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.
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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.
When you are starting from scratch and you have no audience, launching on Product Hunt or HackerNews can feel like the right move. Well, in spite of their reputation among pop-startup and indie hacker scenes as “part of the journey” I’m here to tell you…don’t do it. Let’s take a closer look at why you probably shouldn’t ever launch on Product Hunt or Hacker News, and why you definitely shouldn’t count them as your first or only options.
Unlike bottom performers, superstar reps get bombarded with questions during sales demos. And that changes everything. Once buyers understand the value they sprint through the sales cycle. That means: Faster deal cycles. Better win rates. Higher ACV. And bigger commission. These are the 5 “acts” that winning sales demo scripts follow PLUS 5 examples to follow as you build out your script.
Jonathan
Costet
@
gong sales
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people look to others to help them make better decisions or adopt the right behaviour. When we’re uncertain about what to do, we assume that the people around us (experts, celebrities, friends, etc.) have more knowledge about what’s going on and what should be done. There are 6 categories of social proof that people respond best to: Experts, Celebrities (paid or unpaid), Users (past and present), Wisdom of the Crowd (approval from a large group of people), Peers, and Certification.
As a Product Manager, you are working within a discipline that exists at the intersection of many other functions, but rarely have these disciplines directly reporting to you. Being able to influence all these simultaneously is not an easy task, but a necessary one in order to drive outcomes for your customers and the business you work for. To start, we need to first define what influencing without authority means.
The most sure-fire way to achieve rapid growth in your business is to make sure you’re marketing to the right people. In the early stages of founding a startup, finding clients can be a bit of a shot in the dark. If you’re not sure who could benefit from your services yet, casting a wide net and targeting a broad market is one path towards identifying them. So how do you find the perfect sales target?
Every ad campaign consists of two distinct phases: The pre-click phase and the post-click phase. When creating ad campaigns, many digital marketers focus too narrowly on optimizing just the ads (the pre-click phase). A great Google Ads campaign will also build a compelling post-click experience—one that convinces customers to stay, learn, and eventually convert. The difference between an average Google Ads campaign and a great one is that a great campaign focuses more on the post-click phase.
So, you want to know how long it will take for you to build an MVP and put it into the hands of your users. The short answer is that, in my experience working with dozens of startups at Altar.io, it shouldn’t take more than three to four months to build an MVP. However, that answer comes with some caveats that depend on how many features you need to validate, and if you’re building a fully scoped product or an idea on a napkin.
In UX research, finding participants can often stand in the way of getting to your next big breakthrough. How many ideas could become reality if you instantly had people to talk to every time you spun up a new research project? Let’s explore ways to cut down on the time, effort, and money it takes to recruit research participants. We’ll look at quick and scrappy techniques, leveraging relationships, and using automation.
