Go-to-Marketing Strategies for Startups [HubSpot]

[Music] anytime I'm doing a presentation I like to start with good news so when you look at this it is good news so what I'm the statement I'm gonna make is there's arguably never been a better time to be a startup then now so when Brian and I mash our two co-founders got together from MIT and started HubSpot back in 2006 it costs them about two hundred thousand dollars to start HubSpot fast forward to 2017 arguably the same amount of costs are today in 2018 2019 what cost them two hundred thousand dollars now cost them

about twelve hundred dollars today so it's good news right it's never been a better time to be a startup on the contrary it's never been a harder time I guess to go from a startup to a scale-up what I'm showing you here this is basically the marketing landscape that has almost 7,000 companies in it but back in 2006 there's about 50 right so when you think about it's arguably never been a better time to be a start-up and it's harder than ever to be a scale-up because there's so much competition out there so why is

that happening well today buyers are really in control right so when you think about the go to market strategy it's never been a better time to be a startup it's harder to be a scale-up there's a ton of competition out there buyers have a ton of control we have to change the way we go to market we can't just hire salespeople have them cold call and annoy a buyer today so the way we go to market has changed and we have to adapt what's interesting this is a statistic that says 77% of a prospect or

a potential customer has done research on your product or service in your brand before they've even reached out to you before they've chatted with you online before they've given you an email they have read your about Us page they have looked at your team they have they have done the background information and research on your company so when you think about that right you have to be really smart about how you're going to go to market how you're gonna interact with people because they know a lot about you already 77% of people know about you

already and what's interesting when we think about a go to market strategy often when I say go to market I mean marketing and sales but we'll talk today about product and customer service and how that ties into it as well if you take a look at this you've got doctors nurses scientists teachers you've got you know sales people marketers stockbrokers car salespeople politicians and lobbyists right so it's not very good news if you're out there being a salesperson or a marketer today you're not very trusted so what do we have to do to you know

allow our buyers to trust us to build trust during that process is a really important thing so we're gonna talk about how this all fits in today but I wanted to frame it and when you think about being a salesperson or a marketing person it's really about how you can help right what problem is your customer trying to solve what are they doing research on and then how you can help them is a question that at HubSpot over the years I've been at HubSpot for eight and a half years in the sales or the whole

time and we start every conversation with how can I help you came to HubSpot you told us you chatted with us you filled out a form you told us you're big a biggest marketing challenge was lead generation how can I help you right that's how the sales conversation has to go because I can't just interrupt that person's day-to-day I have to help them as a trusted advisor so when you think about that just think about the landscape and how things have changed and think about how you're gonna adapt your own go to market strategies for

your business as we think about setting this all up right and we think about the go-to market I like to say there's really three phases phase one is the MVP phase you're really just trying to get initial traction you're going out there talking to your friends and family and you're just trying to get anyone who will be a customer because you're really trying to get and collect as much feedback as you possibly can then there's product market fit which two years ago I would have told you lead with customer acquisition unit economics you know are

you acquiring your customers at peace and how is that it doesn't look healthy on how you're actually acquiring them what's interesting is now when I do a lot of mentoring and talk to startups the number one thing we're talking about is customer success so when you think about do you have product market fit so many people think that's like are you acquiring customers and are those customers growing with you I would argue we're going to talk about today why customer success is a really important metric for how you're starting to identify if you have product

market fit what's also really cool about this and I'm starting to see it internally inside of HubSpot is over time our customer success org has felt like a second-class citizen what's happening now is we're shifting it's all about customer first it's all about the customer you know hubs why does product market fit what I'm telling you today is we started to shift and think about customer first a little too late so what we always try and do inside of hub spot is take all the mistakes that we made as a start-up and a scale up

and tell all of you so that you can grow faster you can be more successful than HubSpot and you don't have to make the same mistake that we made so that's where a lot of this is coming from today is that we don't want you to make the mistakes that we made and the mistake that we made back in 2010 so HubSpot start in 2006 2010 happened we had a churn issue we were acquiring a really great customers and they were leaving us we had to stop everything and figure out how to actually solve that

churn problem we're going to talk about today is if you actually think about product market fit as you're acquiring really good customers and they're growing with you I think you can avoid that problem and then the third stage is growth and scale so we'll talk today about how you're gonna hire the right people create a repeatable hiring process and then grow and scale that over time I've got like some scorecards and we can talk about some data around who the right people are to hire early in your business so that you can grow and scale

and then we'll talk about alignment and operating systems and some pricing and packaging as well this is an interesting chart I actually really like to talk about it because when I speak to startups what's interesting is they'll come to me and they'll be like we're growing 200% you're over here and I was like okay great so your customer acquisition is great how many customers are you keeping six months from now they don't really focus on that right and I'm a start-up CEO I'm just focusing on getting customers today Kim okay well how many customers are

sticking with you six months from now so when you think about this chart you've got two options option B I'll say that one first is it is it it is in my opinion not the best option is you can grow one hundred percent year-over-year and you can have fifty percent revenue retention so you acquire 100 customers 1213 months from now only 50 or left option a is if you could focus on product market fit with customer retention and customer happiness is you're gonna grow at a hundred percent year-over-year and your revenue retention is gonna be

a hundred percent so you're gonna acquire hundred customers this year and one hundred customers are gonna stay with you next year and then as you think about new products and services that you can release you can actually start to sell more to your customer base and you could arguably say Kim we're not looking to sell more we're looking to add more value we're looking to solve more of our customers problems over time that's what you that's the scenario you get into as a growth in a scale up mode if you can take option a to

a path of healthy growth this is something back at HubSpot we have been maniacally focused on this like I said we had a turn problem in 2010 you probably heard other people from HubSpot talk about that but one of the reasons what this is just I would say like irrelevant data don't look at this and say wow like this is not real HubSpot data just so you guys know but what happened is this you know back in 2010 if you look at this at month 13 it would be all red month 12 would start to

be like yellow and orange month 10 yellow and orange so what happened is we acquired customer until like month eight they were happy and then something was happening this is a chart that shows really good healthy growth that says okay we're acquiring customers month 12 and month 13 you know we're losing some when they're going for their annual renewal but what's happening in 113 is based on a pricing and package model about addition upgrades and more seats they're paying us more so they're paying its who are acquiring a customer they're growing with us they're paying

us more on their renewal which is great so that means it's healthy growth and then in month twenty five they're still sticking around is what you can start to look at if you do these cohort and heat map analysis is you know is it green and then there's something happened in month twenty five and then you want to continue to drag this out you know what happens at 36 months what happens at 37 months and really start to analyze this so what I'm really trying to say here is the real product market fit me equals

are your customers happy it sounds so simple but it actually is really hard and when you think about like why is Kim saying that product market fit today equals customer happiness is because this is a subscription economy is here the buyers in control if you today you know if I don't want Netflix I don't I can cancel by the click of a button if you don't want to continue with HubSpot you can cancel right it's all about are we adding value to our customers and are they happy because things have changed and if you think

about this is a cool stat that we use all the time about it's from HBR is that acquiring a customer can cost anywhere between five and fifteen hundred and twenty five times more than retaining one so when you think about your LTV to CAC and you think about your unit economics what this is saying is it's it's better math to acquire a happy customer and have that customer grill with you then continue to go out there and be on this hamster wheel and just acquire as many customers as you possibly can again a lot of

a lot has changed right and what I'm telling you today is a lot of the mistakes that HubSpot has made and about two years ago we realized that we were telling everyone it's about a funnel it's about an inbound funnel it's about marketing spends time on the top of the funnel they generate leads and then sales closes those leads and then they you become a customer well the thing that's wrong with this is a customers are an output of the input of mark getting in sales and when we realized again with our mistakes is that

that's just wrong customers aren't the output a customer has to sit in the in the middle customers are everything so our services org our marketing or gar sales org all have to be aligned around the customer and I'll share with you how that I'll share with you a little bit more details about how that looks inside of HubSpot but this is a revelation we had so I wanted to share that with you because it's no longer about the funnel now we call this a flywheel and the customers at the center I will give Amazon a

shout out they do this I think better than anyone and we probably learned from them on that they have growth at the middle of their flywheel but customers are on the right of it which actually I think like ties into the growth which if you look up the Amazon flywheel you can see it and then when you think about the go-to-market operating model what I wanted to share with you here is that when you think about on the y-axis the cost to acquire a customer and then customer acquisition an average sale price is what is

your go to market model do you have a channel sales team are you doing a partnership model where you want to have a channel sales team that works with partners and then those partners share the message on your behalf already have an enterprise sales team if you're forming an enterprise sales team right out of the gate what I would say to you is you should have the average sales price to support that enterprise sales hire do you have an inside sales team or do you have a touch of saquisili model like an ablation where you

actually don't need salespeople right your customers can come to the website and they can purchase without talking to anyone that support that process is pretty cool we'll talk a little bit about that today but I'll share with you if you are going to hire an enterprise sales team or an enterprise sales hire you probably want to have an average sales price of at least 25,000 for the year if not more if you don't have that pricing and packaging strategy the chances are your unit economics don't make sense and the cost to acquire a customer and

keep it doesn't justify hiring an enterprise sales rep so with that ASP you'd have to go with an inside sales team and then when you think about the channel sales Enterprise sales inside sales and tuchis acquisition how are you acquiring those customers when you have a channel team it's when you want to leverage that partner ecosystem to resell your product or service if you have a touchless model you should have transparent pricing and self-service so that the customer doesn't have to be sold or talk to a salesperson if you have an enterprise sales team you

probably should have a pretty complex product that requires a solution architect to support this enterprise sales rep if you have an inside sales team you probably have you know a product that needs to be explained and what we see a low and we're are doing a lot of mentorship with startups is they think they have a product that doesn't need to be explained and then they want to go to transparent pricing and self-service but they don't acquire customers and then they're in this really interesting situation where they actually need to hire a salesperson and they

don't know who they should hire so when you think about that the inside sales team you want to think about those as sort of like inbound consultants where they can actually understand the buyers pain point and consult them on the value that your products gonna add not an enterprise sales rep where there's a lot of complexity and they need a solution architect so again we talked about looking for a success indicator right how do you know you a product market fit and it's about customer happiness so here's a couple examples early on inside of hub

spa what we said was is the customer using five plus apps are they using five plus apps in a period of 30 days that was an a leading indicator of success and if they were using five of our products by 30 days it meant they were doing a good job on our onboarding and that likelihood and predictability score that we gave them that they were going to be successful was pretty high here's just a couple examples you can either using X features by day 7 by day you know whatever you decide daily active users weekly

active users they have their entire sales team using HubSpot do they have their entire marketing team using HubSpot the other one which is pretty cool is do they have a power user you know is there someone in there that is the administrator that is logging into the system or your product or service every day and are they having success with it if you can identify a power user what happens is that person typically goes on to become your champion and help you over time and then they become really happy and they you can start to

use them as references and things like that so again it's the importance to a line around the customer success you know all this sounds so easy when I like talking about it it is really really freaking hard and when you think about customers today you know you can buy a Tesla online by clicking a button and then it will arrive you know 14 days after and you don't have to talk to anyone what's cool about today's world is customers love simplicity the number one thing that I think frustrates customers and I know it frustrates my

me as a customer is when I've had a really cool buying experience and I haven't had to talk to anyone who want to have a really shitty customer experience I need to talk to some of there's no one to talk to right like that's just who do I call you know I have to go to Twitter and then I have to follow them and then I have to direct message them because that's the only way I figured out that I can talk to people right so I think as you think about that as you know

founders and CEOs of your own business you want to create this seamless you know customer acquisition channel with no friction but then you don't want to invest and worry about are my customers happy and that's a little bit of backwards thinking and this is from HubSpot research but we always like to share a little bit of data points for you here but if you can work on making your customers happy 55% of them you know we'll talk we'll share good news about you which is awesome 46% of them will be glad to be a customer

reference and let you come in video them and let you put their face on your website and they're telling the world how great they think you are that's awesome right your customers can sell your products way better than a salesperson at the bottom so when you think about that product market fit it all ties back to you is your customer happy because if your customer is happy they'll do a lot of work for you you can put them on a customer panel if you go to any HubSpot event and you see our customers on the

customer panel that's by design we want them to be there we hold the quarterly company meeting and we invite our customers to come to that meeting and give us feedback because we want to hear if our customers happy right everything that we're starting to do and have started over the last couple years is all about our our customers happy part two is okay all this sounds great but how do you get the internal alignment piece so this is where I'm proposing and a bunch of startups that we talk to you on a daily basis has

really started to do this and then I will share with you my global team we started to do this as well and what we've done specifically within our team is we have a monthly meeting and I used to start it with all of our metrics and we did like a home run like yay here's how great we're doing here's a hockey stick chart up into the right that's now at the end and what's at the beginning is a customer story and then from the customer story our customer onboarding and then we start to dig into

the data how are we doing with our customers so we've shifted the entire focus of running the business when you think about the alignment here you've got sales hiring right so hire someone who wants to help your customers don't hire someone who just wants to take their money the sales compensation I'll get into an example of how you can compensate your salespeople but you can put some really interesting customer happiness and revenue retention metrics on your sales compensation customer success and onboarding you know measure that compensate the customer success or gone onboarding happy customers marketing

define a we call them Q ELLs and I'll talk to you a little bit about what that means but that's a qualified lead you know compensate marketing on how many qualified leads are they actually driving for the business and then product and engineering talk to them and align all around like customer enhancements what are your customers the happiest and products should know that right production just be sitting in a siloed area building all the coolest product that they think is cool they should be listening to customers in building that product right the other thing that

I'll share with you and I have seen a bunch of startups start to do this not every startup founder is making the decision to hire a full-time voice of the customer role but you can get pretty creative around this and you can hire a voice of the customer role part-time you know and look with someone in your organization that likes to help and make sure and you know gets joy when people are happy hire the voice of the customer we have this role inside of HubSpot now and it works really cross functionally and they arguably

have the loudest voice inside of the company it's an important to give them that voice and then we back this up with data I want to share with you that 74 percent of voice of the customer programs that companies roll out are successful so when you think about how you gonna grow your business in a healthy way again I'm repeating myself a lot but it's all about the customer right so this is a really cool way from a programmatic perspective to you know hire someone in there or have someone do it part-time and then just

give them some eating cadence I give them 20 minutes at the beginning of every meeting to talk about the happiness or of your customers you start to see the SLA with product marketing and sales and then what they do in a monthly recap meeting within the company they align product marketing and sales in that meeting and it's not just marketing in sales anymore it's all three combined so when you think about this only 33 percent of companies have an SLA and it necessarily is really great because you know way back when I first started HubSpot

I used to love selling HubSpot to marketing because I knew what it was like when a VP of Sales came into the room and said to marketing you're not generating enough leads for our sales team Marketing would be like we're generating a ton of leads to your sales team your sales team isn't just following up on those leads so when SLA is a really good commitment level within each other to say okay I'm a head of marketing I'm the head of sales and I'm gonna in marketing I'm gonna generate 500 leads a month for you

and I need that your sales team to follow up on every single one in a time period that actually matters if a lead comes in a qualified lead or a high intent lead and a sales rep follows up on that you know within five minutes a day two days I think it's a 48 hour window the likelihood of that deal closing is 7 X C is it that SLA and that time commitment matters why I'm talking about product and I think I mention it in here is that now we have an SLA with product marketing

and sales because product is starting to generate what we call Q ELLs inside the product it's not just marketing anymore generating leads you know product can generate leads for the sales team to close so this is an example of I'll share with you here this is what an SLA looks like but it's really important to track it in this case marketing is signing up for the green blueish bar and then if marketing can hit that what's happening with the orange bar is that's the amount of M R that's projected that's the amount of revenue that's

projected if marketing can hit their SLA right so the likelihood if you're sitting there you're the CRO where you're you know trying to understand are we gonna hit our goals you have a scientific approach to understanding actually how you're gonna hit your goals and then on the right I know this is sort of like an eyesore but on the right this should this shares how many deals were created per rep this is what a manager looks at and a director and a VP of Sales how many deals were created how many we call them inbound

growth assessments but basically it's like a consultation call how many were created how many demos were delivered and then how many deals closed and from here as a sales manager and the head of a segment working with marketing once you have that SLA you can really dig in to say ok well what if you're creating a ton of deals but you weren't delivering a bunch of something was happening there something's breaking down in the customer journey or the prospect journey this is what I wanted to share with you all as well around like a product

driven QL and what this means is now product can sign up for a qualified lead a high intent someone that they're then in product or within a workflow is now pinging a sales rep that says this person just took this action in the product which means now they have a high intent follow up with them so what's really cool and sort of from a sales perspective is now I have if I'm a sales rep inside of HubSpot I'll just use us as an example now I have leads coming from product now I have leads coming

from marketing life is good right I don't have a BDR I'm not picking up the phone and cold calling I'm just taking calls right I'm helping people all day long and that is really what happens we do not in our whole small business division we do not have business development reps we don't have STRs because we figured this out on how marketing and product and everyone can all work together around that customer and prospect journey I'm getting kind of scientific here on like QL data but it's important to understand where those cues are coming from

so to us a QL is did they say they wanted to contact sales in the app in the product if yes we're gonna track that we're gonna hand that over to sales really quickly do they request a demo did they talk to you well we have something called an inbound sales consultant which is if you're in a trial we give you a consultant to talk to you did they talk to them and did they do an action where that you know that can be manual from the inbound sales coach or consultant and they can say

you know there's a high intent here hand that off to sales there's trial activation which is kind of cool too so it all kind of works together right so now you have leads just the point here is that night I believe coming from product marketing and the sales life is pretty cool building a day of driven culture this is a little bit redundant but the number one thing I'll share with you all as a sales manager let's say you are a CEO working with the first sales hire is you have to get data-driven around work

rates out of everything coming in are you following up with them and are they closing right so really sort of be scientific and have your closed rates and your conversion rates known publish those to the company and then share them and then just talk about them if you've got 50 Q ELLs coming in on a monthly basis and you're closing 25 of them that's a 50% conversion rate you can just double down and you can invest in that all day long that's a great conversion rate right the standard conversion rate on a landing page is

about 25 percent if that if you're converting on a product QL at 50 percent and a marketing landing page at 25 percent you know as a as a CEO where you going to invest you want to invest in those the product actions all day long and then this is on I'll talk to you a little bit about a scorecard about how to hire some salespeople what has worked for us over time what works for a bunch of startups we mentor it's about building a diverse team but they go to market hiring so who do we

look for in the hire that we're making we look for do you have a growth mindset are you curious are you coachable what's your work ethic like have you had prior success and then we used to say something called a cultural fit but now we say something called are you additive because cultural fit was sort of putting them into this hole of like are you the same as everyone else do you fit what's going on here we changed that to culturally additive which actually starts forcing a completely different behavior which are you adding something is

this new person over into the team adding something that no one else has that's additive so when you think about this go to market hiring this sort of characteristics that we look for does anyone have a guess about what we started to see was the number one criteria that led to success it was the two is curious and coachable this is a scorecard and what you're trying to do is create a repeatable process for who's your first sales higher what did characteristics are you looking for how are you waiting that criteria and if you are

right you go on to repeat and scale that process of who you're looking for so this is a really simple I guess like scorecard to build you can wait it to whatever you guys decide in terms of what works for your company and then if this starts to work you can really scale and hire a lot of sales reps with this equation in mind and then this is something we do too well some people find this pretty interesting so I wanted to share it with you I talk to a lot of organizations and they're like

we just need to hire salespeople can my okay well what is your sales enablement strategy or what is your training strategy or do you have a Learning and Development Department are you investing in someone to teach your salespeople how to actually do their job and no one is and I'm like well that's interesting and that's one thing that I'll share at HubSpot they did really well early on is they invested when they're hiring their first five salespeople they invested in a sales trainer to make sure those salespeople knew how to do their job and then

inside of HubSpot specifically if you are a sales rep and you get hired or wherever you're getting hired into the company but specifically in sales I'll tell you guys this is that you have to learn the product for 30 days so the number one salespeople at HubSpot aren't the best sellers they have the best product knowledge right and then we'll we do is we have 30 60 90 120 day check-ins are you meeting expectations are you exceeding expectations are you not meeting expectations if you come out of new hire training and you aren't meeting expectations

that conversation is then shared with the hiring manager and you know right you know where you stand every single 30 days which is really really helpful so I would just make sure that if you're gonna adapt something like this that you do have a 30 day sort of like criteria and feedback loop because again if you've hired people that care about these things the number one thing they want is feedback it's not always bad right and you can't give what we call like patty cake feedback you can't get fluffy feedback we actually have to give

radical candor feedback that is also oftentimes hard to give you know but you're telling someone what they should stop doing start doing continue to do just to help them right it's coming from a good place I wanted to share this with you because so many people always ask okay you talked about you know product market fit equals customer success how do you compensate sales reps this is an example that you could if you find it useful you can sort of take and adapt for your own but in terms of like how would you compensate a

sales person you could do by revenue goal right that's easy how many months up front you can do a month's upfront minimum so oftentimes you know I talked to a lot of startup founders about do you want to do an annual commitment do you want to do a semi-annual commitment you can compensate sales reps to drive that behavior of how long of a term you actually want them to sign up the customers for so that's a month upfront criteria and then this is really one that's never changed for us is a 13 month retention so

what this means is you cannot get promoted as a sales person if you bring on bad fit customers so it's aligned to the incentives and the compensation which drives the behavior that we want for the salespeople is that we want them to bring on good fit customers and a lot of people will hit all the other criterias and yet that you know have 110% attainment you can't be on a performance plan but if you miss the 13 month retention you can't get promoted and if someone's like well that sucks like I did you know I

don't think that's a fair metric but it is because the expectations been set that you have to bring on good fit customers because that's what's happening in a SAS model right we need to bring on good customers that grow with us so build a strong culture based on company-wide values and missions I would just share that I think this is really important for a couple reasons so I speak to a bunch of startup founders some of them are a little bit apprehensive to share their values and missions right they don't want to go out there

and tell the world what they care about and I think that's a little bit silly because everyone that joins your company is wondering what you care about so I would just encourage you all to really this is again a little fluffy but I would encourage you all to think about you know the why behind it what are your mission and what is your values and then you can start to hire people that care about the same things that you all care about that are additive to what you're doing so at HubSpot like if you if

you want to be told what to do and you like that style and some people do you're not a good fit for HubSpot because what we like to do is hire people who are autonomous and like to figure things out that's just the culture right that's part of the culture code it's part of our mission and values we dare to be different and and challenge the status quo you know if you're an employee and you love to challenge the status quo and push people to think differently and raise your hand and write a wiki post

and tell our CEO exactly what you would do as a CEO you're actually going to get a meeting with him the next day that's the type of people we want in our company that doesn't mean you want them in yours but that's for us and that's who we want right so we published that and we let people read about that and we have a whole employment brand team that goes out there and shares our culture we want to show that to people so that we can attract people who are intrigued by that and then what

we're trying to do is help millions of organizations grow better and the global segments that I run and Amanda's the director of marketing for it our mission is we want to help millions of startups grow better so we just insert the word startup in there and we're completely aligned to HubSpot as a business the pricing strategy to reduce friction what I mean by that is your pricing and packaging strategy shouldn't add friction to your customer acquisition channel how about research shows when we ask buyers if confusing pricing would keep them from buying 69% of the

people said yes I actually think 100% of the people would say yes but we'll go with the data and what's interesting is like how many people have gone to a page and looked at someone's product or service and been like this is confusing how much do I pay for what and what do I get so when you think about that and we go back to what I was sharing with you earlier like what is your go-to-market strategy what does your sales team look like how do you want to share your pricing if you have a

partner channel and you have a sales channel sales team is the pricing and packaging only available via your partners if you have a partner channel it's a little bit expensive because you're probably going to be paying rev-share to those partners who are actually selling your product or service on your behalf so you have to account for that in your pricing and packaging strategy if you have an enterprise sales team typically you have a call us button on your website which I hate cuz that means I'm gonna get sold too and it means I'm gonna have

to negotiate and there's gonna be a lot of friction there right that's by design I would argue that times are changing the buyers in control they don't want to call us and have a fight with the enterprise sales rep that you know someone got a 10% discount my friend got a 12% discount you know whoever I'm gonna buy something at the end of the month because I know I can get a better deal you know you that's not is that is that the world that you as a CEO and a founder or a founding team

and a start-up is that the world you want to create right I don't know that's up to you transparent and up at a point to call us so we're pricing and packaging is a little confusing they need to talk to someone it's probably an Inside Sales model and then the transparent on the website a sliding scale by now you know exactly what you get you can put in your credit card and you're off and running you know that's when you can have no sales team so in terms of the friction you've got partner friction happening

if you have a channel sales team and your pricing and packaging is only available via your partners you've got some partner friction happening there if you've got an enterprise sales team and you have a big call us button you've got a lot of friction happening between you and your buyer if you've got an inside sales team and you're packaging pricing and packaging on your website is a little confusing you've got a little bit of friction there and if you've got a transparent pricing and packaging strategy you've empowered the buyer they are clicking they're putting in

their credit card and they're off and running you've really got no friction so what that says is you can apply some force and go a little faster their partner friction that's that's okay it just happens and I think when friction is oftentimes a bad word but I think what I'm just sharing with all of you is you have to think about and be realists around like how much friction is this customer acquisition channel and what do we want to do about it you again are at the end of the day are trying to sell for

customer happiness the key takeaways product market fit is about revenue retention you know you want to focus on that the voice of the customer role is important I love when startups are investing in that early on but again you don't need to go out there and hire someone full-time it's a great intern project but the key thing is they need to have a cross-functional voice strong internal alignment around customer happiness is really important SLA is you know it encourages a hard conversation at times but they're pretty good and then build the framework and a process

for your sales team and then you can repeat in scale thank you to AWS law for having us have spot for startups what we're doing is we're trying to help startups grow better who give you education software all at a startup friendly price AWS activate does the same there's so many companies out there that are creating startup programs for again it's no better time to be a startup I'd haven't listed them all here but there's just a lot going on out there first startup so if you are a startup and you're looking at purchasing a

product or service you know check and see if they have a startup program because off there might be benefit for you well thank you [Applause]