Kieran Flanagan: Hiring Tips for Growth; North Star Metrics; Hubspot's Mistake | 20VC #916

(beeping) Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination. Kieran, this is such a joy to do. I so appreciate you taking the time. I heard great, great things and great stories, by the way, from your, your colleague, Kipp. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Harry. I'm a fan. Um, I'm excited to be on and excited to speak to a fellow European, not that far away.

I mean, it is rather lovely to have-

(laughs)

... another European, uh, on the show. But I do wanna start, you know, uh, y- you run and work in some of the most impressive growth orgs, uh, now obviously at HubSpot. How did you make your way into the world of growth and what was that entry for you?

Uh, yeah, I think that... I, I'm a computer engineer by background. Uh, went into marketing. Have done a lot of different things in marketing and at some point kind of was asked to build up a product-led motion for HubSpot. Um, I was very fortunate that pre me, there was a guy called Brian Balfour who set up a lot of the templates and the ways that HubSpot could do this. And Brian is, uh, someone I look up to in that industry. And, uh, had the opportunity to do something quite unique at HubSpot when we were an established company to build a PLG motion, a product-led motion, and built out the marketing and growth and kinda learnt on the job, because I was a marketer going in to learn ab- about growth and do growth. And so my career I've kind of just always tried to do the thing that I think is the next thing that's important. That's what I actually get excited by, like the new thing.

I, I, I have so many questions. We don't... (laughs) Like, you can tell, like, no wonder, you know, no one can do a 20-minute meeting with me. Um, my first question to you is, you managed to obviously kind of PLG, but this is PLG before PLG was such a term and so popular. How do you think PLG has changed as a go-to market in the short time that it has been so popularized and used?

Yeah, I think there's three... So there's three stages companies go through, and then I'll talk about how that's changing in the market. So the companies generally, back... even back then, and maybe today, like I spend a lot of time with founders, they go through the phase where they're like, "Hey, we should do growth," without really knowing what growth is, but they wanna move a metric in a meaningful way, and so they try to do that. They do it in a way where team design and all of that is an afterthought, so it kind of creates chaos, but out of the chaos, there is something good. And they're like, "Wow, growth actually works. Let's get serious," and they try to create then... We go from chaos to centralized, like we create a centralized team, we build a growth function, we decide where that lives within the org, we sponsor that, uh, the founder sponsors that, and that starts to work really, really well. I think the next iteration of that would... to me is like truly, uh, curious is, we have central growth teams and they do growth principles and they work with the product team to instill those principles in how you create product, how you do onboarding. I think at some point you can see growth be much more decentralized into just how PMs create the product itself. We build in, uh, mechanisms to promote the product through virality or these other things. We build onboarding flows, we build upgrade flows to get people to buy our product. And so I think you go chaos, centralized, and decentralized. I think in the market, growth is becoming much more well-defined. Like, you have brands like Reforge, which I think has, for the most part, been a trailblazer and set the standard, and I think they are helping the market themselves realize what growth is, how I should think about growth, how I should structure that team, how it should work within companies. So I think it's becoming more defined. Uh, and particularly, uh, like, I've seen that from founders that I've talked with. You know, two years ago to to- today, it's a much more understood concept.