The Survival to Thrival Podcast

April Koh, Co-Founder and CEO of Spring Health, talks to co-hosts Bob Tinker and Tae Hea Nahm about how a Go To Market Fit playbook enabled her company to achieve 6 x growth for four years running. April gives an overview of Spring Health, what it has evolved from and how it changed every six months - despite astronomical growth. She also expands upon how she transitioned from being in the weeds to a course-charting role of growth.

Mickey Alon, CTO and Founder of Gainsight PX, talks to host Bob Tinker and special co-hosting guest, Nikolai Skatchkov about Product-Led Growth. Mickey gives Bob an overview of PLG, what it has evolved from and where it may be heading. Nikolai's company, Circula, is currently in the midst of implementing PLG and so, he picks Mickey's brain on the best strategies to implement it successfully.

Ashwin Ballal, EVP and Chief Information Officer at Medallia, talks to hosts Tea Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker about why he loves being a first customer. While it can be a risk, being a first customer can also bring huge rewards; if the product solves your company's urgent pain, it will give your team the opportunity to champion a brand new product and become a ‘customer hero'.

Authors Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker share more wisdom from the Survival to Thrival book series. This time, how to win your first customers. It's illogical for any customer to want to be your first one so founders can get around that by making sure they deliver real value, make their customers a ‘teaching customer', and ensuring the product elevates a customer's career.

Hosts Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker are joined by Kyum Kim, co-founder and Head of US Operations at Blind. Kim shares how they were able to move to the US with no network and successfully expand the Korean anonymous professional networking platform to the US market. Plus how hosting Silicon Valley parties helped the business grow.

Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning By Design, has worked with more than 800 startups solving sales marketing challenges. He speaks with host Tae Hea Nahm about the common Go To Market stumbling blocks and how to get you and your team to fix them.

Hosts Bob Tinker and Tae Hea Nahm announce the launch of Unlock, a new open-source resource for finding Go To Market Fit and unlocking growth. Unlock is a deep dive into the four-step formula to find GTM Fit, and is the practical guide to complement the Survival to Thrival book. In this special episode, Bob and Tae Hea explain how and why Unlock came about and why they want listeners to get involved. Check out Unlock here: unlock.survivaltothrival.com. 

Hosts Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker are joined by guest, Christof Baumgartner, an experienced CRO. They discuss the differences, which  startups should know about, between going to market in Europe and America and how to change the GTM Fit playbook.

CRO is becoming a common term for the modern breed of SVP of sales. A true CRO looks after the full customer lifecycle from customer experience, to revenue generation and growth. This episode we speak to a familiar guest, Mark Smith who's a rare go to market leader for companies such as NPI, Infobox and Arista. He discusses with Bob and Tae Hea the changes and unlearning moments required for this ultimate sales leadership role.

'Thinking in Swim Lanes' is a powerful tool for first-time CEOs making the transition from Founder to Real CEO. So how do you do it, which areas of the business do you need to segregate and how do they change the company, as well as you the CEO? Hosts Bob Tinker and Tae Hea Nahm discuss their own and others experiences.

Bob Tinker and Tae Hea Nahm dig into how a CEO must change as a company grows. With growth comes role change, and navigating this requires self awareness and critical honest reflection. They share their own and others' experiences and struggles of the growth journey.   

Bob Tinker and Tae Hea Nahm speak to Mark Smith, a rare breed of B2B sales leader who has led teams of less than $1M of revenue all the way up to mega-scale growth of billions of dollars. He opens up about the challenges of those transitions and how he had to unlearn his skillset and roles.

You've started to unlock growth. Awesome!  Now you're terrified.  How do you keep up with your startup as it grows? And not get fired? Hosts Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker explain how 'unlearning' is key. And, it applies to everyone in a startup.

For an early stage founder or CEO in search of product market fit, when do you need to set up sales compensation, and how does this tie into the overall business plan? Hosts Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker discuss and relay experiences on the fundamentals of sales comp.

What are the metrics that tell whether a startup has found Go To Market Fit, and how can you use these metrics to run the business and unlock growth. Co-authors Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker discuss the magic numbers for SaaS businesses that will accurately predict an increase or decrease in recurring revenue and how you can change them.

Finding 'Urgent Pain' and your 'Wow' are two vital ingredients in building your Go-To-Market Playbook to unlock growth. How do you find them, or even know when you have? In this episode Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker use real world examples from startups they've worked with of how the founding teams found these two things before going on to scale.

How does a startup operationalize the GTM Playbook? How do you get the whole team aligned with it? How do you know when you need to evolve your GTM playbook or create a totally new one? Where are the handoffs and who owns the project? These are the questions that co-authors Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker answer in another episode packed with real world advice from entrepreneur and investor.

How do you create a playbook and manage a sales team while working remotely? How do you build company culture from home? In this episode, co-authors Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker talk to Chad Malchow, VP of Sales at Honeycomb, about his experiences of growing and scaling a fully distributed company.

How do you create a playbook to find Go-To-Market (GTM) Fit? A GTM playbook is a repeatable map for finding and winning customers over and over again. But what does it look like? Who builds it? What are the common challenges startups might face when creating one? These are the questions addressed by co-authors Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker.

How does an economic downturn affect your Go-To-Market Fit (GTM Fit). Last episode we broke down how to find GTM Fit - the key to unlocking growth. Now we look at how to adapt it when the whole world changes. Co-authors Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker cover re-finding the 'urgent pain' of your customers and re-defining your ideal customer profile (ICP).

In the first ever episode of the Survival to Thrival podcast, co-authors Bob Tinker and Tae Hea Nahm discuss the key concept in their Survival to Thrival books - Go-To-Market Fit (GTM Fit). Finding GTM Fit is the formula to unlock growth for enterprise startups. What is it? How do you get to it? And how do you know you have found it?