Product-Led Growth (PLG)

… It really goes into the concept of product-led growth acquisition, which means you're relying on virality, on word of mouth, on user-generated content in order to attract new acquisition through top of the funnel. So why is that earned…

… Every single company starts with their growth efforts focused either on product-led growth. Hey, I'm going to have everything being done self-serve or on sales in marketing.

Basically it's now called PLG, but yeah, at that time we didn't even know what to call it exactly.

… that was extremely fascinating and there's so much there. I can go in so many directions.

Yeah. Again, it's like product led truly means product led because you can't just SEO the hell out of something that is a terrible experience.

… requirements, and you say, "Hey, I don't like sales, so I'm going to do a PLG motion," you'll fail.

… And some of this dark stuff you're talking about on PLG, it anti-compounds, right?

… The magical thing at the high level that it compounds, if you have a self-service model, a PLG model, I actually think the number one most important metric is churn. It's going to this churn, churn, churn, churn.

… One is I believe PLG is, I have maybe a different definition of PLG, but I think the way that we are basically adapting products to the consumer or to the business professional and using the product itself to sell the value proposition…

Yeah, so I'm trying to connect dots. The sharp problem is a little bit of that whole quadrant framework, which is what problem are you going to work on?

Let me talk about a few fundamentals. Onboarding is a substitute for sales and all these account management teams for millions of customers.

And so that's where the revenue model really clicks in is you have all these individual contributors who love you, but then they also work at these big companies and these big orgs, and they become these internal champions who spearhead…

… I think if you're doing growth, right, if you're doing product-led growth the right way, then you're trying to balance the science and sort of taking a somewhat ...

… And so when you think about freemium product led growth, even we created a high velocity sales motion there, there was just so much innovation because you had these folks that just knew how to solve problems and worked really well…

It really comes down to the product because initially I think most companies are leaning heavier into sales or heavier into product-led. You're usually not doing both at the same time.

I actually think it's less about expertise in skillset, if that makes sense. And more there a ability to, again, I think of it like a portfolio manager.

So we see different trends coming now with companies, because almost no one can do pure product led growth. Because your investors want to see accelerated growth, and most people believe that adding an SDR or adding an AE will add a…

… Product led growth depends so much on your product and your buying market. There's some buying markets that are less likely to use salespeople, and you need to go in from the beginning.

… You can have a product led growth motion. If your product needs to be put in context, and customized, and assisted, sales teams sometimes are expensive services arms to cover over product issues and help customers buy it until it's…

Great question, so let's start with product-led growth. We've talked about it a little bit in our first episode, but let's revisit the topic.

We have a big focus given that we are a PLG-led company around growth and self-serve business

… the first step actually, I would recommend founders and leaders to just understand what's PLG funnel, what's sales-led funnel with SLG funnel. Because I remember when I begin to work on PLG at GitLab, it was not that clear to me.

Between the AI like SLG and PLG. Yeah, for me they're two sides of the same coin.

… And then growth work to think about the PLG funnel, everything from acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention. So, that's one group.

… So, some of this intersects with the shift from product led growth to adding in a sales motion. So, when I joined Calendly, all of our ARR came from our PLG channel.

… The way that things get done has to be highly integrated versus can be a bit more siloed when you're just sort of the self-service PLG business that in many ways runs itself through the product being well optimized. So, there's a lot of…

We're also moving more towards these product-led tactics, product-led growth. All of these things I feel like made this perfect storm for product operations to come in and start calming things down.

… So, experimentation is a really big part, growth culture, growth hacking culture, PLG culture, growth marketing culture, any kind of growth, at least in my sphere, and sometimes teams can be really, really dependent on experimentation…

… And that helped us ultimately move more towards that PLG motion for a while, but was essential to getting it set up in the first place.

… I'm especially helpful for pre seed and seed, usually, anything PLG, positioning, messaging, figuring out your channels, experimentation, all that early, fun stuff. I love it.

… This was a decade ago, so the acronym PLG had not been coined yet. And I really just thought of myself as a user and data-driven product person.

… There, I built teams across product, data, growth engineering, design and research, and again, focused on product-led growth and monetization. Over those two jobs, I found myself doing a lot more advising and speaking on the side on…

… And now with the rise of PLG, we've seen more of these usage based approaches gaining speed, so that's pretty exciting to see. Whether it's number of API calls or messages sent or terabytes of storage used or words written, this…

I think a lot of it was about the level of intention around building community. And the more there are organic conversations happening about Figma, the better.

Maybe a different way to talk about what we just talked about, is just, there has to be this, almost irrational, this emotional response to your product and this like love for it. First, it has to be cultivated internally, too.

… I think it has become quite buzzy and it's certainly aspirational for a lot of product led growth companies and even those that are maybe a little bit outside of the product led growth orbit. And we're seeing all of these startups I…

… It's also an amazingly fast-growing business with some stellar PLG-focused investors and board members from the likes of Ed Sim at boldstart to Tamar Yehoshua, Slack CPO. 6 billion....

… the mission for the company, and all those things you mentioned in terms of PLG, community-led growth, focus on developers, the security space, these were all things that if you create a Venn diagram of all the things that I'm really…

… So, PLG or bottom up and security, these were never words that were known to have been spoken together in a single sentence, right? So, security has always been a centralized function.

And the way that you make a decision on which one you focus on is similar to best customers. So high willingness to pay.

… It means that we rename everything marketing to product led growth, or growth, or referral programs. To me, it actually dilutes the value of marketing should be playing in the company.

… So DevTools are probably the most successful product-led growth companies that we don't talk about being product-led, but that's totally how they grow. A junior engineer or a really senior engineer can pick up some dev tool and play…

… There's either a real landing page there, or today there is just a Google form for you to fill out that will ask you a few questions sort of about product-led growth, which is the area that we're building in. And if you're someone who is…

And then I'll ask a couple questions as we chat through this. Yeah, so early on, I mean, I definitely got the job that I got at Slack because I had been a game designer.

Start with product-led retention.