Bentos - shifting Coda from building blocks to solutions.
Leading solution marketing to shift Coda's go-to-market from raw building blocks to composed, ready-to-use solutions.
Coda is a powerful no-code platform where anyone can build docs, tables, and workflows. After leading Coda’s Solution Studio (started this professional services function to embed and deploy custom solutions, think small team of FDEs), I transitioned to lead solutions marketing. My first project: how might we take what works with direct sales and make it self-serve?
Challenge
- People who build software sit on a continuum: real developers (1-2% of the workforce), citizen developers (3-4%), and the vast majority — knowledge workers and end users (90%+). Most of that 90% didn’t want to build software. They wanted solutions to their problems.
- Coda’s positioning as “a set of building blocks” was powerful for makers but created a discovery bottleneck. Prospective users struggled to see how raw ingredients — documents, tables, formulas — could solve their specific problems.
- The go-to-market motion relied heavily on account executives in the room pitching. This didn’t scale and created a funnel bottleneck from discovery and awareness through to adoption.
Not everyone wants to make software — and that is totally okay. What we kept hearing was: can I just start with a solution to my problem?
Solution
- Inspired by how food is packaged and served — from raw ingredients to composed dishes — we created the Bentos framework. In Coda’s world: raw ingredients (a document, a table, a formula) become composed ingredients (a Figma integration, a project tracking table) which become full dishes (Pinterest’s OKR solution, Figma’s product roadmap, Google’s launch calendar).
- We packaged use cases into Bentos: each one included guides, prepackaged templates, integrations, and case studies with social proof. These were distributed across the entire customer journey: a self-serve gallery, landing pages for outbound and advertising, in-product recommendations when users created new docs, and onboarding and resurrection emails.
- On the land side, we built the Product Team Hub — a composed solution where product teams could self-serve, copy the doc, and pick the pieces they needed. A crypto payments team might use it for Project Tracker and PRDs but skip standups until they’re ready.
- On the expand side, we partnered with the customer-facing team to map where we were landing within accounts and identify new use cases to branch into — marketing, sales, success, support. We created content and a CSM quarterly conversation framework for exploring new department usage.
Impact
We saw hundreds of product hubs created through self-service, alongside webinars and promotion efforts — a significant shift from the account-executive-led motion.
More importantly, the solution-oriented packaging opened doors to entirely new industries. We continued winning tech companies, but started landing in traditional enterprise: business services firms like Deloitte, Accenture, and PwC, and dedicated internal product incubator teams within CPG companies like Nike, Loblaw, and Yum Brands (KFC). Those stories and logos solidified Coda’s message as a platform for Fortune 100 enterprises, capable of powering rich solutions not just for teams, but for full departments.
On the expand side, NRR (net revenue retention) climbed and remained high as existing customers adopted Coda across more departments and use cases. The horizontal nature of the platform meant that once a team landed, the Bentos packaging gave us a repeatable playbook to grow within the account.