In the 8th episode of the Generation Builders podcast, we sat down with Stella Garber, co-founder and CEO of Hoop, a software company that helps teams make better decisions without meetings. 

Stella shares her experience as the first marketing hire at Trello and how she helped grow the company from its early days to its acquisition by Atlassian. She also discusses the importance of integrated marketing campaigns and collaboration between teams for success. Tune in to learn more about Stella's journey as a serial founder and startup person.

Stella is the co-founder and CEO of Hoop, and Hoop is helping teams make better decisions faster (without meetings!).

She was the first Marketing hire to join Trello and grew and led the Marketing team from the early days all the way to tens of millions of users and a $425 million acquisition by Atlassian. Since her early days, Stella has held the helm at 5 businesses, turning her into what we like to call a serial founder!


We dived deeper into the following topics: 

Marketing deep-dive at Trello

• Why did you decide to join Trello?
• What was the hardest part about the 0 to 1 phase of Trello GTM? 
• What were the key drivers of the organic growth of users in Trello? 
• Trello is a horizontal product as well and can drive many use cases. On the content and SEO side, how did you try to cater to different use cases? 
• Many early-stage companies delay the monetization to a later stage and focus on building and perfecting the product. When did you start monetizing Trello and why not earlier? 
• How are you thinking of PR? For a typical software company, PR is usually not the biggest nor a scalable channel, what’s your take on how best to leverage PR for early-stage startups? 
• What would you do differently if you joined Trello again? 
• Let's talk about Trello’s acquisition. Being a small company, with a scrappy and doer team, suddenly getting acquired by a big company with a big marketing organization. 

Path to founding a company

• What is Hoop? and what is your mission with it?
• You have recently launched Hoop Alpha, people can apply for early access. How do you stay close to customers and prioritize your product backlog at Hoop? 
• What do you think about the dilemma of losing quality with speed vs perfecting the product before launch? 
• What can startups do to build the execution and shipping muscle?
• Startup life is full of challenges, what have been the hardest challenges you have faced so far at Hoop? 

Community

• What role do Community and Education play especially in successfully growing these types of products and companies? 

The Future of no-code

• How are work and tools changing in modern organizations? What’s the next phase of tools and products that’ll empower the individual knowledge workers to adapt the tools to their workflow, and build their own solutions to the problems they are trying to solve? 
• How will the new generation of kids learn software? will they build their own? 

Angel Investing

• You are also an angel investor in a number of amazing companies. How does that involvement help you be better at your own startup? Are there some things you are learning back from companies?