How developers buy software tends to eventually become how everyone else buys software. Just look at the current buzzwords of SaaS: product-led growth, consumption-based pricing, the (re)birth of freemium products, the push towards building user communities. Gone are the days of the traditional SaaS funnel of prospect, MQL, SQL, opportunity, and all that jazz. It has been replaced by a journey that reflects how people actually want to adopt software.
When a product’s onboarding is neglected, it’s like throwing a massive party with balloons, fireworks, and a bouncy castle in your backyard, yet no one can get past the front door. It’s a waste of time and resources for everyone involved. The irony in all of this is that the user onboarding is usually the only aspect of a product that every single user will experience, including those who decide it isn’t right for them.
Usage-based pricing is having a moment. It coincides with achieving faster revenue growth at scale, building a truly customer-centric culture, and enabling a land-and-expand business model. Still, ditching subscription-based pricing is easier said than done. Usage-based pricing isn’t one-size-fits-all, either. With all this potential risk and complexity, is the juice really worth the squeeze?
When the first day of trading ended, Snowflake had sold 28 million shares and raised nearly $3.4B. While it may seem like luck or good timing, like all overnight successes, Snowflake’s growth was a long time in the making. 1.4M annual organic visits; 177K monthly visitors; 140K live backlinks. The secret to create a dominant online presence in the data cloud niche: Positioning.
Buy-in is the lifeblood of Product Management. I learned this the hard way. As a new PM, I walked into my first roadmap planning meeting confident and excited. I was about to recommend that we build a new search feature, and I knew it was a slam-dunk idea. After, I left the meeting defeated and stressed. This is a common problem, and one you can learn how to fix: Buy-in is the result of showing your team why your idea achieves their goals.
Simply put: the content landscape is competitive. Hiring an expert content marketer can help you stand out. The vast majority of new content rehashes the content that already exists. It’s cheaper and faster to put up lackluster blog posts than to invest in a smart, original content marketing strategy. But without a strategy designed to cut through the noise and push prospects down the funnel — and a strategy for measuring the outcomes you want — you won’t see much payoff from all your effort.
Anytime you see a founder (or a product) who’s really killing it remember: there are tons of layers (under the surface) that contributed to their success. Here are the factors that lead to a SaaS gaining traction in a given market. The product you build should be a response to genuine demand. It’s even better when you notice demand is growing, or is currently unmet. As a founder, you’ll need some “unfair advantages” in your market. Most success is about stacking your skills, network, passion together.
What is the right way to build products? Earlier in my career, I would have told you everything should be AB tested, and that you should build only as little as you need to validate a hypothesis. However, these “best practices” can take too long or can often be too expensive, how do you approach different product situations? I want to share a few frameworks that I think can help, but there is no substitute for judgment here.
Reciprocity remains one of the fundamental principles of marketing psychology. Why? Because it’s incredibly effective. Giving something free today goes a long way to building trust with prospects. Even if they don’t buy right away, the recipient will be more likely to buy in the future because subconsciously they feel driven to settle the score.
Detailed plans for the future, while important, have never really helped teams be agile in a situation that calls for transformation. But few product leaders build roadmaps without waiting for external change to improve their offering. We talked with some product leaders who shared their first-hand experiences on embracing change, building pivots in their plans, and reimagining the future of SaaS products in the world of disruption.
As opposed to the more traditional pricing being based on production costs and the standard competitive markup, value-based pricing makes the most of what the maximum cost that their customers would be willing to pay for their product or service. Understanding how to optimize for this revolves around how much perceived value is behind your product and brand.
“If I create great B2B content but can’t measure it, did it make an impact?” is the question marketers ask regularly. Measuring the impact of content marketing allows B2B marketers to optimize campaigns for better engagement and more effectively attribute ROI. But what are the strategies, tactics, and trends behind measuring content marketing performance?
Free and free trials come with real costs, especially soft costs. Engineering costs to maintain the trials and trial experience. My learning and rough rule: trials and freemium options work well — if you can support them well. Can someone potentially deploy your app in minutes? If so, would it work well self-deployed? Does it need a ton of data in it to work well and show value?
Learning something new is a pain. Imagine if you had to tweak your new iPhone and its settings before using it or customise Google before you had to search for something. Would you do it? Enter default settings. Defaults are the values or settings pre-selected for the users. It’s a framework, a basic structure underlying a system, and these frameworks hold massive power that makes users’ decisions.
Sales women/men, you don’t need to learn six rules or seven habits to become a successful salesperson. All you need to do is know your customer. That’s it. You need to listen to your customer and truly understand their needs. As a salesperson, you need to identify a customer’s struggles and then present the products or services to them from their perspective. Too often we focus on the product or service and its features.