Becoming an Authority

Situation: Woven is a technical screening software startup that helps high-growth engineering teams hire hidden gem engineers that a traditional resume screen would miss. When they were pre-seed, they were entering a challenging market. Engineering leaders tend to trust other engineers over marketing or sales people, so we needed to find a way to scale their brand without turning off their target buyer. 

Solution: We doubled down on the idea of “engineers learning from other engineers” and launched a podcast called Scaling Software Teams. This was an interview-based show hosted by Woven’s CEO, interviewing high-growth VPs of Engineering to understand what hiring, management, and scaling challenges they faced as their companies grew. 

Execution: We launched the weekly podcast by featuring interviews with our clients, which served as audio case studies in addition to social content. From there, we began outreach to blue-chip VPs at the best tech companies in the world. We were able to ladder-up to some of the best brands in the space quickly by targeting our outreach effectively and pointing back to great content that sold the value of our show. This gave us the halo effect from larger brands plus warm introductions into our ICP, with tons of potential follow-on content for marketing efforts. 

Results: While there aren’t revenue or pipeline wins I can attribute to the podcast, Scaling Software Teams was some of the best, most actionable content I’ve ever produced. This show featured conversations with engineering leaders from Drift, Stripe, Zapier, Product Hunt, and AngelList. Today, I believe these interviews are still some of the best pieces on the web about how to scale a high-growth engineering team.