Mike Stone

Saw the news today that PivotalTracker is shutting down. Although I haven't used the product in years, PivotalTracker was, to me, the perfect example of how opinionated software can supercharge a development team. All software embodies a process. The best tools are ones that not only record information but drive your process and your team forward. If you tried to use PivotalTracker but didn't follow their process, you'd find the tool would not work well - and so you'd be forced to adopt their process (which was a good process). Other tools that are more general, like Jira, let you do whatever you want, which often results in teams with poorly defined or loose processes, which results in teams that don't operate effectively. RIP PivotalTracker. For me, its legacy as an example of what opinionated software can do to make a team operate with peak efficiency will live on. https://lnkd.in/e3_jvQ9g

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Thanks for the insightful pitch strategies. When can I get a slot to pitch to you?

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Lots of misconceptions about what product-led growth really is. So I sat down with the man himself, Wes Bush to go deep on: - what PLG really means - Who it's for (and who it's not for) - How you can think about implementing a true PLG motion in your business. Even if you're sales-led today, this is a great listen cause it talks to the psychology of a buyer a lot. https://lnkd.in/d4VvJmru

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Looking for a Product Leadership role? Explore these top opportunities to drive innovation, lead teams, and shape strategy at these companies: 1. SVP, Product Management – MasterControl, Salt Lake City, UT (Remote) Lead product strategy and development for MasterControl's quality and compliance software portfolio while managing the product management team. MasterControl provides cloud-based quality and compliance software to over 1,000 companies in life sciences and regulated industries. 2. Group Product Manager - Microsoft Security Service Edge – Microsoft, San Francisco, CA (Remote) Lead Microsoft's Security Service Edge (SSE) offering, driving product strategy and development for Microsoft Entra Internet Access and Private Access solutions. Microsoft is a global technology leader with 228,000 employees across 190 countries, focused on empowering every person and organization to achieve more through technology. 3. VP of Product Management – Benevity, Seattle, WA Lead product strategy and development for Benevity's Finance Platform, managing a product team while driving vision, roadmap execution, and platform operations. Benevity is a B Corporation that provides social impact technology to Fortune 100 companies, enabling corporate giving, volunteering, and other social action initiatives. 4. VP of Product – Banyan Software, Chicago, IL Serve as a key executive leader at SoftSmiths (a Banyan Software portfolio company) responsible for driving product strategy, innovation, and execution in the energy sector, initially working independently with potential to build a product team. Reports to the CEO of SoftSmiths, working closely with VP Technology. Banyan Software is one of fastest-growing private software companies in the US that acquires and grows enterprise software businesses with dominant positions in niche vertical markets, operating with a permanent "buy and hold for life" strategy. 5. Director of Product Management – Mark43, New York, NY (Remote) Lead the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) product line and Mobile applications, managing a team of 2-3 Product Managers while driving product strategy and development. Mark43 is a technology company that develops cloud-native software solutions for law enforcement and public safety agencies to improve community safety and quality of life. 6. Head of Product – 0x, San Francisco, CA (Remote) Lead Product team overseeing consumer and developer platforms while driving product strategy and fostering team growth. Reports directly to the CEO. 0x is a Web3 company providing developer APIs for token access and liquidity, having processed over $130B in trading volume through major platforms like Coinbase and MetaMask. Want more Product Leadership roles? Access the weekly updated database: https://lnkd.in/gq9qY6s4

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There are so many vendors, and so much noise in the market right now. It's hard to tell what anyone does, harder to figure out who’s delivering value, and impossible to differentiate one from the next. I’ve been talking to a lot of VCs lately, and they all feel it in their portfolio companies - even good companies w/happy customers, great products, and strong net retention - just can’t get the market to believe (or pay attention to) to the success they are delivering for customers. It’s a huge problem - everyone is struggling to generate pipeline and opportunities, and struggling to win new business when they do get conversations. So what are we (as a market) doing about this noise problem? YELLING LOUDER (and more often) More emails. More calls.  Emails informed by intent data.  Emails informed by AI w/intent data context.  aiSDRs. Auto-dialers, AI-driven video at scale. Inbox creation/rotation/warming.  Signal-based emails. Microcampaigns. “Quick question”.  “Are you the right person?” “Q4 Priorities at %%Company_Name%%” You can have the most advanced technical outbound setup in the world w/Clay linked up to Unify linked up to HeyReach w AI Layers and Human Layers and waterfall enrichment, and all this (pretty damn) impressive/clever tooling, and could have downloaded the entire brains of Brendan Short and Mark Kosoglow and then trained an AI on them on how to set this ^ all up... But… the gains are only incremental at best, b/c the bigger problem is the channels (ie email, LinkedIn inbox, soon to be phone) are just bombed out. My inbox certainly is a mess - but interestingly enough - I’ve gotten so good at scanning/deleting an email about lead generation services that’s clearly AI-generated in about .35 seconds - that ironically I don’t actually get that many well thought out human emails. So what’s my prediction for what works for cold outbound in 2025? Well nothing really - again the channels are bombed out and anything that does work won’t be a silver bullet and will only be a small incremental improvement.  But if there is one thing that might sort of work in 2025… I think it’s a return to manually written, well-thought out outreach. And a whole bunch of dials :) Long-term I think we need to rethink the underlying problem of trust and attention in B2B though - there’s a whole lot of energy being wasted.

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Fyi: Funding / IPO / Equity of “Founders”: For the St. Louis Region and Beyond, #EcoNetworkSystem for #Founders, #StartUps, #Entrepreneurs, #Innovators, #SMB’s and Others. All of content: “SaaS founders — if and when you IPO, how much of the company will you own? Many folks throw around a couple key checkpoints. The first one is founding teams should try to hold on to 51% of equity after the Series A raise. That’s a fine goal (although many great companies don’t have that and still go on to wonderful outcomes). But how about at the end of the journey? Disclaimer: this is not Carta data and it's only 34 companies. But I still find the info collected by Jason M. Lemkin at SaaStr fascinating. Standout points: 1. The average ownership across the entire founding team at IPO was 22%.     2. The "first founder" (usually the CEO) had significantly more equity in companies with 2 co-founders (often about 2:1 ratio). Now - there are significant outliers here. The founding teams at Atlassian, Klaviyo, and ZoomInfo all IPO'd with majority ownership. Atlassian at 75.4% is an outrageous mark, kudos to them! If you remove the three high outliers, the key benchmarks look like: • 75th percentile ownership across the founders: 22.3% • 50th percentile: 17.1% • 25th percentile: 14.4% Does that feel like too much? Too little? The range is gigantic, from 75% down to 2%. And it’s definitely possible that founders across the board took some money off the table with secondary sales, etc over the lifetime of the company. Seems like every path to IPO is distinct enough that comparison is just an academic exercise. And hey, 2% of billions is still a lottery-level outcome. Here's to this damn IPO market opening back up soon, for everyone's sake 🙏 #founders #startups #dilution #fundraising #IPO -------------------- 𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘢 Some of these companies may have more co-founders than listed who aren’t large enough shareholders to show up in the S-1 cap table.  For purposes of thinking about equity ratios, the focus was on identifying folks with >= 5% ownership or who were named officers or directors. Stock option grants may not be fully included in these numbers which would push ownership numbers a little higher. Data from Jason Lemkin & SaaStr | Chart by Peter Walker _____ #StartLouis Where “StartUps” Start. Ed Schneider ——- For the St. Louis Region and Beyond, #EcoNetworkSystem for #Founders, #StartUps, #Entrepreneurs, #Innovators, #SMB’s and Others. _____ (O:081024-0219p-(147) -(R:0319p). _____

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Maven is having a killer quarter after a strong last 12 months. People rarely share this publicly, so here's an insider look into how we've navigated product/market fit: Maven’s initial launch was wildly successful. We started a movement. The phrase we coined, “cohort-based course,” showed up in countless startup pitch decks. We were on a $4M GMV run rate in 3 months. It was intoxicating. After the launch energy faded, we faced reality. We had no product: we were hand-holding instructors behind the scenes. This resulted in a 73% instructor revenue retention rate, and many instructors were telling us we weren’t critical to their business. Today: It took 2 years, but we’re now at 120-140% instructor revenue retention. Our business is growing despite a tough market, and professionals are actually using (and loving) our product to speed up their careers. We made a few critical decisions that led to 3 big breakthroughs: Breakthrough #1: We started by looking at follower counts; now we focus on real professional expertise. Our first persona was creators with 100ks of followers, but Maven was often their 3rd or 4th priority. Simply put, they didn’t NEED us, but they were bringing in a ton of revenue. We shifted away from creators to experts, eventually losing 95% of our first $4M in course sales. This shift took 2 years, but it worked – Maven now has hundreds of “subject matter expert” instructors who have spent 10-15 years in their field. Today, Maven has its killer value proposition: we offer ambitious professionals access to the experienced operators to take their career to the next level. Lesson: Persona is key. Focusing on who really needs your product is more important than short-term traction. Sometimes the early signals are wrong, and you need to course correct. Breakthrough #2: We started as a platform; now Maven is a marketplace. When starting Maven, I envied the Substack business and modeled Maven off of it. Maven would provide software while the creator would bring the users. This was a failure of “business by analogy.” In the course world, instructors didn’t value software the way creators did in the newsletter world. They demanded we create a marketplace, and students were increasingly asking us why they couldn’t easily find great courses on Maven. I knew from my time at Udemy and Lyft how hard it is to build a two-sided marketplace, so I resisted this for 1.5 years of heavy internal debate. Eventually, we launched the Maven marketplace. Now, hundreds of thousands of students browse Maven’s courses to find something that can help them in their careers. 25%+ of all course sales come from Maven’s marketing, which has been critical to our instructors and students. Lesson: Find your own path. You can be inspired by other companies, but ultimately every market and situation is different. Be willing to change even the big things when your customer demands it. I reached LinkedIn's character limit so check the comments for the rest!

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Some tools I'm using in many of my consulting engagements right now (steal my tech stack—"Good artists copy, great artists steal": (For context, the type of engagements I'm doing include: automated PLG workflows, inbound automation, scoring, micro-campaigns, and automated warm outbound/signal-based selling). ~~In alphabetical order~~ [CRM] Attio (a new one in the mix) HubSpot Salesforce [Data] Apollo.io Clay (a spreadsheet with APIs into 80+ data providers and LLMs) Sumble ZoomInfo [Miscellaneous] Chili Piper (Lead routing) Default (next-gen lead routing) HeyReach (LinkedIn automation) Ocean.io (Lookalikes) [Signals] Apollo.io Champify Common Room Koala Orchestra Pocus RB2B UserGems 💎 ZoomInfo ••• The alpha is not in the technology. It's in the strategy. Remember, avoid catching "GAS" (gear acquisition syndrome). The tools used to execute the strategy is merely a means to an end.

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Hot take: The most impactful systems builders rarely come from IT. They come from Sales, Ops, Customer Success—the people who live and breathe the problem they’re solving, who’ve been told “no” more times than they can count, and who can’t help but think about optimizing every process in sight. These are the builders who see the inefficiencies hiding in the day-to-day and chase solutions to make things truly better, faster, and smarter. They’re the ones I want to see at the center of the future we’re building, not sidelined. But here’s the key: both IT and these frontline builders have to buy into working together. And I’m hopeful that AI can finally bridge this gap, helping each side speak the other’s language with minimal effort. When AI accelerates what no-code was always meant to be but hasn’t fully delivered on yet, we unlock the real potential of collaboration—systems that don’t just work, but transform the way we work. Let’s get there.

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Positioning is everything for job seekers right now. > The Product Manager who owns the roadmap... vs. the one who's turned user research into a competitive advantage > The Partnerships Manager who "has a deep rolodex" vs. the one who knows how to monetize > The Eng Director who's led teams of 30 vs. the one who's brought revenue-generating products to market with speed and efficiency Same people. Two different ways of talking about their experience. One makes them sound like everybody. The other lands interviews. Do you know what your competitive advantage is?

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Very energized by the customer workflows I’m seeing incorporating Zapier core, Tables by Zapier, Interfaces by Zapier and Central by Zapier! Whole applications and ecosystems are being built and they are all powered by Zapier! If you haven’t heard of the solutions above, you’re not late but folks are certainly bush whacking no code and it’s just a whole new category of automation! #zapier #builders #automation #saas #central #tables #interfaces #chatbot #zapconnect #automationforeveryone

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@Founders - Do you think you know what SaaS means? If you are an early-stage startup and you write "Software as a Service," you're thinking about it wrong. It needs to be "Service as a Software." At the end of the day, we are in the service business and productizing processes that people struggle with. This leads into my thoughts on demand-driven development. Cast a wide net on who you think needs your product (ideally from your experience and background), and then, like the game "Guess Who," circle the people that need/love the product and "X" out the people that have no interest. Each time we did this, our wide net became more like a spear, becoming very effective against our target market on who can use our product today. Using this data, we were able to work backward from each iteration and figure out the features people needed and jointly partner with others to develop things we couldn't even dream of. Here's to the next set of announcements coming your way 🥂

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Does negotiating with development agencies feel like a puzzle? It doesn’t have to! On this week's SaaS Founder Stories, I chatted with Kurt Willis from Boro Dev Agency, LLC. We talked about how to align your tech needs, investor expectations, and development goals. His biggest lesson? Transparency and flexibility are key to a successful partnership. If you’re scaling your SaaS and working with dev teams, this episode is a must-listen. 💡https://lnkd.in/gU88cK8E #SaaS #TechLeadership #StartupGrowth #DevAgencies #StartupAdvice

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Hot take: killing features is as important as creating them. We just killed our first feature in Peek. Even though we've been out in the market for barely 2 months. We decided to get rid of the feature "Concierge." The "Concierge" was a chat window designed to let users ask our team any personal finance questions, promising responses within 24-48 hours. From "Should I pay off my loans?" to "What’s my FIRE number?" Sounds like a nice feature right? Since it's a free for all for users to essentially ask anything? There were a few things wrong with concierge: 1. Mismatched Expectations: Users accustomed to instant responses from AI chat windows found the wait time for human responses underwhelming. 2. Lack of Focus: The open-ended nature of the feature made it hard for users to understand its purpose, leading to confusion and underutilization. 3. User Guidance: Most users need prompts to identify valuable insights in personal finance, and chat isn't always the best format for this interaction. We're still committed to improving insights in our product, but we'll be delivering them in a different way. It's important to kill features that don't add value to the product. Every part of the app must have a clear purpose: to solve a problem or delight the user. And it may seem harmless to have a little-used feature It might feel harmless to include a little-used feature in the app—sometimes there's sentimental value or sunk costs associated with features you've built. However, hoarding features that don't add value can create bloat, detracting from the overall user experience and value. Sometimes...less is truly more.

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I love data. Especially people data. It helps answer those lingering..."is it just me...or?" late night questions. The OpenView SaaS Benchmark Survey is one of those annual ones I always read and reference with the founders I work with. That's why I'm so excited that High Alpha is partnering with OpenView, Paddle and Kyle Poyar to launch the 2024 annual SaaS Benchmark Survey. And guess what -- it's live! If you want early-access to the report, be sure to participate and we'll be back in November to share insights. Link to survey below. https://lnkd.in/ey9FAgYV #SaaSBenchmarks

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The other day I met with a founder & CTO who advises and scales early stage companies - with several successful exits under their belts. We talked about “what exactly is Rev Ops” and how if done right - we are a lean / mean strategic investment to drive GTM operations at scale. Many founders are doing exactly this type of work. But when a founder has to focus on sales, or marketing, or pmf, or, or, or….who is taking this lens. So we talked about the purposeful investments in ops and the strategic need for Rev Ops. Driving cross business alignment of gtm operations, tooling, data, and business strategy that fuels the revenue creation engine. Knowing what levers to pull by when, how, and to what outcome. Don’t grow at all costs. Don’t grow inefficiently. Grow sustainably using the levers you already have in your business. #revops #growtherightway

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“Build an MVP…just get something out there and get feedback” is conventional startup wisdom, but I don’t think it applies universally and definitely not so much today. With so many vertical SaaS companies built over the past 4 years, and so many more that can be built on top of AI + APIs, a feature or one core use case may not be enough to survive. Getting users by being great at one thing isn’t exactly hedging your bet when features can be built in record time. Workflows or user experiences that connect to various products and offerings are more likely to resemble platform plays that have been the biggest winners in web2, such as Meta and Salesforce. You can replace feedback on live code with product research and interactive prototypes before you start and build flexibility into the use cases. Below is a provocative headline we may not totally agree with, but to me it’s clear I’d rather be a platform play with a big swing and some hedge in the bet, than betting the house you will get the first feature right or have the time and money living in a niche with limited scope to pivot.

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Some software companies make it really f***ing hard to buy their product. 😡 I had an experience recently, And thought how that would look if it were an in person interaction. Lil’ awkward don’t ya think? 🤔 Here’s the thing - I’m not some giant #PLG advocate who thinks every product on the face of the planet should be self-serve and that sales people aren’t needed. You do need sales people ✅ You do need to ruthlessly qualify your prospects ✅ And because the above are needed, you’ll naturally have some friction in the buying process. But most software companies today have OVERCORRECTED for this. So what to do then? Here’s what I would do 👇🏻 Find some feature set that can deliver value to your customers immediately, and package that into a self serve version of your product. Look at your sales folks as a “sales success team” (eg more like a customer success team), Who’s job is to share best practices, provide additional use cases for the product, and unlock the extra features needed for your customers to accomplish these things. Easier said then done, I know. I also know that some products are so inherently complex that self-serve seems out of reach. But think of all the things we have now, that used to feel out of reach. 🤔 So just because it doesn’t seem possible, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, egh? Happy Monday y’all ✌️ #revops #revenueoperations #salesops #salesoperations #customerlifecycle #buyingprocess #buyerexperience

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