How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk)

... 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, you know, the quantitative side of things that help sh- guide quarter-to-quarter focus and ensure you can be intentional about where you're investing, that becomes a big enabler. You know, you're never gonna 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, um, role of the strategy.

(instrumental music) 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, 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 100 users, what they got wrong when they tried to monetize early on, when they hired their first marketing and sales people, 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 gonna 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's 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 workload for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve 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 from many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shishir, 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 $1,000 credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit on your account. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I've been hearing about AG1 on basically every podcast that I listen to like Tim Ferriss and Lex Fridman. 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 AG1. One, with a small scoop that dissolves in water, you are 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 AG1 like a software product. Apparently, they're on their 52nd 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 gonna 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 ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Ben, welcome to the podcast.