations, bad reviews, lost trust support volume. There's a cost to that.

Yeah, absolutely. So we've kind of talked about free trials, freemium. We're kind of circling around this topic of pricing, which is an area I don't have much experience in working on consumer businesses, but seems to be a major part of what growth teams work on in B2B businesses. Can you talk about kind of insights you've had on pricing that you think are generalizable for other companies in this space in terms of how to think about it, how to test it, et cetera?

Yeah, I love this topic and I think of it more broadly beyond just pricing and packaging. I kind of summarize it as a price to value comparison. What's the value that you're providing to your customer and what's the price that they're willing to pay for that value? Where companies get tripped up is mistaking value for perceived value. Just because you're offering a bunch of so called premium features to a customer. If they don't value them, nothing else matters. So it's important to really get into the user's head and understand what's the perceived value of the premium offerings.

How'd you do that at Evernote and Invoice2Go.

You talk to them. There's a really great. Read this book called Monetizing Innovation by the partners from Simon Kutcher. They're a big pricing consulting firm. I think they've summarized a lot of strategies here really well. One is bringing that willingness to pay conversation as early as possible. I think a lot of companies design a product, build it, and then decide how to market in price. A lot of time isn't even spent in that part of the process. It's like you spend a year building something and then you spend a day saying, well, let's just charge X. This model that they're encouraging is really spinning it on its head and saying market and price first and then build the product. And so this is where you're not just asking people, do you want this product? Do you want this feature? It's saying, how much would you pay for it?

Right.

Because if you ask customers if they want a series of features, they're going to say yes, they have no skin in the game. But as soon as you say how much would you pay and what's the relative prioritization of them, it just totally changes the conversation. And that helps you understand who you're ultimately targeting and the economics of your business. Another kind of layer deeper here. I think this type of research should also inform your customer segmentation. It's really, really common for companies to use kind of superficial like demographic variables to do their customer segmentation, like what's somebody's gender, age or how big is the company? If you instead reframe it as what are their needs and their willingness to pay, you can do a much better job of matching your customer segments to the pricing and packaging of your product. Yep, this is really going to help you maximize revenue in subscription SaaS businesses.

What about pay as you go businesses? I think we've seen this a lot where as you use the product more, you pay more. So it starts out feeling very cheap and then if you end up growing your business a lot, you end up paying them a lot of money. How do you think about those models for pricing versus some of the stuff that you've seen in the businesses that you've worked on?

Yeah, that's a good question. One benefit is that it's typically clear to the customer what the business model is. It's kind of going back to Dropbox of having storage as their currency. It's tied to your first use, whether it's number of API calls, number of seats, number of messages, amount of storage, those currencies people can really understand in the context of your product really easily. But alternatively, with subscription businesses, if you're putting a bunch of features into higher priced plans, you're constantly having to market and build awareness around those features with your customers. There's constantly this education game of what it is that you're selling to them and the value of tiers higher than where they are. So it tends to be more straightforward. I think the problem here is that customers need to do a bunch of math when they land on the pricing page.

Yeah, I feel like Mixpanel is an example of not doing a great job at this. There's a lot of businesses that I've spent money on in my career. The price escalates with usage and that makes sense. But if you have to do math or second guess the value as you're increasing the amount that you're using a product, then you get into trouble with your Customer base. I remember with multiple companies using Mixpanel, we started to second guess whether it was worth tracking this event because of how many times it would fire and how that would increase the Mixpanel bill. And that actually decreased the value of Mixpanel overall as a product. Whereas it almost seems like using your framework, events are not a value metric. It's the combination of events and the insights they create that is the value. But then if you stop tracking all the events, you lose the value.

You start disincentivizing your users from using your product.

Yeah. Which is pretty crazy. Whereas I think of email marketing systems have done a much better job of this pay as you go model where if I grow the business and I start sending more emails, sure I'm paying this email marketing system like an exact Target or a mailchimp more money, but on a per unit basis, I'm spending less money sending each email, which means I'm actually making more profits because those emails actually make me money. And that math equation is super easy for me to do. Whereas the math equation on is this event worth an extra $10,000 a month is a lot harder. So that makes a lot of sense. What's your take on the typical B2B pricing wall? It's got these different tiers. Some of them are highlighted, some of them are kind of hidden away. It seems like there's a lot of psychological tricks growth teams use in pricing these B2B products that have to sell themselves on a landing page. You think that stuff's worth it? Have you learned anything from your attempts?

Yeah, I don't think of it as much as psychological tricks, but more broadly about how to just match the right customer to a given package and price. I think that anchoring is only really effective when it actually does seem to be the right plan for them. There's ways to do this too. In the onboarding flow or looking at usage data. When someone's early on with your product, it can inform which plans and packages that you should be marketing to them. And by gaming it and trying to upsell them into a plan that doesn't make sense, you're probably not going to be that successful. And any initial success is going to be outweighed by down funnel complaints. Kind of what we talked about before. You're going to get cancellations, you're going to get support calls, and at the end of the day you're just losing trust with your customer base. And I think a lot of this game around price is about building trust and making sure that there's transparency around your price and that customers feel like it's fair and appropriately priced to the value that they're getting.

Yeah, I like the suggestion here of instead of presenting a bunch of plans and trying to highlight the one that makes the most sense for you as a business, using like an onboarding flow to learn about the customer and then say, hey, here's what we think is right for you. Sure, there's other stuff you can look at if you disagree with us, but we've kind of done the work for you to say here's what makes sense given size of your business or amount of usage you want to have. I think that makes way more sense. And I think we haven't seen as many businesses invest in that as we would like.

Yeah. And even what vertical you're in, I think there's a lot of intent based onboarding that can be really tailored based on what you know about a business.

Yeah, makes sense. We talked a little bit about this. I want to go deeper on the topic of churn. So if you're having monthly contracts or annual contracts with many of these businesses usually have a focus in B2B businesses of making sure you don't lose that customer a year in later, making sure they renew, etc. And I've seen entire teams focused on preventing churn in B2B. How do you think about preventing churn or winning back customers who churn? What's been is that valuable and what's been kind of most successful there?

Oh, definitely. I'm very much a retention first growth person. I think of this as a very long term game. And auto renewing annual plans, that's the best way to get lock in. There's a lot of ways to get people on that path. Volume discounting, where you're saving on a per month basis. If you go to the annual plan, a lot of companies also will display monthly prices, but really bill annually. That can be a little gimmicky. So it has to be clear what the customer is paying for.

I don't like that myself.

It's a common practice. But with respect to preventing churn, it really starts much earlier in the life cycle. This isn't about just did they renew on the day of expiration. This is about what has their engagement with the product been. Are there any early indicators that somebody is going to churn and how can we combat that as early as possible? And in this context of smaller kind of SMB, we're not going to have this high touch account manager or customer success Rep kind of reaching out to the business. This has to be an automated way of using data, using predictive analysis to really bring that user back into the product before they are leaving your business and at risk of churning months before their expiration date could come. So we do a lot of automated personalized messaging within the product. You can use email, you can use push, you can use other in app communications to make sure that users are getting the right message and the right content at the point when they need it most. But, but preventing churn isn't about looking at their expiration date. It's about looking at their engagement throughout their entire life cycle.

Yeah, I think that's a healthy way to think about it. There are a lot of cases where if you're looking at a business where you're managing a subscription, you're like, oh, they're continuing to pay me, we're all good. And I don't think that's necessarily the right way to think about it. Right. If the customer's paying but not using, then they're just a churn risk. And you should try to think about why they're not engaging. Sure, if it's insurance and they're paying and not using, that makes sense. That's how insurance works. But most of these you're paying to use something on a regular basis. And if you're still paying but not using it just means you're someone that's going to stop paying very soon. And trying to address that as soon as you see the engagement go down instead of the payment go down I think is a much healthier way of thinking about it.

Yeah, I think a lot about both user retention and revenue retention and looking at those separately really understand what's going on. And you know, if people do leave, I think churn surveys are a nice way to just get more data, force people to pick a reason for churning when they're canceling with your product. This data can actually be really strong way to think about a win back strategy. You know, some customers might need a discount, but some others might just need some love from customer support. So understanding why they might be leaving can really try to get them back to your product in a way that's personalized for them. Another aspect of churn to consider is separating voluntary churn from involuntary churn. A user who goes through your cancellation flow and actively cancels his or her subscription should be treated very differently than somebody who churns only because their credit card expired. Having a really tailored flow to let users know that their credit card Expired is a nice way to really minimize your involuntary churn.

Yeah. Elena Verna, who is previously at SurveyMonkey and now at Malwarebytes, she gave a great presentation at I think it's weapons of mass distribution on a bunch of things they did to prevent involuntary churn. It was pretty fascinating and it had a real impact on their business. That's just the type of thing that I've never really thought about the amount of times you want to try charging a card, how you reach back out to people who have cards that have expired. But it's really important in terms of keeping people in the product. And it's not just important for your monetization, it's important for those users to be happy. Right. Because they don't want to get pulled out of the product either. And in a lot of cases they don't know why. Okay, switching gears a little bit. With most of these businesses you're making money to not have to only grow organically. You can invest in paid customer acquisition as well as optimizing the product to drive new users. How have you seen those teams be structured? Are they the same team? The team that's spending money and the team that's investing in product changes, Are they a cross functional team? Do they not talk at all? What have you seen and what do you think works best?

Yeah, this is a fun one. This is kind of well debated and something that companies are asking me about all the time. At Invoice to Go, we have two separate teams across user acquisition and more down funnel product growth, conversion, monetization, retention. But the full stack approach is the best way. I'm just a firm believer that the best way to move a metric is to have a cross functional team own it. That's a way to just maximize efficiency. In this case it's less about someone's title or who they report to and it's more about what problem they own. What is that metric that they're trying to move. And another kind of layer in this is I build growth teams both within a product org as well as a standalone team alongside core products. And I think there's different times in a company lifecycle when each of those makes sense. I think if a company's mature and hasn't really had a growth mindset, there tends to be a lot of optimization work to do.

Yeah.

And that's where an autonomous full stack growth team can just get a lot done. And if the company is at a point in maturity where maybe they're building a whole new product or A whole big redesign. That's where growth really needs to be embedded in the product. That's where growth and core product need to be joined at the hip. And that growth mindset just needs to be a part of how we develop product as a company from the ground up versus thinking about it as we're just going to build it and the growth team will optimize it later.

Right? Yeah, that's pretty dangerous. Yeah. I've become a bigger fan of the cross functional approach over time as well. I think. I agree that getting something started is probably something fairly autonomous that just goes and fixes a problem that the rest of the company hasn't cared about. But there are a lot of advantages as you grow to having these functional teams of product marketing and design, analytics, whoever makes sense, sitting together, working on these problems together, but then going back and reporting to the rest of their functional teams what they're doing, why that's important, and making sure there's alignment as to what growth cross functional team is working on with the rest of the teams. They can help really embed a growth understanding to the entire organization. In a way that's hard if you're this separate team that just kind of updates people with what's going on every once in a while. There is a weakness there in that, you know, there's no dedicated executive like yourself that's driving the growth initiative and you know, trying to drive consensus between product marketing, analytics Eng is not always the easiest thing to do. But I think the pros outweigh the cons in the long term in terms of having a company aligned around growth and what it means and making sure it's the right type of growth for a company. I also think that if you have these different functions kind of sitting together and working together on a problem set, they unlock new opportunities they wouldn't have done alone. So if you get a marketer and an engineer actually working together and trusting each other, no small task. But if it can happen, the types of solutions they come up with together are way different than what they come up with individually. So I've seen that with engineering supporting paid acquisition, in terms of models you would build for AdWords or Facebook ads or better landing page testing, matching the query that something's coming in from. And those are things that are really hard to do if you have one team over on the side and then they're kind of passing the user over into the core product.

Yeah, it's pretty empowering for cross functional teams to co own a big problem. I love when new ideas and hypotheses come from our engineers, it makes me really happy for it not to be kind of a transactional relationship of product rights requirements and hands them over a wall. These are such hard problems to solve. Things like getting more people to pay you, getting people to pay you more than they were paying before. Having people who come from all different parts of the business solving it together, I've just had a lot of success with.

Yep, agreed. What we didn't talk about in that cross functional team was sales and sales being the default path of growth for these businesses. How do you think about sales in the companies you worked with or in this type of space in general? Are they needed from the start? Do they get added as you go after bigger and bigger clients? What's the framework in terms of how you think about it?

Yeah, I mean specifically at invoice2go, there is no sales team. Our price point just doesn't support the cost structure of having a sales org. So it's important to understand the unit economics of your business and whether it can be justified. That being said, at Evernote, when we transitioned from kind of B2C to B2B, we took advantage of a stepping stone by having a small inside sales team. That's a nice way to kind of justify. Is there something here before you dive into a full outbound enterprise sales team?

Yep.

What I do like about kind of testing out sales employees is it's a really nice feedback loop back into product. It's a different conversation and a different source of data than you might be getting from App store or support or social. So I think it's a really important kind of exercise in validating. Do we have an enterprise solution here? Who are these sales resonating with? Are there certain verticals that we're getting most traction in? At what point do companies outgrow our current offering? What kind of customization do they expect? How much are they willing to pay? I mean, there's kind of rich source of information that you get when somebody's on the phone with these businesses versus any research or current user feedback loops.

Yeah. To learn about something is to try to sell it, I guess, in a way, right? Yeah. When I think about it, I think usually you see startups focus on one or the other early on. So they're either sales driven or product driven. And obviously we've seen a lot of these product driven companies scale really fast, but it almost assumes that that's the way it's going to work. Infinitely. So it assumes a cost structure that doesn't need sales. And we've seen companies like Twilio for example, when they get larger and they need to go after bigger and bigger clients and they need to add sales, company's not really ready for it. So if, if there's a shift into enterprise, which a lot of companies eventually want to do, because there's a lot of money to be made there and you have built a culture around not needing salespeople, it can be hard to then say, okay, we're building a sales team and these people are now asking different questions and whoa, we have to really change our financial model to account for them. That can be really hard. I think what we're seeing right now is a lot of the newer companies in this space kind of getting healthy product driven growth and healthy sales growth in the early days. And I think Slack's been a good example of this. So kind of trying to exercise both of those muscles early on. And even if you're not going to grow primarily via sales, you understand how to work with that group. And as they target bigger and bigger clients, you get this more natural evolution into some of the features you were talking about early on, like single sign on or security or things like that, which, you know, if you're way too focused on the clients you've been growing early on that have never asked for that, it can be hard to adjust. So normally I'm a fan of like you're really focusing on like one particular growth strategy. But I think in this case, if you're able to understand the importance of product and sales early on, you've really positioned yourself to not have like these saturation points in a growth strategy where you get stuck and you can kind of continue to grow healthily for a much longer period of time.

I think that's right. And I think it's the product team's responsibility to not think of like I have a different customer than the sales team. Like I'm building for the end customer where sales is selling into the decision maker at the top. Yeah, I think it's product's responsibility to say that those aren't mutually exclusive and really build for both. It's just a game around kind of roadmap prioritization at that point. Like is this feature for the end customer that's going to create a lot more demand internally and make them love us and use us more higher priority than maybe some user authentication feature that your CIO expects the product to have. And so there's those debates early on. But I think once you have the table stakes features, it can be a lot easier for the business.

Yeah, it seems like it took Evernote and Dropbox in particular a while to get their heads wrapped around that new market. With companies that have grown so fast in a consumer or consumer like environment. When they did finally have to target enterprise, it seemed like they almost did it regrettably and much later than maybe they should have. And I think now they've kind of come out the other side and they've learned those lessons. But it seemed to be from the outside, some painful adjustments. I don't know what your perspective was.

I think one big difference between kind of Evernote's and Dropboxes of the world versus Slack is Evernote and Dropbox. Collaboration wasn't necessarily one of the initial value props of the product. They had these personal use cases around. I use it for my meeting notes, my to do lists, I use it to store my files and later kind of grew into more collaborative shared workflows with other people. That's really different than a product like Slack, which why would you use Slack by yourself? That's just so inherently social. And collaboration is kind of core to the product offering. So I think that that's a distinction between a company that's really kind of nailed this out of the gates versus ones that are really heavily focused on collaboration kind of ground up now.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about not only do your growth strategies need to change, but also your product strategy having to change. And not only does your product strategy have to change in terms of you have multiple customers, you have kind of the purchaser and then the end user, but also what those end users want. When the goal is to have the entire organization versus one particular person use, it also requires very different. So I didn't really appreciate this point with those companies and then moving into enterprise is that not only does their kind of target customers need to change a little bit, but their product had to expand a lot more than I expected. And those are hard things to do when you've grown with a product with such strong product market fit early on. Well, thanks Naomi. I think we learned a lot today about how growing B2B businesses and startups is a lot different from growing growing consumer businesses. You not only have this user growth problem, but you have this monetization problem. That's a core focus of a lot of the growth teams on the B2B side. And of course you also have this balance of multiple different customers, market segments, selling to a buyer versus an end user and trying to convince everyone that this is the right solution. And there's a lot of nuance here that you don't see in consumer also around very minute things like is the credit card going to continue to work and how do you help people navigate through that business so that not only do you continue to get paid, but they continue to be able to use the product that they love. So really interesting insights and thanks again for coming on the podcast today.

Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.