Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries, the show that explores the future of tech with innovative B2B founders. In today's episode, we're speaking with John Jahnke, CEO and Co-Founder of Tackle.io, a cloud go-to-market platform that has raised over $148 million in funding.

• Tackle.io's mission to enable software companies to go to market through cloud marketplaces, making it a business decision rather than a product and engineering problem.
• The company's impressive traction, with 550 customers, 100%+ year-over-year growth, and an expected $3 billion in transactions through the platform in the current year.
• The evolution of the go-to-market landscape, with a growing emphasis on efficient distribution and the emergence of a new tech stack for digital selling.
• The process of creating and defining the "Cloud Go-To-Market" category, starting with content creation, experimentation, and a pivotal virtual event in partnership with cloud providers.
• The importance of delivering real value to customers and gaining traction before attempting to create a new category, recognizing that category creation can be a lengthy and challenging process.
• The role of analyst relations in validating the Cloud Go-To-Market category, with Tackle.io creating its own "State of Cloud Marketplace" report to fill the initial information gap and subsequently engaging with analysts from Gartner and Forrester.
• The critical importance of storytelling in fundraising and the value of John's experience as a sales engineer in translating complex ideas into relatable narratives.
• The challenges faced by Tackle.io in the past year, including navigating a restructuring process, transforming the leadership team to adapt to a changing market, and the stress of the SVB bank crisis.
• The long-term vision of accelerating the migration of B2B software sales to the cloud, with a focus on making software selling as efficient as possible through innovations in product-led growth, usage-based pricing, and ecosystem development.