Brian Balfour

Reforge

Reforge is a platform for AI-native product teams.  We've unlocked the performance of 100K+ top professionals from Meta, HubSpot, Canva, Atlassian, Microsoft, Dropbox, New York Times, and more.

↳ Started Reforge in 2016 to encode knowledge from the world's top operators.
↳ Grew the company to $30M+ ARR
↳ Co-creator of Product Growth, Retention + Engagement, Growth Strategy, Product Strategy, AI Foundations and AI Strategy courses. 
↳ Leading company evolution into a platform for AI-native product teams starting with Reforge Insights

Founder/CEO

Long Journey Ventures

Venture Partner

Multiple Startups

I am currently an advisor and/or investor to Pipefy, Loom, Wonder School, Gametime, HelpScout, Shareaholic and more.  Former companies include Grabcad (Acquired by Stratasys), Namo Media (Acquired by Twitter).

Growth Advisor/Investor

Harvard Business School

Guest lecturer on Growth for Mark Roberge and Frank Cespedes entrepreneurship class at Harvard Business School.

Guest Lecturer

HubSpot

Working with an amazing team, we helped take HubSpot from a single product to a multi-product company and establish a product-led growth motion. 

↳  Established the product growth function. We blend consumer marketing tactics, engineering, product, and data to drive rapid growth of engaged users.  
↳  Led growth of new products such as the HubSpot CRM and HubSpot Sales Hub growing to hundreds of thousands of users.

VP Growth, Sales Product Division

Trinity Ventures

Boundless Learning

*  Lead user acquisition, customer development, and product teams
*  Established company's initial direct to consumer marketing strategy including targeted online and offline campaigns
*  Established and executed ongoing customer development efforts
*  Raised approx $10M in VC funding

Co-Founder, CMO

Viximo Inc.

***Acquired by Tapjoy***

Viximo is one of the largest social game distribution companies working with premium social game developers and international social networks.  I co-founded Viximo with Sean Lindsay in Fall of 2007.  During my time at Viximo I held multiple executive roles taking on new challenges as the company grew. 

*  Raised over $10M in funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners
*  Steered company through pivot to successful product/market fit
*  Established Viximo's social gaming distribution business signing deals with major distribution sites including IMVU, Tuenti, VZnet, Bebo, MyYearBook, and major social game developers including LOLapps, Casual Collective, Game Insight, Playrix, and more.
*  Developed Viximo's initial direct to consumer strategy on platforms such as VZnet, growing to over 100K DAU's in under 2 months
*  Directed company's B2B marketing strategy

Founder, VP of Growth

Zoom Information

Managed the development and implementation of social features into Zoominfo.com

Product Manager

Unique Productions

***Acquired By Multiple Parties***

* Founded an event entertainment company at the age of 20
* Bootstrapped to profitability in first year
* Signed clients such as General Motors, Toyota, CDW Inc, Major League Baseball, National Football League, Chicago Bulls, and more

Founder, President

Founder/CEO @ Reforge, Venture Partner @ Long Journey Ventures, Previously VP Growth @ HubSpot

Growth, Customer Acquisition, Marketing, Product Management, Social Networking, Social Gaming, Game Mechanics, Online Communities, Startups, Entrepreneurship,

The next major distribution shift is officially here.  OpenAI announces Apps in ChatGPT.  There is no opt'ing out of this game. 

We have officially entered into the "Open" phase of this cycle.  

If you want to know what is next, and how to play it, I wrote about this months ago.  Links below.

Founder/CEO @ Reforge, Advisor @ Long Journey Ventures, Previously VP Growth @ HubSpot

🆕  The Reforge AI Growth course (https://lnkd.in/gswnCyxD) is here with Bruno Estrella (Head of Marketing Clay) and Lauryn Motamedi (Notion) 

Huge thanks to Noah Adelstein (Growth at Rippling), Kyle Poyar, Patrick Campbell, and Ethan Smith for also contributing.  

Ely Lerner will be leading the first cohort of it starting October 14th. 

This was a massive undertaking. 120K words (500 pages) worth of material.  It's definitely not for folks that just want a few new tactics. 

We build off the timeless principles of Reforge's first-ever course (The Growth Series) and cover how to build growth engines in the AI-era.  

Just a few of the things covered:

Foundation:  Understanding the new playing field. 
Acquisition:  Building and Optimizing AI-Enhanced Growth Loops
Retention: Creating Adaptive, Personalized, Dynamic AI Engagement
Monetization:  New monetization models to capture value in an AI market
Defensibility:  Creating Compound Moats When Everything Can Be Copied

Enroll here -> https://lnkd.in/gswnCyxD

I'm starting to build the foundations of a new GTM team at Reforge.  This Founding GTM Engineer role is a key piece.  

In the past year, we’ve launched four AI-native tools for product teams, and now it's time to accelerate our GTM engine to match. While nearly everyone in our target market knows Reforge for education, only a fraction know we now offer software that's already being used by NY Times, eToro, HubSpot, Autodesk, and many more.

This is a chance to build GTM engineering from scratch with extraordinary assets at your disposal: a beloved brand, 100K+ alumni network, 320K+ owned contacts, 1M annual website visitors, tens of millions of social impressions, and the deepest product management content library in existence - all sitting largely untapped for outbound.

If you are a power user of tools like Clay, an avid listener to the GTM Engineer podcast by Noah Adelstein, or can't stop using AI, you might be a fit.

More details and application link below 🙌

The distribution shift is here.  OpenAI is making progress on all three main entry points for products:  Search (ChatGPT), Apps (Apps SDK), and Social (Sora).  

Ravi Mehta and Adam Fishman joined me on Unsolicited Feedback.  My favorite quote from Ravi:

"This may be the uh-oh moment for a lot of the big incumbents. Strong monopolistic positions are built on how you launch into apps. 

Google Search is ultimately an app launcher. I search for something, and then I launch into a content site, or I launch into an application. 

The iPhone, the home screen is an app launcher. I go to it. I figure out which app I want to use. They control the app store.

The really interesting thing about ChatGPT is that it completely absolutes both of those as app launchers. Neither one of which was great to begin with. Search is not a great way to find an app. The iPhone home screen is not a great way to find an app. 

What is a really good way to find an app is just talk about what you need and then the AI figures out, well, this is the perfect tool for you. Let me launch it for you. Let's start a workflow within that app. 

I think this is a big moment in terms of reshuffling around incumbents."

So, what do you do if you are a product leader? 

We broke down OpenAI's ChatGPT App SDK launch and the steps we are taking.  Full episode below.

AI broke a lot of pricing muscle memory, but the four fundamental questions haven’t changed.  How to think through pricing an AI product...

Full Post: https://lnkd.in/gjERFnFw

First, what’s different with AI :

Variable costs & unpredictability: AI introduces meaningful variable costs and the usage from users can be highly variable and unpredictable.

Value ≠ inputs: Customers buy outcomes, not tokens. Figuring out how to map price to an external value metric that your customer understands is key.

Hybrid > Perfect (in most cases): Market is moving from seat → usage → outcomes; hybrid models are emerging as a bridge. 

🧩 The 4-part monetization puzzle that hasn't changed

Scale(how price scales): The unit customers associate with value (tickets resolved, docs generated, seats, etc).

What (what’s in each plan): Gate in ways that accelerate adoption and expansion. If collaboration drives growth, don’t choke virality by gating seats.

Amount (how much): This is your actual price point—$19/month, $99/seat, $0.002/token, etc. The amount must balance value perception, competitive positioning, and unit economics.

When (when you charge): Do customers pay upfront, get a free trial, use a freemium tier, or pay based on usage? The timing of payment affects willingness to pay, conversion rates and more.

✅ Three tests every AI pricing model must pass

 Customer value test: Does perceived value beat perceived price by a clear multiple?
 
Growth model test: Pricing should enable loops (free → team → expansion), not block them. (Classic example: shifting the free limiter from people to usage to unlock virality.)

Cost-to-serve test: AI introduces variable COGS—your model must sustain both CAC and compute.

The original framework developed by Elena Verna and Dan Hockenmaier as part of the Reforge Monetization Strategy course.  We use it in the new AI Growth course to explore different ways to price AI products.  Details 👇

My 5 biggest takeaways from my convo with Aaron White on AI credit anxiety, teaching AI to do your job, and more...

1. Nobody knows what AI will actually cost them, and that's a problem

Many tools have created AI Credits as a pricing model. But with many of these, Users have zero clue if something will cost them 10 credits or 1000. It's like ordering dinner without seeing prices on the menu - you're either overpaying for credits you won't use, or constantly getting nickeled and dimed.

2. We’re already forgetting how much human work used to cost

Many are betting on AI tools capturing human labor budget and that sustaining. But look at Reddit threads on Cursor. in Q1, people were losing their minds with joy that Cursor could do $10k worth of dev work for $20. Now in Q3? Everyone's complaining about spending 10 credits on the same thing. User expectations have shifted in just nine months. Some aren’t comparing AI to human costs anymore. They are comparing to other software.

3. AI could turn software purchasing into a real-time agentic bidding war

Imagine a procurement agent that sent the same prompt/context/task to 5 different competing AI services and automatically compared the quality of their outputs, speed, and cost to choose a winner. You could re-run those every quarter. Sticky contracts become less sticky. 

4. “Real work” shifts to teaching AI to do your job

Aaron said if you're doing something manually, that's just an experiment, not real work. The real work is documenting the process so an AI can do it next time. Every employee is becoming a process designer. You're not valued for doing the task anymore; you're valued for explaining how to do it well.

5. We’re terrible at judging what AI should automate

It’s hard to mentally calculate whether automating something is worth it, especially if we are unsure if AI can do it yet. The tasks we do most often are paradoxically the hardest to change because our habits are so deep. Aaron had the idea of building a productivity tool that watches your work and tells you what's worth automating.

A lot more on the latest episode of Unsolicited Feedback.

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