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That’s how Freshworks Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham started out his opening letter in the company’s recent S-1 filing. Girish attributes Freshworks’ success to being unconventional from the beginning: “We didn’t target large enterprises. We didn’t have access to a been-there-done-that talent pool. We designed our products for the people actually using them. We offered a ‘fresh’ approach relying on efficient, product-led, low-cost, and low-touch sales; and we targeted massive, underserved markets.”
As a customer progresses along their journey, they evolve from a previous inferior state to a new superior one. Whatever the journey is, the customer isn’t purchasing just one solution to solve their needs. The typical mid-market company purchases 137 SaaS products, and the figure grows 30% annually.
I’ve been thinking about product-led growth (PLG) for a while now. These products market themselves, have low churn and massive potential. I thought I’d share an example, and encourage you to think about your own products - and whether PLG makes sense for your business model. I see a brilliant product-led growth plan that Clideo executed perfectly. How perfectly? 4.1M monthly users perfectly 🤯
Ready for a marketing brain dump? I’m going to share with you 9 simple marketing lessons that have shaped my perspective on marketing. B2B marketing is more similar to B2C than most people think, but you’re still selling to people. People with emotions. People who have complex lives. People who have different motivations from one another. Some marketers will hate me for this BUT… It’s true. Top of the funnel marketing is great but it’s not always necessary.
Marketplaces have the most interesting growth loops. Your supply can drive your demand, your demand can drive your supply, demand can drive more demand, and supply can drive more supply. What a world! If you can find, nurture, and accelerate one or two of these loops, you’ll find a powerful new growth lever that your competition may not have.
How long does it take to get a new customer live? What are the steps involved? How much manual labor is required? We weren’t self-service freemium. We had wonderful humans helping make our customers successful, and that took time. Only later did I realize that this was actually a positive, and not a negative.
Bill.com has become an SMB powerhouse, with 120,000+ customers and a stunning $25B+ market cap. All while selling at a $2k ACV! Here are some of my top learnings: You can’t rush a network, you can’t always rush a fintech product, channels matter in SMBs but each one is different, there are 6m SMBs that buy SaaS software, virtual credit cards have radically changed spend management, word-of-mouth scales forever, and many more.
