Benjamin Sklar

Really interesting perspective on how a GTM systems team can drive business success.

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Have you ever looked for theory that can answer - how to approach investors - what kind of product to build first - how you’ll defend the company against competitors This new article from CDA partner, Kevin Maney extends Steven Johnson's writing from the book Emergence to #CategoryDesign. All #Startups and #VentureCapital teams should dig in. (link to article in comments)

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What’s the key to unlocking AI’s true potential? Hint: It’s more than just hiring AI specialists. In his interview with TechCrunch, Gusto’s Edward Kim explains how we’re building an environment where everyone can leverage AI — creating a win-win-win for Gusto, our employees, and our customers. Discover how Gusto is using AI to empower businesses and teams: https://lnkd.in/dCj4brep

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In their recent earnings call, Reddit, Inc.'s CEO spoke to their investment in AI & machine learning, which includes testing LLMs to be used more broadly across the platform. He spoke specifically the ability to do translation at human-level quality, which will allow users from all over the world to connect. Not only will this allow the platform to be more accessible to non-English speaking users, but it will propel growth as the site becomes indexed on the search engines in other languages. Read the full piece below! #largelanguagemodels #machinetranslation #aitranslation #ailocalization #l10n #reddit #llms #generativeai #smartling #languageai #globalgrowth #earningscall

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Here's my commits/week vs. customers added. Not a perfect metric for total product effort, but a decent proxy. I get so excited about building products because, compared to consulting, there is unlimited upside. A fixed amount of product effort can make unbounded money while you sleep. (And yeah, I'm not factoring in time spent on customer support. Obviously that's rising with customer count and at some point requires hiring staff. But you get the point.)

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I hate to lose more than I like to win. I hate seeing "Lead Lost" or "Closed lost" on my SF reports, especially after reading the sales notes that say the reason of the loss was timing. If its timing, its not lost, its just not now. Then my next question becomes what can our marketing team do to turn that no into a yes, 3 months or 6 months down the line> Here comes nurturing. Now, I am on the receiving end of more than a few nurturing campaigns at any given time. I can't say that I've been particularly impressed by any of these in the past so this is my call to marketers out there... What nurturing campaigns have you seen that stood out for you, that helped a product stay top of mind, that build trust in that brand? #askingforafriend #marketing #enterprisesales

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How does a Senior Product Manager go from layoff to landing a Staff Product Manager role with a significant compensation increase? Join us as we chat with Nora Hughes, a seasoned product manager with a decade of experience in the tech industry. Nora shares her journey from being laid off in October to navigating the challenging job market. She talks about her initial struggles, including the overwhelm of job searching during the holidays, dealing with COVID-19, and the loneliness that came with it. Nora discusses how she discovered the Intentional Job Search (IJS) program and her thought process before joining. She highlights the program's structure and quality and how it helped her regain focus, prioritize effectively, and build confidence in her job search strategy. In this candid conversation, Nora also reveals her aha moments, including the value of peer interviews and the comprehensive support from the IJS community. She explains how the program's personalized coaching and strategic guidance were pivotal in helping her land a dream role as a Staff Product Manager in AI and ML at a large public company, achieving a significant pay raise and working alongside best-in-class professionals. If you're curious about how the IJS program can transform your job search and career trajectory, this video is a must-watch. Nora's story is a testament to the power of structured support and intentional effort in achieving career success. Key Moments in this Episode ======================== 00:00 - About Nora 01:00 - Challenges before IJS 02:45 - How Nora decided to join the program 07:30 - Nora's experience in IJS 17:30 - Negotiations 20:00 - Her message for you https://lnkd.in/eHEBAxpQ

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🚀 Is Headless Commerce the Future? With the help of our Salesforce Technology Partner Builder.io, Black Rifle Coffee Company was able to embark on a groundbreaking journey from Shopify to a serverless, headless-first stack with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. 🎧 Hear how headless CMS and Commerce Cloud empower Black Rifle's teams to build and deploy across web and mobile with ease and the game-changing role of AI in coding, testing, and shaping the future of #ecommerce.

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7. That's the median employee headcount for SaaS companies under $1m in ARR. Nearly half of those positions are in engineering. I'm often asked about headcount planning and it's so helpful to provide data to drive decisions. The High Alpha SaaS Benchmark Survey is live and it's full of data like this. Download the report now. (Link in the comments)

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Will AI replace solutions and sales engineering? Not likely—but it will change everything about how we work. I feel lucky to be in constant conversations with SE leaders. We’re trading notes and hearing about what’s the top-of-mind across calls, meetings, and private dinners that we host. We recently started asking folks on what themes around AI exploration are top of mind for their teams. Here’s what comes up again and again: Clarity on what AI can and can’t do. There’s a lot of AI companies — large and small — that promise the world and incredible outcomes. Leaders get excited, learn more, test in a POC (or even purchase), and then get disillusioned. It’s a cycle that we keep hearing about. Unfortunately, there’s no true shortcut here except more education on the latest LLM / RAG / agents research. A good proxy can be seeing the type of companies that have successfully implemented the AI solution and how long they’ve been using it in production, but it’s not a perfect one. At Arphie, here’s our philosophy as we use AI agents to help respond to RFPs, DDQs, and security questionnaires: We’re very clear from the get-go on what our AI agents can and can’t do. For example, folks sometimes ask if they can ship out the answers our platform provides out-of-the-box to customers. We tell them that on average, 50-70% of the answers can be used as-is, 20-30% can be used with minor edits, and the remaining will likely need more significant workshopping. Over time, as we ingest more company-specific knowledge and understand their writing style, we’re able to increase the % of usable answers — but we think human-in-the-loop is the right way to approach mission-critical responses. Are there other themes related to AI that are top of mind for you?

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Big news from Stigg: we’ve raised $17.5M Series A! 🚀 Our mission is simple but ambitious: to build the first unified monetization platform for engineers, giving teams the tools they need to iterate on pricing and grow without limits. With one API, Stigg syncs everything from catalog modeling to entitlements, usage tracking, and GTM integrations—making it easy to monetize modern software. 🚀 That’s the perfect time to join our team! Check out our open positions (link in comments) or talk to me! 🙏 #AI #Monetization #Hiring

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a note on intuition and building products (via mike knoop, founder - zapier, go follow him on twttr) -- Wisdom for founding teams is "talk to users". Over the last 10 years this has become the playbook for doing 0 to 1 work. As the advice became dogma, some founders forgot why it exists, and a new failure mode emerged: "the blind walk to product-market fit". YC popularized "talk to users" in response to the classic mistake of coming up with some idea in isolation, building in secret for months or years, and launching just to learn no one cares. Talking to users forces faster contact with reality. Your initial idea and and intuition are likely wrong in material ways, so you want to shrink the time to learn this. At Zapier, I tell teams to try and model this behavior: ship in the AM, demo to users in the PM. If you do this, you get 5-7 hits on reality per week compared to a team on a 2-week release process (or worse). This all makes sense and many founders conclude their idea, intuition, or experience don't really matter. They model finding pmf as y=mx+b where cycle time is "m" and the initial idea is "b". In this model, founder intuition gives them an initial head start but impact is quickly overtaken by iteration speed. This leads them to heavily discount or even outright ignore their own experience and intuition -- many get stuck doing a fast cycle, but ultimately directionless, traversal through the pmf maze. The modeling mistake here is the "m" term is decomposed into (iteration speed) * (intuition). Every time you make contact with reality, you learn something new. And you get to decide what to do with that new information. Should you ignore it? Update but carry on? Change directions entirely? This is why intuition is important. Your idea and experience do not just establish initial position on the Y-axis. They are a multiplier on every decision or change you make. The faster your iteration speed, the more overall impact your experience can have. If you're ideas are right, they are right faster. If they are wrong, they are wrong more obviously. All other things equal, founders with experience in a domain outperform blank-slate founders doing the blind walk.

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For most SaaS founders, this summer probably felt like a wild ride 🎢 Seasonal slowdowns like this are normal, as consumers and employees alike take time off to travel (and buy less software) However, *this* summer slowdown was far from normal... 📅 It lasted for over 4 months, and... 📈 There was even a "false" recovery, before SaaS crashed back down It's difficult to determine an exact reason for this summer's volatility, but its likely that 2024's strengthening economy gave consumers the confidence to take longer vacations and travel internationally for the first time since COVID. (But if you have any of you own theories about this summer's slowdown, I'd love to hear them in the comments!) All that said, despite the volatility, September's ProfitWell by Paddle growth data brought great news - the summer slowdown is finally over, and SaaS has rebounded! 💼 B2B SaaS averaged 5.3% CAGR, up from 0.3% in August 🎁 B2C SaaS grew to 12.7% CAGR, up from -5.3% last month The good news doesn't stop there either. B2B has much more room to grow, with new sales still ~5% lower than their pre-slowdown average, and downgrades still elevated by ~15% above their average. Taking this into account (along with the Fed's September interest rate cuts) SaaS is set to have a stronger Q4 than we originally forecasted, surpassing our estimates of 11% & 8% CAGR for B2B and B2C respectively. So, for the SaaS founders in my audience who struggled this summer - give yourself a pat on the back for weathering all this craziness. You made it! It's all uphill from here 📈 P.S. If you want to watch the full breakdown of this September's growth data, check out the latest edition of the SaaS Market Report, with myself and the great Karthik Puvvada 👇 https://bit.ly/4faD9fr

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😱 Fear of #productmarketing? If you're a high growth company (or aspire to be one) and you're not doing a lot of these tactical and strategic activities, your likelihood of success is quite low. Someone on the team needs to be doing all / most of this 👇 , whether formally called out in a separate and distinct role or not. 🤷‍♂️ How does Sales, Customer Success, Account Managers - and CUSTOMERS - know what functionality is coming out, and why they should care and how it'll help them? 🤷‍♀️ How does the Marketing team know whom to target and what points to drive home in its campaigns? ❓ How does the Sales team know how to show its differentiated value to the right audience, and win deals? 🤫 Hint: it's product marketing!

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It will be interesting to see how this dynamic changes things. Even if the #SaaS pioneer changes their #pricing model, there are bound to be shifts. Customers for whom the old model was great may balk at shifting to the new, while others will jump at a pricing structure that is now better suited to them. Assuming that WTP will remain constant across the existing customer base regardless of the pricing configuration feels like a HUGE risk. While SFDC wants to extract the maximum value from its customers... evolutions in the tech will ultimately mean that customers NEED LESS Salesforce to accomplish their goals. Can Salesforce also evolve and retain its position as indispensable to customers? Pricing is often an optimization strategy. How can we get more by capturing latent WTP. If I were SFDC, I would add to this strategy (not replace it) a strong look at the market not currently served due to price. I'd want to know if #AI allows SFDC to serve markets that they currently cannot profitably serve? Opening new TAM > shuffling the deck chairs IMO. There's a pride to being the premium provider that can undermine your goal of maximum revenue. #cmozen

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We’ve had lots of people SUPER EXCITED about @attio’s email sequencing launch today. Here’s how our team made email sequencing less boring! 1. So why build our own sequencing tool? Say it with me - DEEP INTEGRATION. Sequences works with your live CRM data - allowing you to pull variables directly from a Person, their linked Company or any another referenced Object. If data gets updated, we pull the new values automatically into future emails. 2. It's 2024, no launch would be fit without some AI features - step aside spintaxing, enter AI personalisation. Insert AI-generated content and tune it directly inside the editor - include user-specific variables in the guidance to help generate more accurate personalised content. In order to build a more cohesive sequence, AI generated content is given the full context of the email, as well as each variable configuration. 3. Any sequencing product worth its salt has OOO detection - however to take this to the next level, we combined classic heuristic-based detection techniques, with the power of modern LLMs. This hybrid approach allows us to take advantage of the smarts of AI, without the humungous GPU bill from scanning every single one of the 10s of millions of emails we sync a week. This not only detects OOO replies, but also dynamically alters the delay between future emails so that nothing is missed while your recipient is enjoying some sand 🏖️ 4. Isn't it annoying when a sequencing tool doesn't integrate with your specific booking tool - and follow up emails get sent despite your recipient already taking action? Sequences uses calendar sync to detect if a meeting gets booked (either directly or via tools like Calendly), and let's you automatically exit them from receiving any more automations emails! 5. For some reason - people really care about ACTUALLY getting their emails delivered... As part of Sequences, we've completely redesigned the way we deliver, with one of the major advancements being a new workspace wide delivery pipeline. This ensures that we spread out both sequence and one-off emails throughout the day, massively improving successful delivery rates 💯. This - alongside a suite of settings to control delivery windows, business day only sending and threaded replies - brings on a new era of email in Attio ✉️ 6. Last but not least we have delegated sending - again another permissions and UX nightmare in other products. In Attio setting up a Sequence for delegated sending is a breeze 💨 - simply invite your colleagues to pick which mailbox they'd like to send from, and in one click they're now setup to either have Workflows send as them, or be used manually by another with access to the Sequence 🤖 And of course... WE ARE HIRING This new product is enabled by an insane amount of technology we've built out over the years - as well as some fun new bits (🧵on scaling LLMs soon 👀). Like solving hard problems? https://attio.com/careers

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My teammate Sean O'Brien, asked me an interesting question while we were discussing how epic it is that, moving forward, very small teams (1-3 people) will build significant software products thanks to development agents like Replit. He asked, "Does all software melt to N-of-1 solutions over a decade?" Essentially, will all software be a highly personalized experience where the software adapts to the needs of a single user or entity. Cool question. My current thinking: Not all software will melt to N-of-1 solutions, but the trend will likely dominate for many categories... Likely to Melt:  Consumer-facing software, productivity tools, and AI-driven platforms (e.g., CRMs, content creation tools). Less Likely to Melt:  Regulated industries and foundational infrastructure where standardization and compliance outweigh personalization. I predict we will be looking at a hybrid landscape: general frameworks at the foundation and N-of-1 solutions flourishing in user-facing layers. Over a decade, most software will have no choice but to embrace elements of personalization and adaptability. For many investors, I think most of the ROI is to be made in the regulated industries as only a select few companies on the consumer-facing side will own almost all use-cases. Am I off the mark?

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