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Naomi Ionita

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57
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2023-01-12
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2023-01-12
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podcast

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  1. “There's a lot to cover here. I'll cover a few missteps that I think are most common. One is waiting too long to monetize. Another one is underpricing. And this isn't just setting the base price too low, but it's also leaving money on the table by not offering different plans to cater to different segments. And the third one is all too often with pricing, people set it and forget it. So this idea that when your product development work is never done, neither is your pricing and you need to combat that along the way. So those are three areas I think we can cover here. Maybe starting with one, I can jump right in. I think I'm waiting too long to monetize. So the beginning of a startup journey is all about creating something of value, right? That's the whole point. Hopefully founders have some unique market insight or some authenticity around a pain point and some novel solution that's going to change the world.”

    2023-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “You know, employees are accountable to each other to say, this is how work gets done, like design and figma, roadmap planning and ticketing and JIRA are linear. It just becomes the default platform. And monetization goes up, right? Revenue scale is with usage. And so the more people using it, the more they use it, you start tripping the wire on paying more and more over time. And so everyone really struggled in crossing that chasm from the prosumer tool of choice.”

    2023-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, we're going to clear some cobwebs here. It's been a while, but one challenge Evernote really struggled with was this evolution from single player to multiplayer to team to enterprise. It's a chasm that a lot of bottom-up SaaS businesses struggle to cross. Everno was philosophically antisocial. You know, it was meant to be your second brain, kind of your personal tool. And I think that capped the company's growth potential. You know, I always used to say you can't retrofit collaboration. You have to be collaboration first, and a lot of companies now really take that for granted. But back in mid-2000s, this is going to be a new way of building product. And so we miss that bridge. If companies do that well, it benefits every metric. That bridge from single player to multiplayer, acquisition goes up, you grow organically through referrals and shared workflows. Retention goes up because now you have these shared workflows that are incredibly sticky.”

    2023-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The acronym PLG had not been coined yet, and I really just thought of myself as a user and data-driven product person. After Evernote, I joined a bootstrapped mobile SMB company called InvoiceGo. It was the top gross business app at the time. There I built teams across product, data, growth engineering, design, and research. And again, focused on product-led growth and monetization. Over those two jobs, I found myself doing a lot more advising and speaking on the side on these topics. And my board members used to farm me out to their companies to help their founders think through things around product growth and pricing and various topics like that. And ReForge came together at the same time. So I would come in and speak on topics through that community. So that really accelerated my transition into venture. I realized how much I love having that portfolio view of the world and helping founders look around corners. So I think it's.”

    2023-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Perfect. So I'm a partner of Menlo Ventures. I focus on early stage SAS from seed to series B. I started my career in engineering and consulting before getting into tech back in 2006. Fell in love with product, did some new product development at a big media company before business school. And while at business school, I spent time at the design institute at Stanford. So this was an opportunity to kind of bridge my analytical background with this refreshing view on human-centered design and learning from the founder of IDEO. So brought that with me then to Evernote back in 2011, early days over there. I was there from about 10 to 100 million users. And over that arc, I shifted from more of a core product role to starting our growth product function. This was super organic. I started just collaborating with colleagues from across the business, come up with hypotheses, do user research, run experiments, drive metrics. This was a new way of building product back then. This was a decade ago.”

    2023-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, well, thank you. I'm, you know, I think early growth folks like us have a unique bond and lens on startups and investing. So my operating background is something I lean on every day and has actually informed a lot of the thesis areas where I spend time now as an investor. So hopefully we'll bring it all together in that capacity.”

    2023-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Do not set it and forget it. I see companies do this where they labor over designs and features and they build this perfect product that's delightful to use and then pricing sort of plucked out of thin air and then they don't revisit it. This was Evernote. It was many, many years before we went back and overhauled the pricing. So think about your pricing just like you do your roadmap. So every six to 12 months, there's probably something meaningful that you're launching for users. So treat that as an opportunity to revisit your monetization strategy and making sure you're compensated appropriately.”

    2023-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to price your product | Naomi Ionita (Menlo Ventures) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source