Modern Growth Stack (MGS) Adoption
by Naomi Ionita • Partner at Menlo Ventures at Menlo Ventures
Former VP of Growth at Invoice2go and early product leader at Evernote. She specializes in Product-Led Growth (PLG), monetization strategy, and the modern growth stack, currently investing in early-stage SaaS companies.
🎙️ Episode Context
Naomi Ionita joins Lenny to dismantle common misconceptions about monetization, arguing that startups often wait too long to charge and fail to iterate on pricing. She introduces the 'Day 1 vs. Day 100' framework for feature packaging and discusses the 'Modern Growth Stack'—a suite of tools enabling growth teams to drive revenue without heavy engineering dependencies. The conversation covers practical survey methods for pricing and lessons from Evernote's missed opportunities.
Problem It Solves
Engineering bottlenecks where growth/business teams cannot access data or run experiments without developer intervention.
Framework Overview
Moving away from building internal tools to using a composable stack of SaaS products that decouple data, workflow, and impact. This enables non-technical teams to drive revenue and experimentation autonomously.
🧠 Framework Structure
Data Accessibility: Use Reverse ETL (...
Workflow Automation: Enable self-serv...
Hard ROI Focus: Select tools that dir...
Product-Led Sales: Use data to signal...
When to Use
When the engineering team is bogged down maintaining internal dashboards, billing scripts, or A/B testing frameworks.
Common Mistakes
Building proprietary internal tools for non-core capabilities (like billing or experimentation) instead of buying purpose-built solutions.
Real World Example
At Invoice2go, Naomi's team built heavy internal tooling for metering and experimentation. Today, she advocates using tools like Eppo (experimentation) and Orb (billing) to avoid that technical debt.
With this proliferation of SaaS, it's created this need for more data access and interoperability... breaking down these silos.
— Naomi Ionita