Myles Recny

If I had to restart @ElevenLabs GTM from scratch, these are the things that I would change 🖊️ - Hire quicker. I was alone selling for the first 9 months because I believed we didn't have PMF. Main reasons: the AI tourist external mantra of 2023, and the uphill battle convincing everyone to hire more GTM (Sales development, Sales, Customer Success) because we were still mostly PLG / self-service. The hiring constraint lasted until earlier this year when we boosted our team to meet demand. - Build an enablement team earlier. Sales enablement has such an important role in an org, and we mostly think about it when we hire a lot of people. The reality is that we need Enablement earlier due to the speed of product iteration. - Open more markets. The results from Uber v Lyft operating models played a key role in deciding to open markets early, but I would triple down on it if we were to start over. - Have more big bets. Similar to VCs, you only need 1 big bet to work in order to generate Alpha. We could have executed more big bets if we had had a single person owning & iterating on them. Former successful founder profile with drive and speed. - Be more vocal about product ROI & our success. People buy from people, and companies buy based on success & ROI. In AI, we've all been slow showing ROI. This should be the key number when you start a conversation. - Hire senior sellers. In startups, we've been told that culture is everything and someone with +25y experience may struggle to fit in. This is bullshit. The experience, connections and drive +25y sellers bring is crazy. We have a bunch today, but I would hire many more earlier. - Reduce cash commissions and replace them with more equity. Cash is king, but Equity is queen. Queens also rule countries, so why not make Equity the dominant one in GTM? - Open more offices. We are a remote-first company, but our customers are everywhere, and employees want to meet each other. I would open more offices to be embedded in markets quicker. - Fun brand. Brand perception is 33% of the work. Building a fun brand adds quickly. - Outbounds outbounds outbounds. We waited too long to migrate to an Outbound organisation. I would do it from day 1 now. - Pipeline construction with more whales. The ideal pipeline needs to have a combo of segments to reduce risk, improve results and provide liquidity. We waited too long to pitch & bring whales. - Not all deals are good deals. We, sellers, want to close a lot of ARR, but it is important to split early on between good vs bad deals. Thank you to Tomasz Gmur for asking how I would do GTM again!