Snowflake

Lenny's Podcast · Sep 28

A 4-step framework for building delightful products | Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)

It has a principle called superhero, cited as an example of a B2B company valuing emotional connection with its users.

Tips

• Treat B2B products as business to human and build emotional trust▶ 25:52Dropbox has a principle called cupcake and Snowflake one called superhero; Buffer's refund email targeted about 2% of inactive users.

Lenny's Podcast · Oct 22

A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Sales Pitch)

It began as data warehousing for the cloud, then widened to cloud data once it was larger.

Tips

• Start in a niche of an existing category before creating one▶ 53:05Salesforce began as CRM for very small businesses; Qualtrics was survey software until about $300 million revenue; Snowflake started as data warehousing for the cloud.

Lenny's Podcast · Jul 13

M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs)

It went from a $4 billion to a $12 billion company in 2019 as cloud data warehouses exploded, which gave dbt its opening. Its first value is customers first.

Lenny's Podcast · Apr 30

How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian)

The benchmark for net dollar retention at roughly 165 to 180, close to doubling revenue from existing customers alone. For years its only ad was one billboard on 101.

Tips

• Spend consistently on a few brand placements over many years▶ 21:37Market tests showed two, three or ten times more people recognized the Oracle brand without the logo versus SAP or IBM.
• Pick companies using a checklist of ten health signals▶ 12:52Snowflake was the benchmark for net dollar retention, with a figure recalled as roughly 165 to 180, where 100 means customers renew at the same dollar amount.

Lenny's Podcast · Dec 15

Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)

It has roughly 500 salespeople, cited as proof that large B2B products scale by adding sellers.

Tips

• Plan to add sales to a self-serve product▶ 25:50Dropbox was slow to build product for organization-wide selling. Slack added sales leaders because $19 to $29 a month grows into $50,000 to $250,000 contracts. Snowflake has about 500 salespeople.

Lenny's Podcast · Sep 22

Why product-led growth is the future | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Surveymonkey)

It is a single-user style product that usually relies on marketing or sales for acquisition. It now offers trials, a version of the shift toward easier self-serve entry.

Tips

• Offer freemium even for high-friction products, and shrink provisioning cost over time▶ 45:18

Acquired · Sep 5

Amazon Web Services

AWS's one big miss: it became a roughly $50 billion company running on AWS and other clouds. It works out of the box for developers while Redshift fought the last battle against Oracle.

Tips

• Snowflake won data warehousing because Amazon fought the last battle against Oracle▶ 2:02:10Snowflake reached about a 50 billion dollar valuation while redshift stayed a fast-growing but second-place product.

App Masters · Jan 17

Exploding Kittens, Head of Analytics on Mobile Game Retention & Monetization

He uses it to store raw data and query it with SQL, and it connects to Tableau. His rule is that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Tips

• Keep the analytics stack simple: Adjust, Snowflake, Tableau▶ 5:58