There are plenty of young, flashy startups that seem to be overnight successes, bursting onto the scene, grabbing headlines and growing at a break-neck pace — Atlassian isn’t one of those stories. Atlassian relied on product-led growth before anyone coined the phrase, so let’s unpack how they are so tactical about running their business: the self-service funnel, a global network of channel partners, and enterprise upselling.
Let’s be honest: creativity is a nebulous landscape. With the evolution of digital technologies, we’re now exposed to other people’s opinions, ideas, and work on an almost minute-by-minute basis. But here’s the thing: humans can’t have new ideas without prior sensory input. It’s not me; it’s science, and it’s how our brains work.
John Silverman (Etsy CEO) talks about the very clear but not-as-recognized fact that you can’t really manage what you don’t know. It doesn’t mean you should go out trying to do everything, but instead, as a manager, you should allow and incentivize experts to solve problems the way they believe is the best (input), while you focus on the result (output). Setting up a system where failure is affordable and picking when you can fail are two important things.
Freemium is back. Atlassian, New Relic, Zoom, Slack, etc. have all found tremendous value with freemium. But having built a partly freemium service that hundreds of millions use … I’ve learned one thing: almost everyone gets the math wrong in Freemium. Freemium is great. Freemium forces you to have better onboarding and a slicker, easier-to-use product. Freemium is the way you and I like to try and often buy.
Learn how to measure, analyze, and improve your retention rates to turn your SaaS business into a success. Every time I think about how SaaS companies grow, I come back to the idea that: Growth is the result of engagement, retention, and monetization. But at the same time, retention is also the most crucial factor that drives acquisition and monetization. What that means is that retention plays a role in all three elements of a successful growth engine.
Your prospective customers are faced with a mountain of choices and content. When they’re making a decision about whether to engage with a brand, customers—in every demographic, B2B, B2C, and across industries—are overwhelmingly signaling that they prefer personalized messaging that is relevant to their needs. One of the easiest ways to boost content marketing relevancy is through personalization.
One way people make buying decisions is through tradeoffs. Simply put, a tradeoff is when a customer thinks through a decision and eliminates the inferior choices to come up with the right product or service to buy. It’s choosing the best way to make progress, as opposed to just a compromise. In sales, a tradeoff is more about helping people make better decisions than coming to a compromise.