Ramping up: Developing Product, Marketing, and Sales in a start-up
Channel: Open Source in Business
Date: 27/05/2021

Featured speakers: Aneel Lakhani, Craig Kerstiens

In the beginning, tech start-ups tend to have small, technology-focused teams building something that does a specific job. As the company starts to get traction, you very quickly need to decide what exactly you are selling, to who, for what price. Functions that were non-essential at launch become very important - Product Management, Product Marketing, and Sales. As you grow, these functions are the primary interface points between your company and your current and future customers, and bootstrapping these functions in a company represents a delicate inflection point in your growth and future success.

In this episode, Aneel Lakhani, Product Marketing expert and start-up advisor, and Craig Kerstiens, Product lead at Crunchy Data, and formerly at Heroku and Citus Data, join Dave Neary to share their thoughts and experience on the main considerations to bear in mind for start-ups entering that phase of growth. We will discuss what the key elements of a business strategy are for this growth phase. How are the responsibilities and lines of demarcation drawn across Sales, Marketing and Product? How can you be successful, both from the perspective of a founder bringing in new people with specific skills into your company, and as a Product or Marketing professional considering a role as the first member of a new function in a start-up?

Links from the video:

* "Don't just roll the dice: A usefully short guide to software pricing" by Neil Davidson: https://neildavidson.com/downloads/dont-just-roll-the-dice-2.0.0.pdf