My guest for Episode 112 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Mark Tanner, the Co-founder & COO of Qwilr.

Mark began his career working at an ebook startup during the early days of the Kindle and the iPhone, before joining Google to help forge many of the publisher partnerships that led to Google Play Books and ebooks on Android.

During his time at Google, he got a first-hand look at how global communication tools were changing, and the potential future of documentations and presentations.

After moving back to Australia in 2013, Mark along with his high school friend Dylan, co-founded Qwilr to reinvent the way businesses communicate through documents.

As co-founder and COO, Mark manages Qwilr’s sales and operations, and has helped build a totally remote, globally distributed sales team.

Since raising $1.5M in 2017, Qwilr has grown from 15-40 people, expanded into the US and Europe and seen revenue double year-on-year.

Qwilr recently raised a $10.8M Series A round led by AirTree, Skip Capital and Typeform co-founder, Robert Munoz.

We covered a range of topics in this interview including:

• finding product-market fit
• getting focused on your product roadmap
• when you need to shut off viral growth
• how and when to hire your first sales rep
• how to structure the sales team and compensation packages as you scale
• & much more!

Show notes:

• Marc Andreesen
• Product-User fit comes before Product-Market fit (blog)
• 12 things about Product-Market fit (blog)
• Dylan Baskind (Co-founder of Qwilr)
• Garry Visontay (Partner at Right Click Capital)
• Right Click Capital
• Sydney Seed Fund
• Google Wave
• Matt Hodges
• Jobs to be done
• Airtable
• Notion
• Robert Munoz
• Pedro Magrico
• Influence: the psychology of persuasion (book)
• How to win friends and influence people (book)
• Spin selling (book)
• New Sales Simplified (book)
• The challenger sale (book)
• Predictable revenue (book)
• Crossing the chasm (book)

Join our next live podcast interview with the Investment Principle at AirTree Ventures, Elicia McDonald!
Date: 26th May 2020
Time: 8-9am (AEDT)
Registration link: https://tinyurl.com/Ep113AirTree

Feedback/connect/say hello:
[email protected]
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:
Music: Joakim Karud – Dreams

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