Crunchbase started as a tool built by Techcrunch and was in the unique position of having product market fit and brand awareness before spinning out as its own company. Since then, the product has transformed from being a database to a SaaS company that helps companies close more B2B deals. Throughout that journey, Shanee has maintained a perspective of balance between right brain and left brain, growth and profitability.  

In this episode, we talk with Shanee about how she manages good growth in the current environment. 

Key Lessons:

• Having a hybrid go-to-market motion that includes both product-led growth and sales teams helps to diversify how revenue is generated, the quality of revenue, and the type of customers that you can serve
• Marriage is a good metaphor for growth. When you’re doing growth, you’re essentially proposing to prospects. You need to invest in developing relationships before you can propose. 
• Cross-functional growth squads that include product, engineering, marketing, and sales create very effective collaboration for smaller companies and startups and career opportunities for those team members
• There are always some teams that are flying closer to the sun, and other teams that are farther out from the sun. The latter group should be ready with strategies so they can hit the ground running when they move closer to the sun
• Don’t think about it as trying to do more with less. Try to have the most impact that you can. 

Shanee Ben-Zur is the Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at Crunchbase. She is responsible for the full marketing funnel as well as the company’s product-led growth strategy. Shanee is one part analytical realist and one part creative optimist, which serves as a winning combination when leading modern go-to-market teams. Prior to joining Crunchbase, Shanee built teams and scaled global B2B and B2C brands—Salesforce, NVIDIA, and PlayStation (SCEA)--and supported fast-growing startups including Dropbox, where she worked pre and post IPO. In these roles, Shanee developed deep insights into how companies can efficiently establish product-market-fit, acquire customers, engage users, grow communities, and increase revenue through self-serve, direct sales, and product-led growth motions.

Some argue that the metaverse has arrived, while others disagree. This point of contention is why we decided to take a detour in this episode away from our usual focus on the Plus 1 stage of growth for companies to talk about the metaverse as an example of an emerging technology breaking through the Plus 1 stage of growth. Jessica Outlaw is a metaverse researcher and storyteller, and she guides us as we explore the ethical frontiers of the metaverse. 

In this episode, Jessica shares her insights on how mindful and ethical product design creates competitive advantages for technology companies. 

Key Lessons:

• Describing a new technology by framing it with an existing technology helps people get comfortable with new technology
• The adoption curve for new technologies often starts with enterprise customers first, which then helps consumers see the value and buy it for themselves.  
• PMs should be mindful about data collection and retention policies, especially with biometric data, and think carefully about how the data could be used. 
• Designing products for privacy, accessibility, and inclusion can be a competitive advantage by building trust with users.

Resources:

• The Extended Mind: https://www.extendedmind.io/
• XR Access: https://xraccess.org/
• Rise of Privacy Tech: https://www.riseofprivacytech.com/
• 2021 Privacy Survey: https://www.extendedmind.io/survey
• 2017 study of Women's first time experiences in social vr: https://www.extendedmind.io/why-women-dont-like-social-virtual-reality
• The weaponization of app data (this is a mobile example): https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxp8/grindr-location-data-priest-weaponization-app.
• 'Anonymised' data can never be totally anonymous https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/23/anonymised-data-never-be-anonymous-enough-study-finds
• VR and accessibility: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/vr-is-failing-the-very-people-it-could-benefit-most
• Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2505-psychopolitics
• The Voices of VR Podcast which has a catalogue of more than 1000 interviews with VR/AR/Metaverse creators: https://voicesofvr.com/

Jessica Outlaw is a behavioral scientist and the founder of The Extended Mind. She creates decision tools to advance social and behavioral science into emerging technologies. She focuses on virtual and augmented reality because of their potential to give people new experiences of understanding data, co-locating across distance, and how embodiment can influence decision-making. She is the author of a book on cognitive biases in product development and another on decision-making. She is the creator of the online course the Tech Ethics Toolkit offered Spring every year.

Imagine growing from $2B in revenue to $26B in revenue. Imagine scaling from 3,500 employees to 75,000 employees. This is the Plus 1... no scratch that... Plus Infinity, rocket ship stage of growth that our special guest, Sean Alpert, was part of during his eleven years at Salesforce. As the company expanded from three product lines to many, Sean and the product marketing team used messaging frameworks to tell a cohesive story and excite customers.

In this episode, Sean shares the valuable lessons from Salesforce that he’s now applying at Qualified about how to tell a billion dollar story. 

Key Lessons:

• An aspirational message paints a view of what the future is going to look like for your customers and motivates them to buy your product rather than enumerating every feature.
• Trendjacking ties your messaging to something that people are really paying attention to in order to harness the momentum of the trend.
• Messaging hierarchy starts with one key message at the top, and organizes messaging for individual apps to ladder up to the bigger message.

Sean Alpert is the SVP of Product Marketing for Qualified, the #1 Pipeline Generation Platform for Salesforce Customers. Previously, he worked at Salesforce for 11 years, where he did marketing for the Salesforce Platform, Einstein Analytics, Sales Cloud, and the Corporate Messaging team. Before Salesforce, he worked in marketing at Cisco Systems, Amazon.com, and Appian Corporation. He attended Dartmouth College for undergrad and got his MBA at Kellogg.

After its initial start as a yearbook design company, Canva has pivoted to become one of the world’s most beloved design tools. Their mission is to “empower the whole world to design” and they’ve drawn everyone from social media influencers to restaurant owners to use and love their tool. This strong community of promoters helps drive user growth for their tool.

In this episode, we talk about how Canva empowers a community of promoters to build a large base of freemium users, and offers many different ways to move them from free to paid users. 

Key Lessons:

• Align your product features with your company mission and product-led growth
• Cultivate a community of promoters to drive additional virality through community-led growth 
• Tempt your free users to become paid users by demonstrating the value behind the paywall and providing different ways to pay for it that best fit the users’ need

If you haven’t used Canva before, check it out here. Lauren has used Canva to create the artwork for this podcast, slide presentations for conferences, and signs for her birthday party. We get a small commission if you sign up with our link and upgrade to a Pro account, and that will help us buy more equipment for this podcast.  

Becoming a parent is a huge life transition for many. Layer on top of that being the leader of a small team at a fast scaling startup in the midst of fundraising, and you've got a perfect collision of personal and professional life. Our special guest, Patricia DuChene, shares her story of how she's found her stride integrating parenthood with a thriving career as SVP of Revenue at Postal.   

In this episode, we chat with Patty about how she's embraced being a new parent at a fast scaling startup. 

Key Lessons:

• There's no such thing as the right time to start your journey into parenthood, but companies that have a supportive leadership team and good family benefits can make life a bit easier for you.
• You can only control what you can control. Prepare for your leave by anticipating what your team might need while you're out,  set expectations for when you want to be contacted during your leave, and most importantly - get comfortable with delegating and trusting your team to run with things. 
• Being a parent is part of who you are and leaning into it can help to humanize your work relationships. 

Patricia DuChene (also known as Pat, Patti, Patty, Tricia, and PD) is the Senior Vice President of Revenue at Postal, a leading Offline Marketing Automation Platform and marketplace that helps personalize, automate, and scale direct mail, internal and external events, branded company swag, and personalized gifts to drive better engagement with prospects, customers, partners, and employees. Prior to joining Postal, Patricia was the Vice President of Int'l Sales & Managing Director for a work management software company called Wrike, where she built out client facing teams in Dublin IRE, Melbourne AU, Tokyo JP, and Kyiv UA. A native of the 805, she was thrilled to join the Postal team with the promise of delivering an authentic, scalable offline marketing platform based in San Luis Obispo. She is a passionate advocate for women in technology and takes an active approach when encouraging women to consider careers in technology. When she isn't in the office, Patricia can be found hiking with her husband, daughter and diva pug.

Figma is one of the most popular design tools today, but there were many other design tools already on the market when they first launched. In fact, Eugene worked for one of those other UX design tools called Pixate that predated Figma. Although Figma was not first to market, they quickly distinguished themselves from their competitors by understanding the importance of collaboration to their users. 

In this episode, we break down how Figma’s laser focus around the key insight of collaboration has taken their business from 0 to 1 and continues to guide how they scale their business in the Plus 1 stage. 

Key Lessons:

• Choose the right benefit to be best at based on biggest pain points in the market
• Make sure your business model reinforces your benefit 
• As consumer expectations increase, you need to find new ways to add more value

Substack’s value proposition is simple. They make it easy for a writer to start an email newsletter that makes money from subscriptions. But since their beginnings as a tool for paid newsletters, the Substack platform has grown to encompass much more than just paid newsletters. Today, creators use Substack for everything from serializing comics to publishing podcasts. 

In this episode, we explore how Substack has managed the push and pull between expanding their audience and achieving significant scale, while staying true to their roots, that many startups experience in the Plus 1 stage. 

Key Lessons:

• Look for adjacent audiences and understand whether your product can adjust to accommodate those new markets. 
• Communities matter: not just for growth, but also for future investment. 
• Real change will ruffle feathers. Be prepared for rough waters. 

Entrepreneurs start companies with an idea. They explore the idea, start building and selling a product, and often pivot - sometimes even several times - before they find their product that resonates with customers. That's the 0 to 1 stage. But what happens after they found that first product with product market fit? What happens in the Plus 1 stage? This question is what the Plus 1 podcast is all about.