Three Freemium Principles

Dave Boyce is a go-to-market–focused technology executive, author of Freemium, and longtime SaaS operator and board member. Over two decades leading and advising B2B companies, he’s helped founders navigate the shift from sales-led to product-led, from gut-driven to instrumented, and now from manual GTM to AI-assisted systems. Today, Dave teaches revenue architecture and PLG through Winning by Design’s Growth Institute, works with leadership teams on Bow Tie–based growth models, and is all-in on how AI will reshape GTM as a true engineered system.

Discussed in this episode

• Why classic sales & marketing playbooks haven’t caught up to how modern buyers actually buy.
• How the Bowtie model exposes the real levers of growth that funnels hide.
• Why PLG-style thinking is now essential even for sales-led and enterprise motions.
• The 3 first principles of freemium: empathy, generosity, and metrics.
• Where AI can reliably outperform humans across the customer journey, and where it absolutely shouldn’t.
• How to design hybrid human + AI workflows using a clear data model, not vibes.
• What RevOps should own in a modern revenue architecture (and why it can’t just serve the CRO narrative).
• Hard-earned founder lessons from Fundly on reinvention, calling bets early, and letting go of old branches.

Episode highlights

00:00 — GTM is still running 20-year-old playbooks

01:29 — “Sales, marketing, CS… the last unengineered engine”

03:20 — The myth of “just add more heads”

05:50 — The Fundly story: reinvention, too late

08:30 — Why Freemium had to be written

11:01 — Three first principles of freemium

15:25 — Mapping AI across the entire customer journey

19:29 — “Automate the predictable, humanize the exceptional”

25:18 — What the Bowtie exposes that funnels hide

27:25 — Building a “minimum viable Bowtie

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor: ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is the GTM Intelligence Platform built for sales, marketing, and RevOps.

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Learn more at zoominfo.com.

Follow Dave Boyce (Guest)

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boycedave
• Substack: https://daveboyce.substack.com

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The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

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