20Growth: How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprise, How to Assess "Bets" in Growth; Which to Take and Which to Not with Gonto, Interim CMO @ Vercel
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2024
⏱️ 71 minutes
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Summary
Martin Gontovnikas, a.k.a Gonto, is a software engineer at heart who moved to the “dark side” to focus on Marketing. With this career transition, he found a way to combine his 2 passions by applying his “engineering thinking” model to Marketing. He is now a B2B SaaS Advisor to Vercel and Airbyte among others and Co-Founder & GP of Hypergrowth Partners. Previously, he was SVP of Marketing and Growth at Auth0.
In Today's Episode with Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto) We Discuss:
1. From No Idea to Growth Leader:
- How Gonto made his way into the world of growth when it was not a thing?
- What does Gonto know now that he wishes he had known when he entered the world of growth?
- Why does Gonto believe product and marketing is more important than sales and marketing?
2. Growth: What, When and Who:
- What is growth? What is it not? What do people misunderstand most with growth?
- When is the right time to hire your first growth person?
- What is the right profile for the right first growth hire? Junior? Senior?
3. Mastering PLG and Enterprise:
- What are the single biggest mistakes startups make when scaling into enterprise?
- Why does Gonto believe that all PLG companies should start with 6-8 design partners?
- Is it possible to do enterprise and PLG at the same time?
- How does one provide enough value in a PLG motion to convert enterprise buyers?
4. Data vs Intuition: Art vs Science:
- Is growth more art or science?
- Why does Gonto believe qualitative data is more important than quantitative?
- How does Gonto think about psychology when selling and marketing? What do so few startups? understand about the psychology of their customers?
- How does Gonto approach messaging and what is truly great product marketing?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Psychology is key to marketing. |
| 0:02.0 | Our decisions are emotional. |
| 0:04.0 | And I actually think you can in enough cases use biases that we have to our advantage. |
| 0:10.0 | Product growth company should always start with design partners. |
| 0:14.0 | When people think about scaling to enterprise, they think it's an on-and-off switch. |
| 0:19.0 | I think the links that are the most important right now |
| 0:22.5 | are marketing and products together, not sales and marketing. This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. |
| 0:29.1 | Now 20 Growth is the monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world |
| 0:33.3 | to discuss their tips, tactics and strategies on mastering growth. |
| 0:37.8 | Today we have Gonto. |
| 0:39.1 | Where to start on Gonto? |
| 0:40.5 | He was SVP of marketing and growth at all zero until their $6.5 billion acquisition. |
| 0:45.8 | Today, he's B2B advisor to Vassell and Airbyte, among others, and he's also the co-founder |
| 0:50.8 | and GP at Hypergrowth Partners. |
| 0:52.8 | This is a very in-the in the weeds show. We get very |
| 0:55.3 | technical, so much to learn here. So get the notepad out and get ready to take some notes. But |
| 1:00.7 | before we dive into the show today, short form video has never been more important for your business. |
| 1:05.9 | Social media managers, growth marketers, this is the single biggest opportunity you have today. Did you know |
| 1:11.7 | Ollipop took their sales from 3 million to 200 million by doubling down on video? But wow, |
| 1:17.9 | it is expensive to do well and it takes a shitload of time. That was until captions came into the |
| 1:23.1 | world. Honestly, captions is one of my favorite tools. I use it here at 20VC all the time because it makes creating videos so easy and simple. |
| 1:31.3 | They have the most incredible array of tools from advanced captioning, which I use for all the videos we do, to revolutionary dubbing tools, allowing teams to take one ad and repurpose it even into multiple languages. |
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