What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #232

Keeping user (not customer) stories top of mind as you scale your dev first/PLG startup

Apr 10

The enterprise venture funding market continues to be on 🔥 with a number of newly announced massive rounds including Canva at $15B and Redis at over $2B and anyone with a pulse who says they are developer first or PLG getting a check.

That being said, focusing on what you do with the 💰 will be the more important step as we move into 2021 and beyond. Along those lines, if you are a PLG or developer first company, here’s a tip:

Ed Sim @edsim

Love when developer 1st companies start board meetings w/ a couple of user stories…not customer ones - reminds us of the North 🌠 for product + GTM, win ♥️ + 🧠 of devs to win company.

If you want to be successful at PLG or developer first, you need to consistently keep the individual user top of mind, no matter how big you get. It also sets a nice tone for the meeting and brings what the company mission is to life. especially as the meeting progresses to product roadmaps, key wins and losses in sales, hiring, etc.

This past week Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO of Twilio shared another one of his board decks from 10 years ago, April 2011. And it’s no surprise that he too started out his deck with user stories. Amazing to see the consistency of focus and messaging to this day as it’s grown to over $1.8 billion of revenue in 2020.

Jeff Lawson @jeffiel

Time again to dig into the @twilio Board Deck archives & share the preso from April, 2011. Things have progressed: we have the beginnings of a sales machine, the revenue impact of GroupMe was a hot topic, & yes Twilio Client's codename was "Chunder" dropbox.com/s/cko59e3iasfe…

Here’s one of the first slides from that Twilio board deck. I highly encourage and recommend any dev first company to share individual dev stories at the beginning of the board meeting to make sure the product and company North 🌠 is top of mind.

Second, while ARR important, one of key metrics is developer usage and growth in registrations.

Which leads to tracking free vs. paying accounts.

Consistency of purpose and vision has led to Twilio amassing over 10 million registered developers - this takes a crazy amount of time, especially in the beginning, drip by drip to build that bottoms up motion (see investor presentation from March 21).

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.

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