Blake Hutchison

Really well illustrated diagram on Growth Loops - an essential part of product led growth. Your key takeaways: -Reduce friction to getting to an Aha moment -Make it easy to share and add others to your product in a free/viewer mode -Make it easy to pay -Make sure your product gets more valuable the more people use it What are your thoughts? #product #design #plg #quantana

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This just keeps getting better and better 😍 ... As a recovering perfectionist, the scrappy early days of building something from 0 to 1 are highly uncomfortable for me. Add in the variable of about ~14 other people you need to work with to pull something off, and you've just taken that discomfort level from 10 to 100. But I'm learning to love it - this process of being OK with something evolving over time, learning and improving as you go and I'm growing a lot as a person as a result (if I can say so myself...!). I am SO proud and grateful for the amazing team of volunteer correspondents we've gathered to bring together Pulse Check (the new monthly newsletter from Overnight Success). They've been super patient and flexible as we've worked through the scrappy bits of pulling it together and now we're all seeing the rewards in the form of not only more subscribers (we'll crack 400 this month! 🤞 ), but also genuinely valuable, engaging content people are loving! 🎉 . If you haven't already, check out this month's edition and you'll find these gems... 💎 Kirstin Hunter & Preethi Mohan launching the first ever Investor Leaderboard for our 'Funding the Balance' initiative. Gav Parry offering a super insightful perspective on the role of tech innovation in the music industry. Lea Rausch's insights about Aussie startups going global, as gleaned from chats with Gecko.rent founder Ben Kennedy and Maxine Minter of Co Ventures. Berenice Chong putting a spotlight on the new Curtin University Venture Studio. Andrew Harding talking about Main Sequence's investment into the fascinating world of sustainable apparel dyeing via Xefco. Erin Howell answering the question - WTF is the Bitcoin halving...? Dickie Currer giving the 101 on how Australia's innovation ecosystem stacks up globally. Leila Oliveira with tips from Bae Juice founder Tim O'Sullivan on lessons from their recent fundraising round. Holly Clark explaining why agritech innovation is so challenging, feat insights from Olympia Yarger at the recent FutureAg Expo. AND Anna Mackenzie sharing her ever-insightful and perfectly articulated case for 'optimising for creativity' (and ideas on how to do it!). Phew..! It's a lot of amazing content all in one edition! 🤓 Check it out 👇 🚀

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Introducing GTM Mentors APAC, a new series by talking tenets. Episode #1 Nathan Schubert: The new SaaS economics of Go To Market - Implications for Sellers & Sales Leaders A GTM and RevOps expert with a unique background, he's also been an AE. Most recently he was Head of GTM - New Products with Go1. He believes that unit economics are broken in many SaaS orgs. Lean is better to combat the challenges of unit economics and the importance of optimizing CAC payback time. The way in which SaaS companies achieve this can have far-reaching implications for AEs. If done well, AEs could find greater support from a unified sales, marketing and RevOps team, be laser focused and intentional on a the right customers, at the right time. Done poorly, AEs will face more pressure to do much more, with less support. 🔗 Listen or Watch now (Links in comments).

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“Top sales reps don't get laid off”   I've seen this a few times recently.   On paper it's hard to dispute.   But let me tell you a quick story.   In 2021 I helped a pre-IPO firm build their GTM team in ANZ.   We spent a year recruiting the best folk in the industry.   AEs. SEs. CSMs. Channel. SDRs.   All genuine A-players.   They did great. Signed some big logos. Tracking well.   Then the CEO announced they were pulling out of ANZ.   The entire team was let go including the VP.   It was properly shit. We felt terrible but no one saw it coming.   Now I can't speak for the rest of the world, but if hiring in APAC you've got to take this into account. Many SaaS firms completely pulled out of region here. Stop assuming good people dont get laid off. Being ignorant will cost you.   #techsales #gotomarket #saasrecruitment

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Nick O'Neill is the greatest sales person in the southern hemisphere! The way he has helped Hype & Dexter | 5x APAC HubSpot Partner of the Year | Part of the Avidly Group grow over the years has been absolutely incredible. If you want to learn a thing or two from one of the experts in HubSpot and sales, tune in to the new RevSpot episode! Listen Here --> https://lnkd.in/e2nWjVGE #revops #crm #sales #ai #marketing #service #hubspot

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Do you work with Startups or Scaleups? When our Founders, Startup / Scaleup Leaders, or Startup Employees join Aussie Founders Club's free membership on Frontcover, they then unlock exclusive offers for products and services. On the list, we currently have offers from companies like: Rapha: 6 months FREE on their recruitment system Heatseeker: A 30% disount on their subscription which gives you access to tools for generating value propositions, conducting live competitor audits, and running in-market experiments Mayfly Ventures: A free 45 minute Product Strategy Session HubSpot: Discounted access to Hubspot for Startups which opens you up to MANY MANY offers for startups BetaTrends: A 25% discount on their analytics subscription Granton: A free 30 minute consult to discuss eligible grants for your startup ScoreApp: 50% off your first month (I love Scoreapp) Informly: 10% off your Idea Validation report (I've used this - their reports are incredible) Also offers from my own businesses: Kairos: Offering exclusive AFC rates for your first hire placed through Kairos Mployd: Discounts on services for startup employees looking for work I've got many more in the works but if this sounds like something you and your business wants to get across, getting you in front of your target market and supporting them with an exclusive offer - you can! Fill out our EOI form and we will be in touch - link here: https://lnkd.in/gWqN32cb

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At Forum we look at thousands of deals each year across our Accelerator and Pre-Seed funds but only end up investing in a little over 1% of those startups.  As an early stage VC, I am in the business of saying no to nearly every startup I meet, and while there is nuanced rationale for many of the startups I pass on, a vast majority of businesses that don’t meet the qualification to get funded typically fall into one of two buckets. ▪ First time founders have a tendency to go out to market too early to raise pre-seed capital ▪   I’m sure most founders have heard some iteration of this from VCs that ultimately pass on their business.  In some cases it's a blanket excuse covering up for other pass reasons- perhaps a VC doesn’t believe in a team or isn’t bullish on the market opportunity - but in many cases founders simply haven't proven enough to the market to warrant an investment. I meet many teams with an articulate vision for the product that they want to build, but they either haven't performed enough customer discovery to prove demand for their initial wedge product, or need to raise pre-seed capital to build out an MVP.  In those cases, pre-seed investors are unwilling to underwrite those risks.  To be default fundable, teams need to be able to keep costs low, perform extensive customer discovery, and ship some version of an early product - pilots and early paid customers are key. A huge piece of this is having founding engineering talent on the team. ▪Not every startup is a venture opportunity ▪ By definition, a venture backed business is solving a problem within a market opportunity so massive and so desperately needed, that its growth rate is off the charts.   It spreads like a weed, absorbing almost unlimited amounts of capital to fulfill demand within its customer base.   Each year there are maybe 20 companies launched that ultimately have venture scale outcomes. The bar to reach this rarified air is unfathomably high and the reality is the vast majority of founders simply aren’t building for opportunities that have the potential to be one of these generational companies. Many startup founders view VC as the only viable option for capitalizing their business, but not every great business is a venture business, and most successful founders never take VC dollars.  In order to reach an IPO/acquisition large enough to generate venture returns, a startup needs a credible path to $100s of millions in revenue. This is the standard by which early stage opportunities are evaluated. The flip side to this, and I share this feedback often with founders I meet that are building interesting business in non venture markets, if you are able to scale to $10- $20M in revenue that can be a massively successful outcome for a founder.  There are investors who focus on these type outcomes, namely lower middle market PE shops, and the typical path to those deals is a bootstrapped business or a friends/family capital raise.

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How Dovetail grew to a $970M (Australian) valuation in 5 years—and created a new SaaS category: I chatted with 4 members of their team, and 4 UXR leaders, to learn the details. 1. Product-led growth, design-led company Dovetail's business model is decidedly product-led growth. The company relies on the product, and inherently viral features like research reports, to acquire, convert, monetize, and retain users. But design-led is its culture. CEO and co-founder Benjamin Humphrey has been in the details of the design since its beginning. And the product "feels" like it as a result. 2. Creating a hub for a neglected persona Rewind to 2016. While engineers had JIRA, Designers had Sketch, PMs had Google Docs, and analysts had Tableau, User Researchers had... nothing? Their workflow was a mess of hopping between different software. Ben had lived it as a product designer at Atlassian. There was a plethora of software focused on how to build, but there was almost nothing about what to build. So, after proving out the idea with an MVP, he recruited his Atlassian Engineer friend, Bradley Ayers, to join him. 3. Mastering the PLG motion Dovetail excels in all layers of PLG: → Acquisition: they don't use any outbound sales, focusing on product acquisition → Core problem communication: the home page emphasizes improving how you make product decisions → Reduced friction: its onboarding is focused on a standard walkthrough, but it is 10 steps → Activation: Dovetail has an intuitive product, examples, and templates to take you from setup to habit → Retention: as a system of record, the product gets stickier as more (qualitative) data is put in it → Monetization: the free plan has unlimited functionality, but only 1 project → Expansion: it has a natural growth of free users, who eventually become editors 4. Creating powerful, reinforcing growth loops Dovetail 2 two core loops: • More paid seats helps them build a better product, which helps UXRs succeed, which drives more UXRs and paid seats                                 • UXRs succeed, driving collaborators to join, which go from free to paid seats As well as 2 ancillary loops: • The more paid seats, the more it can invest in inbound sales • The more free seats, the more expansion products like Channels (to analyze customer support data) it can build 5. Building towards a category of one While there are competitors in the research insights space, Dovetail is building out its own category. It's not quite transcription. It's not quite a hub for research. It's that and more. This has helped it create its own, new category in SaaS. As Benjamin, still the CEO, told me: "We're building a system of record for all insights... It's a friggin' long, 20-year journey. You need to be a little nuts to have that level of ambition. "

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I'm putting together a Team of people (sort of like a big Partners Team) interested in exploring and potentially co-funding (or symbiotically partnering) around various Internet, Technology and Startup-related opportunities together (no matter whose ideas they are). Sort of like a Partners version of an LP. I'm about to give away $5M+ of emerging IP and Tech from my Tech Portfolio/Library, so a lot of people with better connections than me could potentially profit like crazy. It's all in the form of about 300+ technology solutions, platforms, APIs, SDKs, Apps, Websites, etc, which are already creating so many partnership requests it's insane... so, I want to have a bigger Partners Team in place - because we don't do everything. For example, I just got off the phone with an Investor who owns a Payments Provider company that is an alternative to Square, Stripe, Paypal, etc. to be a default payment option with a higher risk-acceptance for these $250k, Customizable E-Commerce Shops we already have Clients on, but are now about to release as free SAAS. He's in btw. We've got IP and Solutions in our Library/Portfolio ranging from: Voice (voice-activation, voice-enabled, voice-recognition, voice-searching, voice-commerce, etc) to AI to CarPlay Tech to Global APIs, 256-bit Encryption Tech that passes Enterprise-Level PEN Requirements + Tests, Website Installer + Replication Tech, Loyalty + Rewards Tech, tons of E-Commerce (stand-alone, Square, Stripe, Paypal, Venmo, Cash App, Authorize, Zelle, Native E-Wallets), Native Swift Apps (and templates) for iOS, Native Android Apps (Java), CRMs, Affiliate Tech, Tracking Tech, Real-time GPS Tech (both browser based and Native Mobile App based), sophisticated back-end Admin Dashboards with tons of data-friendly architecture and export / reporting capabilities, automated PDF generator tech - and the list goes on and on. I also have 2 live Apple CarPlay Entitlements now - the 2nd one took 10 months to get and my current Partners Team and I are almost set on tweaking a current CarPlay App we have to create something brand-new and extremely BOLD - for one of the biggest industries there is. Give me a shout. I'm looking for some go-getters - because we're about to go get a bunch of things.

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Early Stage Startups HIRING NOW!! 👇🏼 - Startup Opportunities Worldwide - Jobs - 39 early-stage (all have < 50 employees), founded by REPEAT founders🔥 - Big thanks to Ben Lang for curating this list and thanks to Jean Kang for posting this to your network!! 🙏🏼 - Guys you don't want to miss these updates: follow Ben Lang and Jean Kang - they are posting some impressive content!!!

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49 founders and senior startup leaders respond to a survey from Sifted on the relationship between founders and VCs. Are expectations off from the start as VCs try too hard to pander to their founders with over promises of "value-add" and extensive platform teams? Do founders need to be reminded of their primary role - execution?

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How Dovetail created a new SaaS category while growing to a $970M (Australian) valuation in 5 years: (I learned the details by having a chat with 4 members of their team, and 4 UXR leaders.) 1. Product-led growth, design-led company While Dovetail's culture is design-led, its business model is decidedly product-led growth. The company relies on the product, & inherently viral features like research reports, to: • Acquire • Convert • Monetize • And retain users 2. Creating a hub for a neglected persona Let's go back to 2016. While: • Engineers had JIRA • Designers had Sketch • PMs had Confluence • Analysts had Tableau • User Researchers had... nothing? Their workflow was a chaos of switching between different software and tools. Ben had lived it as a product designer at Atlassian. While there were many softwares focused on how to build, there was almost nothing about what to build. So, after validating the idea with an MVP, he recruited his Atlassian Engineer friend, Bradley Ayers, to join him. 3. Mastering the PLG motion Dovetail excels in all layers of PLG: → Acquisition: they don't use any outbound sales → Core problem: the home page emphasizes on improving your product decision-making → Reduced friction: its onboarding is focused on a standard walkthrough → Activation: an intuitive product, examples & templates → Retention: as a system of record, the product gets stickier as more data is put in → Monetization: free plan has unlimited functionality, but 1 project → Expansion: natural growth of free users, who become editors 4. Creating powerful, reinforcing growth loops Dovetail has 2 primary flywheels: • More paid seats help them build a better product, which helps UXRs succeed, which drives more UXRs & paid seats • UXRs succeed, driving collaborators to join, which go from free to paid seats As well as 2 secondary flywheels: • The more paid seats, the more it can invest in inbound sales • The more free seats, the more expansion products like Channels (to analyze customer support data) it can build 5. Building towards a category of one Dovetail is building out its own category even though there are competitors in the research insights space It's not quite transcription or a hub for research. It's that and more. This has helped it create a new category in SaaS. To learn about the complete story and breakdown, check out the deep dive here: https://buff.ly/4dBAdHs

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How much ARR do you generate for every $1 you spend on Sales and Marketing? The answer is your magic number. It's probably my favourite GTM metric. It normalises well across companies and timeframes. Here's how Monday has performed over the last 10 Quarters. Surprisingly it's fairly middling. Much worse than companies like Atlassian ($2.34), Datadog ($1.07), Crowdstrike ($0.83) But better than companies like Asana ($0.19) , Docusign ($0.16) and Box ($0.06)

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something different on World of DaaS pod with Sam Parr : we dive into the realities of raising kids after a big exit. Sam's super candid about wealth, parenting, and why most VCs mess up community businesses. Lots of insights for founders here:  https://lnkd.in/e8THCQ2V

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This drove a 26% CR increase 🚀 A 30% ATC increase... 🚀 And 16% more orders... 🚀 Liz Fedorak @ Ethique came to Because🌈 with this problem: How do I quickly stand up personalization on my website without getting my developer involved? And once I know it works, do I really have to ask my developer to now hard code it long term? This is one of my favorite things about the platform we've developed at Because🌈. It's a CRO solution like you've never used before. We don't BS you when we say it's no code like most of the legacy personalization platforms out there - it REALLY is. You can actually use Because for not only messaging AB testing, but also long term personalization implementations on your site. Once an AB test performs well, you can choose to publish the campaign live to 100% of the audience... (like for example what Ethique did with a quiz personalization message to a Klaviyo segment of users with a specific quiz result). This would traditionally take weeks to scope and build with developers (or a painful process in legacy platforms), but with Because, the Ethique team was able to stand it up in less than an hour. Fully connected into their Shopify site 🤝 Fully integrated into their Klaviyo data 🤝 Anyone else recently struggled with this problem? I'm happy to chat personally and walk you through a demo of how Because works. Booking time for first week of December right now so shoot me a DM ✨

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“The deal team tends to forget about the ambers and greens, even though they often outweigh the reds”🚦 That was the feedback shared with me by a seasoned CEO who is now running his third PE-backed company. He was making the point that traffic light (or “RAG”) ratings for diligence findings are usually effective for helping to focus the mind of the deal team on the single-most impactful diligence findings (usually those flagged as red risks). And this is often what is required to get deals across the line⏩ ⚡However, when it comes to operating / integrating the newly acquired asset post-closing, in the aggregate, it is often the lower-order issues identified in due diligence that require the most attention and are those that are most neglected by the deal teams. 🔰 With a degree of compassion, he acknowledged that “you can’t really blame the deal teams. Investment committees and boards rarely have any interest in discussing ambers and greens”. 📄 It is for this reason that some of the more sophisticated corporates and financial sponsors are now broadening their internal reporting and dashboards. 🖼 The goal being to expand the viewing pane through which diligence issues are considered holistically and integrating feedback from the management teams / PMI advisors earlier in the diligence process. One Head of Corporate Development told me that “we used to include a list of the top ten (or so) risks and their mitigants in our board submissions. Now we share a dashboard of all of the findings and we make sure we take into account the feedback of our ops team before we do so”. No doubt to the relief of management teams and PMI advisors, this approach seems to be increasingly common. Although, by way of contrast / light relief, I was also recently talking to the Global Head of Corporate of a large advisory firm about their innovations in the space of diligence. One example he gave – with surprising enthusiasm - was the recent introduction of a traffic light system into their DD reports… Fortunately for them (and their clients) this was not the only (so-called) innovation… #manda #dd #duediligence #pmi #ragreports #dontforgettheambersandgreens

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The IPO markets are back? Service Titan set to go public at over $7bln valuation Not quite…. I met the awesome team at ServiceTitan 6 years ago and was so impressed at the trust they had built in their brand. They are the operating system for houses and offices. One stop shop for all your needs. * $685mln revs growing 24%. * 110% net dollar retention & losing 183mln (but wait my VC is telling me you need to be profitable!) * 70% of revenue is subscription Two points. Firstly that means they are will coming at at 10x revenue (which is on the upper end of what a company like this would trade at in public markets). That is just where software is these days Second, the reason they are going public now is that they have a “compounding ratchet” which put a deadline of May 24 after which they the series H investors compound at 11% IRR quarterly and effectively own more of the company. These ratchets are rare but they do happen and push a company to go public even if they don’t want to or market conditions aren’t favourable. Every VC investor will be praying that Klarna Service Titan kick open the doors to the >1k unicorns that are in the stables ready to roll out.

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Never pitch unprepared ❌ Use this template to nail it every time: 1. [Company] is a [offering] that [value prop]  Example: "Acme Inc. is a SaaS platform that cuts IT costs by 50%" 2. We're targeting the [market] market, which hit [market size] last year  Example: "We're targeting the cybersecurity market, which hit $200B last year" 3. We're up against [competitor1] and [competitor2], but we [key differentiator]  Example: "We're up against McAfee and Norton, but our AI-powered threat detection is 10X faster" 4. We've [current state]  Example: "We've launched our MVP, have 10 pilot customers, and are closing a $1M seed round" 5. We're looking for [the ask] to help us [goal]  Example: "We're looking for intro's to Series A investors to help us scale to $10M ARR" See what I mean? Concise, compelling, and crushes all the key points. No more rambling pitches. Ditch the fluff. Tighten it up. And go get that bag 💰 Like what you see? Follow me Jimmy Acton for more! Comment and share if you love this content. Another credit to Chris Tottman for the amazing Brain Dumps content!

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I keep pinching myself over the partnerships we're building in our business. It surely can't get bigger than this? Gymshark, LVMH, Lounge Underwear - even the Sydney Roosters are powered by Patchworks. To be partnered and working together on solving customer experience problems for their Shopify clients is next-level exciting. Jim Herbert and the team have built a world-leading platform. While we're still young at Order Editing, it's a massive vote of confidence that we've built a robust app that the biggest brands on Shopify need. They spoke to their merchants and learned how much time is wasted in customer service each day changing addresses, applying discount codes, merging orders and every other ticket we self-service. This partnership is a no-brainer. With Patchworks, we create an editing period that gradually tightens as we get closer to the same-day shipping cut-off. This small window will self-service all your support tickets and drive upsells as customers add products to their orders. Turning order editing tickets into thousands of dollars. #Shopify #Ecommerce #Customerexperience

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