I 💚 change... a lot

Hello fellow humans (robots, aliens, and any 4th or 5th dimensional beings reading this post)!

My name is Blake and I couldn't be more stoked to be looking after revenue growth here at LaunchNotes. 👋🏽

A little about me

After spending my wee years clambering up and sliding down the mountains around Tahoe, I found myself wandering the San Francisco Bay Area looking for every excuse to eat as much crawfish etouffee at Brenda's French Soul, brisket at Tommy's Joynt, or luna sandos at Miller's on Polk, as possible. I digested by listening to as much live music as I could at The Independent, and sneaking away for striker missions to snowboard or golf more times than was probably appropriate.

Smack dab in the middle of my SF stint, I took off for about 9 months to live and work abroad in Dublin, Ireland and Sydney, Australia. Along my journey, I’ve held various GTM leadership positions, co-launched a few international hubs, and have helped further the revenue initiatives of a few companies like Patagonia, ClearSlide, NextRoll (fka: AdRoll), and COMPASS.

Looking back, I believe all roads have led me to LaunchNotes. And here's why: Any degree of Product, Process and Project Change is an inflection point - company momentum, org efficiency, team productivity, and subsequent revenue will either accelerate or stall as a result. Our solution empowers Product, Marketing, Revenue, and Enablement leaders to leverage Product Change as a growth asset, rather than suffer its potentially painful consequences. And, I've personally experienced how a product, process, and/or project change can influence a deal cycle, a deal's propensity to close, the upsell likelihood of an existing customer, the retention of an existing customer, and the longevity of an existing customer. To say change is a passion of mine would be a radical understatement.

But that's not all. Beyond being super passionate about making product change a growth asset, here are a few additional reasons I'm so psyched to be a part of LaunchNotes:

The team

This small but mighty team is the real-deal.

The speed at which they iterate, their ability to prioritize the customers needs above all else, their laser-like focus on problem solving as opposed to feature building, the thoughtfulness they all clearly bring to every employee discussion and/or decision, and their collective understanding of the space are impressive to say the least. From my first conversations with LaunchNotes up until today, I can't help but continue to be enamored by their obsession to help teams extract value out of points-of-change, rather than simply trying to solve pain (which all too often short-sides SaaS startups).

LaunchNotes clearly has a vision when most companies at this stage do not. As I see it, like mentioned above, that vision is to unlock companies' ability to leverage points-of-change as growth assets, rather simply alleviate the pain they're suffering due to a lack of resources, headcount, broken process, poor tooling, etc.

The space

In addition to the above, I'm drawn to ambiguity. And this space, the Change Communication space, is riddled with ambiguity.

There are changlog point-solutions that only go so far, existing process and generalized tools (i.e. decks, emails, chats, coveted minutes at weekly all-hands meetings, cherished coffee breaks with Heads of Product, etc.) that create an enormous amount of overhead and coordination, and tons of extremely well built, high-fidelity platforms focused on one piece of the puzzle (i.e. Asana for tasking and project management, Jira for roadmapping and planning, etc.)... but no one seems to be thinking about or building the connector, the conduit. The power-strip, if you will. If you have 12 plugs but only 2 sockets, it's impossible to communicate all relevant information to all relevant parties. LaunchNotes changes that.

LaunchNotes is the hub that all change communicators (i.e. product, process and project change communicators) can use to effectively get their message out their and connect their change to the top-line business metrics. This is fascinating to me since, as humans, all we really do and think about is how to better communicate with one another.

The product

To wrap it up, I joined LaunchNotes because of everything I mentioned above but also because of the product itself.

It is elegantly simple yet modularly flexible, expandable and complex. To that end, it's clear that LaunchNotes is a key, not just another tool. It doesn't only help you fix broken process, it unlocks a super-power. A super-power that every effective communicator didn't know they needed, wanted, or craved until they started using LaunchNotes.

If change communication was the Tour de France, LaunchNotes would be an outlawed performance enhancing drug. It's a performance enhancing platform for those who want to unlock the growth asset that is point-of-change, who understand the future importance of precise, efficient, clean, templatized communication, and for those who can see the clarity through the veil but need a little help along the way.

All that said above, it's also worth mentioning that I'm pretty fired up to be part of a super small, nimble team again and am pumped to have been offered a seat on this shiny, new rocket ship.

Here's to harnessing change!