A short Product Marketing School interview (host Nitin Karthik) with guest Ryan Sorley, who recounts how he built a business from $0 to $10M without outside investment by focusing on a clear buyer-seller problem, capturing actionable insights from buyers for sellers, prioritizing client value, and growing organically (hiring as needed). The clip includes a brief host introduction and a motivational closing encouraging entrepreneurs to pursue similar paths.
Hey there. Welcome to Product Marketing School. I'm your host, Nitin Karthik. As director of product marketing and a top product marketing voice, I'm keenly aware of the importance of continually sharpening the saw. And that is why on this show, I bring you important lessons from some of the best minds out there. And today, my friends, we are joined by Ryan Sorley in Boston. Ryan is VP of Wind Loss and co founder at plu. And so tell us, Ryan, from your experience, what is one important lesson that you would like to share? Yeah.
Great. So I'm going to talk a bit about how to build a business from $0 up to $10 million bootstrapped. And there are a lot of people out there, especially in the product marketing space right now that I've been watching go out on their own to build their own consultancy or agency to support different aspects of product marketing. And from my experience, I was a salesperson, then a sales leader at Gartner, and then I left to go start my own business because I saw an opportunity to be able to kind of bridge the gap between our clients, which were the buyers of technology, and our clients, which were the sellers of technology at Gartner. There was a lot of confusion amongst the two groups. So I found this problem. I dove right in. I believed really strongly in being able to solve this problem. I felt like I was the right person to do it. So I went off. I built a system to be able to capture information from those buyers to share directly with those sellers. I was able to not grow because of a sales team that I had, but just grow because I was really focused on adding client value, being able to help organizations drive positive change through the information that we were collecting for them. So ultimately, the business grew organically. No outside investment. We just added people as we needed to because of the problem that we were solving, the niche that we found, and the fact that we were so focused on client value. So that's my minute and a half story about how I went from being a salesperson at Gartner to starting my own business to growing it, to actually becoming part of Clue, which is where we are today.
Absolutely fabulous. Wonderful story and so inspiring, folks. There you have it. Definitely, if you're, let's say, looking into entrepreneurship, maybe you have the next big idea. Take the advice of Ryan and see that you can build your business. Maybe, like Ryan, you'll be able to grow from solo to 10 million and maybe even be acquired. So wishing you all the best with that. Definitely reach out to Ryan for more great advice like this. And armed with that knowledge, let's make a magic happen.
