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.
Founders often ask me questions like: What is an OK churn rate? How does our conversion rate compare to other startups? How are we doing in terms of CAC:LTV? What they show is that founders are keen to find out how their business is performing relative to their peers.The challenge is that no single metric is very meaningful if considered in isolation, which is why my answer to these questions usually starts with “it depends”.
All product validation methodologies consist of two parts: an explicitly followable process, and a tacit component that may be best described as ‘having good product judgment’, or ‘product taste’. Following the explicit process would only do you so good. In certain domains, success depends just as much on the tacit component, which is harder to articulate, and therefore harder to get. How might you develop taste?
When you actually launch new products to customers (which many teams don’t do), product managers and designers that have focused on scaling issues and optimization have to flex a new type of cross-functional muscle: how to work with product marketing. The default mode of this partnership across the industry is beyond terrible. Product works in isolation on product, then at the last minute hands things off to product marketing to name it and “launch it”.
In an unlimited world of quantification, why should a business pay for anything more (or less) than exactly what they want? They shouldn’t. Usage-based billing method enables a perfect value match between each customer and the service level they want. Once your customer is in the door and experiencing a useful product, it’s much easier to retain their business or upsell to a higher level of service (in this case, more usage).
In two seconds my $83k deal flatlined, going from “Most likely” to thin air. So what went wrong? The answer isn’t simple. Mostly because it was about momentum, and that’s not something you can “see.” As a result, sales teams trip into the same pitfalls over and over again, losing winnable deals along the way.
From onboarding secrets to PLG metrics and beyond, the ProductLed Summit explores the most valuable topics for PLG professionals–right now. These insights from top product-led experts give you the tools you need to become great at product-led growth. Every presentation (and article) was carefully crafted by our experts with the goal of helping you grow and build a successful product-led business.
Picture this company: Multiple viral growth loops built into the core product workflow, a 3-year head start over its competition, some of the best technical talent available in California, an active, global user base of millions, deep integrations with Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Slack, Tableau, Oracle, and basically every other major tech player, entirely subscription-based for many years and has a small services arm started 6 months ago. This looks like a good company! The only problem? This company lost.
Mark Spera didn’t plan on becoming a growth hacker, but when he launched an online clothing retailer in 2012, he had no choice but to embrace his new identity. “It was a matter of starting a company and being like, ‘Oops, how do I get customers?’” Spera told Built In. “It was a necessity.” Spera sums up what he was doing as “data-driven experimentation for the purpose of growing a business” — aka, growth hacking.