Shifting from founder-led sales to repeatable GTM, differentiating on responsiveness/customer support & the art vs. science of product building w/ Stephen Whitworth @ incident.io

Stephen Whitworth (Co-Founder & CEO @ incident.io) joins us to discuss strategically differentiating your product based on responsiveness / customer support and the shift from founder-led sales to repeatable / scaleable GTM. You’ll learn how they landed major logo companies like Netflix, Airbnb & Etsy and how you can apply that to your early enterprise customers. Plus the story behind their co-founder team transition from part-time to full-time, a product-market-fit “cheat code” that helped them decide on incident.io, how they generated 750 demo requests on launch, key qualities when hiring your first AEs to help scale yourself out of sales activities, and Stephen’s perspectives on the art vs. science of product building.ABOUT STEPHEN WHITWORTHStephen is the co-founder and CEO of incident.io, where they're building incident management tooling that's so good, people will break things on purpose. A software engineer by training, he previously led engineering teams at Monzo, and co-founded Ravelin, a fraud detection startup.ABOUT INCIDENT.IOIncident.io provides a platform to help you better respond to and learn from incidents. Helping you seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish.Join us at ELC Annual 2025ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025 SHOW NOTES:The early days of incident.io (2:45)Transitioning from working on incident.io part-time to full-time (5:32)Tactics that helped the co-founder team decide on incident.io over other ideas (8:21)How incident.io received 750 demo requests right away (11:07)incident.io’s product-market fit cheat code & identifying internal PMF (12:24)How incident.io landed major logo companies like Netflix, Airbnb & Etsy (14:32)Strategies to differentiate yourself from competitors in the B2B space & why execution and responsiveness can beat technological advantage (17:30)Stephen’s perspective on “inflicting software” on people & how that changes your product, org & GTM strategy downstream (21:14)Enterprise sales insights that surprised Stephen (23:56)Why GTM is infinitely harder than product & how founders can start to scale themselves out of sales activities (27:21)What incident.io’s GTM team looks like now (32:12)Differentiating in B2B enterprise on customer support & the strategic role of support at incident.io (34:20)Why a culture of responsiveness and support can be your hidden advantage (37:03)Rapid fire questions (39:26)LINKS AND RESOURCESBillion Dollar Whale - Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history.This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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