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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): And okay.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): let's get started.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. I'm excited to discuss today. Webinar, on marketing and building pipeline with a technical buyer.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): very excited to also ha! Be joined today by Carolyn King and Ryan Mccurdy. Carolyn is the head of pipeline mar marketing at chromosphere, and she recently led marketing at Caliptia and Stream. Native Ryan is the Svp. Of demand at astronomer, and he was the head of marketing at laceworks and booster.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): So thank you all for joining Carolyn, I'm gonna start with you. And I'm gonna start with a high, level question, how do technical buyers like to buy.

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Carolyn King: great great question for us to get started. I think that one of the things that's very top of mind is that

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Carolyn King: buyers want to learn at their own pace. They don't want to be sold to. So what we focus on a lot is really understanding what type of content, what type events, whether that's

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Carolyn King: webinars, hands on labs, etc. How are we building that out and really giving that to them? So that if they are looking to engage through a technical blog that's there for them. If it's something where they do want that hands on instructor led training. So it's it's a bit of just thinking through what those different channels are, and different assets, and making sure that that's easily available.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): And Ryan. What are some of the unique challenges that you face with technical buyers compared to other audiences that you've marketed to.

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Ryan McCurdy: Yeah, that's a great question. You know. I I think the biggest one that I've encountered. And I I think you know, founders encounter a lot of times, too.

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Ryan McCurdy: is

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Ryan McCurdy: technical buyers, can. They can easily tell if, like, you know what you're talking about.

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Ryan McCurdy: So if your content isn't authentic.

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Ryan McCurdy: if it's not technical enough. If you're missing like the key

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Ryan McCurdy: like jargon pieces, it's probably not gonna hit. They're probably not gonna believe you.

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Ryan McCurdy: And they, you know, we'll go elsewhere. And and that

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Ryan McCurdy: problem is actually typically compounded by how close these communities are.

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Ryan McCurdy: So

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Ryan McCurdy: you have to be really, really thoughtful about what you put out there, and the authenticity and the accuracy of it for technical buyers. Specifically, it's just like the the marketing, I guess, Fluff, so to speak like just doesn't hit. And it actually does you a pretty big disservice? So you know, especially with things like Chat Gpt kind of coming onto the scene is like

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Ryan McCurdy: to a certain point, be can become overused. And if you're not careful.

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Ryan McCurdy: you you're gonna do a disservice to your your brand, and what you're talking about.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): When you think about building out content for these buyers and being authentic like.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): where do you start? And how do you think through that content. How do you not fall down that slippery slope of just kind of building out the generic marketing Fluff, so to speak.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Carolyn or Brian? Why don't you? You start and we'll kick it over to Carolyn.

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Ryan McCurdy: Sure.

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Ryan McCurdy: so I mean at least more of a startup. Or you know, hyper growth company. The founders are usually pretty hands on, and you usually have a bunch of great technical people.

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Ryan McCurdy: and you know, getting them out there, getting them talking about it, getting them to write.

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Ryan McCurdy: you know, content is king. And in my opinion it takes a village typically to get these things. So if you can get all your technical people

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Ryan McCurdy: having some sort of cadence of writing, and, you know, having a cadence of content production, you're in a really good place, and if those people are your founders.

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Ryan McCurdy: Which everyone wants to hear. Anyways, I think it puts you in a great position to go create that authentic content.

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Ryan McCurdy: give you an example.

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Ryan McCurdy: I shouldn't be the one, probably writing a white paper

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Ryan McCurdy: on like data orchestration. For example.

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Ryan McCurdy: I can go summarize a lot of that, and I can go up level it. So whenever everyone understands it, make sure we're communicating the benefits to various fires. But that's gonna be best written by one of our Smes, probably who has lived that pain ideally previously.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Dylan, what do you think on how you build out that content? And how do you even get those team members to write? Because sometimes that that's a skill in and of itself that a lot of

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): you know, engineers

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): founders themselves don't don't necessarily have.

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Carolyn King: Yeah, no, this is this is definitely

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Carolyn King: a challenge. I think one thing that was was interesting. When I joined Stream Native, we were really early, and so most of the team was engineers, and so that it was so organic that we would really lean in and and rely on those engineers to create content. But I think because we established that

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Carolyn King: as part of the company culture, early we were, we were really able to continue with that when I joined Caliphia at our first all hands, I announced that we had a new community team.

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Carolyn King: and then the next slide was welcome. You are all a part of that community team. And so that was the way of really kind of introducing that idea that content doesn't just come from marketing that really everybody in the company is going to contribute to that. And so I think, you know, I'm very, very much what Ryan said, even though I'm a marketer, I'm generally biased against having marketers create content for a technical audience.

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Carolyn King: And so I think about it that the marketers are really listening to the market, understanding what topics? You know how we're gonna build out these different campaigns and then bringing in the right thought leaders to to actually put on the webinar or to write, I think, on the writing front in particular, it's a very strong partnership. I will work very hands on with developers to, so that they can contribute

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Carolyn King: the technical expertise. And me or someone on my team can help bring the the polish and whatnot. We need add the Ctas that are necessary. Make sure we're targeting the right audience. Things like that.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): And then how do you ensure that the content

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): and have that relationship with you know? Let's say there is an engineer that loves writing, and sometimes potentially writes a little too much. Do you? Do you put those boundaries, or those guardrails in early of what they can talk about and what they shouldn't.

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Carolyn King: So this this has happened. It's not that common and there's actually not too many complaints on on engineers wanting to contribute. I'd be. I hope that that would be a problem. I'd have more. But I think one thing that's been helpful is to

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Carolyn King: get them to come in early. So we say, Hey, before you go and write the blog post, let's have a conversation, and in that conversation you can start to align and make sure that the

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Carolyn King: content is targeted in the right way. So as an example, sitting down and saying, Okay, who's the audience for this? What do we want the takeaway for this to be for that audience like, what types of actions are we hoping to drive? Very, very simple questions?

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Carolyn King: But questions that people skip, and then they write, spend a ton of time writing. And and it's really just not on track. So I think, really encouraging the team to look at marketing as a partner and to come to us very early, so we can start to have these conversations and build together is really important.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Ryan, do you believe that more content is better in this case with this audience, or any you know? Do you? Do you look at your engineering team, your founders, and anyone who's willing to write

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): try to put a piece together, or is it much more selective.

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Ryan McCurdy: Yeah, you know. Carolyn kind of hit it on the heads like this is a great problem to have if you have it. There's never enough at least, in my opinion I've never. I've never ran into having too much content.

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Ryan McCurdy: I think, where you know you you kind of have to interject a little bit is, well, how are you structuring? The content, not all content, is very helpful, like I'll still take it. But and there's probably some place I can use it. But like then, typically.

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Ryan McCurdy: you know, we're talking like, usually like startups. Hyper growth teams are pretty small. So like

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Ryan McCurdy: you want everything to be meaningful. So there's no random acts of content.

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Ryan McCurdy: And if you can start having somewhat of a roadmap just like you would in product

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Ryan McCurdy: for content and matched SEO. What I found is you, can

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Ryan McCurdy: you can be a little bit more proactive about this, and just give, like your engineers and the other subject matter experts in your your company.

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Ryan McCurdy: almost a list to choose from.

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Ryan McCurdy: And we. We've done this to really map out like our next. Just let's call it year 2 year SEO, and kind of like content strategy. We grow a lot through inbound

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Ryan McCurdy: and we we have that list, and we have templates that we want people to work off of. So like, we know, like when they write something.

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Ryan McCurdy: it's a certain way certain things are called out so it's a little bit more plug and play.

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Ryan McCurdy: But that said, even if you don't have that.

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Ryan McCurdy: I'll take the content. And you know things like chat. Gbd can help in this this regard like it's great for structuring content and or maybe pivoting it, pivoting it a little bit. So

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Ryan McCurdy: That's that's my take.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): And how do you ensure that that marketing message and those ideas that you're putting out? How do you ensure that it resonates with the engineers or technical talent that you're trying to sell to

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Carolyn. Do you want to start.

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Carolyn King: Yeah. Yeah. And I think this this builds a bit on on what Ryan was just talking about as well. It's that idea. And I think it's a an important point of clarification. It's not just about going to your your engineering team and saying, Hey, guys, start writing some blog posts. It's much more strategic and structured on the marketing side. So, as Ryan said, putting parameters like, we we as a marketing org typically decide what those topics are.

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Carolyn King: and then we go and talk to different. We see what who our resources are and like who's best equipped to help contribute on this. And then that person does it. So so there is a lot of structure

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Carolyn King: behind the scenes. I would cite the the question of

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Carolyn King: how do we know that this is resonating.

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Carolyn King: or that we're building content that resonates. I think this is like the hardest thing to do, because, especially with there being so much content out there.

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Carolyn King: In my experience, we focus a lot on what we're hearing in sales calls what we're hearing at meetups, what we're hearing when we're doing discovery calls with open source users. And so there's not a lot of like, oh, I think this is a good idea. We should go build it. It's I've heard this on 5 or 6 calls now, maybe we should go do a blog post on it, and so it is.

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Carolyn King: It's pretty informed by the time we get there. So it's not not such a risky bet to take, I I would say. And you we don't always hit it spot on. But I'd say, you know, we recently did a deep dive on

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Carolyn King: the customer journey for an account we just closed, and it was really interesting to see

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Carolyn King: what deep engagement they had throughout the sales funnel in webinars and technical content. And so, looking back on things like that we can actually go back and measure and say, Okay, what content is helping to drive sales? And yeah, it's it's a learning process for sure, though.

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Carolyn King: in.

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Ryan McCurdy: Just just to add on onto that just real quick. I I think you know, one of the things is how you track engagement just like kpis, like, component of this

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Ryan McCurdy: is absolutely like

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Ryan McCurdy: the I think, the the proactive piece of like. Alright. I'm hearing these things. We should go create content around them, and then go test. And I think the testing, like, you can see how many people have visited this blog or this page. And then, as a secondary step.

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Ryan McCurdy: you know, through Utms, or whatever else in your calls to action, you can say, Okay, well, did this, you know, did someone jump from this blog into a demo, or into our self service, or trial, or into a webinar, so like what was kind of that next step in their their path to converting and I. And this is really when we start looking at like, well, how much pipeline is this topic driving.

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Ryan McCurdy: and that sometimes, then we'll build the case like, should we build another? Go to market theme?

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Ryan McCurdy: Or should you put more investment in this topic?

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Ryan McCurdy: and I, I find, like, you know, that's a that's a

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Ryan McCurdy: a great mature motion to start running down from a demand. Gen. Point of view.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): So you both have a lot of expertise in open source products as well, which is unique. And having tried to re recruit people in this space. It really is unique for a marketer. I'd love kind of tips in your, you know, general playbook on how you think about project adoption to product sales. And that process, like, you know, Cliptia, for instance, had an incredible.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): you know, open Source product early on, I know when you joined Carolyn. And then how did you think about taking that and turning it into actual sales?

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Carolyn King: Yeah,

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Carolyn King: I think it's. I mean.

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Carolyn King: I think it's different. And for for every open source, and what that relationship is to the commercial product, and I also think it depends where you're at in the stage of the business. But,

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Carolyn King: the like. Early steps are like, let's go and learn about the community. So very early on my first like month at Caliptia, we launched the fluent bit newsletter. And we said, This is gonna be an entire newsletter that's dedicated to fluent news. And again, nothing like shocking, or.

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Carolyn King: you know, crazy to think about. But a lot of people don't think about these things like. Prior to that, the blogs had been very much focused on Cliptia core and not on fluent bit. And so when you have that focus on the commercial product, and you are not building to support the community. You're leaving a lot on the table. So we said, Okay, let's start to build a foundation to support the community, to drive engagement.

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Carolyn King: Have there be a place? We built fluent bit Academy, where we would house all of our on demand webinars and whatnot. So really starting to build that foundation. So the community knows that

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Carolyn King: that they're supported, that if they do want to go and adopt that there will be trainings that will help make ensure that they're successful, that there are thought leaders and whatnot, that if they have questions they can come to us, we can kind of help support them in that open source journey. So I think that that is like Step One is definitely making sure that you're building that relationship and that

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Carolyn King: that there is no selling happening there, that it's pure. We're here to support you. We're super passionate about fluent bit. You're super passionate about fluent bit like, how can we do stuff together, whether it's a meetup or whatnot to to drive more awareness, engagement, sharing of best practices, etc. And I think that for us, and this is actually very similar to Apache pulse or and stream native, once you start to build that there's going to be some segment

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Carolyn King: of that population that that doesn't want to do the open source. They want that commercial offering. And so I think that if you can build that trusted relationship on the open source side, you'll get people to start to raise their hands and say, Oh, wait. What? What's that other stuff that collecti is doing the the built in that we don't need to build it ourselves. And so not to make it sound like to Rosie of a picture. But I I that's what we did eclipt, and it was very powerful and driving demand.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Ryan, I'd love to hear from your perspective like, how do you think about that playbook? And that that transition.

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Ryan McCurdy: Yeah,

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Ryan McCurdy: it's it's actually, you know, pretty tough. The the company.

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Ryan McCurdy: I'm at astronomer, you know. We don't own the project

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Ryan McCurdy: which

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Ryan McCurdy: presents a different challenge. Right? So we help drive it. The project where?

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Ryan McCurdy: you know the I would. We're definitely the commercial stewards of the project. We're part of every release, but Apache owns it. And you know, then Apache has its own board, and all the Pmc. Members

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Ryan McCurdy: really drive the project, which I think half of our partners from our

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Ryan McCurdy: but

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Ryan McCurdy: what it really comes down to, I believe, is being able to clearly

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Ryan McCurdy: and and distinctly like

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Ryan McCurdy: draw a line between all

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Ryan McCurdy: where what's open source? And what's the product, or what's the commercial offering?

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Ryan McCurdy: We've we've taken a lot of steps at astronomer over the last year

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Ryan McCurdy: to clearly show and articulate that

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Ryan McCurdy: because when they if if they blend together

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Ryan McCurdy: you know, you're gonna get the question is like, well, why do we need you?

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Ryan McCurdy: And this, this is something that that we've we've spent a lot of time thinking about

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Ryan McCurdy: as our buyers progress with us

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Ryan McCurdy: how we're gonna keep creating value past the the open source offering

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Ryan McCurdy: and what's open source. And you know what's Astro for us?

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Ryan McCurdy: and we've done a incredible job of that

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Ryan McCurdy: And you know we've we've saw just a ton of growth this last year. So you know, when you think about that. And you have a really clear line you really are are able to go talk about.

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Ryan McCurdy: you know. What should we go educate the open source community on. And then what's the nurtured path

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Ryan McCurdy: to

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Ryan McCurdy: becoming an enterprise, you know, adopter of our product.

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Ryan McCurdy: And we've developed a couple of really core themes that we market

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Ryan McCurdy: where we have a strong handoff

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Ryan McCurdy: between devrel and community

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Ryan McCurdy: and demand gen

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Ryan McCurdy: marketing. We're all in the same organization. Actually.

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Ryan McCurdy: So we've we've spent a bunch of time thinking through what are the things we should be educating the community on. That is a natural path to come. Talk to us.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): So from a branding perspective.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): If it was all up to you in the case of if you have a open source project and you're building a company an

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): a commercial company alongside it.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): What do you think it should be branded some something similar? Or do you think it should be branded something completely different. Should there ha! Be any parallels

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Carolyn, do you wanna start.

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Carolyn King: If I could choose it, I would I would have there be

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Carolyn King: like strong consistency across both. I think it is definitely an added challenge, because essentially, you're building

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Carolyn King: 2 distinct brands. So in my, in my previous life, that was Apache, Pulsar and stream, native

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Carolyn King: like those are very

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Carolyn King: there. There's no inherent connection between those and and even with Fliptia and with fluent bit. And so what happens is that when they are so

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Carolyn King: like separate, you have to spend a lot of time connecting the dots for your audience.

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Carolyn King: so that they know. You know there's a lot of like, you know, when I joined Kleptia. Our first coupon. My first coupon with them was.

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Carolyn King: who's what's kleptia? I don't know. Oh, do you know, fluent bit? Yeah, I know fluent bit. So it's like, How do you close that gap? And we can talk more about that. But yeah, I I would love to go in to the. If I had the chance now I I wouldn't brand alongside.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): I I I thought that would be the case. But would definitely wanted to lead on. You guys as experts on that

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): again from kind of the marketing lens. What advice would you give a founder who is thinking about building an open source, commute or building an open source product or starting with an open source product.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Was there any specific advice that you would give them before as they're getting started.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Brian, I'll take it to you.

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Ryan McCurdy: yeah, I you know, I I think one of the

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Ryan McCurdy: biggest things is

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Ryan McCurdy: who like.

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Ryan McCurdy: who who am I building this for? And really having a a good understanding of the accounts, they'll either adopt the Open Source project and or the accounts you should be selling into. So it's like, what is your account based? Approach?

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Ryan McCurdy: And then, of course, taking that further, who in those accounts will care at the persona level?

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Ryan McCurdy: I think the best companies in the world do that

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Ryan McCurdy: cause. If you don't do that.

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Ryan McCurdy: you're not. It's hard to get everyone really focused.

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Ryan McCurdy: And then you're selling to everyone, or now everybody's the buyer.

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Ryan McCurdy: So I think if you really understand the the accounts you should go focus on, and having some form of an account based strategy

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Ryan McCurdy: that puts you in a great position to win.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Carolyn any suggestions for you for founders as they start thinking about these different paths.

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Carolyn King: I think you know, it's interesting to think about launching a company alongside an open source project like, I think

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Carolyn King: that

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Carolyn King: the timeline for open source to grow. Typically, there's an incubation period that a lot of commercial companies aren't afforded. So I would definitely think about about that. I think the timeline is just typically longer. For for the scale and adoption for an open source, I would say, if I'm thinking about launching an open source very early. I would be thinking probably

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Carolyn King: not exactly what Ryan said, but kind of along the same lines is like, who are those like massive companies? That will be.

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Carolyn King: not even massive. But who are those big markets that will be engaging? Because the biggest thing you need is contributors in the early days. And so if there's not if you haven't identified who those people are that will come in and help you build this, it's gonna be pretty challenging.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): So I shift a little bit and talk about teams internally, and collaboration between marketing and product development is really crucial in targeting the technical buyer. How do you foster effective communication whether you're managing up managing over managing 2 product managers? How do you think about this relationship? And how do you foster an environment where you can have those feedback loops?

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Ryan? Do you want to start.

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Ryan McCurdy: Sure.

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Ryan McCurdy: I think the most clear way to do it is there's some form of kpis.

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Ryan McCurdy: To give you an example, we have a

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Ryan McCurdy: A sales led motion at astronomer, and then also a product led motion at astronomer. So we have to really work really closely

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Ryan McCurdy: with the the product team to

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Ryan McCurdy: get our self service or and or trial to where we want it. And

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Ryan McCurdy: I think in order to do that, if we're not aligned on the Kpis specifically, growth engagement activation.

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Ryan McCurdy: Mr. R. For example.

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Ryan McCurdy: it, it's like, you're always probably gonna butt heads. So it it really starts there like, what are the Kpis we we need to agree to. And then building, I would say, just a plan together on what we? What can we deliver that will help us accomplish that.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Is that something that you like to build from the top down? Or is that?

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Is there anything unique in there that you like to point out for building out your Kpis.

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Ryan McCurdy: yeah, I think. You know, we've we've launched our product live motion the middle of last year. So

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Ryan McCurdy: you know, we had to go start from scratch like W. What? What does

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Ryan McCurdy: great look like? Of course, when we launched it? You know, there's just a ton of learnings, and there's learnings all the time.

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Ryan McCurdy: So you know, we have a couple really, big kpis that we track to

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Ryan McCurdy: signups.

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Ryan McCurdy: you know, once people sign up, are they actually activating and or doing something?

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Ryan McCurdy: And then, like, you know, at the end of our self service, you can put in a credit card. And then from there are you consuming, consuming? And those are the 3

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Ryan McCurdy: or 4 kpis that we really try and track to. And you know we're always talking about, what features can we implement the help consumption? How can we make things easier? Should we have multiple?

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Ryan McCurdy: Ask? People can can go down. So like, for example, for us.

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Ryan McCurdy: You know, we have a lot of people come to us. As the you know, stewards of Apache air flow, which is huge. I think there's like 30 million downloads a month.

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Ryan McCurdy: We have a lot of people who want to adopt Apache airflow. And then we have a lot of people who are already using airflow, who want to buy Astro.

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Ryan McCurdy: That's a those are very different. Maturity curves. So to go build out couple of paths like that, you know, from a product perspective, it's pretty difficult from a marketing perspective. Well.

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Ryan McCurdy: alright, there's different nurture things that we've been doing for a long time that isn't new.

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Ryan McCurdy: So it's really working together on some of those mechanics to get it right.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Carolyn.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): So in your experience in working both with product and you've done early stage where product, head of product is also founder. How do you think about managing that relationship and working together and having that building out that feedback loop.

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Carolyn King: Yeah, I'm I'm smiling as this questions being asked because my product people have been my founders at my last 2 companies, and so very much that relationship with product is the same as the relationship with the founder, who is often also the head of sales or my sales. Guy, you know, or girl to start with. I think

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Carolyn King: in the early days, and I would say I mean the early days, me being less than 50 employees. The feedback piece is actually not that difficult, because the team is small, right? But that's like taking a lot of things into that's making a lot of assumptions. So I'll say, to be more specific for for founders on the call that are thinking about this.

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Carolyn King: How are you capturing learnings on a weekly basis and communicating those. And a lot of that in the early days is is coming from sales calls.

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Carolyn King: And so for me, product, of course, is super important, but the feedback in the like early stages. That feedback coming from the market, it's not coming from, you know, product. People have ideas. Marketing. People have ideas, but the customers telling you like what the path is. So I think, being very tapped into what we're hearing from sales. What are those learnings? What are we hearing from customers on calls? And how are we sharing that across product and marketing like that's that's the biggest piece.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): So

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): going back to to tactics. What are some things that you guys have done, either in marketing, to marketing, an open source project or marketing your commercial product? What are some tactics that you have done that have been

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): possibly unique to this technical buyer? Or is the flow similar to a traditional Sas company that's selling into the business team.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Ryan, you want to start.

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Ryan McCurdy: Sure. So

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Ryan McCurdy: so it's a great question, you know. I I think, somewhat of a basic level. It does all come back to content. How authentic that content is, and

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Ryan McCurdy: creating a path for people you know, to

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Ryan McCurdy: learn about the problem, educate them, learn about why they should think about you, and ultimately have some form of mechanism

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Ryan McCurdy: to get their hands on the product. And tactically, that last step is really critical.

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Ryan McCurdy: and you know. How do you get people? How? How do you enable people to get their hands on their product? And how is that?

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Ryan McCurdy: you know, effectively done? I I think one of the things I've ran in the past is like

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Ryan McCurdy: little cliche, but like a Pepsi challenge, if we all remember that from many, many years ago.

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Ryan McCurdy: which is like a speed or skill test.

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Ryan McCurdy: You know, for us, we find

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Ryan McCurdy: like they're either using the open source project already.

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Ryan McCurdy: Maybe they're using

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Ryan McCurdy: one of the cloud native tools out there for orchestration.

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Ryan McCurdy: And like we, wanna you know, kind of put our money where our mouth is. And and for a technical buyer that's great

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Ryan McCurdy: because of what it actually acts like is like a Poc, so you can actually accelerate sales cycle, sometimes

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Ryan McCurdy: by doing some type of speed or scale test where you're comparing

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Ryan McCurdy: their product versus ours. Now, if they're not using anything that's that's very different. That that probably is best, for not for a product led motion.

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Ryan McCurdy: but for a sales led motion. Those kind of like Pepsi challenges, as I call my, I found it work really well, and you can do those virtually in field events.

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Ryan McCurdy: so I found those to be like pretty effective. Takes a little bit to, you know, get those things set up. But

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Ryan McCurdy: when you couldn't really start showing how you're different and the the the benefits and potentially like Roi.

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Ryan McCurdy: You know, technical buyers want that stuff, too. They don't just want feature function.

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Ryan McCurdy: So that's yeah. I found that to be really effective.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Carolyn. I know you've done also a lot of in person.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Tactics over the over the last few years. So is there anything there specifically any advice you give for how

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): a team should think about approaching this.

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Carolyn King: Yeah, definitely.

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Carolyn King: I think. And and this is like a a interesting question, because there was how we did things during quarantine. And then, after quarantine was like the world just opened up, and there there was so much more to do there. I think there's different opportunities, you know. Obviously, things like technical meetups are great. If you're trying to connect with developers.

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Carolyn King: I think 2 things that we've that we've done in in my past life and some things we're thinking about doing right now that served a very different purposes. So I'll give you the first example is

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Carolyn King: doing a open source focused meetup. So we did

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Carolyn King: the the pulsar summit every year, and that was great, because it was an opportunity not just to bring all of the different users together, and to get them sharing best practices and connecting but it also shows people who have not adopted pulsar that

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Carolyn King: who's using it, how they're using it, etc. So it's kind of like marketing and promotion for the Open source project, which I think is is very impactful, and I know we were talking about this before hopping on live. But choosing the city. To do that in is is really important. So we did our first in person in San Francisco, and so we also focused on

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Carolyn King: all of the speakers were were Apache Pulsar users, but we reached out to the broader tech community. So we were bringing in

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Carolyn King: all of the big names and tech you can think of from the Bay area and getting them in attendance. So I did just like the the opening keynote, and said, Who here uses Pulsar, or who here, you know, people raise their hand, who hears this new to 70% of people. It was new to. So it was like this, like magic balance of for the users like they're now

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Carolyn King: super excited. They're meeting other people using it, etc. But it was also a huge event for us to do like that net new audience. So that that's like one thing I I like to think about, because it serves very different purposes another event that we did was we were working with

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Carolyn King: a company that was a massive user of Apache pulsar. And so we said, Okay, we're gonna come on site and do a training. And then a one day training. It's a very big company. There was like 99 engineers attended that. So something like that is like very impactful in

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Carolyn King: ensuring that they're gonna continue to use pulsar, and also that their adoption of pulsar will spread across the company. So again, one is like very technical like, how do we drive deeper adoption within this very specific account? On the other side it's like much more broad like, how are we driving net? New awareness.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): So now I want to shift it to advice for founders. So a lot of founders, especially early stage founders that we work with

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): don't, even at the seed stage, don't even have a marketing team or marketing person yet. So what advice would you give them for starting to think about pipeline. You 2 are both demand Gen. Experts. How should a founder start to think about building pipeline in those early days? Carolyn, you want to start.

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Carolyn King: I'm like e early days, early days.

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Carolyn King: you know. Make sure that like build from the bottom up right? Make sure you're capturing people who are interested when they're coming to the site. So this isn't very hard stuff to do but develop ctas. Get people into your newsletter. That's where things like events, a lot of people are not gonna come to your website and sign up for your newsletter. But if you're doing an event, and you can like get them into the funnel. So I would say.

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Carolyn King: early days. Make sure that you're like, you're like bringing people like very top of funnel. But then you're able to like convert somehow. So get that email, get that content contact information and start to build from there. But I think the other thing. And Ryan hit on this earlier is like test, different content events. If it's early.

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Carolyn King: you know, a lot of companies end up pivoting. So maybe you think it's this thing that they're coming to you for. And you learn through conversations that it's something else

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Carolyn King: testing, different, like content. And events is, gonna be super helpful and getting you there more quickly.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): And then on that event

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): topic before I pass it over to to Ryan with the same question, what draws people in? Especially with this technical brat buyer like, what do they

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): especially? Let's take it from an early stage company.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Yeah, what should? What's the carrot to get these engineers there.

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Carolyn King: Yeah, I think you know, one thing that I've had a lot of success in doing is identifying a couple of specific use cases and then building for that and the the differences. And I'll give you the example from Stream Native. You can do

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Carolyn King: like an Apache pulsar 101, and that's really great for people that are already using Apache pulsar and are already interested. One of the early learnings that we had is that

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Carolyn King: people who are moving to micro services were much more likely to be interested in pulsar. So we built a 3 part series on developing and building micro services. And so that was a really really successful campaign for us. Because number one, it's not leadership. Number 2. It's like highly educational. There's a value. Add, for whoever's attending that event. And it wasn't just about Pulsar Stream native. It was the the educational

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Carolyn King: value that was being provided was much broader than that. So for us, that's like a great way, and you might not always know what those used cases are. But again, when we talk about testing. You probably have some good instincts from your sales, conversations, and whatnot, and then put that that content out there. And that's a really great way, especially if it's used. Case focused, you're not trying to sell them anything you're trying to like, connect them to experts who can help

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Carolyn King: bring value as they're they're looking to build out this initiative.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): And Ryan for you. What advice would you give founders that are early stage and don't have a marketer to to lean on. But need to start thinking about building demand.

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Ryan McCurdy: Yeah, I I mean, honestly, we could. We could spend a whole session just talking about one topic, in my opinion, like.

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Ryan McCurdy: there's, you know, potentially a lot.

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Ryan McCurdy: but I you know, I like to kind of break it down into maybe like 3 steps. That first step I would really go identify your Icp. Those are my

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Ryan McCurdy: 3 favorite letters, ideal customer, profile. Specifically.

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Ryan McCurdy: What are the accounts? Who are going to care the most.

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Ryan McCurdy: or what accounts have the most pain that we can go solve.

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Ryan McCurdy: You can map those out through different tools. But you know that that's a thing that like is a lot of times a North star for a marketer or go to market specifically.

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Ryan McCurdy: In fact, that's how a lot of

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Ryan McCurdy: the best go to market teams that I've worked on really come together and execute is having a great Icp

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Ryan McCurdy: And once you have that, and maybe even before you have that. And and Carolyn, you know you touched on. This is like, well.

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Ryan McCurdy: there's there's the content aspect of it. And having calls to act. And I think if you can really marry those 2 like

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Ryan McCurdy: forming somewhat of a content engine as a founder, either through yourself, your co-founders, the other subject matter experts you have on staff.

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Ryan McCurdy: You scream. Where, hey? We're gonna go write this many things.

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Ryan McCurdy: We're gonna have calls to action as a next step. And all those things like that's what? You gotta marry the the content production with the calls to action to maybe a webinar. Maybe it's a meetup. What is the next step like? You can't. You can't forget that, or you're never gonna capture them.

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Ryan McCurdy: You know. That's how you build up your database. And you know databases are like gold mines like. That's what you go nurture and convert. So you gotta you gotta build that up

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Ryan McCurdy: like those. So those are. Probably I would say, like.

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Ryan McCurdy: you know, kind of the big 2. And then from there it's just really having

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Ryan McCurdy: what I would call just like an experimentation mindset.

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Ryan McCurdy: So how are you testing? How are you analyzing? What should we go try next?

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Ryan McCurdy: And what's gonna happen is you're gonna find this build pipeline or this doesn't. This is our buyer, or it's actually this other group.

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Ryan McCurdy: and you know, then you're gonna go. I think from there, figure out some of the really

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Ryan McCurdy: you're gonna really figure out some of the hard problems.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Fantastic. So final question

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): a quick one, if you can answer it quickly. But what is one thing you wish founders knew about marketing

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): Carolyn.

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Carolyn King: Yeah,

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Carolyn King: Ryan, do you have this one?

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Carolyn King: I like.

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Ryan McCurdy: Yeah, yeah, I gotta think of that. Right?

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Carolyn King: So many things.

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Ryan McCurdy: There, there you're right, there is, and

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Ryan McCurdy: I think there's there's there's 2 and there you're right. There's a lot of things, actually. But I think the 2 big ones content is king.

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Ryan McCurdy: And in order to like

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Ryan McCurdy: Ab.

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Ryan McCurdy: any like one blog or one page like isn't content. You were talking about like a

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Ryan McCurdy: content engine that is like being maintained. That takes a village.

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Ryan McCurdy: It's not just the one marketing you ha! Person you hire, which I've had to be that person before, like no, it takes a lot of people to go do that at a really high level, and there has to be like. It has to be managed and kpis against it.

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Ryan McCurdy: And sometimes.

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Ryan McCurdy: you know, like, it's just what people are paid on. Sometimes like it's part of like, you know how we comp them.

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Ryan McCurdy: I think that's a really

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Ryan McCurdy: big thing that Thomas should, should, you know, try and learn more about. And I think the other thing is

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Ryan McCurdy: lot of times when I've joined earlier stage companies. It's all feature function.

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Ryan McCurdy: We created this. It does this.

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Ryan McCurdy: It's hard to really extract any value

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Ryan McCurdy: or benefit.

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Ryan McCurdy: it's just not spelled out. So I'd really think through, like, okay, we created this, it does this which helps you accomplish XY. And Z, or helps your comp, your company accomplish. XY. And Z. You can't forget that the value you can't forget the benefit so

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Ryan McCurdy: content. And like that, you know, kind of the value based messaging, going hand in hand. So those are the things that I would, I would say. There's a bunch of other things of like investment headcount. And this this could be a whole nother topic.

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Carolyn King: Yeah. Alright.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): There you go!

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Carolyn King: I'll do 2 real quick. Thanks, thanks, Ryan. I needed a minute to to make it concise, so I would say. The first thing is, don't get overwhelmed by marketing. There's many different aspects of marketing. You don't need to do everything. So in the early days focus on what's most impactful like, if you start with the blog, and then you build in the next thing, and then you build in like you don't need to do paid out of the gate. You don't need to think about.

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Carolyn King: It's controversial SEO out of the gate like you don't need to do all of the things like start like crawl, walk, run, would be the first part, and then the second thing very much in terms of what? What? Ryan just said. A little bit different. But that idea, if you're talking about like

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Carolyn King: features that you're building, etc, you're talking about you, and I'll see this like it'll be like one of the first things I do. If somebody's like, what do you think about our marketing? You go to their blogs. If every blog is about me

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Carolyn King: like my company. Something's wrong because people aren't coming to know about you.

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Carolyn King: Technical buyers are coming to learn how

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Carolyn King: you are going to help them solve their problem. So you see, it's like very, very interesting for companies that are doing it right with technical audiences. It's the value. Add on the problem for them. So it's like about you. If you go and you're writing about me, about us, about our features. There's gonna be a huge disconnect right off the bat.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): No, I, that that is a great point to to end on and I I believe that in all elements of marketing that when you're building this content, you can't just be hard selling the entire time. You have to be thinking about providing value.

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Anne Gherini (Sierra Ventures): So with that, I want to thank you. Thank you all for joining Carolyn and Ryan. Thank you so much for for taking the time. Please check out Sierra ventures.com slash ascend is more of our founder and portfolio content. And we'll have a blog post up next week with this and the video if you want to share it. Thanks so much, and have a great weekend.

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Carolyn King: Thanks you guys, great to talk to you.