Episode 57 // Brand Your Products Using Product-Led Growth

Sep 6, 2022

Yet another Remarkabrand Podcast episode! Mike Jones and David Cosand  discuss a super effective tool in product branding called product-led growth (PLG) and Matt Johnston, CEO of GitKraken, is back to discuss how his company uses PLG to effectively sell to their very specific audience. 

Contact: Mike Jones mike@resoundcreative.com

Discuss at https://www.linkedin.com/company/resoundagency

The show is recorded at the Resound offices in ever-sunny Tempe, Arizona (the 48th – and best state of them all).

Show Transcript

Mike Jones:
Post-election withdrawal syndrome pills.

Sam Pagel:
Is that OTC? Is that prescription?

Mike Jones:
I think it’ll be OTC by then.

David Cosand:
Okay.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, the FDA’s going to really move fast on that one.

Sam Pagel:
And then we’ll do election vaccines. That’s three.

Mike Jones:
Forever inoculate from the elections.

David Cosand:
Get your booster every two years.

Mike Jones:
I would get that.

Voice Artist:
You’re listening to the remark a brand podcast, where authentic brands win. With your hosts, Mike Jones and David Cosand.

Mike Jones:
Okay. We’re talking about something that’s really fun inside the world of marketing and branding, and that is product branding. And, as promised we have back with us, Matt Johnston to talk through product branding and how his company GitKraken and has been successful in branding their products. But before we get to that, we’re going to do a little improv.

Sam Pagel:
Oh man. Name 10 things. Are you guys ready?

Mike Jones:
We’re ready. I’m ready?

David Cosand:
Always ready.

Mike Jones:
Are you ready David?

Sam Pagel:
David is so ready. This is so exciting. Okay. I want you guys to name 10 hot new products in the year, 2025.

David Cosand:
Oh. Monkeypox erasers. Sorry.

Sam Pagel:
One.

Mike Jones:
Post-election withdrawal syndrome pills.

Sam Pagel:
Two.

David Cosand:
Two. Okay.

Sam Pagel:
Is that OTC? Is that prescription?

Mike Jones:
I think it’ll be OTC by then.

Sam Pagel:
Okay.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, the FDA’s going to really move fast on that.

Sam Pagel:
And Then, we’ll do election vaccines. That’s three.

Mike Jones:
Forever inoculated from elections.

Sam Pagel:
Get your booster every two years.

Mike Jones:
I would get that. I would get that.

David Cosand:
They’re going to invent taffy pancakes.

Mike Jones:
Wow.

David Cosand:
Oh, Taffy Pancakes.

Sam Pagel:
Four.

Mike Jones:
Wow. Taffy pancakes. It’s awesome. Did they come with the little jokes on the rapper?

David Cosand:
Yeah. Laffy, taffy, pancakes. That’s awesome.

Mike Jones:
Horns on the cob.

Sam Pagel:
We’re halfway there.

David Cosand:
New eco-friendly air conditioners.

Sam Pagel:
Yep.

David Cosand:
Because, climate change guys.

Sam Pagel:
Totally. Yep.

Mike Jones:
Water, you can recycle immediately after you pee it out.

Sam Pagel:
Oh yeah. Nice.

Mike Jones:
It just goes right back in the bottle.

Sam Pagel:
It’s perfect. Three more.

David Cosand:
Solar powered newspapers.

Sam Pagel:
Yep. That’s eight.

Mike Jones:
Fesla the knockoff Tesla.

Sam Pagel:
The fake Tesla.

Mike Jones:
Fake Tesla.

David Cosand:
Nice.

Mike Jones:
Made in China.

David Cosand:
GrubHub is going to merge with Postmates and Uber eats. GrubHub. Postmates. Uber eats.

Sam Pagel:
Okay.

Mike Jones:
Grub mates, uber.

David Cosand:
Yeah, exactly.

Mike Jones:
Oh man. That was terrible.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Yay. We did it.

David Cosand:
Did we get 10?

Mike Jones:
We got to 10.

David Cosand:
We got to 10? Okay. All right.

Mike Jones:
We should have gotten to 11 on this one.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Voice Artist:
Find your frequency.

David Cosand:
All right. Branding for products. But before we start, before we get into that, I think we need to have a quick refresher. Why is a product branding different from branding the company?
We talked a little bit about that last time, but I think we need to kind of dive in a little bit more, product branding. It’s important. I don’t think we can ignore that while we’re working on these organizational brands that are really important, but the product brand also matters. So, why is it that we’ve got to differentiate them?

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
Well, we talk to a lot of manufacturers who are really good at what they do. They build cool stuff and they think it’s so cool that people are just going to flock to them and want to buy it. And that, rarely ever happens if ever.
And so, you do need to brand your product. There needs to be an identity there that doesn’t just focus on, here’s all the cool stuff that you can do with this. But, it also is led by who it’s made for. The audience. And that’s a huge ingredient, maybe the most important ingredient when you’re thinking about that and back to your question of why is it different to have a product brand versus an organizational brand.
And, we talked about that in the last episode where you have a product that might stay the same forever, but likely your company is hopefully going to grow and grow into different areas, different audience sectors, and probably different products or services over time. So, you don’t want to pigeon yourself into a single product as your company. You’re going to get stuck eventually.

David Cosand:
Yeah. I like what you said about the audience, because I was thinking the people that you’re selling to, there’s a relationship that they have with you, the organization or the company, but then there’s a relationship that they have with your product or your service. And, I was just actually thinking about Jeeps. There’re these commercials that I happen to see for, it’s Grand Wagoner, right?
Hose things are expensive. The there’s one starting at 60 grand and there’s another one at $90,000. I’m sure there are people out there who are Jeep people who are nowhere near that level. They love Jeeps. They probably had Jeeps before, but they’re not going to go buy the $90,000 Grand Wagoner. So that’s, a good example. You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself into well, Jeeps are only for rugged outdoorsy, single people. They could be for wealthy C level, suite execs that have the money.

Sam Pagel:
With seven kids.

David Cosand:
Right?
Sure.

Mike Jones:
Or, seven bodyguards.

David Cosand:
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Whichever one you want.

David Cosand:
They all got to fit in there.

Mike Jones:
They all got to fit in the same car.

David Cosand:
So, Jeep is extending their brand to accommodate different audiences. And so, the relationship you have with a grand Wagoner is probably different from the simple… I don’t even know what the other Jeeps are called.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

David Cosand:
But.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah. And a lot of people think of Jeep… When you think of Jeep, you’re like, oh, off-roading, four by four, four wheeling. They have a lot of vehicles that are not four by four, that you’d probably never want to take off-roading.
And, over time they’ve grown into these different customer groups that probably will never go off=roading in their Jeep.

David Cosand:
Right.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. And, there’s… Not to rehash last episode too much, but I think there’s an angle from the last episode, we didn’t really unpack, which is that if you’re building the organizational brand really well, people are really bought into that. And then, they’re looking for products that will serve their specific needs. That requires you to come up with new ideas, to come up with new product lines that maybe you didn’t have when you started.
So, I think of Jeep is a great example. I might love Jeep because I get to four wheel and I’m out doing bouldering and stuff. Well that’s one use of a Jeep, but then there’s my wife, who’s going to carry our kids around all day. She probably doesn’t want something that’s that incredibly maneuverable, can four wheel all the time.
She’s like, “No, I want something a little bit smoother ride, maybe a little quieter that works. Well, maybe even a little bit more spacious. I can fit more car seats in there.”
But, really wants a Jeep because that’s what we’re bought into is the brand, the brand of Jeep. Full disclosure. I’m not a Jeep guy, but.

David Cosand:
That’s interesting because I think Jeep, when I think Jeep, that works as both a product because Jeep has kind of this specific product.

Mike Jones:
They do. They have a very-

David Cosand:
And a brand right?

Mike Jones:
… Strong visual kind of resonance around one particular kind of Jeep.

David Cosand:
A specific type of car.

Mike Jones:
The original Jeep almost. And then, that’s gets kind of transferred into a lot of the vehicles that they offer. But I mean, going back, Salesforce is another good example of an organization that is offering a huge variety of different solutions under their Salesforce name.
And, each one of those still has to fit the needs and the applications of each particular kind of customer they’re selling to. Some are more geared for marketing. Some are more geared for sales. Some are more geared for business analysis and those are very different use cases. Those are different personas. Each of those products probably has to talk to a particular audience in a very particular way while still being Salesforce.

David Cosand:
When Salesforce first came out, I’m sure at least I think it was B2B. And it was a specific size of company. Now-

Mike Jones:
And it was salespeople, right? It was like CRM. That’s what I knew Salesforce for years and years, was purely just customer relationship management, put all your data in there, keep track of your contacts, keep track of your deals. And now, it’s like, I mean, you name anything from demand gen, even brands, automation with your advertising and marketing all the way through to sales and then business analysis and financials on the back end.
It’s like, whoa, they’re trying to be a lot more than what I originally had in mind with Salesforce. And, I think that’s a good example of just your product brand is going to evolve over time as well. And so, you can’t let it just kind of, “Oh, well it’s doing fine.” It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. Don’t need to worry about it. I can think of car companies where that’s kind of caught them.
It’s like, “Oh, our institutional, our organizational brand will carry us.” And then, they have particular issues with certain products and over time, it’s just like, man, you get hammered and you just can’t get that product to work.

David Cosand:
What does that look like inside of a professional services company?

Mike Jones:
Yeah, I think it’s very similar to the Salesforce approach. Your organizational brand is really carrying most of the weight. It’s carrying doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but I think where it translates is that each particular major area of problem that you’re helping solve… So, I think accounting firms is a good example. There’s very few accounting firms who just only do tax returns for a variety of reasons, not least because the customer that you bring in, doesn’t only need that. Right?
They’re coming to you and saying, “Hey, we’re a business. I need you to do our tax filing, but I also need you to do it for me personally, with my family, because it just makes more sense for the same accounting firm to do both.”
So, now you’re offering services, tax both for businesses and for individuals and then it’s like, you’re going to get other problems that you can help them with.
Like, “Hey, our bookkeeper is just not cutting it. Can you guys do our bookkeeping or help us fine tune our bookkeeping process? Can you help us research whether there’s any special tax credits that we can apply for with our research and development?”
And, I’m speaking from personal experience right now, we’re looking for a new accounting firm and these are the things I’m asking like, “Hey, do you have somebody who can help me with sales tax and local tax issues? Can you help you have somebody who’s going to help me with employment withholding for our employees?”
Even if it’s not doing it’s like, can you advise me because I want to know how to do that in the best way possible for our business and stay compliant and be above board. And so, that requires a firm to really say, “Oh, we do offer different services because not every client’s going to need every one of those.”
And, each service has to have its own identity within an identity. And, I think that’s where the idea of a family of services, a family of-

David Cosand:
That’s where you get these-

Mike Jones:
… Brands.

David Cosand:
… Packages. [inaudible 00:12:27]. Right, where it’s kind of bundled together in a package that I can buy easier. It’s easier for me to understand what I’m getting in this package, right?

Sam Pagel:
And if you know, who wants or needs your product specifically… Let’s take a B2B company, go back to the accounting example. You have an accounting firm who is specializing in automotive dealerships and they have these, let’s call it three separate products or services that really are great for car dealerships. But, who are they talking to at the car dealership?
Are they talking to the guy on the lot selling the cars? No. He doesn’t care about how his dealership is dealing with all these tax issues. He’s probably talking to the CFO or the controller. And so, when you figure out who you should be talking to with your products, then you can talk about him in the right way and figure out even things like, “Well, how does the CFO want to be approached?”
How does he want to be sold to does he even recognize that he needs our help? And, you start asking these questions from your target person persona, and then you can really dial down and communicate well from those product lenses, not massive company wide stuff. You’ve got these different avenues-

Mike Jones:
Different solutions.

Sam Pagel:
… Different solutions. And, they’re probably all talking to different people. And so, they need to talk differently to different people.

Mike Jones:
And yet, they still all have to feel part of the same family. I think that’s can get lost too is like, do they all look like they are belonging together?

Sam Pagel:
And that’s, what sets you apart too. If you are, let’s say you’re in accounting firm and you are the really happy everything is glass, half full company. And, that’s how you’re going to approach everyone. Then your products are going to be presented that way. Have tax issues? No problem at all. We’re going to be here for you. We’re going to help you solve all these issues. You’re going to be totally fine.
Whereas there could be another firm that has the same exact services geared towards the same exact people who maybe have a more serious tone or… Like tax issues, those are a big deal. We’re going to help you with those. That’s a really surface level thing, but it matters how you talk about those things.

Mike Jones:
I think we’ve covered really the guts of product branding pretty well. What would be some steps that an accounting firm or a professional services firm or another company needs to start thinking about or taking in order to get their product branding?
They’re thinking, “Oh, I’ve got some new products I’m working on or I have some new solutions. I have a new market I’m going to enter into.” What are the things they need to be thinking about as they do that, to do that well?

Sam Pagel:
Crickets. Crickets. Was that the cliff hanger?
Just kidding.

Mike Jones:
All right, I’ll just go.

Sam Pagel:
Do it.

Mike Jones:
I think you start from your organizational brand and I think you got to start with your values, your personality and your story that you’re telling at the top level and then say, how does this product fit into that larger story? And, how do we make it make sense? If someone is already buying with us on a particular solution and they encounter this solution, how will it make sense to them? How [inaudible 00:16:21]. Well, yeah. Of course, they’re doing this. This makes total sense. I might not be the right person for that solution. Hopefully they are, but maybe they’re not right.
Maybe they’re interfacing with you on personal taxes and you offer some business audit. That’s one of your new service lines. You go, “Yeah. That makes sense for you because of your organizational identity and what you guys say you do and why you do it and who you do it for. And what’s your purpose in the world and the brand that you’re putting out there, this identity as an organization, that makes sense to me. I don’t need it, but that really makes sense to me.”
Obviously, if they’re the person who actually needs that service, they go, “Yeah, I need both.” And then, how do we launch it in such a way that it doesn’t detract from the other products? And, it doesn’t detract from the larger brand? I think the temptation for so many is to like, “Oh, we got to spin up a whole new brand for this new solution, because it’s so different. It’s so unique. And, it’s got all these things.”
Maybe that might be true, but is it going to actually feed your larger product or sorry, not your product, but your larger organizational brand. Is it really going to help drive that and drive that forward?

Sam Pagel:
And if it doesn’t, what I love about that too, is it gives you the fuel to say no. To say, “Nope, we’re not going to do that.” Or, “We’re not going to do that anymore.”
We tried. And, we figured out that just doesn’t fit with who we are as a brand. And that’s, a good decision usually, when you figure that out.

David Cosand:
It’s interesting. I mean also if it feels like it’s a different thing, then maybe it needs to be a different thing. I like what you said, Mike, is it a natural kind of next progression or progressive step in our suite of products or services?
Does it feel like, oh yeah, of course they would offer that. But if it doesn’t, well, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not something to pursue. It just means it might not be a part of this brand. And, I agree with you Sam, maybe nine out of 10 times. That probably means you should just say no, but if you want to explore experiment, maybe that’s a different opportunity or a different brand altogether.

Mike Jones:
Just make sure you’re ready to count the cost.

David Cosand:
Sure.

Mike Jones:
Right. Launching a whole new brand is very expensive. It’s costly. And, to do it right. You need to be thinking back to, I’m basically standing up a new organizational brand. At some point, we’re going to be repeating last episode again, where our product is going to turn into an organization if it continues to grow. And, I think that’s where there’s opportunity to bifurcate to say, “Okay, we have this brand over here with these products, this new idea we have is so different. Maybe we do need to consider launching a whole new brand, but that’s going to require its own marketing engine, its own kind of brand and it’s going to be a lot of work and that’s okay, we’re ready for that. Great. Let’s do it.”
But how can you make it make sense? And, I think there’s a time too, where you can still draw some of those dotted lines. You can kind of say, “Hey, we’re doing this thing over here, but it’s powered by this larger brand or this other brand over here, maybe down the road, we’ll separate them more. But for now we can do both kind of side by side and allow one to kind of grow under the tutelage of the other.”
But, I think that’s a really hard to draw those lines on those decisions without really doing a lot of hard work and some homework and thinking through again, who’s your audience? Who are you trying to talk to? How different is that audience from who you’re already targeting? How different is this product from a mission and vision standpoint, from what we’re doing with this organization that we already have?
How unique is it, too? I think that’s another really important piece. If it’s like, “Oh, we’re, we’re an accounting firm and we’re going to go chase another market. Like another industry with the same services we’re already doing now.”
There might be a case to brand give that its own identity, but more likely than not your organizational identity is the value. And, it’s probably not worth trying to stand up a whole separate wholly contained brand for every industry that you chase with the same services.
Now, if it’s like whole new industry, whole new service, we’ve never done before. Not people we’ve ever talked to. Okay. Let’s maybe talk. Maybe there’s something there for a unique identity, all on its own. And, it’s worth putting in the effort to do that.

Sam Pagel:
And, those things typically work themselves out over time. We’ve talked to a lot of businesses who tried to shoehorn a product into their existing line. And, over time they realize this just isn’t working. There’s a lot of friction here and on the flip side of that, when you do… Maybe you integrate a new product or service and it does fit and you figure it out and it just seamlessly kind of fits into your brand, your organizational brand, it’s beautiful.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
It’s really… It’s fun to see.

Mike Jones:
It is.

Voice Artist:
Find your frequency.

Mike Jones:
As promised Matt Johnston CEO of get Kraken is back with us for a second episode. His company get Kraken is a leading provider of get tools for software developers. And, as we discussed on our last episode, Matt led them through a very successful rebrand shortly after joining the company.
And, today we’re going to now shift to talking about product branding and more specifically, a decision made inside of product branding called product led growth. And Matt since get Kraken used this model, tell us about product led growth and the success you’ve had branding your products under this model.

Matt Johnston:
So product led growth, or you might see it as PLG is basically a new way of bringing your solutions to market. And what it means is historically, if you think about SAS companies think about Salesforce, think about MADIC, think about Marketo, pick your poison. It meant that there’s a sales rep and you know, can fill out a form and they’ll give you a demo. And if you like it, then maybe you’ll get a trial, but more likely they’ll give you a quote and then you have a bake off. And, that is okay for some types of audience.
I don’t think it’s a good idea for developers, for sure. And so, product led growth is this notion that you should be able to buy… First, you should be able to try before you buy. And secondly, you should be able to buy on your own terms.
If you want to talk to someone, you can talk to someone. Most developers don’t want to talk to anyone. And so, it’s the frictionless no touch ability to not only bring people to the right solution, but allow them to try it freely. And that, takes two forms. It could be free trial or it could be freemium.
And in our case, one of the things that’s unique about GitKraken and is we actually do both. So, there is a seven day free trial for most of our products. And then, there’s an ongoing freemium. So, it’s kind of unique. Usually it’s one or the other it’s free trial or freemium. We have actually kind of taken the best of both worlds and said, “Hey, you’ve got a free trial for a period of time between seven and 30 days and you can use the entire product, everything.”
And then, if you want to keep going and you’re using it on open source projects, you can use it free, forever.
And it’s not feature gated, it’s the whole product. But if you want to use it on private repositories or commercial projects, that’s when you would actually upgrade. So, if you think about companies like Calendly or Slack, Dropbox, those are great examples of product led where you don’t ever have to talk to anyone.
You don’t have to sit through a demo. We’re actually test driving some software right now within GitKraken and I won’t say what category. I won’t point a finger at these companies, but they it’s taken months for us just to get through their sales process. And-

Mike Jones:
Because it’s all gated.

Matt Johnston:
… It’s all gated. “Oh, you have to talk to our CEO before we can approve a trial.” And, we’re literally sitting here saying, “Can we give you money? Please.”

Mike Jones:
Yeah, we just want to use it.

Matt Johnston:
We just want to use it. And so, product led growth is usually a bottom up adoption as opposed to a top down motion. And, part of that speaks to, we have a hundred employees in the company and literally zero of them have sales in their title or sales in the responsibility. There’s no BDR, there’s no demos. There’s none of that. We have two people that are in customer success and do a phenomenal job with it.
But, that’s onboarding and training big customers. That’s somebody going and saying, “Hey, I want to add a hundred seats.” Let’s work through that. Or, I want to try one of your other products. Okay, let’s get you set up. But even then, it’s only when asked and it’s incredibly low touch.
And so, one of the things that drew me to GitKraken was not only that it’s serving developers, not only the stage and the success, not only that it’s profitable, which matters more and more in times like this, it was the fact that it’s product led and it’s pure product led, which to the recovering CMO in me is just manna from heaven.
You’re not sitting around saying like, “Oh, what’s my sales team saying, what are they… What’s going on in the field?” Our marketing has to bring the right people to the table and our product has to start and win the trial. If it doesn’t, then we failed and we don’t have a business. And so, we are laser focused on those types of things.

Mike Jones:
And, I’m sure that puts a very high bar on just the experience you create with the product itself, right? Because that’s really, what’s determining whether someone’s going to stick or not.

Matt Johnston:
A hundred percent. And, it goes even beyond the product, it’s everything from that intro tutorial to the welcome email, to your support content, to the marketing website and the expectations you set during the trial process. And, I love that about it, that it’s every single brand touchpoint weaves together to create this great experience or this broken experience.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. I feel like more and more, there’s this larger conversation happening about not just the product experience, not just the marketing experience, not just if there is a more traditional sales experience, it’s the entire customer experience.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. And, if you’re product led, there are no bodies to throw at the problem. You don’t have a salesperson holding their hand. You don’t have an account manager who can say, “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m sorry. Our platform’s a mess. I’ll take care of it for you.”
It forces meritocracy. And, we were talking about in the process of a rebrand, how it brings a team together and they have a shared vision and a shared definition of success. Well, that’s what product led growth requires. It’s not marketing saying, well, I got a bunch of leads. I have the MQL. I did my part. Sales team can’t close.
And, sales is saying, “Oh, those leads were garbage.” This is one experience. It’s one funnel. It’s one journey from A to Z. And so, if any group or of that is broken, it becomes readily apparent very quickly just based on the data based on the feedback. And, you can look at it and you can just constantly tune and adjust it, which is one of the coolest things.

Mike Jones:
On that kind of note, I’ve seen, and I’m asking, because I want to find off what I’ve seen is right, that one of the challenges with being very product centric and especially if you’re very customer centric with your products, that there can be a temptation to let them morph in the direction the customer wants to see them go, rather than maybe according to the brands’ kind of authentic vision.
How do you balance those two needs? Because at some level, you’ve got to deliver value for your customers. And that, means listening right? And saying, “What is it you need?” But on the flip side, it’s like, you can easily stray, I think if you take that too far.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. We’re incredibly lucky in this regard. And, I’d love to tell you is my vision all along. We have a ridiculously low concentration of revenue in any one customer. So, our biggest customer is less than one half of 1% of revenue, which means we get to listen… It’s a meritocracy. We get to listen to that customer. But we also listen to the indie developer. We listen to the startup team and sometimes they might actually pull us in directions of where the market’s going.
And so, we to don’t have to sit back and say, “Oh my God, they’re 28% of revenue. We’re going to do whatever they tell us.”
And, I’ve lived in companies like that. And, it’s very difficult to escape that gravitational poll of your biggest customer. Here, we have customer advisory groups and some of them are big enterprises with a thousand seats. And, some of them are new users to us and some are indie developers and some are international and we just have conversations and listen to them. And, a lot of what we’re doing is pattern recognition. Maybe you talk about it differently than you do, but you’re both trying to solve the same problem. Great. We found a theme. Let’s go do that.

Mike Jones:
Yep. No, that’s really good. That’s really cool. Merges and acquisitions. You said there was one acquisition right before you came on, is that right?

Matt Johnston:
Yep.

Mike Jones:
And then, you’ve had another since then. How do you manage those as the brand? If they’re adopting your brand, there’s a whole level of managing all those new people that you’re in taking, new products that have to be merged in, the brand is so core to that. Maybe speak to that a little bit.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. You’re a hundred percent, right. M&A is a wild card, when it comes to the brand. It might be additive and beautiful or it might be disruptive and disjointed. And, I would actually say it begins at the beginning. And what I mean by that is if you have identified the right types of M&A opportunities, then they fit naturally. They fit your user base. They fit your product suite. They fit your north star vision.
Then, I won’t say the branding takes care of itself, but you don’t have all of these obstacles in place to say, “Why do these two things live together?” And so in our case, we were really, again, I won’t say lucky, I’ll say we were really fortunate. And, the team that did that work was phenomenally well equipped to do it. These three products were destined to live together.
What we have are, three products. One is a client for the desktop. One is an IDE extension and one is an issue tracking system extension. And, those are the three primary surfaces that a developer wants to interact with their code. They want to write code or they want to review someone else’s code or they want to comment or test.
And, sometimes that’s on the desktop. Sometimes that’s in the development environment, the IDE, and sometimes that’s in the issue tracking system. And so, these three fit together so well that we didn’t have to do a lot of stretching and trying to figure out why are these three cars parked in one garage? They were destined to live together because they’re so complimentary.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. Fortunate.

Matt Johnston:
Yes.

Mike Jones:
And, probably there’s some good intentionality in that, right?

Matt Johnston:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
It’s not just luck of the draw. There’s some sure there are a lot of good thinking going into that.

Matt Johnston:
In fact, when the private equity firm actually made the majority investment in GitKraken in August 2020, as they were doing their due diligence, they had identified these two companies as number one and number two on their, we hope some day list. And so, to be able to follow through that within 12 to 14 months and actually get your top two choices and not just the products and the customer base, but actually add the leadership.
So, one of the acquisitions of GitLens brought us, our chief technology officer and the other one brought us a general manager of that entire product line. And, they’re part of the leadership team. There is no us, them. They’re in it.
And now, they’ve gone from building their own thing to building the greater GitKraken. And, when you can get those things, the alignment around is this a good fit for our portfolio? Is this a natural extension for our audience? And then, if you can get the details of the compensation, making sure our incentives are aligned, they are in it for GitKraken and they’re not sitting around saying, “Yeah, but that’s not the way I used to do it.”
And so, if you can get those two pieces, a lot of the tumblers fall into place around M&A. The challenge is, those are two really difficult things to get right.

Mike Jones:
Yes, they are. And, I’ve seen a lot of organizations not get them right. And, it’s a mess.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
It’s a really hard mess.

Matt Johnston:
It’s a mess. I mean, people think about the cost, but it’s really the opportunity cost you burn quarters, and even years scuffling trying to make this thing work.
These two puzzle pieces were never meant to fit together, but somebody made a decision and now I have to jam them together until they sort of fit and they never really do.

Mike Jones:
And, the talent that you’re going to turn through in that process is just really hard. I’ve been personally through that one organization that I worked for and it was hard. It was really hard.

Matt Johnston:
And, in a time and place where just because you live in Phoenix, doesn’t mean you have to work for a Phoenix based company. You can work for a company in London, you can work for a company in the valley or New York city and your best employees have the most opportunity.
So, if you start to frustrate those people and they’re banging their head against the wall, try to, they’re out, try to make a decision that you made work, and it’s not going to work. You’re not only going to lose the success of the acquisition, you’re going to lose some of your top talent.

Mike Jones:
Which is going to have an impact down the road, too. That institutional knowledge loss, these are probably the best people to figure out that integration process.
And if they’re not on board, it just makes it that much harder. So yeah, that’s really, really interesting. I love talking about mergers and acquisitions. I think that’s one of my favorite hot topics. How do you get multiple brands to become one?

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, there’s a high science to it. There’s plenty of art as well. But like I said, I think so much of it begins at the beginning. If the puzzle pieces were really intentionally built and kind of meant for each other, then it just removes so much of the friction and guesswork.

Mike Jones:
That’s so very true. What’s the most interesting or unique thing you’ve done so far to build the GitKraken brand?

Matt Johnston:
So, in the midst of a pandemic in the fall of 2021, we launched our first ever branded virtual conference. And that’s, kind of an unusual time to do that. Everyone’s zoom fatigue. This was in October 2021. And so, everyone’s fatigued and I don’t want to sit and consume more content and they steered right into it and said, “No, this is the right thing. And we think that we have a big enough audience and engaged enough audience.”
And so, they put together this wonderful GitKon it’s called GitKon with a K and there’ll be another one coming up this October.

Mike Jones:
I love it.

Matt Johnston:
And, great content, not only from us, but from partners from other thought leaders. And, it was really just centered around again, the developer, it wasn’t for the CTO. It wasn’t for the analyst. It wasn’t for even customers necessarily. It was for the developer and there was kind of early stage novice content. There was intermediate content, there was advanced content and we ended up drawing 4,000 attendees, half of whom were completely new to us.
And so, this was when the company was still called [inaudible 00:35:48]. And so we expect an even bigger and better get this year where we’ll probably expand it out to multiple tracks and even multiple days.

Mike Jones:
I love that. I think conferences and just events in general are one of the more, I think, interesting ways to extend the brand and really start to create an experience around it. That’s beyond the product.

Matt Johnston:
We’re even thinking about, assuming that the pandemic stays somewhat at bay. Do you start to introduce an in-person element to it either for local users, local customers, or even if we just brought in some of our larger customers as an opportunity to spend some time with them.
So, I don’t know if that’ll be part of this year or not, but certainly on our mind to start to say, “What’s the best blend of virtual and physical?”

Mike Jones:
Well, I’ll be watching to see what you do.

Matt Johnston:
Pressures on.

Mike Jones:
It’s a hard question for a lot of groups right now. Is how to slice the event pie. And well, do you do hybrid? Do you do two totally different events, one virtual, one in person. DO you even try to tackle in person at all?

Matt Johnston:
And, you’re trying to predict the unpredictable, right. And so, I think just like we try to stay nimble and agile as a brand and from a product perspective, we’re going to have to roll with it and try to put together the best experience, the best set of content for that audience. And just be again, really true to them. Not only in the substance of it, but in the style of it.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. I love that. What’s next for GitKraken?

Matt Johnston:
Oh, nothing.

Mike Jones:
Nothing much.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. We’re just hanging out. Cruise control.

Mike Jones:
Somehow. I doubt that.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. We have a lot of work in front of us. We’ve done a really good job integrating those two companies in a short amount of time. And, this is a local team that hadn’t really been through that before. It was this bootstrapped startup, really well run, profitable, but hadn’t been through the M and a process either of getting acquired or of acquiring other companies.
And so, the team rallied and did a really good job of bringing in the people, the processes, the products, the prices, the customers, and really grafting it together well in just a matter of six months or so. With that said, I think we have a lot of work to do. I think we position our products fairly well. We’re very clear about it. What’s the value prop. Who’s the audience? What are the use cases? Where do we win? Where do we lose?
I don’t think we do that very well as a company yet. And so, as a marketing centric CEO, that’s on my mind and on my list of responsibilities to help us find that north star and then articulated into this brand story, not only of a great product or great products, but a great company and a great place to work.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. Yeah. Talent acquisition is so incredibly important right now and kind of integrating the brand, not just on the marketing side, but throughout that entire employee experience.

Matt Johnston:
For each audience. Right? Customers want to hear one set of needs addressed. Prospects, it might be something else. Partners it’s something else. And, even things like media or prospective employees or current employees. You have to be able to map your message and your value prop back to that audience and what really resonates for them.

Mike Jones:
That’s great. If you’re up for it. I have one little game that we like to play.

Matt Johnston:
Sure.

Mike Jones:
We’re big into improv. So we play a game called name 10 things.

Matt Johnston:
Oh boy.

Mike Jones:
So, I’ll give you a category. Name 10. I’ll fill in the blank and just off the top of your head and there are no wrong answers, so don’t feel inhibited to come up with answers that are-

Matt Johnston:
I might disprove that theory.

Mike Jones:
But if you’re up for it, that’s sure that’s what we like to do.

Matt Johnston:
Fire away.

Mike Jones:
All right. Name 10 trends in software development that you see coming.

Matt Johnston:
Oh boy.

Mike Jones:
Or, it can be happening right now.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. So, 10. Someone’s going to have to keep count for me.

Mike Jones:
Me. Yeah. We’ll keep counting.

Matt Johnston:
All right. The first one I would say is that every company is a software company. Some of our companies, you would just kind of Chuck that and you’d be like, “Wait, why do they have a thousand engineers?”, And the answer is they’re building back office systems, they’re building smart devices. So, whether it’s financial services, insurance, manufacturing, every company is a software company.
It’s not necessarily software development, but I’ll say it affects the software development process. User expectations are ridiculous. They’re unfair. Everyone expects everything to be this Apple-esque Tesla-esque experience where everything works perfectly and it anticipates my every want. So, it just raises the bar and, you have to get everything right from your website to your product, to your mobile app, to your return policy, to your support system, the entire customer journey has to just be this beautiful, perfect thing.
A little bit more technical. One is distributed teams. And that’s that, that’s one of the areas we play really well. Not only about the productivity of the individual developer, but about the collaboration across teams. You know, might want to work at night, and I work in the morning. You might be in Spain and I’m in the west coast. We’re sort on different teams. You’re working on the mobile app and I’m working on the website, but having that visibility and that collaboration’s incredibly important.
How many is that?

Mike Jones:
You’re at three.

Matt Johnston:
All right. The next one I would say is the need for speed. So, we’ve gone from a waterfall world where you launch once a quarter, once a year. To an agile world where you’re launching more and more rapidly. And, now we’re into the evolution of continuous integration, continuous deployment, which is, “Hey, I’ve got a new thing. It passed through all of our tests. It doesn’t have to be a big release, get it out there.”

Mike Jones:
Yep.

Matt Johnston:
The fifth one I would say is that it almost inverts the notion, the developer in a lot of cases is the star and the development manager or director is managing the stars. And so, almost like a professional basketball team where you’re managing a lot of perspectives, agendas, egos, things like that, just different points of view and different personalities.
And so, I think the developer has been uplifted and the spotlight has been put on them. And the development manager is now trying to juggle a lot more than they used to when it was a command and control type world. Next one I would say is the technology has changed for sure. And that could be the tools that developers use. It could be things like the cloud, you used to have to have a server sitting over there in that closet. And now you’re just like, “Oh, I’m just going to spit up an AWS instance and it’ll be fine.”

Mike Jones:
It’s totally different world now.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. Next one I’ll say is just the form factors that technology lives in. For a long time, it was okay, it’s a desktop client, cool. Or, it lives in a browser, then it was mobile then it’s IOT. Now, it’s just smart devices. The lawnmower needs to be connected to the vacuum. The refrigerator needs to be able to order for you.
And so again, I think that not only does it increase the number of applications and code bases, but it also just raises the bar again, consumers expect it to all be perfect. And, I don’t really care that your job is hard. Your job’s hard. So, is mine. Make it work. So that’s, another big trend.

Mike Jones:
You’re at seven.

Matt Johnston:
We’re at seven? Trends in development. The other one I would say is interesting that we’re seeing, and this is a little bit technical, but historically the GitKraken client lives on your desktop.
And, if you look at what GitHub is doing, what Microsoft’s doing with vs code, there’s this move back to like, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have to have a terminal or a client.”-

Mike Jones:
Oh, interesting.

Matt Johnston:
… Maybe you should be able to write code and interact with code in the browser. Like marketers write their content or sales people manage their contacts. And so, there’s kind of a recent shift towards how do we go from having to have this big desktop or a really powerful laptop, what if it lived in the browser? What if it lived in mobile? Am I going to go write code on my phone? No, but do I want be able to review it. Yeah. Do I want to be able to sign off and say, “Yeah, that’s what I was talking about.”
So, I think we’re seeing almost the consumerization of the developer stack where suddenly we have conversations about, do we need to have a mobile app? And if so, what are the use cases that would need to support? Because maybe I’m not going to write lines of code, but I could edit, I could review, I sign off on something and that’s a big part of the developer flow as well.
I don’t know if it’s a new trend, but I’ll just say it’s a new heightened emphasis around security and that’s everything from network security to the database side of things. But, it’s also just any kind of vulnerability. There’s so many bad actors and trust is so easily lost that if you get that wrong, it’s really tough to bounce back with your audience.
And even from a brand perspective, if you have that outage, if you have this big breach, just tough. And, I think in some ways consumers have gotten a little desensitized to like, “Oh, okay, well, yeah, this happened to that retailer. This happened to that bank and my information’s out there.” But one group that hasn’t been desensitized to it is developers. Hard expectation.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Matt Johnston:
How many was that?

Mike Jones:
You’re at nine.

Matt Johnston:
All right. My tenth one, we talked about the need for speed. In terms of development, cadence, we are perpetually impatient users now. So, what used to be okay, you’d go into your CRM and you’d hit. I want to look at this report in 20 seconds would go by on the paged load. We just have no tolerance or that. And again, doubly true for developers. We want things to be performant. We want it right now. And, the fact that, that’s really difficult. Sounds a lot like a you problem. Not a me problem.

Mike Jones:
Yep. Those were great. That was awesome. You flew right through it.

Matt Johnston:
Cool.

Mike Jones:
Matt, is there anything, if people want to find out more about GitKraken, do you guys have anything coming up that you want people to know about? How do they get involved?

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. So, obviously they can follow us on social media, GitKraken with a K actually two Ks. GitKraken.com. The one thing I’ll say is we are hiring. It feels to me like the job market’s tilting a bit, we’re starting to see more talk of layoffs.
We’re actually seeing some layoffs. And so, the plug I’ll offer out there is not only are we growing, not only are we hiring, but we’re profitable and we’re building it sustainably so that we can weather storms like economic turbulence.

Mike Jones:
That’s the kind of company I think everyone wants to work for and should work for.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
That sounds great.

Matt Johnston:
Cool.

Mike Jones:
We’ll make sure all those links are in the show notes. If everyone wants to find out more, they can check that out there. Just want to thank everybody for listening into another episode of the remark a brand podcast and just thank you, Matt so much for coming on and chatting so much about GitKracken, your experience, brands, mergers, acquisition. I mean, we covered, I don’t know, 30 different topics.

Matt Johnston:
We covered some ground.
[inaudible 00:46:28]. Thanks for having me. This was awesome.

Mike Jones:
So this was super awesome. And, thanks for coming to the studio, which is always super fun.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, my pleasure.

Mike Jones:
So.

Sam Pagel:
The remark of brand podcast is a project of resound and is recorded in Tempe, Arizona with host Mike Jones and David Cosand. It’s produced and edited by Sam Pagel. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and@remarkablecast.com.
If you’d like more episodes, subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Google play, or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. To contact the show. Find out more about the remark a brand podcast or to join our newsletter list to make sure you never miss another episode.
Check out our website@remarkablecast.com. Copyright resound, creative media, LLC, 2022.

 

AZ Brandcast - Subscribe on iTunes

Archives