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Figma did it for design. Slack did it for team comms. Zoom did the same for meetings. Salesforce - CRM.



Every once in a while, a tool comes along that pushes the envelope of our imaginations and brings our presumptions crashing to the ground. And reinvents how sh*t gets done.



In 2023, user research and testing aren’t quite the same anymore. And for that, we have Maze and Jo Widawski to thank.



And if you’re reading this and thinking “What do I need usability testing for?” - you’re not alone. But you probably will be.



Jo started up in 2018 with a mission to democratize testing. Within 3 years, Maze had built the foundations of a new category, washed away the demons of complexity it was mired in, and put a new weapon in the hands of - not just researchers, but designers, product managers, marketers, and many others.



Today, over 60,000 brands ranging from Uber and HP to McKinsey and GE use Maze for user research and usability testing.



Building a new category is no easy feat. Jo will be the first to tell you:



“Building a company is a lot about shooting arrows and then during targets around them afterward, and saying it was your vision all along. When we started, we really believed that we just needed to build better research.”



With the targets now drawn, we thought it’d be worth getting to the bottom of how the hell Jo and Maze did it.

This is the story of how.



00:00 Price against value


00:31 Tweet Reactions


06:33 Verbalizing a category


08:50 Introduction


11:52 Maze's GTM evolution


17:44 Product taking the center stage


19:41 Switching to Enterprise


22:38 Layering sales in PLG


26:42 Early branding investments


29:08 Design pet peeves


31:32 Rapid Fire


34:02 Up next for Maze

D’Arcy spent 11 years at Oracle, selling database management systems on either side of the dot-com bubble bursting.

He is the man you’d get if you wanted to carve out an early advantage in the enterprise sector while going head-to-head with only one of the most viral tools of all time. Box became Dropbox’s worst nightmare in the enterprise sector during D’Arcy’s seven years there.

He’s who you’d get when you’ve cracked SMB and mid-market and are now beginning to go from $10M in ARR to $100M.

You want a man like him at the helm if you’ve found PMF, just raised a Series B round, and are beginning to set your sights on the Fortune 500.

And so late last year, we sat down with the current SVP of Sales at Productboard in an attempt to uncover the building blocks of the enterprise sales gene.

We cover a lot of ground here with D'Arcy, including:



00:00 The Dropbox Problem


1:50 Meet D'Arcy


3:23 Early lessons on identifying ICP


5:11 Choosing sales


7:09 Priorities today as SVP Sales, Productboard


8:02 Dealing with a recession as an early-stage company


10:12 Economic headwinds 2008 vs 2023


10:59 Selling during the dotcom bubble


13:44 Selling in times of budget cuts


15:15 Value engineering


17:26 Speaking to the C-suite


18:23 Box vs. Dropbox


23:04 Role of marketing in enterprise sales


24:38 Trade shows


27:25 Where PLG fails


30:15 Setting up a post-sales process


32:31 Does persuasion play a role in enterprise selling?


34:58 Traits he looks for while hiring


36:20 What separates the best from the rest in sales?


39:09 Closing an 8-figure deal


40:39 Differences in selling software in the '90s vs '23


44:22 Differences in software buyers in the'90s vs '23


46:16 How to deal with buyers' preconceived notions


47:21 Next steps for Productboard's GTM


53:14 Building customer-centric products


54:15 Rapid Fire

 Superhuman: The platform that monetized time!

Superhuman - the fastest email experience ever made. In a world where more than a billion people spend three hours a day reading and writing emails, Superhuman enables them to fly through their inboxes twice as fast as before.

Gaurav is one of the founding team members who set up many of the company's key functions (onboarding, success, delight, growth…), scaled them from 0 to 1, built repeatability, and moved on to build the next function.

Today, Superhuman enjoys a waitlist of over half a million users and was recently valued at $825M! 🚀

Catch our in-depth breakdown of Superhuman’s growth story here.

We cover a lot of ground here with Gaurav, including:


We cover a lot of ground here with Gaurav, including:
Memes as a measure of culture 
Tweet Reactions 
Building in the UK vs. the US 
Introduction  
Sales lessons from "Get out to vote" 
Ingredients of the Superhuman onboarding experience 
What not to do with your onboarding 
Why a strong product vision matters 
How to engineer word of mouth  
Superhuman's top-down PLG motion 
The ideal split b/w PLG & Sales 
Rapid Fire

Shownotes/Gaurav’s recommendations:
🛠 Tools: aText , Brain.fm
❤️ Product Superhuman derives inspiration from: Apple 

🐦 Twitter shoutout: @hubermanlab

Connect with him at :

🔗LinkedIn

💙 Twitter

OpenPhone is an app to which you can add all your work numbers. It can live on all your everyday devices and, on top of calls and messages, offers a full suite of integrations to your work tools.

Daryna is on a mission to rewrite the future of the business phone, bringing it back from the dead and into the 21st century. 🚆

With an impressive 200% + Net Revenue Retention (NRR), OpenPhone is loved by teams at Sonder, Linear, AirGarage, Soon, and Avalon, among others.

Catch our in-depth breakdown of OpenPhone’s growth story here!

We cover a lot of ground here with Daryna, including:


Tweet Reactions 🐦
How does OpenPhone help you?
How to win trust in online communities?
How to find a balance between existing demand and demand creation?
Prioritizing customer delight
Engineering word of mouth
Importance of speaking to customers
Dogfooding your product
Plugging sales into a PLG motion
The difference in how sales operates now vs. 10 years ago
Engineering spike events
Rapid Fire

And more!

Shownotes 📝
Darya’s recommendations:
🛠 Tool: Zapier

🙌 LinkedIn Account: Devin Reed

Connect with her at :
🔗 LinkedIn

💙 Twitter

Steeve Vakeeswaran, Head of Sales & Expansion at Zapier; Zapier offers over 5,000 app integrations and powers automations ranging from central workflows at Fortune 500 companies to such side projects as Seinfeldtext and Kanyetext. Zapier's growth from $0-$140 million has been largely driven by their bottom-up self-serve engine🤩. In early 2021, with Steeve Vakeeswaran at the helm, Zapier started testing a Sales motion.💥

Zapier's growth levers unlocked: https://www.topofthelyne.co/p/happier-with-zapier

Learn how Steeve scaled sales at Zapier and how sales can be layered into your PLG motion on this podcast hosted by Toplyne.

Mario Araujo, Head Of Growth at Softr; the world’s largest ecosystem for building no-code apps. The product makes enables anyone without prior experience in coding to build an online presence in the form of communities, portals, stores, and even CRMs. 🤯Softr has zoomed organically from 0 to 50k users in less than 15 months, picking up Product Hunt’s Product of the Year 🥇at the 2021 Golden Kitty Awards. 🤩

Softr's growth levers unpacked: https://www.topofthelyne.co/p/softr-l...