Having a strong “why now” certainly gives you a better shot at building a large and enduring business, but it isn’t absolutely essential. Companies like SpaceX, Airbnb, Pinterest, DoorDash, Instacart, Facebook, and Netflix had little if any why now. But these companies all executed like crazy in a large market, and in many cases succeeded because they rode a new trend later in their life (e.g. Netflix and broadband).
SaaS users are our tortoise. They notoriously take months to convert into paying customers, especially at an enterprise level, and there are many steps they need to take to get there. Micro-conversions are at the very core of this journey. They are the reason for the customer journey being so tricky, in-depth, and such a great area of importance for product managers and product-led growth. You can’t expect users to jump straight to the finish line. Long-term users are slow movers.
A solid messaging strategy ensures you grab your target audience’s attention and build interest in what you’re selling. But there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. It should be informed by your market, competitor, and user research, and optimized through feedback and testing. This will help you gauge your audience and how to speak to them at every customer touchpoint.
What kind of business do you want to be? The way you price says a lot: not just about value, but about your values. Good pricing is fair, consistent, and transparent. These may not be the words that you associate with pricing. Still, they are the foundations of any sustainable pricing strategy, and companies that do not pay attention to this will get themselves in trouble.
As PLG becomes trendy, product-led imposters are on the rise. 2020 proved to be the year when a free offering became an essential survival strategy. We saw the number of SaaS companies with a free offering continue to increase in 2021. The biggest jump was among companies selling into Midmarket and Enterprise customers. If you’re not focusing on activation, you’re missing $$$. While the metric itself has gone mainstream in PLG, most companies have a lot of work to do to improve their activation rates.
A solid messaging strategy ensures you grab your target audience’s attention and build interest in what you’re selling. But there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. It should be informed by your market, competitor, and user research, and optimized through feedback and testing. This will help you gauge your audience and how to speak to them at every customer touchpoint.
Startups are about speed. The pace at which you learn from the market, iterate, test and launch is often the difference between life and death for a young company. I built the first version of ‘The Daily Pulse’ 6 months into my time at Intercom, and it was an auto generated email with a set of simple graphs sent out to everyone in the company, every day at 5pm PST. This helped us to force a company-wide a check in 👏 every 👏 single 👏 day, and we had incredibly fast feedback loops for product changes.