Dave Grow always considered himself an operator. When he joined Lucidchart seven years ago, shortly after co-founders Karl Sun and Ben Dilts had built the product, he was there to take care of the business side of things. From answering customer support tickets and doing digital marketing to hiring and setting up partnerships, Dave did it all. With neither of the roles, however, did Dave dare put a C-level title in front of his name.

“I was always convinced that someone more experienced would come down the line who will take it over.”

With some titles that came true. Up until Lucidchart started selling to the Enterprise, Dave was heading marketing. But as soon as they started setting up an inside sales organisation, Dave realised that his digital marketing skills fit for a self-service freemium model were not as helpful to the sales people trying to lure the enterprises. So he stepped down and hired a CMO with Enterprise experience.

He did, however, become the company’s COO and is currently also serving as President. In that role, he has seen the transformation Lucidchart underwent, from offering freemium plans to single users all the way to signing up Enterprise customers such as Box, Dropbox, Accenture and Groupon.

That transition has been challenging at times but was the right direction for Lucidchart. To date, the company has 10 million users and has very reasonable aspirations to reach 50 million in the next three years. Even though Lucidchart is venture backed, it hasn’t used a cent of its $40M to fuel that growth.

Listen on to hear:

  • How the pricing plans have evolved to reach 10 million users
  • What are the different GTM strategies to get to that sort of scale and what has worked for Lucidchart?
  • Should SaaS companies nowadays have a Freemium model?
  • How Lucidchart moved upmarket and how they overcame the challenges they faced
  • How to find the intersection between what you love and what brings value to your company

P.S.

One curious fact that Dave only touches upon is that Lucidchart has not used a cent of the $40 million in funding they raised to fuel that growth. It’s one of many topics he will get into detail at his SaaStock18 talk. Joining him will be many other founders and operators we have signed up as speakers such as Michael Litt, founder of Vidyard, David Cancel, founder of Drift and Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB. Join our Insider Sale by April 1st to get a 2 for 1 ticket discount code.