Martin Gontovnikas (Gonto): The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make When Scaling into Enterprises | E1115

Psychology is key to marketing. When people think about scaling to enterprise, they think it's an on-and-off switch. They think, like, "Okay. We were selling to users before. We were bottoms up. Now we're gonna sell to enterprise." If you forget about who your users were, you eventually go out of business. I think that a product-led growth company should always start with design partners because first impressions matter a lot. And you can only get first impressions once.

What's the biggest mistake you see first-time founders make in growth?

The biggest mistake that I see is that-

Gonto, I have heard so many great things from your wonderful partner, G. But thank you first for joining me today.

Thank you so much for inviting. Very happy to participate.

Listen, I'm excited for this one. But I wanna start, 'cause the world of growth, it's a bit of a weird world, if we're honest. And so, in terms of the entry point, how did you make your way into the world of growth?

I would say I got into growth by chance. I wanted to become a developer advocate, so I was interviewing a sh- and joined Auth0, which is an authentication startup, to do developer advocacy there. While I was doing that, what we realized is that most of the revenue were coming from people that were signing up to the platform and trying it out. So because of that, I was promoted to be the head of self-service. I'm not a marketer, so I knew nothing about marketing, so I didn't know what the fuck to do. So based off of that, I decided that I was gonna apply engineering to try to improve our numbers. And that's how I thought about growth. But when I joined doing growth, I literally did not know that I was doing growth, at all.

I mean, I- I love that. Sometimes the best things are accidents, uh, as my parents always remind me of my conception. Uh, but, uh... (laughs)

(laughs)

Uh, but- but you spent seven years at Auth0, and it's an incredible journey. What are one to two of the biggest lessons for you that you've taken with you from seeing that trajectory and being in the coal face, so to speak?

I think I have two main learnings. Um, number one is that, being an engineer, I was always thinking, like, branding and psychology and all of those things made no sense. But after being at Auth0, I realized that even when you sell to developers, psychology is key to marketing. Because as Daniel Kahneman says, "All decisions are emotional." And I actually think you can, in a lot of cases, use biases that we have to our advantage. And I'll give you a very specific example. But in a lot of cases, in the beginning, we were using emails with a lot of data, and we actually moved them to have almost no data and just focused on making s- sure that the story was coherent. And those converted better. And I think using psychology, even with a more mathematical way of thinking of biases, system one and system two, I think was one of the biggest learnings. The second big learning is there's no exponential growth company that happens without problems and without crazy events. I've seen that with so many companies now. So now I believe that taking big risks is absolutely important to having exponential growth. At Auth0, for example, we had a big problem where we were trying to grow from 40 mil to 80 mil in ARR, and there was no way we were gonna hit those goals. So we decided that half of the marketing team and a big chunk of the product team were only gonna focus on bringing sign-ups up and getting activation, and they would not do anything else. That was a bold move because we didn't do any product marketing. We didn't do any launches. We just focused on usage and revenue. And without that, the company would have ceased to exist. So g- big risks and taking big bets, very key to having exponential growth.