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Lattice: Multi-product as a strategy to $100m ARR.
From multiple pivoting to scaling over $100m arr
Okerosi Davis
May 14, 2024
Hello, welcome to Product In Reverse - unbundling SaaS growth from a product marketing angle. The goal is to extract marketing insights for startup founders, product marketers, and creators from those in the trenches every day.
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Today: Lattice’s Multi-product as a Strategy to over $100m ARR
The Path to Product-market Fit
Jack Altman recently shared the behind-the-scene story of finding a market early on for what became Lattice.
As a founder, Jack emphasizes that if you have not felt market pull before, you can easily get confused as he was, that you have found your product market fit. They ended up pivoting a couple of times before landing on what worked.
Although the first product - an OKR software failed, the relationships built with the business leaders were crucial and led to the success of their first payable product - performance management software.
After finding PMF, Jack notes they over-invested in customer support and customer success early and it paid off.
You should really be spending all of your time talking to customers and that sounds so obvious people will find so many reasons to not do that you know I talked to one……..[ and you consider it enough ]
The Impact of VP of Marketing
Alex Kracov joined Lattice as employee number three. With the help of Dini from Sales whom I will cover in the next section, he scaled the HR tech company from zero to $50m in revenue before moving on to launch a startup - Dock.
In the early days, after pivoting into a performance management solution ( later rebranded to a people management solution) Alex noted that the pivoting came from two factors:
1/ The learning and conversations obtained from running the failed OKR software demos.
2/ The rising trend in continuous performance management in the HR space.
After gaining momentum in the new role as head of marketing, Alex admits he tried several customer acquisition tactics - some were a loss like running FB ads. Below is what worked for them early on;
Building a Brand
Early on Alex understood that to win the HR competitive landscape, they had to build a brand.
Podcast
The approach was launching a podcast; All Hands Podcast - they interviewed the VP of People in companies like Reddit, Pixar, Costo, HubSpot, and more.
Thereafter, they clipped the videos and promoted them on social media.
The podcast interviews still continue, now in season four and hosted by Katelin Holloway ( Former VP of People at Reddit)
Community
Alex emphasizes that this was one of the MOATs that paid off early on and continues giving.
As from the conversation with Peep Laja on YouTube, Alex shared some key insights on how they built their community on Slack.
1/ Make it feel like VIP ( to join everyone has to apply and fill out a form detailing why they would want to be part of the community)
2/Don’t Sales Reps into the community to pitch your products all the time.
3/Keep the community alive by engaging in things outside your company (Lattice).
From the chat, the community had 11,000 members but now stands at 22k+ HR leaders
Design
From market research, Alex realized for them to beat the ‘old guards’ a sleek design for all people management stakeholders was the right path to cut through the noise.
On the go, they focused on great design, and over the years, they have made it their moat against rivals like Culture Ramp. 15FIve and more.
The Impact of the CRO
In 2018, Dini Mehta was hired as the VP of Sales. Her previous roles stem from being the first sales hire at Drawbridge to leaving as the head of sales.
Dini admits on the Grow & Sell podcast episode that she had no previous experience working in the HR tech space.
In the episode, both Dini and Alex Kracov ( VP of Marketing for 2016 -2021) share growth insights that I am going to extract along their forty-five-minute chat.
Note: Alex left Lattice to co-founder Dock when it was doing $50m ARR while he joined at near zero revenue. While Dini joined at $3m ARR and left at over $100m ARR and is currently ‘operating time out.’