Building a Growth Flywheel, Rather than Engine: Product, Media, and Community

for everyone for being here to listen learn and connect H my name is s buoni the BP of marketing at GTM fund and GTM now GTM fund is a early stage Venture fund backed by 350 go to market kind of expert operators who have been there done that if you will to grow some of the greatest SAS companies GTM now is the media brand at GTM fund sharing insight and advice from that top 1% of

operators in addition to of our viewpoints from working with over um a couple hundred portfolio companies and our media routs extend and far beyond even the fund back to sales haacker which is a brand our GP Max ultar founded back in the day he sold it to outreach in 2018 and then last year we actually reacquired it and rebranded it as GTM now so I'm going to kick us off on this

stage day un fortunately you're going to see a little bit more of me as I introduced our subsequent speakers you're going to hear from Seven incredible speakers throughout the day but we will get started with building and growing a or building a growth flywheel versus an engine and an example of product media and community so in the next 20 minutes I'm going to show you a flywheel versus an engine breakdown of an actual example so

our example our use case and three key benefits of building a flywheel now a growth engine requires continuous input to generate growth much like fueling a car unless you drive electric it works but it stops once you stop putting fuel in it a growth flywheel on the other hand grows on its own once it gains momentum with

different parts of the business reinforcing each other and so once it's set in motion it has this compounding growth effect and a much more sustainable growth impact so it's self-reinforcing and sustainable versus a growth engine that is linear and predictable it's momentum driven versus more input driven and it has a compounding effect versus more of a direct

relationship so this is our flywheel at GTM fund fund community media now for a SAS company that would be the product the fund is our product in this case and they all reinforce each other so all elements going of work together the fund is at the top of this flywheel simply because the flywheel is designed to support the fund everything we do is to support the fund and in SAS

company's case everything would be to support the product so if we break those down a few examples of the pieces of the flywheel that come together so the product Fund in this case supports media by providing an industry landscape and visibility to be able to share that kind of insight through media it brings limited partners so go to market Executives together to create a

community media in turn helps the flywheel because it increases brand visibility provides meaningful distribution for portfolio companies in a SAS example that's for yourselves or any of your partners in your ecosystem and for us it also provides a revenue source for programs for portfolio companies media also supports community in the flywheel because it helps amplify the thought leadership of anyone in that

Community to support their professional goals in SAS companies that can be you know prospects in your funnel that can be customers and for us it also serves as a revenue source for community events and last but certainly not least is community it supports our product product by providing built-in goto Market support for portfolio companies on the media side it helps by providing insight and expertise to share through that content and support the

distribution so there's a couple examples of SAS companies doing this really well at a very early stage Pocus is one example you'll hear from their CTO later today his name is Isaac and they built media and product or media and Community pardon me around their product and it's been really effective as they bring this flywheel together another interesting example on the community side is a company called Noble and they brought together an Advisory

Board of their ICP and that Advisory Board their icpr marketers helps them with distribution helps them overall get connected it also informs their product road map however because they can easily get feed back they set up a slack Channel and the interesting thing about that is they've shaped their Advisory Board as a community and then those members get the benefit of having that Community together together it creates a

flywheel and again product Community media coming together so they all work together to create compound and growth now in this graphic the arrows are unidirectional but the real reality is they all feed into each other so they are multi-directional all supporting each

other so with a flywheel growth is baked in not bolted on there's a few key benefits to doing so and thinking about this at a very early stage while you're building number one is efficient growth so building a flywheel can help reduce your ca in the long run as it creates more sustainable organic channels it also just helps you overall do more with less I know it sounds

cliche we say it all the time when we acquire the media business purely it helps us do more with less fewer resources because you can lean into your distribution to get any kind of messaging feedback way quicker than otherwise and Word of Mouth organic so certainly helpful on that front also second it creates a competitive

moat so the recipe of having a flywheel creates differentiation you could have the product you could have a community and you could have media working in silos but when you connect them as a flywheel they create a unique blend almost like I mean a recipe and the reality is in the startup world that we're often against larger companies with way more resources so if you were slow cooking a

recipe for example you'd have a large company they've got expensive pans they've got all the ingredients they can throw it together no problem at a way quicker rate but for startups when you're layering in parts of the flywheel very intentionally it's creating this recipe where each individual ingredient is layering on the next and extracting more flavor to create a unique blend that is harder for any company to replicate and third it helps build deeper

relationships so because we've got these long-standing deep rooted connections it does help in the long run for contributing to higher customer lifetime value in addition to any kind of top of funnel acquisition so any kind of pillars of the business any growth strategies the way we recommend always thinking about it and looking about it is are you compounding momentum or are you

constantly feeding the fire and it's not to say that growth engines do not serve a purpose and a very important purpose they certainly do especially before brand is taking off but everything that is being built can be viewed in the lens of how can this contribute or how are there potential synergies to be creating a flywheel or building towards creating a flywheel for acquisition for retention

and for

expansion so just a quick recap we covered key differentiation between growth flywheel and a growth engine a real kind of example if you wheel a flywheel for us of course that is fund it's a little bit of a different unique use case but the same things lend itself in terms of product Community media and three key benefits towards looking at everything that you do through the lens of how can I build a flywheel that is self-sufficient so efficient growth

competitive moat and stronger long-term relationships thank you thank you for listening we've got seven fantastic speakers coming up so again unfortunately you can't get rid of me that that easily I will be hanging around to introduce them as the next one comes up in about 7 minutes from now so feel free to grab quick drink of water and then we'll be ready back

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