66 - How To Break Through In An Intense And Crowded Market - Evan Davies, Head of Marketing, Partnerships and Solutions at Coda

Evan Davies is Head of Marketing, Partnerships, and Solutions at Coda (almost 5 years!). Prior to Coda, Evan was at Box, and prior to that he was a product manager at Accenture.

Coda was founded in 2014, has nearly 200 people, and is based out of SF. They've raised Series D ($240M total).

The problem: for years, our teams have been split across documents, spreadsheets, and apps. Time to bring us back together! 

The solution: Coda is a new doc that brings words, data and teams together. It's making a doc as powerful as an app.

Here's what we hit on:

“Document collaboration platform” vs. “project management tool” - how are you thinking about the market category you play in;

Evan shared a couple of big marketing/content trends that startup founders and marketing leaders need to be aware of (HINT: the maker generation is one topic we explored, and we also discussed the resurgence of OOH ad buys);

I asked Evan to tell me more about the Gallery content on the website, what's the goal;

We talked about how Arianna Huffington used Coda to build the Power Of Reset doc;

Marketing and creator growth: what’s working well for Coda right now? What channels? (HINT: user generated content, SEO/SEM, paid);

Marketing challenges? (HINT: how to build strategy full funnel, how to build a good product led motion)

Evan has been through multiple funding rounds. How has the team and focus areas shifted over the past 5 years;

What worked the best for Coda early-stage;

What's Evan's favorite startup stage and why;

People that have worked for Evan say he's a super strong leader, so I asked Evan what's his leadership formula and he said 3 things: 1) knowing enough to be dangerous 2) create autonomy while driving alignment 3) build empathy on teams with "yes and" approach.

You can reach Evan on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/evanpdavies/

Find out more about Coda: www.coda.io

This episode is exclusively sponsored by Manifest Commerce, helping merchants with earth friendly e-commerce fulfillment. You can check them out here: www.manifestcommerce.io

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You can find Anna on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/annafurmanov or visit this website: www.furmanovmarketing.com

Thanks for listening!