Val’s Bottom-Up Growth Strategy: Building Enterprise Software That Sells Itself
Enterprise software adoption used to follow a predictable path: C-suite decision, procurement process, company-wide rollout. But Val is rewriting that playbook entirely.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO Andy Berman revealed how Val built a growth engine that lets teams adopt their meeting platform organically, leading to rapid expansion within organizations.
The Power of Self-Serve
“It’s typically a small team and then it spreads throughout an organization,” Andy explains. “We’re bottoms up and we’re self serve. So people come to our website, they sign up for a product and they adopt it.”
This approach has driven remarkable growth. “Our user base has, I think, tripled over the last 40 days,” Andy shares. But what makes teams choose Val in the first place?
The Shadow IT Revolution
The strategy capitalizes on a fundamental shift in how software spreads within companies. “People have the ability to choose their own tools today,” Andy notes. “What people talk about in IT is shadow IT. So do you actually know across your network or across your computers what people are using, what applications on a daily basis?”
This democratization of software choice means that individual teams can adopt tools that work for them, without waiting for top-down approval.
Focusing on the End User
Rather than selling to IT departments, Val focuses on the people who actually use the product every day. “Today users have the power to install any web app, pretty much any app, and is your data in those applications,” Andy explains.
This user-first approach shapes everything from their product development to their messaging. As Andy puts it, “Enterprise buyers, they care about design now, they care about the messaging. And marketers have to adopt tactics from the consumer world. Everyone wants an enterprise tool that looks like it was designed by Apple, not that it looks like it was designed 25 years ago by IBM.”
The Path to Enterprise Adoption
The beauty of this bottom-up strategy is how it naturally leads to broader adoption. “A small team can adopt something you can grow in the organization, and then the IT buyer ends up signing up for compliance and security features and functionality,” Andy explains.
This organic growth is driven by real value. Users describe Val as time travel because “you could log into after being out on vacation for a week and read the TLDRs from six or seven meetings and know exactly what happened.”
Finding the Right Early Adopters
Val’s growth strategy isn’t completely hands-off. “What we’ve done is we’ve partnered with a lot of great channel partners on their startup programs, whether it’s Twilio or techstars and you name it,” Andy shares. “We’re trying to find early adopters where they are and we want people who are coming in to use our product at the earliest days when they’re choosing the new tools for their company.”
The Impact of Real Value
The effectiveness of this approach is evident in user feedback. “There’s a great quote on Twitter from one of our users and he talked about how he’d never pay for video conferencing, never paid for zoom, but the auto record, transcribe and search functionality that was so powerful for them at a company called the Brag Media. And that’s why they signed up for a wall to wall contract with us,” Andy reveals.
For B2B founders, Val’s bottom-up growth strategy offers several key lessons:
- Make adoption frictionless through self-serve
- Focus on individual user experience over enterprise features
- Let value drive organic growth within organizations
- Find early adopters through strategic partnerships
The days of relying solely on top-down enterprise sales are over. In today’s world, the most successful B2B products are those that sell themselves by delivering immediate value to end users.
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