TYLER LESSARD, VIDYARD VP MARKETING ON FINITE PODCAST

• Adaptability and flexibility are key to hyperscaling.
• “Be like water” was a common management mantra at Hopin used to remind the company to stay agile, embrace change, roll with the bum...

• Work closely with key ICPs to shape your product roadmap. Remember that the market you start out serving may not be the market you end up dominating in. With Hopin, we began with solopreneurs, boutique agencies, and influencers but accelerated upmarket quickly.
• Hire more engineers.

• Launch in early access. Build a waitlist, letting in customers slowly. Use a lean marketing tech stack like Hubspot CRM, Zapier, Stripe, and Typeform. This waitlist is your community. StreamYard has an amazing blueprint for building a community of raving fans.
• Get customer permission...

• Prerecorded content didn’t resonate with the audience as well as live content.
• When viewers realized the prerecorded content wasn’t live, they began criticizing the content in the chat.
• But during th...

• Couple the launch with your Series A announcement, directing traffic to your first customer event where you announce a flagship feature.

A good manager is generous.

• They listen, genuinely curious about how their direct reports are doing inside and outside of work.
• They reflect, coach, unblock and share helpful context.
• They ask permission

• Being strategic is a direct indication of how big you’re thinking.
• Fast-moving companies need articulate big thinkers.
• Thinking big means seeing the big picture

• Hire more engineers. Begin to focus on organization, product management, and start to work with GTM on a customer-friendly product release process. Hire a product marketer. ARWAG. Always Release With A GIF.
• Scale the sales team to do ...

• Leverage community feedback (a Facebook group is fine) and user surveys (HotJar is great) for identifying the must-have features that will move customers up to the next plan.
• Product/market fit is when growth numbers are up and to the...

• This is simply a startup-y way of restating Steven Covey’s principle “Begin with the end in mind.”
• The key to early-stage rapid growth is to not just think and talk about ideas, but to attach everything you ...

• In the early days, speed wins.
• Hopin became known for shipping features fast. Almost every week we would release a capability just in time for a big event to showcase it.
• This speed and responsivenes...

• Hopin has acquired five companies: StreamYard, Streamable, Jamm, Attendify, and Boomset.
• It's important for the acquiring company to not come in with guns a-blazing.
• You’re not coming in as a superio...

• As managers, feedback won’t happen unless you ask for it.
• It also won’t happen unless you free up the calendar space for it.
• Being back to back all day every day sends the message that you’re too bus...

• Armando showed me an interesting insight about managing and metrics.
• Several times, I’ve been in a meeting where someone reports on their metrics and Armando will kindly interrupt and ask something to the effect of, “But what is the ...

• Start with a visionary founder who is obsessed with product design, who is an engineer by trade, and who is a natural salesman. Most companies don’t even get past this first step. Hopin did because we have Johnny.
• Hire just engineers as contractors and one other generalist e...

• You should be working with 5+ agencies by now to outsource most of your marketing efforts (brand, creative, paid ads, SEO, content, events, and PR). Write clear briefs. Bring vendors into Slack. Be quick to move on from agencies who are not good fits.

Always have a project that puts you out there.

• A project that puts you out there could be anything — an app, a website, a blog, a product, a consulting service, a book, a side project, a hobby, a com...

• There’s a lot of insecurity when you’re doing something you’ve never done before.
• But I wasn’t alone. No one had experienced this type of rapid growth before.
• When you realize everyone else is neck-de...

• They don't just articulated the problems, goals, plans, people, and metrics of the next quarter, they also have the story, the narrative, that they’re creating.
• They can confidently describe...

• Don’t be afraid to sell a feature that isn’t quite in production yet. Sell the roadmap.
• Not only does it light a fire under the whole company to delight a client by delivering by a deadline, it also is highly probable that by the tim...