Elena Verna

'Vibe coding' (using natural language to generate code) is a new core skill that allows non-technical roles to build functional prototypes.

"I vibe code myself so I would put that as even as a skill on my resume now... it's when I started scaling of what I want to vibe code, that's where his value really came in because I'm like, 'Okay, I..."

AI-native workflows involve moving away from manual tasks like typing and summarizing toward voice-to-text and automated synthesis.

"I use Granola a lot... I use Wispr Flow a lot because I feel like I have no time to type anymore. So I just talk to my phone and talk to my laptop all the time in order to do it."

The guest describes this as a specific, transformative skill for non-technical roles (PMs, Marketers) to build functional software using natural language, which goes beyond simple prompt engineering.

"I vibe code myself so I would put that as even as a skill on my resume now."

Most growth problems are not unique; seeking advice from those who have solved them before is the fastest way to avoid wasted cycles.

"Don't think that you have unique problems. You don't... Your problem has been solved by somebody. Or at least that there's a lot of failures on the problem that you should be learning from. And number..."

Advisors provide a critical external input that helps pattern-match and prevents teams from 'winging it' in isolation.

"Not hiring advisors is something that I do not recommend for you to do. You can get access to anybody for one hour a week. Yeah, you'll have to pay them... but hiring advisors is the biggest career am..."

Focusing on career optionality rather than specific titles allows for a more flexible and satisfying professional life.

"Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have... My goal professional is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do... Career optionality, being the ultimate..."

In the AI era, PMF is not a static milestone but a 'treadmill' that must be constantly maintained due to rapid technological shifts.

"product market fit as a concept is no longer what it used to be, and how every company basically has to recapture product market fit every three months."

The rapid pace of AI forces companies to focus on retaining 'pioneers' (early adopters), potentially delaying expansion to the 'latent majority' (adjacent users).

"The interesting piece here of how I relate to it, we still have the core users. And by the way, those core users are mostly pioneers right now that are excited by the capabilities. Then there's latent..."

In fast-moving AI categories, growth requires constant innovation of new loops rather than incremental optimization of existing ones.

"I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets, and innovate, and create new growth loo..."

Word of mouth in AI is driven by extreme product delight that empowers users to feel like they have superpowers.

"The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off."

Supercharged PLG involves using the product itself as the primary marketing vehicle by removing all barriers to entry.

"This is product-led growth... to the max, supercharged. Yes, because you're literally using your product to drive that awareness by giving it away to the agents in your ecosystem that will do that dis..."

Prioritize 'earned' channels like virality and user-generated content over 'rented' channels like paid search to build a defensible growth engine.

"As a growth team, your number one priority is to create your own or your earned channel. Channel that you've earned and that nobody else can compete in but you... It really goes into the concept of pr..."

Sustainable growth requires continuously layering new growth models (PLG, SLG, MLG) to find the next S-curve before the current one plateaus.

"Not overlaying every single way that you can grow through product, through marketing and through sales as an evolution. Is a huge mistake that a lot of growth teams fail to iterate on and innovate on."

Thinking in loops rather than funnels is essential for creating a self-sustaining growth engine.

"Growth loops... action, reaction that generates another action and it's a self-contained flywheel they can spin."

Self-serve revenue has a natural ceiling due to technical payment limits and individual spending authority.

"Self-serve monetization has a cap of about $10,000. That's just how much we're able to process on the credit cards before they start getting flagged and declined by the banks and how much we as a cons..."

The majority of free users are often unaware of what is actually included in the paid plans.

"In free to pay conversion, there's three pillars that you constantly need to work on... monetization awareness... conversion rate optimization... [and] what you're selling, do people want to buy?"

In new categories, giving the product away for free is a more efficient marketing spend than traditional paid acquisition.

"Another one is giving your product away a lot, this is part of our growth secret sauce. You have to remove the barrier of entry. If somebody, one of our users stands up and say, hey, I'm going to have..."

Standard freemium is insufficient for AI; you must provide enough free value to reach a 'wow moment' before asking for payment.

"AI being so new and the capabilities being so new, you have to remove the barrier of entry. You have to give a lot of your product away for free. But by the way, I don't just mean freemium. Freemium t..."

The transition from individual product usage to an enterprise-level contract is a long-term cycle, typically taking a year.

"It was 12 months plus of usage that had to happen before sales contracts can be created on sustainable way... it takes a year of usage to escalate the problem from individual to a company-level soluti..."

Removing friction is only effective if it solves user confusion; over-simplification can strip the product of its value and identity.

"Growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction... just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable..."

Paid work trials are the most effective way to screen for the high-velocity, high-agency talent required in AI startups.

"But second of all, we do a lot of trials for people. So trial work to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start peopl..."

Ex-founders are ideal hires for AI companies because they possess the necessary high agency and ability to generalize across roles.

"It's also interesting that there's a really high demand for ex-founders now, for those people that truly have a lot of agency and high autonomy... the failed startup founders are now hot demand for a..."

Startups should delay hiring a growth team until the founding team has established product-market fit and a distribution baseline.

"There is a huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team. To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can ou..."

Hiring a 'shiny' head of growth cannot fix fundamental product-market fit issues or a declining business trajectory.

"If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team."

Over-reliance on scientific experimentation can paralyze growth teams; professional intuition and pre-vs-post analysis are valid for low-volume or obvious changes.

"If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, that's a problem... It's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease, that slows down progress... I think tha..."

Product-led sales requires Product to move beyond 'feature factory' mode and take accountability for the sales pipeline.

"In the product-led sales, product acquires and activates a customer and product creates pipeline for sales... the collaboration here is between product and sales, but that means the product has to tak..."

Enterprise sales requires shifting the narrative from individual utility to organizational transformation.

"Individual is not solving for data-driven culture. Individual is just solving for data insights for them. Company's solving for data-driven culture... Sales can tell that story. Sales can bridge that..."

Rebrands and homepage redesigns typically result in a short-term performance hit and should be viewed as long-term strategic shifts rather than immediate growth drivers.

"Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of UK marketing site produce good performance results. New CMO comes in designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflec..."

Building in public creates a human connection and maintains market 'noise' that acts as a re-engagement strategy.

"One of our biggest strategy is building in public, and it's coupled with employee socials, founder-led socials."

Brand storytelling should be embedded directly into the product UI and interactions rather than just external marketing.

"I talk to my designer all the time, how can we add more love marks into the product? How can we prioritize more unique interactions? The little elements that make up that feeling of this product is sp..."

Effective storytelling is essential for making insights 'stick' and ensuring they are digested by the audience.

"Storytelling is a big portion of it actually to stick."

In emerging categories, community serves as a support layer for users exploring new capabilities and as a distribution amplifier.

"Community. I think community is really important here because you need to bring people together as they're exploring these capabilities... Community also amplifies that word of mouth. It amplifies all..."

When building a community, distinguish between user, agency, and partner segments to determine which will drive the fastest business results.

"At Nero, we were first trying to stand up community... I went and I started talking to a bunch of people that have done communities... She's like, 'Well, are you talking about a user community or an a..."

A North Star metric should reflect the core value or 'insights' delivered per unit of time to ensure alignment with user goals.

"My north star metric is insights per minute. That's what I try to use whenever I have any live meetings with people so it squarely fits within what I'm optimizing for."

Use competitors for inspiration and pattern recognition, but avoid blindly copying their flows as they may be unoptimized or context-specific.

"Knowing what your competition is doing is extremely important... But blatantly saying, 'Hey, we're going to copy all of these best tactics or all of these flows because, hey, they're doing better than..."

Onboarding surveys are essential for identifying the 'buyer' vs. the 'user' and preventing irrelevant sales outreach.

"Profile your people, know who you're talking to. It's more important than a couple percentage drop-off that will never going to activate in the first place. No, no, no die user please because all of u..."

High shipping velocity is a growth lever that maintains market interest and forces a culture of high agency.

"Velocity of shipping is our number one core value in development team. So we do anything and everything to just keep it going up, up, up and into the right... we lean on our engineers to do a lot of p..."

When starting a PLS motion, use a small pilot team to experiment outside the traditional sales quota system.

"Attach to yourself a pilot AE, so account executive, or an SDR and see how that works. You kind of separate yourself from the mothership of the sales engine and you actually prototype this separately..."

In B2B SaaS, the hiring order depends on the primary monetization motion: sales-led companies should prioritize sales hires over growth.

"If your money collection is going to happen through sales team primarily, then you absolutely should be hiring sales way before growth. In fact, in the sales led companies, growth teams are not necess..."

Product-led sales acts as a bridge to convert individual self-serve usage into high-value enterprise contracts.

"Product-led sales converts the usage that you've generated via self-serve into a sales opportunity and it attaches a salesperson to close a much larger contract, which can be 15, 20, a hundred thousan..."

Most PLS opportunities require finding an external buyer and connecting them to existing internal product usage.

"90% of product-led sales is converting the usage into an opportunity by finding a buyer outside, by finding the decision-maker outside. This is where marketing and sales are so crucial in the process...."

Consolidating individual users into a single company account is critical for identifying enterprise sales opportunities.

"One of the most important things is to create network effects within the company... any new sign-up that happens from the company that already has an account in my system should be presented with an o..."

The guest provides a comprehensive framework for a specific go-to-market motion that sits between PLG and traditional sales, involving unique metrics (PQAs), organizational accountability (Product own

"Product-led sales converts the usage that you've generated via self-serve into a sales opportunity and it attaches a salesperson to close a much larger contract."