Carilu Dietrich: recommendation

Transcript context

…Based on that, what is it you recommend to founders these days that maybe are product led and just self-service [inaudible 00:40:00] oriented. Do you kind of take this experience and wait as long as you can to hire your first salesperson? I know it's very specific to the situation, but what kind of advice do you generally give? You and I are both like [inaudible 00:40:14] who was just on your podcast earlier this month. Product led growth depends so much on your product and your buying market. There's some buying markets that are less likely to use salespeople, and you need to go in from the beginning. HR might be one, right? Whereas a lot of the hyper-growth companies in the dev tool space can use product led growth because developers both hate failed people, and really love to research themselves. So you see [inaudible 00:40:47] taking off because people engage and kind of self sell. So I would recommend, get closer to their customers and read the signals. If your product is good enough, the people can get time to value in a couple of days instead of weeks or months. You can have a product led growth motion. If your product needs to be put in context, and customized, and assisted, sales teams sometimes are expensive services arms to cover over product issues and help customers buy it until it's fixed. Or if you're in a market where your buyer just really doesn't buy online with research and a demo, then you need to have salespeople. But I would say try not to hire too fast and too far ahead in sales and inside sales, because it seems like it's going to add revenue, but it actually is a huge cost and a huge drain on the business if the product isn't getting that kind of resonance. I just had a conversation with the founder of Retool for this series that I'm working on, and he basically found the same thing you found where they thought it could be a product led experience where you're building internal tools using their product, but it turned out nobody really understood how to do it themselves and it took a lot of handholding to make it work. So they became sales led from the beginning, even though it feels like a tool that has a lot of potential to be product led and self-service.…

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