Buyers don’t just buy products; they buy the experience products give them. The best way to create this experience is by giving them content they can’t resist. But first, let’s get acquainted with the B2B buyer journey (because it’s a bit more complicated than you might think). This journey isn’t linear. The way you introduce a product directly impacts how a user connects your solution to their problems.
Everyone at an organization should own growth, right? Turns out when everyone owns something, no one does. As a result, growth teams can cause an enormous amount of friction in an organization when introduced. I’m not here to sell you on why you need a growth team, but I will point out that product-led businesses with a growth team see dramatic results—double the median free-to-paid conversion rate.
Product-led is cool, and we have a desire to move away from sleazy sales tactics, don’t we? But it’s a false dichotomy: good salespeople don’t use unscrupulous methods to manipulate someone into buying something they don’t need. Contrary to popular belief, being product-led doesn’t automatically mean you’re anti-sales.
Growing traffic into conversions is the ultimate goal for all of us, but is your site stagnating despite all your best efforts? If you’re looking for strategies to push your conversions to new heights – it takes more than simply pushing products out on Google, you need to tap into building a growth focused sales funnel. So what exactly does that entail?
No doubt that conditions were ripe for WhatsApp to explode. The sheer size of the existing base of Internet-connected phones has made WhatsApp’s growth possible. Without question the most significant contributor to WhatsApp’s impressive growth curve is the fact that the app is an exponentially more affordable alternative to SMS and MMS messaging. It’s noteworthy that many of the most restrictive messaging plans and the oldest, cheapest phone models are most prevalent in the developing markets where WhatsApp has taken off.
Too often in startups, Founders track products and their impact by the numbers. But building engaging products is about focusing on how your users think and feel, which can be orders of magnitude more difficult to measure. As we’ve seen time and again, behind every great product is an insight about human psychology. Does your product motivate and reward people to keep coming back?
When you examine the ideas that are percolating now for social apps, you see a clear pattern. The past generation of social apps won the market through a playbook: building big networks with feeds for discovery, creating a followers/status competition for engagement, bringing together creators and audiences, monetizing with ads, supporting photo, text, video. The next generation of social is necessarily a reactionary movement.
Software didn’t just eat the world; it spewed out a new one. The internet enabled us to build an intangible global economy, and software is both the mechanism, and much of the output. We’ve touched on it being cheaper and easier to build software companies. Understanding this in combination with funding requires us to think about what can be built at this stage of the market. The answer is narrow, vertical businesses designed to solve single, specific problems.
Momentum is everything in startups. It creates the Universal Growth Loop: The product grows > that growth attracts and retains talent and capital > that talent and capital enables you to solve more problems in the business > this leads to more product growth. But just like with any growth loop, the loop can work for you or against you. The effects aren’t linear, they compound. Losing momentum doesn’t make things harder, it makes them exponentially harder.
Before the team behind Privy discovered the power of an integrated app store distribution strategy, they were relying 100% on outbound—cold calling, cold emailing, webinars, lead nurturing, etc. Everything changed—and growth rocketed—when they pivoted to focus almost exclusively on an integrated app store approach. Today, they see more than 10,000 installs a month through their app store and freemium model.
Narrowing in on a market and finding the right customer. Building out the first version of the product. Teaching yourself how to bring it to market. Trying not to get lost on the journey to product/market fit. Sticking to a consistent vision, even as you eye new markets and product ideas. These are just a few of the challenges on the path of the PM-turned-founder.
If you are thinking about self-serve revenue and why you should care, we are trying to serve you up with the quickest, easiest ways to go in and possibly have some form of outsized impact with minimal effort involved. No brainer changes that will just have a chunk sized impact on your self-serve revenue, no guarantees, but these are the first things that we would look at.
B2B companies like Miro, Loom, and Calendly are growing at record speeds. Between them, they have over 42 million users. They have something in common; it’s a magic metric they all score exceptionally well in and is rarely mentioned. That metric is the ‘immediate time to value’ for invited users. In each case, the user receiving the Loom video, Miro board, or Calendly invite has to do very little to get immediate value.
Tech leaders need to focus on business value above all else, which includes what’s best for a user and what’s best for business growth. Is it possible to prioritize our customer’s needs and grow rapidly? Why does it feel like a tradeoff? What do I do if my team needs to hit our metric, but we’re losing sight of users’ feedback? In this piece, we’ll break down how to address the challenging user/business tension, through five key investments you can make.
“I like to think of successful brand-building as creating a company that customers would be upset to separate from their identity,” Shapiro says in an interview below. “For example, they’d cease to be the man with Slack stickers all over his laptop. Or the woman who no longer wears Nike shoes every day. And that bugs them.” Although he come from a numbers-driven background, Julian Shapiro focuses on the emotional power of storytelling these days.