BUILD
Listen to Season 6

We’re jumping straight into Season 6 of BUILD! (You can catch up on Season 5 here.) This season, we’re building on the product led growth learnings from Season 5 and diving deep on pricing and packaging to explore innovative strategies to monetize your PLG business.

You’ll hear from leaders at prominent PLG companies like SurveyMonkey, Invision, Pluralsight, Figma and more about what it takes to price and package products in the era of PLG. Happy Listening! 🎧


New This Week

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Featured This Week

For the final episode of Season 6, Kyle caught up with Simon-Kucher Partner, Josh Bloom. He explains the inspiration behind the firm’s book, ‘Monetizing Innovation,’ the concept of developing a product around the price and the most important question founders should be asking customers. He also breaks down the trends he expects to see in the next year.

Upcoming Guests
Who's on BUILD

This season features an amazing lineup of pricing experts! You’ll hear their pricing insights and firsthand experiences, find out the importance of pricing for the way customers want to buy and get the answers to some of our listeners’ most burning pricing questions. 

Episode Guide
<p style="line-height:1.4">Mike Volpe</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">CEO<br>Lola.com</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Amanda Kleha</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Chief Customer Officer<br>Figma</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Andy Wilson</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">CEO & Founder<br>Logikcull</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Priyanka Carr</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">SVP, Strategy & Operations<br>SurveyMonkey</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Jordan Nolff</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Senior Manager, Business Strategy & Monetization<br>SurveyMonkey</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Mike Walsh</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Senior Director, Marketing<br>Reflektive</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Ismail Madni</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Director Business Operations & Pricing Strategy<br>InVision</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Madeline Stein</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Principal Pricing Manager<br>SendGrid</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">John Kelly</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Head of Global Revenue<br>Hired, Inc.</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Lindsay Bayuk</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">VP of Product Marketing<br>Pluralsight</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Porntepp Ungvichian</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">VP, Head of Strategy & Business Operations<br>Pluralsight</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Josh Bloom</p>
<p style="line-height:1.4">Partner<br>Simon-Kucher & Partners</p>
Episode Guide
BUILD: Episode 56
BUILD: Episode 57
BUILD: Episode 58
BUILD: Episode 59
BUILD: Episode 60
BUILD: Episode 61
BUILD: Episode 62
BUILD: Episode 63
BUILD: Episode 64
BUILD: Episode 65
BUILD: Episode 66
BUILD: Episode 67
Meet the Host
Blake Bartlett
<p style="line-height:2">Have Your Cake & Eat It Too</p>

We're kicking off Season 6 by bringing OV Partner, Blake Bartlett, back to discuss the magic of product led growth. Blake breaks down the placement of the paywall, when a freemium model makes sense and the importance of getting specific about your target customer. Find out why PLG means you can have your cake and eat it too.


Mike Volpe
<p style="line-height:2">Lola's Mike Volpe on Pricing to Win in Competitive Markets</p>

Mike Volpe is no stranger to competitive markets. He was part of HubSpot's founding team, then moved into the world of cybersecurity with Cybereason and is now CEO of Lola.com, a travel management tool. In this episode, he explains the relationship between pricing and brand, his perception of freemium and the importance of looking closely at your happiest customers for growth opportunities.


Amanda Kleha
<p style="line-height:2">Pricing at a PLG Company with Figma’s CCO</p>

Amanda Kleha has been involved with pricing at PLG companies like Zendesk and Figma. On this episode, she explains when freemium makes sense in SaaS, the right time to add sales or customer success to a self-service business and the implications of PLG on culture. You'll also learn why she thinks you should know your leaders, fillers and killers.


Andy Wilson
<p style="line-height:2">Customer-Driven Pricing with Logikcull's CEO</p>

Andy Wilson is the Founder & CEO of Logikcull, a legal tech startup that’s revolutionizing how lawyers handle document discovery. In this episode, Andy explains why they pivoted from an annual subscription model to pay as you go and the implications this had on the business as a whole (spoiler: it changed everything). He also dives into how their mission drives decision-making and what they've done to help their customers have an amazing experience.


Madeline Stein & Ismail Madni
<p style="line-height:2">Life as a Pricing Pro at SendGrid &InVision</p>

This episode features two pricing professionals from PLG companies for double the insider secrets! Madeline Stein is the Principal Pricing Manager at SendGrid and Ismail Madni is Director, Product Pricing Strategy at InVision. They discussed the ideal time to build a pricing team, the cross-functionality of their roles and where pricing should sit within the org. You'll also get their takes on which KPIs matter most for determining when it might be time to make a pricing change.


Abde Tambawala
<p style="line-height:2">Making Better Business Decisions Faster at Atlassian</p>

This episode features BUILD superfan, Abde Tambawala, Head of Business Strategy, Operations and Monetization at Atlassian. His team focuses on making better business decisions, faster. He breaks down why even successful companies can benefit from a pricing change, how to create a framework to make data-driven pricing decisions and how their product led growth approach affects their overall strategy. You'll also hear his perspective on when you should embrace change in the pricing landscape (yes, some things are iterative, but others should stay the same).


Mike Walsh
<p style="line-height:2">Hypergrowth Pricing Strategies from the Trenches</p>

Mike is currently the Head of Marketing at Reflektive, but was at Lever and Glassdoor during periods of hypergrowth, where the name of the game was to double in size every year. Mike explains why you should lean on your sales reps throughout a pricing change, how to think about pricing as a competitive advantage and how his background in product marketing has benefited his role in pricing projects.


Pri Carr & Jordan Nolff
<p style="line-height:2">SurveyMonkey's Pricing Change 10 Years in the Making</p>

After a decade, it was finally time to make a change to SurveyMonkey’s pricing. In this episode, learn from Pri Carr (SVP, Strategic Development) and Jordan Nolff (Senior Manager, Business Strategy & Monetization) about how they were able to pull off a massive revamp of the pricing and packaging of a beloved PLG brand without seeing a meaningful impact on acquisition or churn.


John Kelly
<p style="line-height:2">Hired's Switch to Subscription</p>

John Kelly is the Head of Global Revenue at Hired and has been in the enterprise software space for over 25 years. On this episode, John gets into how and why Hired changed their pricing model from pay as you go to subscription. Learn how they knew the switch would work, the trickiest customers to convince and how the change impacted their growth.


Lindsay Bayuk & Porntepp Ungvichian
<p style="line-height:2">Behind the Scenes of Pluralsight's Pricing Rebuild</p>

Lindsay Bayuk (VP of Product Marketing) and Porntepp Ungvichian (VP, Head of Strategy & Business Operations) are the B2B SaaS leaders behind Pluralsight's pricing overhaul. They went public last year, serve 70% of Fortune 500 companies and have customers in over 150 countries. Get ready for some serious note-taking on how they built a process around pricing changes and the importance of having the right infrastructure to make it all happen.


Liz Cain
<p style="line-height:2">Pricing Insights from a VC Perspective</p>

We're bringing OV Partner Liz Cain back to the podcast for the third time. On this episode, she and Kyle dive into their experiences with pricing and product led growth. Learn about some of the most common pricing mistakes they see and why they were both hesitant about PLG initially, but came around in a big way.


Josh Bloom
<p style="line-height:2">Demystifying Pricing with Simon-Kucher's Josh Bloom</p>

For the final episode of Season 6, Kyle caught up with Simon-Kucher Partner, Josh Bloom. He explains the inspiration behind the firm's book, 'Monetizing Innovation,' the concept of developing a product around the price and the most important question founders should be asking customers. He also breaks down the trends he expects to see in the next year.


Kyle Poyar

Kyle helps OpenView’s portfolio companies accelerate top-line growth through deep insights into their market landscape and customers. He leads segmentation, positioning, channel/partner strategy, new market entry and packaging/pricing initiatives, partnering closely with portfolio leadership teams. He also covers OpenView’s SaaS metrics and benchmarking research.

Before joining OpenView, Kyle was a Director at Simon-Kucher & Partners, the global marketing and strategy consulting firm known as the world leader in pricing. Over the course of six years he led consulting teams on strategy engagements with market leaders in enterprise software, business information/data services, digital media, online marketplaces and telecommunications. He completed more than two dozen projects, which commonly drove ARR improvements of 10-20%.

Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn and on Twitter @poyark.

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