The Truth About Product-Led Growth and How This Company Got It Right, with David Dorman VP Growth at Grafana Labs

I would think about PLG being a key part of your marketing lever. It is a huge part of how you're going to drive word of mouth. Yeah. It's easy and PLG to not talk to folks. Everyone was like, hey, you got to talk to your customers. PLG, you can hide behind the data and look at visitors and look at the activation events. You become two data driven, two data from, I don't know what the word is, but you're losing all the qualitative side of what's going on. I guess one unique thing about developer tools in particular in PLG is that you can hire your customers, hire your users. You like, you already bring the persona in. They've got a strong point of view in the market. They know folks that look like themselves. What's the one thing you think founders should know before they start a company? Yeah. So thrilled to have you with us today, David. I've heard so much about your work over the years at Digital Ocean. Obviously now is VP of Self-Service at Grafana. And Grafana just wasn't epic story. Yeah, that's right. I mean, these numbers are insane. 20 million users are on the world leading the observability space over the last decade. And I think they're just a really proud roots in open source and community. Like really comes through over 5,000 customers, 250 million in ARR. So really pumped to have you with us at the drafting table and hearing all the real talk and the lessons and hopefully some of the high highs, the low lows and everything between. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I know we were just saying before, it's great to actually meet you in person. For a time, just never haven't done this in person. I know, I know. And that's the beauty of in person. Hard recording. You have to be in the studio with me. I love it. Awesome. So I usually kick off every episode and I ask, you know, what's the one thing you think founders should know before they start a company? Yeah. I think as it relates to we're going to talk a lot about PLG. I mean, nowadays it's kind of understood like your product is, they kind of have to make it available. I think it's actually very hard nowadays of a few things that security products and some other things. People won't do PLG. But I think that's kind of understood nowadays. Yeah. And that is marketing. I think there's like this idea of like PLG, is it marketing as a product? Like I come from the marketing side of the house by background, PLG is how you're only doing marketing. Yes. Everyone nowadays is like 70% of their traffic is organic or word of mouth. But this doesn't happen, it's because like people are coming and using the product, talking about it. The same way that like I go to a good restaurant and I go and talk to someone about it. Yeah. Right? Like I think, so there's like this mythical, there's like this myth of like how am I generating traffic and bringing people in? Turns out just like having a good product people can use and talk about is meaningful and that makes people uncomfortable. I think that makes founders are exactly uncomfortable to be like, I heard marketing is give me some money, write some content, go to some events, but actually like, yeah, that is one part of the marketing mix. The other side is, how do we create a good front door, front of house and people in? Totally. Okay. Cool. I guess maybe you just like even to start the graphonist story, right? Because I feel like, you know, again, everyone sees the headlines, graphonist now, super successful. But like maybe even hearing some of like the early days and lessons like, well, we're some of the absorbs, some of the downs or maybe just some of the things that they had to figure out in the early days, especially on the open source side. Yeah, so graphonist is one of those companies that isn't like this. Let's put something in open source and figure out how we generate revenue three days later. graphonist has been at it since 2013, 2014, is the origin of the open source project. So I think they built community like the long and hard way over the course of many years. You know, there's a parallel to digital ocean, which we could talk about, but I think they just rode the waves of like various different parts of the ecosystem, right? So for those that aren't aware, graphonist connects any database or any data source helps you visualize it as an open source project. And they just continue to ride various waves, whether it was like influx TV becoming popular to permit theists to some of the other databases that are popular now, graphonist rode each those waves and invest in each of those communities. And that sort of brought us to 2019, 2020 is the company really invested very heavily in not just graphonist as a visualization product, but as a full observability stack, done all on open standards. And that's when the commercial part of the business really took off and we really started talking about how are we taking some of this community to the open source adoption and driving it into a more commercial, a more commercial motion. Yeah. So it took about like, I mean, it sounds like five-ish years, right? It was and just like this overnight. Absolutely. Yeah. And then from there, obviously we were starting, you know, come in the late 2020 teens. How do you describe that? Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Was we're obviously playing with a lot of wind on our back as we already had all this adoption, all the people who cared about the product. Yeah. We already, you know, front and center and some of the waves and Kubernetes and Prometheus that made it, you know, are the sales and go-to market, as we introduced PLG, it made all that a bit easier for us, right? Which is like, you know, put our front and the pedal fairly quickly. Yeah. The last five years have been, you know, just a wild roller coaster. Yeah. I mean, again, so much to break down there. I mean, I think maybe chapter one is the community piece, right? And like maybe being really, again, thoughtful and patient in some ways with the community, right? And developer community is like, I mean, that's a whole nother episode we can go into. Like maybe what are some of your pro tips when you think about developer communities? You've seen so many companies obviously also want to build an individual or community. Yeah. I think it's easier said than done to do it well. Yeah. Totally. I think the work community also gets used to meet a bunch of different, like, could meet a bunch of different ways. Yeah. It's okay. So let's hear how we're funded to find it. Yeah. So in Grafana, there's a few different parts of it, right? Because it's open source, you know, we have developers building plugins, building panels, building visualizations, contributing them back, you know, like that is a key part of our community is that there's actually people building on it, people talking about it, people in forums, we host major events every year, we've been doing this for 10 years. So, you know, that's one approach. When we started digital ocean, digital ocean was more like we were a band. Yeah. It was like, love. And I'm not saying one is better than the other. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Love the swag. They loved the value that we created for them. I mean, we had, you know, I'd say digital ocean was often credited for writing the best tutorials on the internet, right? Right. That's the time. I think that playbook has been commoditized over the course of time. Everyone now gets. You got to write great tutorials and content. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we were very early in doing it. And so much of it was, we just created this like, you know, rock band atmosphere that I think people loved. Yeah. So, like, I don't know if you call that community, you call that brand, whatever you want to call it. Right. That was another way we were able to solve it. Right? So, there's like two different flavors. I've sort of seen between these things. Yeah. Community. And so, when you went from DO to Crophana, did you feel like, hey, let's use some elements of this, did you test part of that and say, okay, well, it's slightly different, you know, like, user. And so, therefore, it looks and feels a little different. Totally. You know, the part I've wrestled with over the course of time, whether it's like CMOs or VP markings joining or anyone else, it's everyone just wants to bring their playbook in. Yeah. I know. And like, the really good people know how to adapt it, right? It turns out they know why the play worked. That's like the big thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe Vickley Shay. And the people that aren't great, maybe miss the point. They just keep trying to run the same thing. Yeah. ran. When I at Digital Ocean, one of our largest acquisition sources was our referral program. And it worked just to call it out loud because it was a B2C to B company. We marketed to developers, they used us paid for the product a nights and weekends. And then they would eventually bring it to work, right? Whether that was right away or months or years later. But it was actually that it was a consumer business that this referral program really worked. I gave you ten bucks, you use it, I'll get a $25 credit. That was amazing. We tried doing something similar at one point at Grafana. We had a freemium product. We were generating still very large volume of developer signing up every month. We actually monetized on the B2BN generally speaking. And as much as we do have a, we are a single player product and we could talk a little about that, it didn't hit home the same way it would hit Digital Ocean where there was like true value developers were running their blog, their side project. It's a little different like Grafana. A lot of people monitoring the nest thermostat at home. It doesn't hit the same way. So we tried that play, we tried that play didn't quite work. There's a few others in there as well. Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's so helpful. And again, it just goes to show like, yes, it might be all to developers, but even within developers, I mean so many different profiles, so many different use cases and how they're using it and where they're using it. That's right. You know, one thing that translates translated very well, and things like an interesting and obvious, right? Some of these things are so cliche, but also what's worth saying. Yes, it's worth saying. We're saying, um, it's like lived experience is around one thing that was beautiful about what Digital Ocean solved and on the go-to-market side with tutorials was they didn't write about themselves, right? We were like, how do we install my sequel on Ubuntu, whatever. Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't about doing it on Digital Ocean. It was just doing it on the server somewhere, right? It's like offer value where everybody else was actually kind of writing about how to do it on their own cloud providers. Yeah, yeah. So that was one thing that really worked. And what they really did well was we really did well was we totally had to do it the long way. Right? We gave you all the right information to do it by hand and we could solve a problem that the next time you needed to do it, we could give you like a push button version, right? You can give you like a one click image in order to do it. Right. How that applied to Digital Ocean. At Carfana, how that translated was, well, let's say someone wanted to monitor Linux machine and use the Prometheus exporter or something along those lines. Cool. We can write you really long lists of instructions on how to install it, use it. We can give you a bunch of community dashboards to then click and install. Yeah. And a bunch of alerts you can copy paste. Yeah. And we wrote very long tutorials on how to do those things. But then we'd say also as a marketer, hey, actually, the next time you want to do this, you can just like click a button. We give this to you out of the box. Right. Useable commands. Right. That play right also works. Right. I think there's something to be said about good marketing and developers is solve the problem by hand, like let them solve by hand, like good docs as an example. Well, like hopefully the product meets is like the other end of that inspection where we can just like solve this for you the next time. And don't get too pushy about forcing them to do it your way right away. So anyway, yeah, that's really helpful. And I think the pushy part is like the fine line, right? Yeah. I think that's the part that like required a little bit of like Again, understanding your user and knowing when to push. >> I think this is like the hard part on marketing. I think it is like when you push too hard. There's this idea and that develops a hard market too. I don't know if that's true, it's just a certain type of marketing. When can you be over the top? Are you putting a huge banner in front of them to not let them actually read the tutorial? Probably not in this world, right? >> Right. >> But yeah, that balance is tricky. >> That balance, right? >> That balance everything. >> Yeah. >> Okay, cool. Then fast forward to your point, like in 2019, you're like, okay, let's go more commercial. And it sounds like that's also when you turn on the PLG, I guess. >> Totally. >> Right. So maybe can you talk about what that motion was like, again, open source, and then the PLG side of the house, like opening up? >> Yep. So yeah, green font is always unique in that. Because it was open source, I call it PLG. You're right, like the product could be used as for free. It was our massive distribution. So in that regard, I would say a PLG company in so many ways. But not to say from the commercial side, right? It was still a sales-led conversation. I think a lot of open source companies, when you give away product for free, and it could be used by millions, you know, the lower end of the market, the mid market might be harder to monetize. So we did very well in the early days I'm monetizing some of the biggest companies in the world, in a more sales-led process. So as a number one, what started to change was the company went, built a full shock of observability solution, right? We used to kind of just be the visualization end. We started delving and providing a database that was a series of permutious endpoints. And we were around, as we raised our series A, was full-stack, right? How are we going to build the modern version of this? And it was very clear to everyone starting with our CEO that we need to have a proper PLG motion, right? Like everyone has solved it. By the way, this is a solved problem at that point. >> Yeah. >> Last, they could have done a version of this. >> Yeah. >> On, they were done a version of this. >> Yeah. >> All these prior open source companies had done a version of this. But it might have taken them years into a tremendous amount of pain. >> Yeah. >> We were able to kind of learn from the things that were maybe hard there. So that was sort of the reason we were starting to do it was to, we were, to invest fully into our SaaS product. >> Yeah. >> And that was the impetus for us. Really to go on. >> Yeah. Well, do you think we're some of the things that were hard that other companies like earlier generation had to do that you all were able to just like accelerate past a little? >> Oh, yeah. Good question. Well, one, we were able to get the billing rate right from the very beginning. >> Yeah. >> I would say that's one thing. >> Like some of the infrastructure around that. >> Yeah. We already had like the usage base billing like nailed right from the jump. >> Yeah. >> So I think that made it a lot easier. >> Yeah. >> Some good decisions were made early on in that regard. So that was encouraging where the other companies, I don't think had that. I think the, the part that our CEO and our, our sales leader, our marketing leader got right was, hey, it's actually really tricky. We were in a decent business. Like Grafano was at a decent run rate already at that point of, how do we not disrupt what's going on in the enterprise sales motion from everything in the bottom up? >> Totally. >> And how do we fund this team? Like, how do we make sure that, you know, we're prioritizing said features or certain types of marketing when, yeah, of course, when most of your revenue is being driven by the high end of the business, how are you going to prioritize it? >> Yeah. >> So the idea was like, how do we stick this team in a corner and I say that in a positive way? >> Yeah. >> Given the resources they need and fund it. >> Yeah. >> Like it's its own little business unit in the early days. So that is the unique part of this. We, it was not day one that we started this way. We had to do injected into the company and so that was, has led to it, you know, is challenging. It granted, I think most enterprise software companies are going to make the vast majority of their money and the biggest companies in the world, right? So that was always an interesting part here was we were never quite expecting, let's say, the self-server PLG part of the business to represent 80% of the revenue. I don't necessarily think that was the goal, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But how do we inject that? It's like the motion that makes a more efficient sales. >> Yeah. >> How do we build a more efficient sales motion in the future and how do we meet our customers where there are? I think some of this decision is easy, right? Like credit to our exact team on it was like, this is how people expect to buy, right? So if we don't do it, I think we're screwed. >> Yeah. >> The day, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> You know, what would the future trajectory of the company look like is an open question? >> So interesting. Okay. So then you opened up PLG and the goal there was to target maybe some of like the mid market or was it to say everyone as a result can touch the product and feel it. And therefore, even regardless of where you are as a tech man, you will have a better experience. >> That's right. It's the latter, right? Like, I think we would of course want to capture maybe the more SMB or mid market side of it. If anything, there's maybe some nervousness on the higher end of the market. I'll give you a trade off. Everything about PLG sounds great, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Well, what if your product's not great? Like, what if it doesn't speak for itself? What if someone from, name your favorite AI startup goes and tries the product on their own? >> Yeah. >> They don't have a salesperson and an army of essays. >> Yeah. >> Got them through experience. >> Right. >> The product doesn't speak for itself. >> Right. >> Just lost out of an opportunity. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> That doesn't get, I feel often gets set enough. >> Yeah. >> Totally. >> Right? >> Like, that's the real trade off. If the product is not good enough marketing, you are in a really bad spot, right? So that's one, okay, that's like the major trade off, just a throw out there. But for us, it really was, how do we show value to everybody? We think on the low end of the market, they're going to try by scale and they don't really have to engage with us. That's ideal. >> Yeah. >> And on the higher end of the market, or whatever, yeah, it's called the higher end of the market, they might try, they're running their own self-proof of concept. And then we find the right go-to-market motion, either trying to get in touch, turns out developers are pretty good at raising their hands at decent size companies when they need to interact with them. >> Interesting. >> Right? >> Kind of counter-intuitive, but yeah. >> Yeah. I think the real question becomes that every company I've been part of is how do we get more people to raise their hands? That's sort of what we owe. That's a great part about open source, or PLG is huge funnel, lots of people will opt in to wanting to have a conversation. >> Yeah. >> And then there's a big drop off between that conversation, very high quality leads from marketing perspective to how are we going to do warm bound, or the traditional inbound to generate conversations. And I think that's a huge chasm I've seen. >> Yeah. And I mean, I feel like there's like, I have a whole list of questions here that I get like super-talked all around like the funnel, right? And like working the funnel and like, I'm sure also depending on the different, you know, stages and of time of the funnel, like maybe different parts of the funnel were more challenging or not. >> But maybe we can go into like maybe some tactical brass tactics here, which is, you know, at a high level, yeah, PLG sounds great, right? >> Sure. >> And especially, I mean, we haven't even talked about AI yet, right? That's like this whole other kind of part of the- >> Feel open in the room. >> Of the reality that we're all in, which is, and again, the fact that, you know, we're kind of, you know, have both been in the space for the last decade is that we've seen the pendulum actually on PLG a few times now, right? I feel like PLG was relatively new and then everyone got obviously really into it in kind of the Zerbera. >> Yeah. >> All right. And then I kind of went back to like, hey, let's go back to sales lead. And now I think it's actually back again, given AI and given the fact that I think people are expecting- or expecting to be able to use and touch products before they try it, right? Or before they buy it, sorry. >> Yeah. >> Anyways, I think we're back on the pendulum side of the house. >> I agree. And like, I think especially for some of the AI products, because these things demo unbelievably well. >> Yes. >> The value is seen in seconds in many ways. So like for those products in particular, I think that's- and I think that's often the why you would make your product available on the Internet for anyone to use, right? Whatever word we want to use is like the product speech for itself. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Totally. >> And I think there was probably a tricky point where not all products do, right? >> Yes. >> Or there's got enough investment in it. >> Yes. >> And you know, in the reality of so much of enterprise offer and SaaS is like so much of the value sometimes happens after long implementation, long integration, long onboarding, right? Which is just like the nature of some of these companies. But yeah, it's something that I've been talking about with my founders a lot, just like, do we think enterprise sales fundamentally will change in this new world where I think there will always still have to be some sort of top-down kind of, you know, sale at some point where they're going to go through security and so forth. So it is an expectation that every user will want to be able to like touch and at least demo and try a product. >> Yeah. >> So I'm curious your thoughts on that. >> Yeah. You know, so all my, most of my background comes on the marketing side. And so I've been sitting on the side of the house, just like throwing leads over the fence, hoping sales and gauges, and I think I said, oh, it's just the classic stuff, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And then sitting this role in pure PLG and self-serve, I was like the, not anti-sales, but just like, yeah, we want to create the best experience that no human needs of me in the loop. For the last 24 months, we now sitting on my team is like a PLG sales team, a velocity sales team. >> Yeah. >> And boy, have I seen the light? And what is different about the value of having, not just like a technical, we can talk about like in developer tools, like do they want to talk to salespeople, do they want to talk to like SEs? Well, that's like an interesting discussion as well. >> Yeah. >> But I've seen the light on the value in which customers are trying to, when things do not fully speak for themselves, right? Like, front out things are good products, pretty good PLG product generally speaking. But yeah, at scale, it's actually a very different challenge, right? Whether you do have lots of humans in the loop that you need to sell in different champions. >> Yeah. >> It is really hard to do that just via a product. >> Yeah. >> So building champions is a really important skill set. And if you have a tremendous amount of data, scale, infrastructure, that's a very different type of problem versus like installing an agent on a single machine or two. >> Oh, really? >> So you just start going on the ability to like open up the aperture and add value in a discussion. >> Yeah. >> Changes. And that doesn't mean you have to be a beginner approach, right? And you see it on some of these, you know, name your favorite AI tool, like we're dealing with them. And that sales process is very different, and I don't think it would work without a sales person. Oh, excuse me. Without humans in the loop to help, you know, bridge the gap. >> Yeah, interesting. Okay, so you still feel like humans need to be in the loop in some way, shape or far. >> Yeah. I think, well, for our product, right? I think it might be different for others, but I think especially the bigger the company Thanks for watching guys. The more scale that is involved, I think there is actually unique value humans, whether be a combination of technical folks or salespeople can add to not just the crewing revenue in the business. Obviously, that's what we're all trying to do, but actually I value it to the other side, right? That is still true. Well, I'm so happy to hear that because that's just like the thing we preach every day at workbench, which is like, you know, go to market is still really important, right? And maybe the flavor and the color of go to market will be a little bit different. Depending on the category you're in, the users you're in, but like go to market is still really important. Actually, the big thing I think more than ever is if products these days actually look quite similar, right? And it's easier than ever to like spin up products than what is your edge and what actually sets you apart. And I think there's a lot of things that, you know, you can kind of copy or mimic, but I think go to market is actually the part that is like very hard to like is truly defensible, right? Yeah, I, you could, I, you said much more concise than I could have. We'll start there. It's still working theory. I mean, that's what we believe, but like I'm very curious if like founders believe that, you know, it's such, it's such a good call. There's, I forget who to give credit to, but there were someone from, like someone in early DevRel at Mongo years ago wrote, there's some block was they talked about like shelf space. And I remember like always saying there was an amazing and out like amazing metaphor for what you're trying to do. And in marketing, especially the developer market was like, you just got to be in shelf space. That's why you're at all these conferences that every meet up. Just like want to be where developers that you care about are someone's shopping for cookies. I don't know pick up. I mean, that's the wrong one. But like, yeah, you got to be in the cookie. Yeah, you got to like, where are you on the shelf at a minimum? Yeah. So space. Okay. And I think that might have mattered years ago. Yeah. I think it's even more important. Now, like it's even more clear nowadays, if there's more commoditization, so many more entrants there. Exactly. And how do you stand out? Yeah. Now, PLG is one small one, right? It could be depending on the industry or where you're at, could be a major edge, right? There are still a bunch of companies in observability where I was a digital ocean that like, yeah, it's still had to talk to someone to engage with, right? So like, we still think there's actually an edge in some places in our slice of the universe. But to me, like PLG is like, I don't know, I'm going to Costco with my kids and free samples, right? Like that's, I don't know. And I'm trying the product. Yeah. By the way, if the product sucks, I'm not buying it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're putting yourself out there. Yeah. Yeah. And if it's actually very good, like I'm probably trying your pretzel versus somebody else's. Yeah, it's totally. Some of this isn't rocket science. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Well, again, it sounds like you've worked with many founders and you've at least seen lots of different companies at this point. I'm sure lots of people hit you up and say, David, could you help advise us on our PLG self-serve strategy? Yeah. Like, what are the top, let's say even like three things that you're like, hey, these are the things that you might not realize, you know, until you're on the journey, right? Yeah. Obviously the first one being a great product. Yeah, great product for sure. But, you know, it's like underlining one of the first things we were discussing on this is, yeah, like you should, I would think about PLG being like a key part of your marketing lever, right? Like, it is, I don't know if I would describe it as a channel because it's not what brings people in, but it is a huge part of how you're going to drive word of mouth, right? How are you going to drive people to refer folks? How are you going to have the community engage with you? So I think that's a key part on, you know, PLG self-serve, whatever it might be, is that this is, like, product is marketing, marketing is product, right? Yeah. I think that changes the opens up a question of like, how do you think about word structure? Like, how do you think about growth teams and marketing and like, what, how do these things all come together? So, I don't know. There's maybe a thread there we can pull. Yeah. So that's number one. I think that's like the big thing we'll always talk about. I think two comes back to like, what are the playbooks, right? How do you, like, how are, how are you going to bring people in the front door like? Are you, are you running content? Are you going to events? Like, the thing is like the channels are the channels, everyone knows about the channels nowadays, right? Yeah. And I find it really hard to meet when I talk to founders or my team. Yeah. It's like, yeah, like, there's content, like, everyone's naming the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The magic is how do you do them right? Yeah. You don't want to start by execution and like, do you know the domain? Yeah. Yeah. The thing that I'll bring about bunch of, uh, especially when I talk to someone super early, there's always this question and marketing or PLG like, am I hurting like a product marketing person? I'm hurting the DG. We're all having the same conversation. And it's like, I think it's right now, okay, like one person's point of view, like one point of view on it is part of I've found having sat on both those roles in the past, like join digital ocean as like kind of first person in scene and product marketing, spend a bunch of time thinking about that a lot by spending a lot of time in DG and some of, you know, trying to figure out how to drive, you know, sign ups and all the classic stuff. Uh, turns out it's hard to do DG if you don't know what to say. I know. It's really hard. I know. Right. Yeah. I mean, I really have work with like a data analyst that doesn't understand the domain. Yeah. Right? Like you can write the sequel. You can, you can, if you don't know what question to ask or how to interpret it, it's like not that valuable. Yeah. Generally speaking. Yeah. Same thing in DG. Like they don't know what to say or how to frame it. Yeah. You still need a like a partner for them on the flip side. Uh, pure play, product marketing doesn't know how to like drive demand and any. Exactly. Exactly. We're, we're spending their time doing. Exactly. Anyway, early, right? I don't mean to say it at scale. Yeah. Yeah. We find some with like domain expertise that knows what to say. Yeah. And then can figure out like how to press the buttons and get in the channels. I don't mean to minimize that point, but especially early, like, I think that's a super critical and tough hire is like, it's so hard. It's so hard. Well, then the what's our bar is like trying to find someone who can do both, like truly the unicorn who can do both. And I think there are people out there, but it's very, it's not easy. Yeah. It's not easy. And like, I think the question becomes who the folks that you can like contract or borrow and advise, like to help some of those things. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, would say there's things in DG LAN that look like that. That's my initial reaction, but that's starting to evolve my thinking on that. Like paid, you could probably bring some ought to do those things, right? Yeah. To pay around experimental channels. Yeah. There's a lot of, especially like spent the last 10 years in DevTools, you can hire like these, you know, technical writers now, that's now like a small cottage industry of technical writers. Yeah. Yeah. And even that, you're like, you sort of paying whatever you get for it many times. Yeah. You're paying for what you get. Um, so I don't know. That's really true. It's really hard to find someone that can hit your message or figure out who your audience is. It's so hard. Totally totally. Yeah. I also think in the early days, like what's so hard is like, as you know, seized companies, very limited resources, very limited budget. Yes. Right. And so, you know, and you don't know what's going to work. I think that's a hard part. You're like, conferences, but I think they could work. Content, I think it could work, you know, starting podcasts, I think it could work, right? And so you almost want to trial these things, but then you don't do any of them particularly well. Yeah. Right? And so like, I'm even curious for you all, like, I imagine over the years or channels that have worked really well, maybe then you realize, okay, maybe like, as we've evolved and we've matured, maybe other channels of good work better, like, you know, I think it's hard because it's not like there's one channel that fits all, right? Totally. Something you hit on there is, we hate the same problem of marketing as we do in a product product development. We were like, you ship it in VP, but like maybe the MVP isn't good enough, so you don't know if you should continue to invest. Yes. Right? That's like the classic problem you run into on the product side. Same thing in marketing. Yeah. Right? It was X, like maybe they sucked. Yeah. You just don't know, right? It's variables. Exactly. Exactly. So how do you figure out? Yes. And I think it's the hardest part. I mean, do you have any pro tips on that? Is it like, you give a set amount of time and you say, hey, look, we're going to try this for three months, right? Yeah. Because that's the hardest part of knowing it's like, when do you pull the cord and say, okay, that didn't work? I have a bunch of thoughts on it. Yes. My pro tips are to, like, well, the cup out answer is like your instincts matter. Like, you're, I think it's important to develop some conviction. I think there is like some conviction, what we think is going to work and why. Yeah. And even it's not you, but like, how are you pulling the, how are you pulling the right folks in your business or externally? Like, the thing for me, I'm not an engineer, right? I'm like, marketing and product engineers for, for a while. The thing that's worked best for me when I was at DO and here at Krofana was, I eventually hired or spent a lot of time with internally, the folks who are the persona. Yeah. Right? That's what it comes down to. And I get back to that. Yeah. And that's cool. There's probably like folks who have a comp side background or engineers that want to be a CMO. Like, those are probably great candidates and you should talk to them, right? Yeah. But I also think their other side is how are you going to find some of the can pull the right, pull the right information out of the right people to help develop that conviction and then double trouble down on those types of things. And I think there's one unique thing about developer tools in particular in PLG is that you can hire your customers, hire your users. So you like, you already bring the persona in, they've got a strong point of view in the market. Yeah. And that's maybe that's a pro tip. Yeah. Find someone who uses your product and loves it and wants to work for you full time. I told, I mean, I can't, I can't say that enough that that is a dream, right? And when we have companies where the customers actually want to work for them, I mean, that's like the best screen flag ever. Yeah. Right? Because I think it's also very authentic. Cool. Like that's the part that it's the hardest part is like, it's coming from a very genuine place. And so then you have all these like, you know, whatever, whatever the title is, but it's like, they can go and talk to your customers because they are or they were a customer. Totally. I think the other part on the what I found on, we could ramble on them. It's for a long time. Yeah. So stop me when we want to go somewhere else. Yeah. But like, it's easy and PLG to not talk to talk to folks. I think that's actually the, I think that was part of the pendulum swing he was scribed of like. Interesting. Yes. Everyone was like, Hey, you got to talk to your customers PLG. You can hide behind the data and like look at visitors and look at activation events. Oh, happy about that up. Yeah. Like it's, you become like two data driven, two data from, I don't know what the word is, but you're losing all the qualitative side of what's going on, trying to make assumptions on things. And then that's the beautiful part of like the swing, the pendulum back to enterprise sales and talking customers, especially early, when you're still trying to maybe find product market fit or figure out where you're going to invest now. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's, that's really important. Yeah. Right. And I think I've just continued to learn that lesson every two, I don't know, every so often we're all just like, I'll go on a route where I'm maybe not as engaging as much. Yeah, but turns out like actually going and it's not even talking your customers like talking to developers talking to folks in your space Yeah, being at a meet up being in a conference. Whatever. It might be talking having a customer conversation. What one You could sit there as like a product marketer or someone writing copy on your website on your e like in email But until you actually engage with someone it's like being a comedian like you can work on your copy all day long But like until you like get up on stage and get the vibe of the room. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's actually really hard to know if it works No, he'd be test Headlines all day long on our website and no idea. Yeah, if it resonates whatsoever I think it's gonna be yeah. Yeah, well, I mean actually the reason I'm like, you know thinking back to literally 2021 was I think a lot of technical founders use PLG as a way of getting out of doing sales. How interesting. Yeah, right because to your point They're like I don't like sales and therefore if I build a great product, they will come Right classic. Yeah, which again, I actually think in this stage like very very true And if anything you just you just need to do both really freaking well. Yeah, your product needs to be freaking great Yeah, to stand out and miss a lot of other products that look and feel really great Yeah, and then you've got to have a great sales go-to-market motion. Yeah, right. Yeah It's the one gas, right? Like I think some of this is you can build a great product Yeah, bunch of people will come questions. How long like you got to keep feeling up the tank at some point on that one would imagine Yeah, right especially like the crazy growth rates people are seeing nowadays. Yeah, yeah, so I think that's so much of This is gas or whatever pick your metaphor. Yeah, we're just continuing to throw on something that's working Yeah, and that's a part that I really admire because it sounds like hey you all knew hey even with an open source community Even with PLG we still need top-down sales Which I think a lot of people you know companies I've talked to over years have said if I could go back and do it again I would wish we actually invested in top-down sales earlier right because that's just not the natural muscle Especially for a lot of developer tools, so like curious and you like hot you know hot take or less than layer It's just it just sounds like you all were like hey, we got to do top-down sales and something I do it was the it was already there Yeah, right and we have our our CEO and say like we The company have note knows what it's doing in that front for sure I think the part that really the lesson I learned over the course of time Especially now being front and center and kind of only a small sales team in all of it is PLG is actually really hard just to continue to build champions and other people who are gonna stand up for your Product inside some of these decent sized companies Turns out people leave their jobs every 18 months. So like your champion today is gonna leave any year from now Then like someone else inherits this deal Yeah, and then what do they get you next? Yeah, they might have worked with your greatest competitor And so I have really seen the light on how valuable it is. I'm just that Whatever where we want to call with their sales ongoing education customer success I don't know what word we want to use for it. Yeah, but like continue to build champions and folks that are gonna care about your product Internally is the big it one of the biggest unlocks. I've I've seen over the course of the last two years in particular Acrofana of the value of that and that's really hard to do in a pure PLG basis. Yes. I love it Okay, are there is there like any one playbook page that's worked really well for you is it that hey We make sure every time we go to a conference. We're hitting up so and so I mean like from a tactical perspective like Because I totally agree with you like the champion part is actually still I don't think there's a short cut around yeah I don't yeah, I yeah, I haven't figured it out right I mean maybe the products again It can be so if you're one of these AI companies and everyone can experience the value that's one thing But I don't know and at least at the current stage in enterprise I don't know typical enterprise software. I think that we're not there yet. It is hard Yes, that is still continues to be an issue You know for us and we saw version of this at digital ocean very different product very different space different time already a couple of years ago We spent a lot of time doing like this ongoing additional technical enablement webinars. We're providing to customers We're doing you know, I'm not sharing any overly secret sauce You can go on LinkedIn and see ourselves team talking about this on LinkedIn But like we'll go inside companies and run garfunny days and go in there and spend half a day talking to them about all our products And not just selling yeah doing hands-on workshops. Yes. Yes And we're trying to introduce them to our flavor. How we do logging in good funnel labs? Yeah, right totally might not be all that People might not be as familiar with because they're used to using elastic search as an example. Yeah, yeah, so when you actually have like the Like the VP of edge champion bringing people into a room have some lunch or have some coffee and we're gonna talk about You know log QL and the you know, what is elegant about it? That's kind of hard to get someone pin someone down to do that over a series of emails So I'll pop them in the product like that's really hard to convince people totally. Yeah, I mean, it's funny We we've talked about this with some of our companies like again Lunch and learns might not be feel like super sexy people always want to do like these huge conferences with like, you know All the splash but sometimes like a really well done lunch and learn technical talk like goes a really especially given your user Right so totally and I think some of the matters I'm like where you're at on it's like do you already have a lot of interest? Yeah, I had a lot of interest. There's a lot of interest And we were trying to figure out a few lit and let's say Curate demand at times versus totally generate it. Yeah, different parts of the cycle. Yeah And I was like super anti all the old like the the the the first wave of demand gen of like Marquetto hub spot. Let's do, you know, gated content and webinars And I was like when I came to the graphon we were starting to do some of those things So like what the I don't know if I can curse on us like what the fuck is this turns out? Actually when you're providing something genuinely useful. You're not there to sell And especially if people knew about us. We were open source product We were just literally there to help you see more value in what we were doing Yeah, it has the side benefit of yeah Now you're in our database now we can talk to you we can nurture you It's funny what's like what is old is new again as long as you're providing value And I think that's kind of the the take what I've seen in marketing developers You kind of the lead with value like offer offer offer offer raise yeah, so yeah, yeah The gate I mean the going back to just like be nerd out on like the marketing stuff like yeah, the gated the gated content I feel like now it's like swung the other way and it's like don't get anything, you know like just like you know The whole links and LinkedIn thing like just write the whole post in the post. Yeah, and let people and you know Get the value from the post. That's right. Yeah, and I mean, I'm curious what you're seeing on this as well But not like everyone out of talk to that's fairly early. I mean, it's even true. It's like Everything, you know, 50% of our like a massive percentage of our traffic. Yeah, it's unknown how it came here Right, which of our which of our content did it come from right? Yeah, it's the word of mouth Is it from some hackers news like what is it? That's I feel like the topic de jure I feel like in the conversations I'm having it's like how do I know it's working when yeah, I don't know you know now chat GBDs referring 8% much like how do I figure out what to do here? Yeah, it's a different rabbit hole But like that becomes I think the interesting challenge on PLG is like where the hell is this coming from? So how do I even have a sense of where to invest? Yes, I think that's the real tricky one I think I mean and again going back into like just this whole funnel because like again PLG had a high level sunscreen But there's a lot of there's a lot of things you have to do right I think yeah for to move a user from like Beginning to end right yeah a lot to talk about there so like I guess like there's people you know I see this where it's like you just to a point earlier It's like you don't actually always know either like why someone drops off right maybe it is the product is just like not good enough But like maybe there's other things that you need to build into the process so that they truly move through the funnel Yeah, right activation right and and everything around the user journey and personalization So like maybe if you can talk through yeah, we're bunching there Well, yeah, I think there's a few bits right like Maybe it's like as it relates to personalization It's like you know, what are the who's coming through like what are the segments of users that are coming through yeah, you know You know In the circles are fronted in DevTools You know, it is a feature that people are coming in as hobbyists, right? That is a feature of what we're trying to do yeah to be clear We would love everyone to come in and be like I'm ready to run you in production. Yeah, do this for like of course Right and but I think some of the job we're trying to do in the marketing and growth side right like somewhere in between those two things is Just figure out who those people are. Yeah, and how do we do everything we possibly can throw as many humans at it if we need to yeah Within reason yeah on the folks that are here to do something real yeah in a B2B contact I think number one that's like And what what those what examples of that might be it's like well, how are we gonna offer calls yep? How are we gonna get you in front of an SE right away like whatever it might be yeah, we're gonna Spend more money time and effort going after that relatively small segment Yeah, but on the hobby aside, it's not that we don't care about the like actually our goal We're playing long-term greedy there. We were trying to bring as many developers in to see value and use us First off, they probably want to talk to us and that's okay as well. Yeah But it's it actually works for everyone they don't want to hear from us And we're actually perfectly okay with to let them see value on their own okay, they're ready to engage with us I call so there's like some sort of segmentation right there like we want to make sure we spend as much time supporting Those that are here to engage in like a meaningful way. Yeah, and then there's a book and then you know that I guess in your data You know, hey, it's okay that we don't talk to them. Yeah, right? Okay. Yeah Well, there's a few ways that are like one week is like ask great bunch That's one thing we've done or we can very quickly imply it from like are they using a corporate email day in a gym now like that It's just like an easy way to bid them for us to say who do we won't not want to annoy just to be free, right? That's that's one way to do it And then there's the maybe what is that first? How do they engage with the product? Yeah, Fauna's unique at a unique stage We're a multi-product company. We actually were multi-product company fairly early So maybe depending on what you used first that might be show a stronger signal as an example right? If you came and you were starting in you installed our agent on a Kubernetes cluster even if it was in dev well We actually don't know where you're installing it, but we know you at least install the collector Yeah, cool very high signal versus if you were coming in and you know connecting some JSON to discredit dashboard Doesn't mean we don't value but just the amount of time and effort we might try and spend from a marketing perspective to try and connect with you Might be a little bit we put you down a different nurture stream and so on Yes, okay cool cool, and then I mean I am so curious of a nurture, right? Because even along nurture, there's like a lot of places where it could be kind of leaky, right? And how do you make it not leaky? And how do you keep them, again, nurtured and/or just not falling out? So it's, yeah, it's a good one. We're like in the mix of working on, you know, like one of our key nurture streams right now on the PLG side. And we were like, one of the guys on my team, we were just having like an update. I'm like, hey, what is the point of all this? And what do we expect? What's funny is like nurture can be a bunch of things, but like oftentimes we all just mean like email, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just to say that I like some of its email. Yeah, it still works, which is great. Does email still work? Okay, cool. Still works. There might be a bunch of other ways to play around with there right now. If you're, you know, interesting things we see is we're engaging with customers in Slack. Like we actually have a joint Slack. Yeah. How do you find ways like nurture very specifically there? Yeah. It's like non-trivial to figure out how to do that at scale. Yeah, totally. So there's something there? Yeah, interesting. So yeah, nurture matters, right? Yeah, yeah. And it mattered for a bunch of reasons. Oftentimes it's like a brand thing. Like I always like not piss people off. I mean, it just like not looks stupid. Yeah, yeah. It's actually very easy to do email and nurture. Yeah. Which is the problem. It's actually very easy. Yeah, too easy. Too easy. And you can, it's easy to look like you don't know what you're doing. Yeah. It's easy to just like have people on subscribe and not pay attention to you. So I think it does, it comes down to how do we say the next thing that might matter to you or actually shows value. Yeah, do the art of nurture. Yeah, right. And when we talked about earlier balance, balance. Yeah, that's right. Like so many of my these things are just cop-outs. Like I, you know, they become like philosophical discussions more than they are. They are. They are. Yeah, so I don't think nurture, I don't think nurture is dead. Especially if you're like, you have an email address. Yeah. But it just plays out slightly differently. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, I could ram, I could ram, for the first of most of my, my early days started. Like my first role in marketing after spending times like a growth PM was on like early days, HubSpot, Marquetto, like DG, sending the emails all the time. So that was like my first, so like, I'd say like the earliest center of gravity started there. And it's still and still there now. Yeah, still. Emails still there now. It turns out just like trying to get engages with people with your like sending them flyers or sending them email. Yeah. Message them in Slack or talking to them on Telegram. Whatever it might be. Yeah. Like we're all just trying to find ways to stay in touch. Yeah, totally, totally. Anything else again, on like the user journey that you're like, hey, this is what trips people up. Yeah, it's, it's so it's very context dependent, for sure, right? That's like the cop out answer. I'm trying to find a more broad way to answer the question. Uh, well, maybe a, maybe one way to talk about it is like, how do we even, how do we even measure it? Well, I'm so glad you said that because then like, because you know, you could have a bunch of people moving into your user journey. You're like, I think this looks good, but I don't know. Like is this good? This is not good, right? And you can, I'm sure there's so much on metrics, you and your team have kind of engineered over the years. Totally. So for sure, there's, I'd say there's like two parts of it. There's like the quantitative sound like, how do we, how do we know where people are dropping off? Like sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard. Depends on the product. Yeah. Um, and we have spent a lot of time over both companies, especially a digital ocean, which was a pure PLG company, trying to get this right. Fair. What is that magic? What is the activation? What is the, what is the, you know, Facebook, X friends and Y days? It turns out most companies don't have billions of users. We're like, you actually don't need that like crazy level of data science to solve a lot of these problems. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I think we've like often overcomplicated. Yes. In, I think that journey matters. Yeah. For its worth, right? Like a more philosophical, like more philosophy. Like the journey of trying to get their matters, you actually learn a lot more in between. Yeah. But I think what we've landed a lot of times is like, what is the leading indicator for that future magic moment? Right? Because what we often see is all these things that correlate with their saying value. They've added a bunch of users. They are starting to scale. Like those are actually all easy. We usually go from, there's, did they set the thing up, install the agent. Step one. Step one, right? Like literally the setup moment to even possibly see value. Yeah. Is one end of the spectrum. The other one is everything else typically ends up being someone that just like purely is correlated with their already seeing value. Like already there. Like in my mind, you seemingly go from setup to very deep into the funnel. Yeah. Very tricky to see in between. Yes. Yeah. At least with kerfana, we're multi-products. There's a lot of different ways you can see value in the experience. And you can probably drive yourself crazy trying to find all the correlations or causations. Right? And it just like ends up being an exercise. Yeah. In many ways. I think that's important. So what we've often found is that that setup moment really matters. Right? Because it's usually very indicative of what happens further down. Yeah. Yeah. And this is really when you think about again, a hobbyist who comes on versus someone who's working at a bank. Yeah. Right? Like is that onboarding journey the same for both of them? Or do you know, do you say, hey, look like what you touch and feel here is different if you're so-and-so? Yeah. It's, it's, this is, I feel like this is the topic we will consistently have is like when the rubber hits the road, we know we have hobbyists, we have folks here to try and do real, real use cases like how do we actually get them into a different spot? Sometimes we just ask, right? And the main thing we've done it, everybody, you talked to other companies seemingly everyone's doing this, the people say they're doing it for work. Hey, like let's do everything kind of get a hold of them so we can talk to them about it. Yeah. Outside of the product. Okay, so that's easy. I think the question is like truly how do you personalize the product experience that might separate it? I think that's, I hope other people have solved that problem. I haven't totally figured it out. Yeah. To be frank. Yeah. But the part we've, the basic things we'll do, which we can aren't rocket science, you can ask them about it and then give them a slightly different experience. Yeah. Or it can be implied. So like as an example, in the graphon onboard any experience today, you know, we basically are providing like two or three options to be like, what's the first thing you want to do? And like I'm ready to, I'm ready to get started. And now there's like, I'm still trying, I'm still trying to figure it out, generally speaking. In our world, what we've learned is there's a tremendous volume of our people coming through our phone every month or already aware of graphon. It's a beautiful part of our experience. And they're just trying to figure out how to use it a bit better, right? They're not as a here. They're actually with their, they have their corporate domain. Yeah. But they were to use it, maybe they're already using us in a commercial capacity or an open source. And they're just trying to like learn how to create a dashboard on their own and get a better more familiar with the product experience. Interesting. So we can basically separate things out from the, I'm down more of this learning path versus the, like I'm truly trying to poke around. Yeah. And that gives us a slightly better sense of things. And the reason I say that is because it becomes very messy when you're trying to give them all these different, too many different options all at once. So we like try to allow users to self-select. Yeah. What does that really do for the end user? Hopefully simplifies things. We have a complicated message at times to be fair. Yeah. So I think that like bifurcation, like one high level bifurcation, we found to be pretty valuable for us. Yeah. I like that. I mean, yeah, a few things. One is like someone just asked a user. Yeah. That sounds really obvious. Yeah. But sometimes you should just ask them, right? Yeah. And maybe, and maybe they will tell you, I think people just sometimes get afraid to ask because they think, hey, you know, is this annoying to ask them? Am I creating other obstacles or friction? Yeah. Yeah. It's too much for all of them. They're going to fall off the funnel. Like, maybe, but like, that doesn't matter. Maybe those people weren't like, yeah, you're maybe grabbing a straw. It also depends where you're at stage wise. Yes. Yes. Um, you know, I think something comes on having that data matters. Yeah. What I would argue is if you're asking people things and not doing anything with it, probably stop doing it. Yeah. Right? That's like the classic. I've folded it to this all the time. I was like, who are you? What are you trying to do? And then like, that just becomes like some piece of data that sits in some CRM somewhere, like doesn't get acted on. Totally, totally. And if you're going to do it, just change your questions. Yeah. That's the dead, simple tactic. It's like, after a while, you've already learned like the classic examples, like, how do you hear about us? Like, we used to do this all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And then like, after a week, if you especially have a big funnel, you already know, you already have all the answers. But then you have more questions, like a more nuanced. Well, which meetup did you hear about? Right. Right. Right. Like, you know, what are they? You shouldn't just like be afraid to change what the hell you're asking. Totally, totally, totally, totally. Um, and the other point, you're just finding, keeping it simple. Yeah. Which again, we overcomplicated at the end of the day, right? Oftentimes. Yeah. I think there's like two things that we often see from like a growth, I don't mean like a growth team side. It's like sometimes we overcomplicated because we're thinking about the problem really hard. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Uh, so that's one thing, right? And our users aren't thinking about any of this generally speaking. Yeah. On the flip side, we'll find that like, I think we believe one of our jobs as like a growth product, growth onboarding team, right? They help any get people into the PLG experience, uh, it should be into the product. Uh, we have to do the heavy lifting for them. Like, this is a product position, not a marketing position. Yeah. Uh, is we have to do all the, like, I think that's usually what separates good taste and developer tools and other things. Yeah. Yeah. We don't want to expose all the complexity to them. Like, how do we actually solve this for them and not have to make it the problem? So, I know, there's, there's this interesting balance we try to strike as we're thinking very hard about it. So sometimes we expose that complexity. Yeah. Where do we reduce it, especially during onboarding? Yeah. Totally. Totally. Um, this has been so fun. Oh my gosh. I feel like, I mean, there's so much more we can dig into. Yeah. I guess if are there any other hot taste or any other, you know, threads to your point that you're like, Hey, founders is about pre-founders or other operators who are in this world should know this that you're like, I talk about this all the time. This is like, you know, people hit me up all the time. I'm repeating myself about this all the time. The part we were talking about like demand gen and product marketing is like the big one. Like the part that this continues to stand out to me over time now is like domain experience. It's not about actually like having like domain experience. It's do you understand the market, do you understand the user, do you understand the product trying to solve? Yeah. By the way, that might be easier in some market. Like when you're selling certain types of software, right? And if you're selling sales software marketing software, maybe it's a little different. It's like the average person can maybe rock it. I think selling software developers very technical audiences, things become very abstract very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. People are not saying no the domain, the product, how to compare things. There's something there that a thing is what separates good marketing versus bad. We all know we're being marketed or sold to someone that can hold a conversation. Yeah. Yeah. And to me, the constant advice, which is balance at the end of the day is like, yeah, you got to go into the channels for sure. But people really know if you know what your like they can take a guess if you know what you're talking about, whether it's on the headline, how you're talking about your product on your pricing page, or if you're a salesperson jumping out of call, like how long can you hold a conversation? Like that's sort of the, when we interview some salespeople on my team, it's like how long can they hold a conversation before I know they know what they're talking about. - Yeah, yeah. - Is it a minute, is it five, is it ten? - Yeah. - I don't know how long is the right one, but it's gotta be a little while. - Yeah. - And you feel it in marketing too, right? So I think there's like, actually knowing that domain, the product, - Yes. - People feel, right? - Totally, totally. - So. - And I think that's the number one thing, perhaps that we talk about so many companies, especially at Seedsage, where there is just, can be very saturated spaces, or you're just selling to developers who are getting hit up from many, many different product lines and many, many, many different companies. - That's right. - Is how do you break through the noise? And I think what you're saying is the, is ultimately comes down to is like, you need to know what you're talking about. - You need to know that. - And developers have to believe that, right? I still think like, I really do think now is very challenging for what it's worth. But I think there's, it's noisier than ever. - Agreed. - And so, it sounds like all the different investments that Grafana has made, which is like, hey, we have an open source, we have a top down, we have a PLG, like all these things have helped in that. - That's right. - Right? Because otherwise, if you're only one channel or only kind of one stream, you know, it's just, it's just limiting, right? - Agreed. And like it might, it probably, like most things, your early success or first wave of inbound traffic or people who will start from our channel. And then to your point, it's how do you just continue to layer them on? I think Grafana has been very successful. We'll just continue to layer on whether it was products, go-to-market motions, kind of like, I think that has gone very well, generally speaking, whereas Digitlosh was a slightly different business, which it was like, yeah, if you could grab 1% of the largest market in software, like you're gonna have a lot of success and we sort of dominated a few specific areas and that worked. But slightly different playbook than we saw here. - Yeah. - I think the other part just to kind of tack on to one of the bits you were getting into, the tricky part to find is like the technical founders, whether like I just need someone who can help position the product. I think the hard part is, that might be true. They like, they want someone to come in and help solve it, but often they are the one that has a unique insight into the market. Like that is the obvious point here. - Yes, yes, yes. - And so it's, how do you find the right marketing partner in that order to help pull out those right bits? - Yes, yes. - And they're, the marketers domain experience, understanding, they, it has to be enough. Like going to ad agencies or something doesn't solve that problem. - Definitely not, definitely not. - It does not. Or yeah, even ones that are like in the space, there's a, like again, a cottage industry of technical branding and go-to marketing. So I think you're generally useful. - Yeah. - I don't know. That is the tricky part I think early is like, usually the founder is gonna have a unique insight. Obviously, that's right, y'all are funding them. - Yep, yep. - So like, how do you pull that out? I think it's hard if you don't have enough shared understanding. - I could agree more, I could agree more in finding. Again, that first marketing. I mean, truly unicorn, right? Because not only do they have to know PMM and DG, but then they have to work with the technical founder who may have very strong insights like likely. And then how do you bring that into the masses and into the world? And then also, by the way, break through all the noise. - Total, you're right. - So easy, such a chill jaw, right? Well, this has been so, so fun. - This is great. - Who do you think we should interview next? Like, who do you think is hearing your feds? Like, super smart that you also swap a lot of notes with. - My buddy Andy, who I used to work with at Digital Ocean, you may know Andy, or anyway, but he's as good as like a growth person I've ever come across. - Oh nice. - He's at Neon. - Oh nice. - He's at Dia, he's just a killer. - And Neon, but an awesome, awesome outcome. - Yeah. - That's so cool. - He's probably like one of the, who knows his best, right? He's actually the class that comes from computer science. Background, near by background, like gets it. - Yeah. - So he's, you know, one of the sculpted people at home trying to figure it out. - Okay, nice. The Dio Mafia, so strong. - Totally. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Are you friendly with like, um, Shaq and Brooke over advantage? - I need to, I don't know them. No, okay, okay, well. - Okay, they were Dio guys. - Oh my gosh, okay. - Brooke was like an early engineer. - Wow, that's amazing. - Yeah, so they're good. - And that runs D, that's over 10 years ago, right? - I think Brooke was like the first PM, but he was one of the early engineers there. And yeah, he's more importantly, fantastic humans. I think I've had a bunch of success as well. - Nice. Okay, cool. And the last thing is, if you were to fast forward through this episode, what do you think is like, the one punchy takeaway? - Oh, punchy takeaway. - Oh. - No, that's hard part. I don't know. I think it's like all about the art, the art of it. - Yeah, you know, it's funny, 'cause I agree. Just to be clear, it's funny saying that allowed. These words are coming out, maybe for the first time, of having, for me saying it, I wanna hear it. - Oh, but I think you nailed it. - Yeah. - Especially 'cause all my, most of my background is much more on the quantitative side of the marketing, right, the way the marketing analytics, marketing ops, DG, like the data infrastructure team rolls into me at Garfano, like I spent a lot of time on the data components of all things marketing. Yeah, but it turns out there is this art that matters when it's all said and done, especially right now, if we all believe that there's some of this is being commoditized, it's that art and how you gonna stand out, right? And I think you gotta support that with all the quantitative bits. But like, I don't think you're gonna iterate your way through looking at all of your data into solving some of the big go-to marketing. Sometimes your instincts matter, right? Having that unique insight, whether you're the founder or just the marketer, yeah, it turns out like all the things I've seen work, like the big wins at Garfano, D.O., they were like, hunches, early ideas, and then good marketers came in and just, go to market, people don't say marketers, growth people, whatever you wanna use, just like through tremendous amount of gas on it, right? And that's a good different skill set too. - And that is like, especially with seeds, like you just don't always have the data in the beginning. So you actually, a lot of these things have to be on hunches and instincts, right? And then of course, you scale from there, but yeah. - It's how long do you go on the instincts without gut checking, like is this working or not, right? - Totally. I will say, because I went down a deep LinkedIn deep dive of all your posts and like your fans post, like the comment section and just like the couple of love from the community, like, I just think that it was like so special to see, right? And like, you can't, I don't think you can manufacture that, like-- - I agree. - Unless you have, you unless you have, like, you know, the secret. - Yeah, I think the secret was like, we built great things, offered it for free or cheaper like for customers to see value in. So people love that, right? That was the same thing at DO in many ways. There was also this sense, especially a digolution of like, we were very, very reaction, like how, like, reactive very quickly, when people speak, had bad experiences, talked about this, probably whatever it might be. Like, it was just like, we cared about the customer experience, right? You know, like, it turns out like, what, who's the, are you a dog person or an animal person? - I mean, I love dogs. - Does the dogs like, so we have a dog and there's this classic example, maybe it's chewy, how they would like, someone's animal would pass away and they would send you a thing. There's like this, by the way, I'm not sure if it's a myth or a true thing, but like, the story gets passed around, which is the most amazing marketing policy. - Yeah, yeah. - And they like care about our customers. So I think like, what is the equivalent of-- - Yeah. - That maybe that's a morbid and that metaphor. - But I mean, the care and the local care, right? I think it, like, there are subtleties, whether it's the email you receive or the swag that is shipped, or how you respond on Twitter. Granted, some of this is more and more table six. People pay attention to what people are saying on socials. But I'm not saying that because you feel it, right? As an end user and like, how do you go developer or person by person by person? Like, that stuff that feels like it doesn't scale, you gotta start somewhere. Like, that is some of the early ways. - Oh, I love that. But actually, that is the takeaway. Just like, do the things that don't scale, right? And it is a Henry note. It is a box sometimes of something that is not just swag for the swag sake, but like, something thoughtful that actually matters to the user. And we're so obsessed now with online and LinkedIn posts and being thought leaders and yelling, yelling, yelling instead of just like, you know, sometimes like listening, really listening. - Yeah, that point can be applied to so many things. There's like two things that don't scale. Obviously, for sure, finding the right product market fit or building, you know, building a thousand true fans, whatever it might be. But it also applies to like, I don't know, marketers, PLG, people, like what I've seen at for fun in particular, so it's amazing culture. It's like very, very bottom up of, we don't wait for like, to have like these big, amazing solutions to automate everything. And like, we're like, how do we just like, ship the thing, how do we do the work, right? Like, do the thing doesn't scale. Like, hopefully do 10 of those things. 20 of those things, whatever it might be, to find the thing that makes sense to figure out what's actually investing in, worth investing in, from a go-to market or product perspective. - Totally, totally. - It's like, it's just do things that don't scale, do things that don't scale, and have the instincts or data to tell you, like, cool, like, now it's time to pour real gas on this. - Yeah, totally. I love that. - Thank you so much, David. - Great, thank you so much. - Awesome.