The TL;DR from ServiceNow’s GTM strategy: 

1. Reputation is how you’ll get started: Having advocates to help you win business based on your reputation early on can be a big lift, but it won’t take you all the way. Understanding the persona you’re selling to and how to speak their language is also critical.
2. Build specialist teams to target new personas that your core team cannot reach: Your team will do their best, but solution sales will be necessary for the first push. This is especially true before you specialize your sales team by customer type. 
3. You’ll have to simultaneously push your core product and your new products: If your sales team neglects the core product in favor of the new product, your revenue might suffer while the new product gets started. Finding a balance is crucial to creating excitement about new products and keeping your sales team meeting quotas. Look for adjacencies where a new product will make an easy cross-sell.
4. Keep sales teams focused with guardrails: The temptation with new launches is to go too cheap or too wide. ServiceNow avoided this trap by setting a minimum contract value with pricing floors.
5. Don’t over/under-index too quickly: These things take time beyond the one or two quarters that Wall Street will push you to have. Gather as much data as you can in order to learn what’s working over the long term. As Kevin says, “It’s not just about whether we could build this great product. Should we build this great product?”

We hope you enjoy this interview with Kevin.

The highlights: 

1. The starting position is perhaps the most important
2. Everyone needs an Eric Hemmer to help the customers: Eric was a scrappy generalist who was willing to lead customers to the next level. You need to make sure you have the right people as you start to expand, as they will set the DNA of the organization. If your employees believe you can be a platform, your customers will too.
3. Follow a maturity model as customers grow
4. Building platforms is about balancing trade-offs
5. Focus on creating the best experience, not just being first

Taking inspiration from successful bootstrappers like Basecamp, Userflow rejected the typical venture-backed path. This discussion gives insights into Userflow's techniques for efficient development and scaling while maintaining work-life balance. By bootstrapping, Userflow has been able to stay nimble and make decisions based on customers' needs rather than chasing fundraising milestones.

Esben shares the differences between his previous venture-backed company and Userflow's bootstrap mentality. He also discusses Userflow's ambitions, which center on continuing to build a great product and business rather than pursuing an exit. For any software founder considering bootstrapping, this interview offers an inside look at how Userflow has made it work.

We hope you enjoy this conversation with a new bootstrapped legend. 

To his mind, it was Merkle’s culture that has propelled his company to approximately $2B in revenue and 15K employees. David believed in the importance of culture so much that he would personally train every new employee on the 25+ beliefs of the company. 

The belief in his team and in his company also started with a belief in himself. He acquired Merkle when he was 24 years old for $5.3M. To save money while he was raising the money to buy out the company, he moved his family into his grandmother’s house in a retirement community for almost an entire year. From there, he bootstrapped the company for another 20 years before raising outside capital. 

Ultimately David and Merkle’s story is about the power of compounding. What happens when you consistently, constantly, relentlessly give your best to a company for multiple decades? The answer is simple: magic happens.