Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Nick Rybak explores how modern B2B companies grow through marketing strategies, website innovation, and content that converts. Every two weeks, we talk to marketing leaders and founders about what’s working and what’s not.
Let's pray for a conversion!
Nick Rybak (00:00)
Gabriel, thanks for joining. Really happy to have you here. Could you please introduce yourself a bit? So for people that don't really know you yet.
Gabriel (00:08)
Yeah, so my name is Gabriel. I'm in software engineering for ⁓ 15 years now and for the last three years I made it mostly into the go to market field calling myself go to market engineer. I'm leading the everything go to market in permit IO startup that create an execution layer for everything.
authorization and permission. yeah, I really love the cross point between engineering and go to market and how can we shape marketing using engineering techniques.
Nick Rybak (00:42)
Not really a popular situation where like an engineer switches to a marketing side. So I think that that's going to be the interesting conversation here. And actually the first question would be like, what's the most expensive mistake you've made that permit ⁓ in time, money or missed opportunity. And I'm asking about like when you actually became an go-to-market specialist already, not as an engineer.
Gabriel (01:09)
Yeah, think the most expensive one, and I think many SaaS and developer companies have it, is treat conferences as a lead gen platform. Conferences are great, but the developer conferences never built for being lead generated. They built to be a brand awareness platform and create your funnel into your lead generation efforts.
For us, it permit the first conferences we did. We just did what everyone do. We have a booth and we try to do sales call, hey, you need this product, maybe, maybe your team needed. And I tried to sell at the conference. got 30 meetings, two showed up like the same ratio in all the industry. And we've been really frustrated. And then we sat and thought, how can we improve our conference presence? We built a framework on how to do.
conferences that are first very focused on measurable brand awareness and second create a funnel that you can after measure attribute and ⁓ be more on the legion after I can say that we are meeting folks at a conference we didn't know that they've been in our booth because we are very in high volume of like hey let's do brand awareness do really cool stuff really cool activities like in every conference we are people are come to see how we do and
Six months later, I get a super friendly message on LinkedIn. Hey, we met at a conference and I'm like, I'm not really remember, but I'm happy that I give you that hanging out feeling that make you feel as a friend. So definitely the first two conferences we did at permit was the most expensive situation that we just throw money on. On the other hand, we learned a lot. So maybe that's a learned price that we had to.
Nick Rybak (02:54)
Yeah, that's a great, great experience, I think. Two conferences, not that big amount to realize that. And let's be a bit more specific. Like, what was the cost of that mistake? And like, let's say money for these two conferences.
Gabriel (03:08)
I think usual conferences like all in all when you're not investing like the biggest book that I reinvent around 50 grand both conferences, know, with all travels and people and booth and everything like that. So I can count on I think 50 K.
Nick Rybak (03:27)
Got it. Thank you for sharing. you also mentioned the measurable brand awareness. So I'm curious, what did you mean by that? How do you measure that?
Gabriel (03:35)
So ⁓
the thing that make me a lot of heart when I'm in conferences is to see the companies that gives you like, I don't know, yeti cups that cost 20 bucks each, just if you're, if they're scan your badge. Scanning badges are kind of attribute. You buy an email, but you can buy this email from Apollo and any other intelligence platform. And people are not really remembering you because of your
because of the cop they get. Maybe they are, but you have zero connection with them. In the framework we had in Permit, the baseline was an online activity that we are asking people to participate in. It can be a simple one, like start our GitHub account, which many do, but it can be also a complex one, like a quiz game or something that they need to watch, something they need to play, something they need to do, some mission to accomplish, something like that.
The benefits of having activities like that is that you can attribute folks. If you're, for example, having a quiz game and then you ask people to log in with their GitHub, so first you get their GitHub account, which is a profile that is way more enriched than the email 1.1.1 at something.com. You get the real profile of the person, so that the first. And second is that you
Actually get on their phone so you get like of course you need to get a consent for that and everything and we did we did it all but you can start attributing person and then you can have a pixel on their phone and if they'll visit your website then you know about them and if they're for example, then you can retarget them with paid campaign, etc, etc, so
The more online connection you get with the people at the booth, you get more attribution that you can track after and you can measure the brand awareness. Another measurable aspect is the fact that many companies spend a lot of time at the booth for irrelevant people. So not every person that stopped by our booth is a relevant ICP. They might be correlated with your ICP. So for example, someone who can tell a friend or an engineer that can tell their manager.
But your booth effort needs to be cascade or adopted or responsive to the person that is just now visited your booth. So the way we built our ⁓ booth funnel was in a way that we have the just visitor ones. They are getting a very cheap swag and we are asking them something that I don't know, like a post, star on GitHub, something like that.
They are not relevant now, but they are somehow developers and would like to keep their details, but we also don't want to spend our time on them. So we give them a self-service experience at the booth to get something, remember us and go forward. Then we have the folks that are worth personal touch, that they might be sometime with some pain. And this is where our mid-level booth folks...
trying to detect people that are kind of relevant, to be more friend with them, to give the personal connection. That after, if at some point they will need something, they remember, hey, I know someone from this company. They will visit your website and they will correlate it with your face. Hey, I'm friend. This is the example I gave earlier. A person I met at the booth, we just have a very friendly discussion and he'll remember me because this discussion has, you know, it might be the option that he saw retargeting ads online.
It might be the option that he get a swag. It might be the option that he play a quiz and now we know really well the permit materials, but he wasn't an ICP at the conference. So we spent just the time we need, you know, to give them the personal touch. Then we have the backend of the booth, the people that are actually, you know, can give a long demo, can give a long shot. They would never be at the front of the funnel. They would never be at the top of the funnel. So the time will be managed by what they really need to do.
And this is the job of the top of funnel representative, to filter the people to the middle of the funnel or the bottom of the funnel so you can manage your time well at the boot.
Nick Rybak (07:54)
Got it. Thank you for explanation. All right. speaking of the company you're working at, so you've mentioned the developers and for people who don't know that your target audience is developers and you basically sell development tools. That's why you mentioned GitHub. so the question I had is that every developer now is using Cloud Code or Courser.
or like basically any other AI based tool like Copilot for coding. And a lot of them are probably thinking that they could just build something similar like your software themselves. And how do you actually sell something to people that are like halfway convinced that they don't really need any developer tools anymore?
Gabriel (08:43)
Yeah. Well, a couple of months after I started to work as a marketer or go to market person, I understood the most fundamental part of marketing for developers. Your biggest competitor when you're selling to developers, the developers themselves, you're always like, it is not like they will choose an alternative product. They always are. But why, why wouldn't I build it myself? Like when you meet people, the yeah, the most reaction
Nick Rybak (08:59)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
for two months instead of paying $9 per month.
Gabriel (09:11)
Yeah, the most reaction that people give you is like, okay, I don't think I need it. I'll build it myself. It is not new with Cloud code with cursor and cursor. The new thing with coding agent is that they are convinced people they can build it themselves. And for some cases that true. The thing with developer tools and I think is general now is the suspocalypse and the fact that you need to
emphasize your infrastructure capabilities. Even Nata Developer Tools today has the problem of I'll build it myself. And especially for, for example, like product that we saw dropped in the last couple of months, task management, to do applications, calendars, I don't know, whatever it is, they're getting like dropped because Claude or Entropiq said, hey, we are shipping the cohort.
Right? So this is a problem now of every, every single company in the market that they had the problem of, we are competing ourselves, to say, and, with that, think that developers again are not alone with that. thing that you need to do as a marketer is first emphasize the infrastructure aspect of you. And second, having the.
there is in AI and LLMs there is the term of harness the software on top of the LLM that do the stuff, right? Let's say for example that if you are using Claude Opus 4.6 as a model you'll see a completely different result in Claude code and when you're working with cursor although they are the same models because they are both built different harnesses to
make the LLM work for you, make the LLM code for you. And when you are understanding better the layers of what make Cloud Code or Cursor build the right thing for you, then you can understand better how to market the layers that they couldn't replace. So for example, if your software do very highly deterministic policy evaluation,
You might want to say, hey, you can do that with cursor, that for sure. But you probably want cursor to use our product because you want our harness to be the one that do the policy evaluations. And there is two sides of how to excel with this approach. The first one is being machine first product. It's super relevant now for developer tools.
AI agents cannot create account in your product and if AI agent cannot work well with your product. So you need to develop skills and you need to develop CLI and need to develop API so AI agents can open accounts in your product. And then you just give the AI, the coding agents the capability to think, hey, why we should develop that if I can more easily integrate it with the product. When you work with coding agent, they also
provide you an offers for products and stuff that you can use for that. So the first thing is having your ⁓ infrastructure ready for coding agent. And the second is when you do continue the relationship part with your audience. So make them love you, make them think that, hey, we might use Cloud Code for that, but the tool that Cloud Code use is this product because it gives me trust. It gives me like,
I can sleep quietly at night because I know everything work for me. know it work well in production. I know it work well in architecture, et cetera, et cetera. So this is ⁓ the things that you need to emphasize more than just here is the easiest way to achieve something, which is was, it was the way we did messaging. Like four years ago, we were like, okay, you can save six months and do it in one only in a month, which is irrelevant anymore.
because if I can do it in a month with you, I can do it in two weeks with Cursor. So now the messaging is shifted into, you can do it in two weeks and you can do it with us, but you get better values. You get more trust, you get more scale, you get more speed, you get more time to develop things that are more important for your business.
Nick Rybak (13:33)
So it's basically differentiator here is the like level of execution for them, right? So how, how, how better you are doing what you are doing or how fast you are doing that. Is it worth to like developing that ourselves or like, it's just easier to use your solution.
Gabriel (13:42)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, absolutely. So again, I think that the fact here is that it is not faster. It is not maybe even not better because better is kind of vague thing. It's kind of something that, what is better? What is robust? You need to be very specific, very technical on what is the achievement of using a product instead of let coding agents just do that for you in your product.
Nick Rybak (14:21)
OK, and you've also mentioned the interesting here thing is that you have you've said something like that you have to prepare the infrastructure for AI agents. And do think it's relevant for only like when your ideal customer is a developer or like basically everyone in the future?
Gabriel (14:42)
Absolutely not. Not in the future. Actually now. I'll tell you the way I see it. So at some point of time, let's say between start by 2010, let's SaaS became a thing. And then your super app to run your software was the browser. We never, I mean, if you met anyone in between 2010 to our days and ask them, Hey, can you build a product or
Nick Rybak (14:56)
Yeah.
Gabriel (15:09)
Is there an option to build a product without a web interface, a web app, a website or something? I mean, this is the way people are running apps. This is the way people are running apps today. When you're thinking SaaS, you are thinking a web app that you're logging in and do something in the browser. So the browser became the super app, something that is very interesting in China for years now.
the chat applications are super apps for everything. You do everything via chat interfaces. So now the super apps for every software around there are agents. So if you're not build your apps to work well with the super app of agent, then it will be irrelevant. And the most baseline stuff, maybe it's not the most basic baseline, but it's super important that also the exploration will be part of it. And exploration is not just about
Nick Rybak (15:38)
Yeah.
Gabriel (16:02)
have ChatGPT to offer you for forks is have ChatGPT integrate and make thing for you when you're just working. One of the thing that is super for me, like it's really changed the way I work with AI. So back then I used to have a planning sessions with myself or with the team, know, you're sitting, you're saying, what is the task that I have to do in this week, et cetera.
Today with agent, the way that you are doing tasks, are already, you are do task and you already give an agent to work on that. Right. So instead of like plan a strategy for a launch, you're not writing it in a task, no matter what the platform you work. But for me, I'm not work with any special software, but when I'm doing my to-dos, I'm already starting chat with agents on how this to-do should be done. Right. So if I'm writing like,
have a plan for a launch, I'm not only writing it in my to do app, I also start a thread with an agent to consult, to brainstorm, to understand how to do stuff. And the result of that is that instead of just thinking, you start by doing. Agents helps you to do a lot, to do many things, to do stuff. And if you want people to work with your product, you don't have the bandwidth between find me on the website and sign up, which is
something that you know, the old exploration phase is that someone is looking for a product and they are going to Google and they Google it and okay, I'll read this one. Fine. I'll go to other website. Fine. I'll do the comparison and then I'll sign up to one of the product. In today's play, the player that will win this game is the one that will have the doing aspect.
And the main baseline doing aspect when people are exploring for a new product, for a new service is the agent to start the thing for them. The agent to do the onboarding, the agent to do the initial skeleton, the agent to do the sign up and, you know, creating the baseline account. So if your product, no matter if that's for developer or not, is not exposing interfaces that agents feel comfortable to work with, then
you're losing the exploration because people will lose their focus and would never come back to sign up. They expect the agent to do the first doing step in your product.
Nick Rybak (18:35)
Do you think that we would even need like interfaces then? I mean, in the classic model of SaaS is like you have, as you said, like you have a web app, you log in, you basically work with some data there, you see some reports or like you create ones, you generate something there and so on and so forth. But at the end of the day,
Now, like it turned out, it's not the best way to work with your data, especially if, for example, if you need to marry two data points in some way. I mean, if you're a marketer, you probably need to see like Google Analytics with Google Search Console, with Meta ads, with LinkedIn ads all together and make some different comparisons and like basically
see all the data together and the interface doesn't seem like the best option to do that.
Gabriel (19:40)
I think it is a great question. I'm not thinking that I can see the future. I'll do well, I wouldn't be here now. But I think I would like to split it into two niches. So the first one is about the orchestration of data. The thing that agents open for you is the companies that try to encapsulate their interfaces to give you the mode of their product.
So for example, you mentioned something that the marketer pay attention a lot is that now I don't need to manage campaign in meta ads, campaign in Google ads and try to ship the retargeting from Google to meta, cetera, et cetera. I can have one interface that is orchestrating everything for me and do this stuff. This is something that we already saw the disruption. I haven't visited, I think, Google Analytics. was like I had daily.
time in Google Analytics for at least 20 minutes a day a year ago. I haven't visited the Google Analytics interface for a year now. Why? Because I'm orchestrating it with tools and do all the intelligence analysis on another interface. But that doesn't mean that I don't want to work with an interface. I work with a different interface. Specifically, this is a chat interface, but to some sort, your focus is trying to get
more into monitoring, into dashboarding, et cetera, et into the UI thing that is easy for our brain to get. A chat is a good medium, but first it costs a lot of time because chat is something that you need to write, you need to be proactive, you need to read tons of text that they are returned to you. And it probably is not the most efficient use of your time to chat with someone for the whole day.
And as an anecdote, there's something that I feel is like when you are chatting, it being very personal, you never tell to a dashboard, Hey, you're a bad dashboard. I hate this personality. Do something better. Right. So it costs you an emotional thing that is not, I think it's not smart to have only chat interface for everything we need here. And probably there are some interfaces. So there, I think it's called the, um,
I can't remember now the standard that Anthropic launched in Claude. So now Claude can answer you with interfaces that you can keep as an artifact and then they will know to sync and they will know to do everything. So on the orchestration side, yes, there is a big advantage now to the LLM providers like OpenAI and Anthropic because they have the chat interface that creates the interfaces. But
We will not use only chats. It will take some time until people will deep breath and understand that not everything you should do is Claude and so on, and that you should do some, you know, better experiences in other agents that give you the right interface. So the interface will completely change the way that we know them, but it will not be only chat interfaces that I don't think it will never happen.
Nick Rybak (22:57)
All right, so let's get back to like more marketing stuff, let's say. And I actually had a question so that everyone right now clearly uses lots of AI workflows in content production. And I've noticed that this is the part of your GTM at permit as well, like a content marketing.
And I had a question. So what is the actual workflow or maybe a playbook for you that works? How to produce a valuable content? And do we create valuable content for AI summarizers only in 2026 or people still read some content? What is your opinion on all this content thing?
Gabriel (23:42)
I'll say first that for sure people are still consuming content. To some sort everyone consume content, I think it's related also to the interface discussion. You're speaking with agents, you do that a lot. Some people do it 90 % of their day, but still every one of us consume content. It can be video, is, I mean, I don't know a person in my life that did not consume at least an average 10 minutes videos a day.
to some sort can be TV but most of the folks are just I don't know stories, ⁓ YouTube, whatever it is. Still many people even with all everything AI watch very long video YouTube videos or educational videos to do stuff. So video is still a platform that from our brain the way that we learn thing, the way that we consume thing many folks works very well with videos.
So videos is definitely something that not dramatically or drastically change because of we are working with AI. Of course, there are some medias that changed a lot. The internal blog of the company, think we maintain the blog was our biggest top of funnel engagement with users. had tons of organic SEO, we still do have some.
And yes, people are reading less and less blogs, but the agents still reading docs. So you need to maintain your content or your context layer of your content public in the internet because the agents need to think about it. With that, we need to understand what AI changes in the layer of content. When we are thinking of content the way that I like to imagine it, we have four layers.
The first one, which is the bottom one, is the context. It's what our company doing, what is the problem of the customer, how we solve that, how our product work, all our documentation, everything. This is the context, and this is the first, the baseline layer. Without this context, you cannot create any kind of content. On top of that, you have a layer that is production and repurposing. You're taking this content and you create stuff from it. It can be blog posts.
It can be videos and can be docs in your website. It can be Reddit sub Reddit. It can be Reddit posts. It can be social posts. can be whatever it is, you're product you do a lot of the layer that do production and repurposing. On top of that, you have the distribution layer that you need to be smart when you distribute. And this is also a task that is taking the time. You need to build your channels. You need to build your organic growth. You need to build your
even performance growth. So you have the distribution layer that you need to do. And on top of that, you have the signaling and prioritization. So you, for example, there are trends at the internet and trends are great way to be bold organically, because if you're detecting a trend and you repurpose some of your context and you distribute it right, then people will read your content because people are consuming still Twitter feeds.
People are consuming LinkedIn feeds, are consuming social media feeds, and I don't think it will disappear. Maybe the content will be more AI generated. Maybe the algo will be more AI generated, but people will need to consume content, right? They need to be passive and consume content. And I think that what AI did is having the layer of production and repurposing that was the most expensive one. If we are just looking two years ago,
Most of the content work you did was about production and repurposing. You never disconnect between collecting the context and writing stuff, right? So the way that content writer work two years ago, they listen to someone, they build an outline from the outline, they build an article or something like that. That effort need to be decoupled.
need to be decoupled for a continuous context layer that you take everything you do to. So you can work with ready-made product like Octave, or you can build your own layer. you, for example, develop a product, a very easy way to do that is to have agents that document everything that is going in your product. And you can take customer meetings for that. You can take a lot to build your context layer.
When you have stable context layer, then you can very easily repurpose and product every type of content you want. And then you can use the distribution and a signal and priority layers to make sure that you are already reacting just in time with the content that is really made a difference now and push into where people are now. I think with that, that investing in log long time content repurposing and content distribution now.
So for example, do SEO effort is not the smartest way, maybe I'm wrong, but this is not the smartest way to utilize your content because the way that people consuming content and the way that content is pushed into people's mind is changing every day. Like if you'll go to all these AEO and GEO companies,
every two weeks they found a new method that charge GPT ranking stuff and they will try to prioritize you better there and if all your effort will still be on producing and repurposing content then you will not stand at the pace of that so the long-term shot that you need to do now is to build a super stable context layer
that it always have the content so you can very easily repurposing or producing some sort of content for me because AI made it easy and build a stable signaling layer that you'd always know what is the right content for me to produce now and where should I distribute it.
Nick Rybak (29:53)
Got it. So I definitely think that with AI it becomes more like it becomes harder every day to get the attention of people because the level of content is like an insane on a daily basis.
Gabriel (30:05)
Absolutely.
Nick Rybak (30:09)
All right, Gabriel. So now it's time for the flywheel five. Basically same five questions I ask every podcast. And the first one is what's one channel you would bet everything on right now? And...
the one that you would kill,
Gabriel (30:26)
Yeah, I think this super interesting one and as I said, it is changed daily. What I say now, maybe tomorrow, everything will change. For now, I really adopt X because with the agents, I can have automation that tell me what is the hot topics on X on Twitter. They have now this recommended news for you, which is super important because then you can immediately think, OK, I'll generate now a post about this one.
and it will really get good engagement. And agents can just scrape Twitter and do something with it. The one I kill, I think Instagram. I think the repurposing is really hard for us now and the cadence is really hard to be bold. So in terms of organic, definitely Instagram. think meta is a great opportunity for performance, but if we're speaking organic, I think Instagram is getting really hard to win.
Nick Rybak (31:22)
Alright, so, and what tool are you using or recommending that most B2B marketers have never heard of?
Gabriel (31:32)
I would say cloud code, but I think it's so pathetic now. And I actually, actually not using that much cloud code. I'm using a lot of codecs and cursor for some reason. I don't know why, but this is me. I think I recommended Octave. I'm not using it personally because I built myself a context layer, but I think definitely a context layer is something that every marketer should do now and should.
invest now in and from my onboarding I thought I think Octave is a really good one and I think I know it I'm already count on three but you can choose after if you want to bring all three I think my my my love choice will be clay I do a lot of clay I'm very data oriented person so doing automations that are data oriented and not automation that are workflow oriented
It's very easy for me, so I'm a heavy user of Clay. Like I'm taking every month I'm using all my 50K credits there.
Nick Rybak (32:34)
Some people are telling that Clay is going to die due to a clot caught. What do think about that?
Gabriel (32:42)
There's a great example of interfaces. I work with clay, although I can do everything with cloud code. That's the fact that I have everything organizing tables that they can understand and manage and visualize and monitor and dashboard. It make it very easier for me because as I said, my brain worked this way. I'm seeing a table, I'm getting ordered. I know what I need to do it. Get me focused. With cloud code is really hard for me to focus on intelligence and personalizations.
Nick Rybak (33:11)
Yeah, I actually agree. you, I personally don't want to like, set up all these API integrations and everything myself, or when you can like one click and it's done.
Gabriel (33:19)
Yeah, this is actually,
yeah, that's also a of a mod. For me, that's not a mod because I'm good with doing it with Cloud Code. But on the other end, the interface is the thing for me. I don't think tools will be that we need to adopt, that we need to be responsive to the market. And I think KLEI do it quite nice.
Nick Rybak (33:43)
at it. What's the most overrated marketing device you keep hearing?
Gabriel (33:49)
Ugh.
I don't think it's an advice, but it's really hard now to track. when you visit LinkedIn, every second post is about a new tool or a new AI method or this gated content or something. I would avoid any kind of post like that. Give me find the tools myself. I can hear recommendation. I saw a nice post on Twitter of a friend that she said that instead of telling people use cloud code, tell them I use cloud code because X and Y.
and let them choose if they need to use Cloud Code. So I think like all these tooling advice that many of them are paid promotions, right? But even the organic one, they just create noise and move your focus from the important stuff is super important to try to ignore the most.
Nick Rybak (34:42)
What's your North Star metric and the one number you actually run toward all your marketing activities?
Gabriel (34:51)
I don't have one. think marketing and go to market engineering is built on top of funnels and every stage of the funnel has a different Northstar and every platform have a different Northstar. It is not that I maybe have Northstar matrix and not Northstar metric. And I think it's really depend and adapt and every day you find thing new. Of course, like the Northstar is having money.
Right? Is having the sales, delivering money out of your marketing activities. If that's not your North Star, then you do it wrong. But I don't think that I have, I think, I think this is really affected by my engineering background. There is a joke. If you have been to developer conference, you probably saw that joke. At least two speakers at every conference has a slide that said that developer answer every question with it depends.
So I think like the engineering approach is that you never see one North Star. You're adopting, you're doing the right thing for the moment and to deliver the value. And the value is again, have more incomes and growth to your.
Nick Rybak (36:05)
And the last one, what does a great B2B marketer know that a mediocre one doesn't?
Gabriel (36:13)
I think I'm still a mediocre. I'm new to that. I'm not that new. feel like today I can be, I can speak marketing fluently, but yet there are a lot of things that I'm not speaking the language. I'm not speaking like the thing. And so I wouldn't call myself a great B2B marketer. I can say that a great go-to market engineer.
What makes the difference is always remember what is your goal. And again, the goal is to create growth and to create revenue for the company. I saw many not that senior professionals that are getting excited about creative, getting excited about copywriting, getting excited about, see what cool website we created, but forgetting what's really important and forgetting how they really need to
how they need to utilize their time with things that actually drive growth and drive a go-to market.
Nick Rybak (37:17)
Alright, so could you give me your most controversial B2B marketing opinions or something that you would say out loud at a conference and watch people either nod or just walk away?
Gabriel (37:32)
I'm very comfortable person, I'm trying not to make people... to annoy people. I'm trying to think what is my anti-pattern advice.
Is not my anti part and advice but i think this is a good anecdote that i can share that correlate with it. There is the cyber security entrepreneur near sook who is the co founder of palo alto networks and you know. Just found another company and i think palo alto network the name the level of creativity at the name of falo alto network is like.
This is a name of, I don't know, like a printing utilities. Like Palo Alto is a city. It's like you're opening an advice for Palo Alto citizens to create networks. Like it's like you call your city, I don't know, New York engines. It's very, the most underrated level of creativity. And yet it did great stuff. And Palo Alto is definitely the largest cybersecurity company at the world today.
And you are created another company and you visit the website and the website looks like someone prompted base 44 with something like create me a website that look exactly how cybersecurity websites were looking 2015. And yet they do a lot of customers. do a lot of activities. So my point of that is that your creativity is not, would not your, would not make your marketing great. What make your marketing great is always remember.
what you need to do, create revenue, create growth. And of course, creativity is a great tool, is a great means to get to that end. But many marketers and that remember to the Mediocre ones, many marketers focus on the means instead of the end, especially with like you can do everything with AI. So, hey, you you saw what I, what I did with Cloud Code in just five minutes, it drove nothing. It didn't took you five minutes, it took you five whole days. So let's like,
you know so i think a lot of if i have something controversial it will be around people that paying attention to the means instead of to the end
Nick Rybak (39:39)
Okay, and what is something you had completely wrong about marketing three years ago when you were a software engineer and that you now believe is true? So what's changed in your opinion?
Gabriel (39:54)
I thought marketing
is fun. Now I understand that it is super hard work. When I look for the job, for the first job, I have a good friend who she's a very known go-to-market person at the world. She wrote books, cetera, et cetera. And we had, we still had a meeting every couple of months. And every time she said, I'm still amazed that you're surviving, surviving go-to-market. I would think like six months after you'll go back and never go.
But yeah, I thought marketing will be more fun. Now I found it's fun, but it still needs to greet and it still needs. And as I said, I said to myself to the cool stuff of like do creative thing and getting compliments on your brand and creativity and so on is maybe 10%. The other 90 % is super hard work demanding and really not always paying like not not paying money, but many times, you know, when you do mistakes,
People will forget everything you achieved earlier and it will be just the face of everything. So it's not easy. knowing how to celebrate small wins, cliche does it sound, and having yourself leave from the wins that you did is super important.
Nick Rybak (41:14)
Yeah, and I think the answer, it depends, doesn't really work here when you report to the board of directors or to CEO.
Gabriel (41:19)
Yeah.
Absolutely. Absolutely. think, I think like you talk about, I've been principal engineer, so I really know how to work with board of director. I know how to write decks. I know how to do strategy. I know a lot. And still, I think I'm like 20 % in delivering a strategy marketing strategy deck to a board. Like it's completely different the way that you speak, the way you put things on the table. It is very like.
When you do marketing well and you celebrate your wins, you learn how to do it more constant and you learn how to do it, but it's super different than do engineering strategy than traditional marketing strategy.
Nick Rybak (42:07)
All right, so thank you for being here. It was Gabriel and thank you for sharing your knowledge. Subscribe on the podcast and where do you think people should follow you? Where do you share your knowledge and wisdom online?
Gabriel (42:11)
Thank you.
I'm
mostly on LinkedIn, a little bit on Twitter but I write on Twitter mostly in Hebrew so LinkedIn is the place where they can follow it, they want to get some more
Nick Rybak (42:33)
Okay, so follow Gabriel on Twitter and LinkedIn and on Twitter if you speak the same language.
Gabriel (42:39)
actually LinkedIn
do, Twitter do a very good auto translation so you can follow there too but I'm sharing there not only on marketing, I'm showing there on coffee, books, whatever it is but yeah see you there
Nick Rybak (42:54)
Thank you
for being here. Subscribe on the podcast and see you in the next one.
Gabriel (42:58)
Yeah, was super fun to chat and I thank you Nick.