Solopreneurship, Memes & Getting Started with Product-Led Sales with Elena Verna
Skip the fluff. Hear the best bits.
Just 5 minutes. All value, no filler.
📓 Key Takeaways
📘 Memes cut through workplace awkwardness, highlighting broken processes, cross-department friction, and goal-setting absurdities. They say what employees feel but can't express, and in doing so, they build shared emotional connection. It's not just laughs—it's therapy. A good meme makes people feel seen.
📘 The real question isn’t how to build a personal brand, but why. Once you scale your presence, you inherit the maintenance—and the trolls. It's a tradeoff. Growth brings reach, but reach brings chaos. Start with your purpose, not your platform.
📘 Most days are swallowed by Dropbox, but stepping back to advise elsewhere sharpens operational thinking. Zooming out makes the core job better. Balance isn’t a static state—it’s a cycle.
📘 Going full-time wasn’t the only option—just the right one for now. But the plan is to return to solar or explore something else. Careers aren’t ladders. They’re loops. Run the course. Then reroute.
📘 A strong content strategy can blend both—memes for reach, meaning for depth. And the best memes do both. Humour lands when truth hides inside it.
📘 Instead of chasing leads with events and cold outreach, the product becomes the magnet. But it still needs demos, education, and hand-holding. It’s not hands-off. If your current model works, don’t fix it.
📘 Throwing acquisition spend at a half-baked product won’t move the needle. Build the experience, test it, interview users, optimise—then scale. Build product depth before sales breadth.
📘 Many leaders are experts in sales or PLG—not both. They struggle to bridge the two because they’ve only seen one side. Specialists become siloed. And without hybrid operators, efforts fall flat. Growth needs translators, not just tacticians.
📘 PLG companies flail in enterprise. Enterprise players bungle PLG. The pressure eventually breaks them toward one side. Few nail the middle. Pick your lane—or get run off the road.
💬 Top Quotes
Memes are actually a wonderful way to talk about very difficult topics without having people put their walls up. Humor disarms us. Memes to me are a way to highlight some of the ridiculousness of our work space, of relationships between departments, of how goals are set, and how companies are writing us as employees and bring some humor to it and make people not feel alone. Make them see that, hey, this relates to a bunch of other people. There's like emotion behind it. It can only be expressed through picture and not words, and a bunch of people are feeling that emotion
There's lots of failure modes there and a lot of PLG companies have a hard time doing that enterprise and enterprise companies have very hard time doing PLG the interesting part is that this ends up the pressure starts to be so high that they start pivoting to one or the other
I don't think it's the question of balance. I think it's just the question of daily prioritization. Most of the days Dropbox absolutely consumes my life and I'm not doing anything else. However, I do know that I am better operator if I also do advising, just because it helps me pull out of the small little weeds and details and see a bigger picture
So I feel very empowered that I wasn't having the thoughts like oh full time is my only option no it's the option I wanted to take at the moment but that doesn't mean that I'm not going to go back into solar premium worship. So one point or next because again once that job runs its course which eventually will every job eventually runs its course I'll get back into being a solar premium we're doing a bunch of other things
So I think it's a balance between still posting meaningful content and memes like you can go all memes. That's one and number two I think memes are actually a wonderful way to talk about very difficult topics without having people put their walls up and a humor and disarms us humor makes us more more willing to accept hard truths
So to anybody who's looking to say, I want to build my personal brand, my always questions, why? Do you want to start with yourself? Because once you build that personal brand, you need to maintain it. Once you cast a wider circle across a bunch of more people, you get more weirdos cut nutnet and like you have to like deal with like those bizarre interactions with
Product led sales is just a different way to create pipeline for sales so instead of a marketing team generating cold pipeline through events with her content where this mql is coming to you you're going to need to educate this mql of what your product is about you're going to need to connect them to the solution do a demo do a full blown sale cycle in this case this is a different source for your pipeline
So first of all if your traditional way is working well for you you're hitting all of your quota targets you're hitting all of your budget numbers keep going like there's nothing says that you should disrupt yourself and start to introduce additional sources of pipeline or additional sources of revenue
However there's more people that are either really deeply profoundly knowledgeable in sales tactics and have no idea how PLG works or they've only worked in PLG only companies and have no idea how sales works and if you have those types of people then they definitely cannot make that bridge come together because they're truly specialists in these very specific and siloed growth motions
So I would hire a product manager first because without self serverable product experience all of it goes flat no matter how much acquisition you're going to throw its way no matter you won't be able to generate any meaningful leads out of it if there's not meaningful product experience plus product experience takes the longest to get right because you need to actually develop it you need to release it you need to experiment on that you need to optimize it you need have to have a bunch of customers interviews to just take more time
