Taylor Smith

As a Fractional CTO, I often prefer to hire individual contractors instead of agencies. Many of my clients love hiring agencies, but I tend to steer them away from that strategy. These are a few reasons why I avoid agencies: 1. Agencies have an incentive to create lock in and push towards a "feature factory" culture. This way they'll sell more "resources". Making roles more granular helps selling more profiles. Eg: 1PM+2BE+2FE+1QA, when it could be just 2 or 3 senior fullstack engineers. With such segregation of responsibilities, each team member can also be more junior on average, and the non-senior profiles are the ones where agencies make the highest margins. Suddenly, a startup has a team of 10 to 15 people. Big costs, without actually shipping much value. 2. Agencies don't have an incentive to increase code quality standards Clunky QA and deployment processes are an opportunity for them to sell the people who operate those. Why should they push for automated CI/CD? They'd lose business by doing it. Issues in prod mean more bug tickets and regressed tasks. Those are scope increments they'll happily bill for. There's an incentive to accept loosely defined tasks, and not go deep to define all edge cases ahead of development. It hurts the client's business big time, though. 3. Agencies add barriers and bureaucracy It's usually very easy to add new people to the team. But not so easy to downscale when needed. Or to fire that person who's not performing. Contract clauses like minimum tenures and so on can really hinder nimbleness in a small team. For these 3 reasons, I do not engage agencies when the goal is to build a long lasting team that I want to grow under a certain engineering culture. I hire directly instead, whenever possible. There are hordes of senior talent around the world wanting to be hired directly by US/UK/EU companies. I prefer hiring them and inspiring those individuals to form a strong team, instead of using an agency that instills such vices in them. If you own a software development agency and think this is non-sense, please reply below and tell me why I should recommend your agency to my clients. I've worked with great agencies too, those exist, but are a minority.

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Why settle for a product that’s just ‘viable’ when you can build something people *love*? I recently stumbled upon an article about SLC (Simple, Lovable, Complete) software process and found it enlightening. **1. Simple ?** - Core features only—no bloat. - A clear, focused user experience. **2. Lovable ??** - Polished interfaces. - Features people genuinely *adore* and rave about. **3. Complete ??** - Fully functional from day one. - No half-baked solutions here. It’s time to ditch the MVP mindset. Instead, let’s build products that delight and inspire. Ready to create something your users will fall in love with? Let’s connect! ?? P.S. here is the article to learn some more about it - https://lnkd.in/gUZicivt #ProductDevelopment #Innovation #SLC

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After a decade of transforming A/R systems for acquired CPG brands, I know one thing: Your business runs on cash, not promises to pay. I've reviewed CPG brands' financials hundreds of times. Want to know the biggest red flag I see? A messy Accounts Receivable system. Here's what I typically find in high-growth CPG brands: → A/R reports that haven't been run in months ? No visibility into cash flow ? Zero metrics to track overdue payments → Departments operating in silos ? Sales doesn't talk to Finance ? Finance doesn't talk to Operations → Partially paid invoices collecting dust ? Credit memos floating in limbo ? Write-offs with zero documentation The truth? Most brands focus on growth while their A/R system crumbles. That rockstar employee who used to handle A/R? They're drowning. Not because they're incompetent. Because your business outgrew your systems. Here's what proper A/R management delivers: → Predictable cash flow → Faster collections → Clear revenue forecasting → Streamlined operations → Empowered team members I'm currently taking on a select number of CPG brands looking to transform their A/R systems. Ready to turn those receivables into cash? Drop "A/R" in the comments or DM me to discuss how we can optimize your Order-to-Cash cycle. CPG #Finance #AccountsReceivable #CashFlow

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Hyper-personalization in e-commerce is crucial. Leveraging cutting edge AI to create personalized shopping experiences, significantly enhances customer engagement and satisfaction. That's exactly what Flyfish does. #flyfish #genai #ecommerce

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Product marketing is hard. Really hard. I think it’s possibly the most undervalued skill set in a tech company and I don’t really understand why. You can spot a product that has a world class PMM working on it a mile off. There are very few people with the breadth of skill to do this role well and product teams with an amazing PMM are great places to be. Anyone up for helping me understand more? Product marketing has been one of the steepest learning curves for me so far on this start up journey.

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Counterintuitive growth unlock: Leaving the "cancel subscription" button at your customers' fingertips. Let's face it. There's a lot of competition out there. And when consumers are shopping around, they're checking out *a lot* more than just price and features. Like flexibility, for example. If your company boasts a no-contract, cancel anytime offer while a competitor doesn't, who do you think consumers are going to be more willing to try out first? Be that company. #b2b #saas #churn #cx #customersuccess #revenuegrowth

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As HubSpot consultants, my teams spends more time as business consultants than technical doers. Why? Because it provides measurably more value to our clients. So what does this look like? Take the home building industry for instance. A builder may pay us $360 to run and validate their weekly traffic reports and the appointment-to-contract conversion rate for OSC-generated appointments. That same builder will pay us $3,600 to proactively bring them insights into which communities are struggling, the root cause of the downward trend, and data-backed strategies for addressing it. >>> Your takeaway (whether you are an in-house CRM admin or revops consultant): There is 10X more value in knowing what to look for in your CRM data than there is in knowing how to find specific data or compile reports. #hubspot #salesforce #crm #revops #builders #construction #realestate #homebuilders #inbound

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Just did a search for [city] + SEO company...LLM answers are currently 10x better than the paid search answers at the top, none of the companies were actually located in those cities, and the LLM answers were a lot better. When we think of friction + real estate + accuracy ... The LLM wins here. Friction + Accuracy: ? SERP: After clicking on the 3 results, I had to go to each site, close out its pop ups, close its landing page, click on the contact page, to get their addresses only to find out they aren't in my city. ? LLM: No need to click on multiple sites and most times (95%+) the companies were actually in those cities, which beat the accuracy from the paid ads by a MILE. Real estate: ? SERP The top real estate on a search page was paid results, none of which were right. Google sprinkled in all kinds of ads, for infinite scroll and elsewhere making it hard for average users. ?The top real estate on an LLM is just the answer, how I want it, table, list, etc.

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In the past year, I’ve audited 8+ companies' full GTM performance. The biggest insight? Most companies don’t have the right infrastructure to effectively measure results easily. Here are 10 infrastructure/reporting holes (outside of best practices) I’ve routinely seen: 1. Not capturing the conversion action. - What was the thing that the prospect did right before the opp was created? Ensure that it’s mapped from the originating contact to the opportunity object. This is the biggest hole. Bonus points if you’re also capturing the conversion campaign, source, and UTM fields. 2. Building on point 1, mixing offers and channels in the lead source/conversion action. - There should be a clear delineation between the category of the action (or Pipeline Source (events, lead gen, outbound, partner, declared-intent, etc.), the conversion type (list purchase, demo, chat, content syndication, gated content, etc.), the campaign, and the channel. I see a lot of inconsistencies here. 3. Inconsistent campaign structure - Having consistent, streamlined campaign naming conventions and outlines of how they’re set will have your future self jumping for joy. 4. Not creating deals from a contact - Not creating a deal from a contact means you can’t bring forward the mapped contact information to evaluate the performance of what’s closing and what’s not. 5. Not date stamping deal stages - which would allow you to determine qualified opp stages consistently vs. an arbitrary stage labeled as qualified (typically recommend the stage that has a win rate of >25%, as a new field, and evaluated routinely if not dynamically). I’ve seen pipeline inflation of $1M+ and deflation - meaning companies either are counting an excess in pipeline that leads to inaccurate forecasting or are too strict on the definition, resulting in not counting performance. Note: you can find these stages without date stamping, but I wouldn't classify it as easy. 6. Determining performance based on departments vs. the conversion, which goes back to point 1. This isn’t granular enough and can be misleading. 7. Not using qualitative data such as Self-Reported Attribution to understand how the demand was created. 8. Not incorporating headcount and software/tool cost into the marketing ROI 9. Inconsistent contact/lead creation process (depending on the object used), especially with outbound. You need to be able to see contact —> win conversion rates. 10. Not storing UTM fields Ensuring you have the right ops infrastructure in place is SO important, as is allowing your team to focus on foundations. Being able to truly connect the dots with performance quickly outside of relying on additional software (looking at you, Bizible) or, even worse, influenced models is a major growth lever.

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Great read, very relevant for all the marketers and decision makers. “Building audience the trusts you” is the missing link for most of the enterprises running behind quick success with AI. They forget that their customers also have access to AI and it’s not difficult to build a solution these days. Credibility and proven use cases can do wonders for businesses. Words of wisdom coming from a mentor. Thanks for sharing sir. ??????

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A question I get asked a lot is, “what should I invest in that would help our ecom SaaS grow?” As the VP of Growth at Social Snowball, I’ve tried it all: Events, newsletter sponsorships (add other marketing things you’ve tried here lol). The one thing we consistently invest in is content. Why? Because content does three things for us at Social Snowball:? - Builds authority in the space - Drives leads - Reduces churn Plus, it educates merchants on using affiliate marketing as an acquisition strategy, instead of typical paid ads. Here’s what type of content I invest in, and how I make sure that I maximize the impact of every piece: We focus on two main types of content every month: Case Studies and Playbooks. 1?? Case Studies Case studies are ?????? at closing deals and introducing new strategies to our merchants. No two brands are the same, so the more diverse your case studies, the better. How we distribute them: In our sales cycle. We want to show leads exactly how they can achieve a specific outcome. All over social media (Twitter and LinkedIn, and sometimes our Newsletters). On our website, for everyone to see. 2?? Playbooks Playbooks help us acquire new customers AND reduce churn of our existing merchants. Our in-house playbooks break down complex topics into easily digestible, step-by-step content that our existing merchants can implement right away. Our partnership playbooks generate us a ton of leads by partnering with strategic partners (like FERMàT, Triple Whale, Sharma Brands, Insense | TikTok & Meta Partner, PostPilot, KnoCommerce, Refunnel, and so many more). Shoutout to Pia Mikhael and the Saasy Media team for helping us write all our content. You guys are the GOATs.

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Want to hear from arguably the best developer marketer in...the world?! ?? Stripe’s first marketing hire + 9 years of successful tenure ?? Retool’s Head of Marketing ?? OpenAI’s VP Marketing ??I don’t think that modern developer marketing leadership pedigree gets better than that! Krithika Muthukumar is an epic marketer, leader and advisor and she is the person you want to talk to if you’re figuring out developer GTM from the early days (or GTM in general, she does more than just developer work!). Here’s an abbreviated preview of one of my favorite questions - I’ve cut the practical examples she dives into which are ?gold ? so go check out the full piece at calyx.substack.com. Q: How do you build an excellent developer brand? Krithika: There are three unspoken rules of developer branding. These are hard won learnings, I can’t believe I’m just dropping them here! 1. Be non-transactional. What I mean by that is if you put out content, don't expect anything in return - not an email address, not a download, not a subscribe. Nothing. Share in-depth learnings, or a unique perspective that people can't find anywhere else. You should aim to make people feel like they’ve found “their people”, or their niche. 2. Sweat the details, and consider them the business value of delight. Taking a few extra cycles to really imbue delight into the things that you're putting out there pays off with developers (and pretty much all audiences). 3. Steal liberally, but not from your industry. If you follow somebody else's playbook in your category and try to do the same thing as them, you’ll end up in a derivative space or optimizing for local maxima. If you can go and take a look at companies in completely different domains, you can learn a lot.? ~ We also dig into whether developer marketers have to be technical, how to teach a scaling marketing org “good taste” and how the marketing team at OpenAI targets every audience from B2B, B2C and B2D. You don’t want to miss it!

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Is AI going to steal your job? If you’re a dev marketer, probably not. For all the econ nerds out there, it has a lot to do with the Baumol effect. What do I mean by that? At its simplest, marketing isn’t manufacturing. Sure, AI tools that help you write ad copy or even spit out pictures and videos might mean more output with a lot fewer inputs. But here’s the catch: without human touch, those outputs lack quality. As I’ve learned building both ScraperAPI and TLDR, devs in particular really need to feel a sense of trust before they bother with your product. I’ve seen firsthand how hard ads and messaging can flop when there isn’t human emotion or knowledge feeding it from the other side (which is exactly why we hire tech experts to curate our newsletters). Marketing is a lot more like the education and arts sectors in that way — it can’t function well without skilled humans. And the stakes here are only getting higher… Anything that AI can automate is just going to become table stakes. The real value will come from all the things AI CAN’T do, raising the importance of retaining and finding marketers who can really tap into their human side, not just crank on ChatGPT all day. tl;dr: AI is great for automating the tedious tasks, but it will never replace the human touch needed to build trust with the ever-skeptical developer audience.

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?? Killer newsletter drop from Elena Verna ?? Profiling in onboarding is critical for all growth and product teams because it relies on first party data instead of third party data. The truth is—you are going to get a lot of signal for activation and conversion rate—but once you segment by persona, demographic, company, role, etc, your data becomes much more clear and your team can focus on the signals and ignore the noise. So many teams I know hesitate to add profiling questions because of adding friction. If a few questions deter your users, then they are not high intent. Can you imagine the inefficiency of daily compounded decision making due to bad data? ?????????????????????????????????? Add those questions! But HOW? Check out Elena’s guide here ?? https://lnkd.in/dRqxnAYC #growth #plg #b2b

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After yesterday's big news, I'm back to writing on metrics for fun (and working on the garden -- you should see the progress on the new outdoor office!). So, which metric is up next? One of the most commonly used GTM metrics is conversion rate and its cousin, win rate. It measures your efficiency at turning prospects into opportunities, opportunities into customers, and beyond. I usually call it "funnel dynamics". Yes, funnels still work as they should. But that's a different post. Conversion rates track the proportion of prospects expected to move from one stage to the next in the buying process. By monitoring changes to these rates over time, you can identify friction points and how to improve the buyer journey. However, conversion rates are often miscalculated because of a blending of cohorts. You can't expect a predictive metric if you mix prospects from enterprise and SMB, different geographies, different time periods, multiple lead sources, etc. So, how do you calculate it? Here's how to calculate and use conversion rates to improve your funnel efficiency. https://lnkd.in/euzXcnt2

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It's been a week, y'all. Some #founder thoughts -> This week looked pretty much nothing like I expected it to. Air Traffic Control — Grow Pipeline With Existing Content was approved for the HubSpot Marketplace MUCH faster than I thought we would be. Their energy and partnership this early in the game is UNREAL. That also meant we had to figure out some product stuff REALLY fast. We knew we needed some in-app onboarding to handle the volume of new customer starts. And then, BAM! We're out there. The team moved SO fast to try a couple of solutions out and we landed on Appcues. More on this decision in another post and the bananas idea we had before going in this direction. We'll have that locked in by the end of next week. New investors joined the ATC journey this week and one was going to be in town on Wednesday. I live near Boston so I looked and, yep, Red Sox we're in town. I met up with Greg Little at the Cask 'n Flagon (IYKYK) and waited till the last minute to snag $65 tickets, 3rd row, field box. SCORE. And the night before good friends pulled me out to dinner. And post-dinner drinks. Plus plenty of Little League games and the rest of life was going on. Two things about having pretty much none of the work and night time stuff in the plan this week: 1) Sometimes the very best thing for a #startup is urgency. It is INCREDIBLE what super smart, capable people can figure out lightning fast. We're small, sure, but it's a full bench of starters. No pine riders here. And we'll never hire one. 2) I don't leave myself much time for being social. I am deep on work. Deep on being a partner and a dad. And doing my best to stay physically healthy. But the social + mental stuff? I suck at it. This week was so fun and joyful. And it made my work days even more exciting to run. Friends, check in on your co-workers, folks in your network, and your friends. And yourself. If you haven't taken a night off to see a friend or hang with your partner, schedule it. Hell. Just go do it. Planned or not. Someone can watch the kids. Your company won't catch on fire while you're AFK. And if your friends and network haven't granted themselves the space to breathe, get drinks, a game, a coffee or a walk on the books. Happy weekend. ??

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The best Product folks have this insane ability to deconstruct consumer behaviors from other apps and apply it to theirs. MPL’s game design, CRED Mint’s referral flows, and Urban Company’s service descriptions are all great examples of these!

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Many are quick to champion user testing as the holy grail for SaaS product launches. They tout the benefits: valuable feedback, reduced errors, and a stronger connection with your audience. Sure, those things are great, but there's a catch. Not everyone can afford to spend time and resources on extensive testing. The reality is, your crucial insights might get buried under the weight of endless revisions and delayed launches. Now, let’s flip the script. Instead of inundating your product with user testing, consider the audacity of building your audience first. You can engage potential users through exclusive newsletters, interactive demos, or even community platforms. Elevating anticipation allows you to gather insights organically as users show genuine interest, creating momentum that can overshadow the need for extensive testing. But don’t get too comfortable; this approach comes with its own setbacks. Building an audience takes time and, let’s be honest, quite a bit of effort. You might lose precious moments while competitors racing ahead snag the attention you want. Why not harness the strengths of both? Adopt a hybrid strategy. Begin with audience-building tactics to generate excitement and then layer in user testing but at a minimal scale. Gather targeted feedback on your earliest concepts while you’re already in front of an engaged audience. This can not only validate your product but also foster community – your future advocates. To apply this combination effectively, kickstart your plans by creating an enticing educational newsletter that showcases your product’s vision but leaves room for user interaction and feedback. Engage consistently to keep your audience invested, and simultaneously incorporate their thoughts into refining your offering as you prepare for a full launch.

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How did REI spend and lose $1M in 24 hours? They had no strategy. Just blasted money into ads and hoped it converted. Surprise... it didn't. For those of us in B2B, Zach Presnall knows a thing or two about complex sales cycles and how to plan GTM strategies. He's been a marketer targeting government agencies for years. He joined me on the GTM Secrets podcast talking how to improve your: 1. Email marketing 2. Content creation 3. Aligning sales and marketer Catch the full episode on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and anywhere else you get your podcasts!

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