Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk)
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being able to identify the various micro and macro loops, how they're all connected, being able to document them in a qualitative model to communicate a shared understanding of how you grow. It's really powerful augmenting that then with the quantitative side of things that helps guide quarter to quarter focus and ensure you can be intentional about where you're investing, that becomes a big enabler. You're never going to have a shortage of ideas in a high performing growth team so knowing where to focus amidst that kind of sea of ideas is a really important role of the strategy. Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is Ben Williams. Ben is a VP of product at Snyk which is likely one of the biggest and most interesting companies that you've never heard of. Snyk makes it easy for developers to catch security issues in their code and there's a lot to learn from how Snyk got started. It started through product-led growth evolved into product-led sales, was very community driven, and was also laser focused on developers which has become one of the most lucrative markets to go after. In our conversation we cover how the founders of Snyk got their first hundred users, what they got wrong when they tried to monetize early on, when they hired their first marketing salespeople, how they structured and grew their growth and product teams, what they figured out about what should go into freemium and what shouldn't, and so much more. As you'll soon hear Ben is British and so the episode is automatically going to sound more sophisticated and I can't wait for you to hear it. With that I bring you Ben Williams. This episode is brought to you by CODA. CODA is an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use CODA every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing, it's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers and it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years I've seen CODA default from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the CODA doc gallery, including resources for many guests on this podcast, including Shriyas, Gokul, and Shashir, the CEO of CODA. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use CODA to run effectively, and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using CODA. You can take advantage of a special, limited time offer just for startups. Head over to CODA.io/Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollar credit on your first statement. That's CODA.io/Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollars in credit on your account. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I've been hearing about AGWAN on basically every podcast that I listen to, like Tim Ferriss and Lex Friedman, and so I finally gave it a shot earlier this year, and it has quickly become a core part of my morning routine, especially on days that I need to go deep on writing or record a podcast like this. Here's three things that I love about AGWAN. One, with a small scoop that dissolves in water, you're absorbing 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens. I kind of like to think of it as a little safety net for my nutrition, in case I've missed something in my diet. Two, they treat AGWAN like a software product. Apparently they're on their 50-second iteration, and they're constantly evolving it based on the latest science, research studies, and internal testing that they do. And three, it's just one easy thing that I can do every single day to take care of myself. Right now, it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient, daily nutrition. It's just one scoop in a cup of water every day, and that's it. There's no need for a million different pills and supplements to look out for your health. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of immune-supporting vitamin D, and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/lenny. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/lenny to take ownership over your health and pick up the
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