ProductLed Podcast: Recent Episodes
Wes Bush, Maja Voje
The ProductLed Podcast is a weekly interview series with both product-led growth leaders and practitioners who have real knowledge to share on what it takes to use their product to grow a business.
Tatiana Morozova, the Head of Growth Strategy & Operations at ClickUp, joins host Mario Araujo to shed light on the untold stories behind product-led growth (PLG) implementation and the enduring value of persistence in achieving success.
In conversation, they emphasize making iteration and failure an integral part of the product-led implementation journey. Tatiana draws from her experiences at MongoDB and ServiceNow, highlighting key learnings about experimentation at scale, the significance of testing before rebranding, and layering PLG on an enterprise service.
Key Takeaways:
[2:15] Tatiana's background and accidental entry into growth
[4:05] MongoDB and launching an experimentation program
[5:15] Challenges of autonomy and silos in experimentation
[8:15] Using qualitative feedback tools for validation
[9:05] Importance of defining secondary metrics for experiments
[9:25] Activation and adjacent user experiences
[12:10] Friction and confusion in the rearranged product placement
[12:55] Recommendation of having secondary metrics for validation
[13:25] Exploring adjacent user experiences and educational paths
[15:25] Doubling of conversion window to paid customers for the same cohort
[16:10] Balancing learning and pivoting
[16:25] Decision-making in teams
[16:50] Factors influencing pivoting decisions
[17:15] Cultural impact on decision-making
[19:05] Lessons from the failed brand awareness campaign
[22:15] Building PLG in an enterprise context
[23:55] The role of sales in PLG
[25:10] Creating a feedback loop with sales
[25:35] Recommendations for companies exploring PLG
[31:00] Final remarks
About Tatiana Morozova:
Tatiana Morozova is an accomplished leader in Growth Marketing and Strategy, presently holding the position of Head of Growth Strategy & Operations at ClickUp. With a wealth of experience, including roles at ServiceNow and MongoDB, she has excelled in the realm of product-led growth (PLG). Tatiana's career journey reflects her expertise in scaling businesses and driving marketing strategies that make an impact.
Links:
Tatiana Morozova | LinkedIn
Today’s episode dives into understanding your customers' unmet needs and mastering the art of building products the right way.
Our guest is Tony Ulwick, innovation leader and the bestselling author of "Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice." Tony offers a simplified approach to the innovation process, and together with host Wes Bush, they discuss Outcome-Driven Innovation as a framework for market success.
The focus here is on discovering what customers aim to achieve (their "jobs to be done") rather than rushing into product features or solutions. Explore the roles of different customer segments, a systematic approach to customer discovery, valuable segmentation for product development and marketing, and more.
Key Takeaways:
[1:00] Tony Ulwick’s IBM experience and ongoing innovation challenges
[2:10] His desire to predict product success before development
[3:15] Understanding customer needs
[9:00] Defining customer groups
[10:40] Targeting underserved segments
[13:10] Finding segments of opportunity
[15:00] Step-by-step process for understanding customer needs
[16:00] Mapping out desired outcomes
[20:45] Discussion of platform-level solutions
[21:40] Mapping out desired outcomes
[24:00] The collaborative approach
[25:00] Categorizing desired outcomes
[28:00] Finding segments of opportunity
[30:00] Segmentation based on unmet needs
[30:40] Focus on the job to be done
[31:00] Example in dentistry where patient segments are identified based on their unmet needs.
[32:10] Identifying unmet needs to inform product strategy
[33:00] Shifting the value proposition based on identified unmet needs.
[34:15] Innovations and unmet needs
[38:30] Free book “Jobs to be Done” theory
About Tony Ulwick:
Tony Ulwick is the CEO of Strategyn, an innovation consultancy. He's known for pioneering Jobs-to-be-Done Theory and inventing Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI) with an 86% success rate. Tony works with Fortune 500 companies to make innovation more predictable and oversees the JTBD + ODI publication.
Links:
Tony Ulwick | LinkedIn
JOBS TO BE DONE book
Step into the world of product-led growth (PLG) with Wes Bush, the author of the popular book "Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself." In this episode, Wes talks about common misunderstandings about the product-led model and shares insights about its promising future.
Dr. Else van der Berg, the founder of Sonderhouse, is also part of the conversation as a guest host. Together with Wes, they have a fascinating discussion, exploring the important idea of focusing on providing value before making money. They also talk about using product free trials, the need for organizations to change their thinking, and the complex task of making sure users find value in what's offered.
Key Takeaways:
[1:00] How Wes Bush got into the product-led field
[4:10] Four components of business
[4:55} Comparing sales-led and product-led companies
[6:00] Organizational and cultural shift to move to PLG
[9:00] Balancing broad AI tools and targeting specific user profiles
[11:50] Utilizing BJ Fogg’s behavior model for identifying ideal users
[14:15] Potential for PLF targeting enterprise clients
[17:15] Importance of value creation before value capture
[17:50] Changing landscape of freemium
[18:40] Future of PLG
[22:00] Differentiation play, freemium in niche markets, and expanding target audiences
[24:45] Mindset shift required for PLG success
[27:00] Wes shares his biggest mistake in growth
[30:30] Challenge of designing a core value proposition
[35:15] Role and leadership skills for driving PLG initiatives
[38:00] User success becomes the company’s success
About Wes Bush:
Wes Bush is an author and expert in PLG and founder of the all-in-one educational platform ProductLed. With a passion for helping companies shift their focus from sales-led to product-led strategies, he believes that delivering value to users before monetization is key to success.
Links:
Wes Bush | LinkedIn
Dr. Else van der Berg | LinkedIn
Free Product-Led Growth Book
The pressures of leadership can be tiring and steer you toward a version of yourself you don’t recognize. In today’s episode, we’re joined by Jason Silver, Growth expert and author of the upcoming book "Quietly Crushing It," who shares his insights on how to achieve success without burning out.
Jason highlights the importance of aligning your actions with your intentions and making room in your workday to prioritize tasks that bring you joy. He shares practical tips and introduces his “Crushing It” approach to enhance communication and productivity at work. This three-step framework involves creating space, aligning experiences, and progressing faster.
Key Takeaways:
[1:10] Jason Silver introduction
[2:30] Importance of leadership and managing in a quieter, more fulfilling way
[5:30] Technical skills in the product-led space
[9:00] Jason's interest in business and building teams
[12:00] The concept of "quietly crushing it" and finding joy in the hard things
[16:00] Work-life balance and the future of leadership
[20:00] Three-step “Quietly Crushing It” framework
[24:00] Clear communication and the impact of miscommunications in the workplace
[30:00] How to implement a brief back to avoid miscommunications
[34:00] Jason’s “Quietly Crushing It” book
About Jason Silver:
Jason likes to help people embrace life's challenges. He worked at Airbnb during the early days and helped build an AI company before AI became the cool thing to do. Currently, he advises leaders on how to build great, lasting companies with fulfilling workplaces.
Every Tuesday Jason shares a new article, always readable in under two minutes, that includes a tangible tactic you can use to help you do or feel better at work each week. Subscribe for free here.
Links:
Jason Silver | LinkedIn
“Quietly Crushing It” by Jason Silver
Enhancing customer value and boosting revenue can be achieved by integrating a sales assist motion into your PLG strategy. However, as we discover in today's episode of the False Starts series, this process requires navigating trial and error and overcoming challenges.
Carrie McMahon, the Head of Scaled Business at Coda, talks about how her team navigated three iterations to find the right approach to adding sales to their successful self-serve motion. They started with a heavy focus on human interaction, then shifted to a success-led motion, and finally reoriented the team towards high-potential enterprise customers.
Throughout the episode, Carrie elaborates on challenges her team faced like overwhelming users with sales interactions. Among many nuggets of advice, she emphasizes the importance of pinpointing success milestones, strategically segmenting your customer base, and maintaining a continuous cycle of validation and automation.
Key Takeaways:
[1:15] Carrie’s background and work experience
[3:30] Mission and ideal customer profile at Coda
[6:20] Coda’s first attempt to layer sales on top of Coda’s PLG approach
[7:15] Challenges of overwhelming the Sales Team with customer interactions and misaligned customer needs
[8:10] Recognizing the mismatch between customer expectations and the sales-led motion
[8:52] Ineffective segmentation of customers
[9:36] Pivoting towards a success-led motion
[11:10] Discussion about the user experience during the initial attempt
[12:50] Listening to customer feedback to understand challenges and missed opportunities
[16:00] Transitioning from the first iteration to the second
[16:15] Shifting the team’s focus from sales to success
[19:50] Segmenting and finding the right users to engage with
[21:30] Examples of customer success stories and expansions
[25:10] Creating transparency and celebrating quick wins
[26:15] Focusing on potential growth for enterprise sales
[28:15] Third iteration: reorienting towards high-potential customers
[29:15] Product market fit discussion
[29:45] Playbook recommendations for layering sales on self-serve
[30:35] Evolution of product-led stack of tools
[36:30] Team structure and objectives
About Carrie McMahon:
Carrie is a collaborative leader and innovator with proven success at building and enabling teams and developing programs at scale to drive revenue growth and ensure operational efficiency. Prior to her role at Coda, she spent nearly 6 years working at Zendesk.
Links:
Carrie McMahon | LinkedIn
Carrie McMahon | Coda
In this episode, ProductLed CEO & Founder Wes Bush speaks with Laura Kluz, ProductLed’s Director of Content discuss the newly created Product-Led Assessment. The Assessment is designed to help businesses understand where to focus their efforts to build a successful product-led business.
It measures nine core areas of a business, including strategy, ideal users, free model, onboarding, experience, pricing, data, growth process, and team. The assessment provides a holistic view of the business and helps identify the highest leverage opportunities for growth.
Learn why every business should take the Assessment to learn what the core issue is so that they can focus their time and resources on the right problems.
Key takeaways:
[0:22]: What the ProductLed Assessment is
[4:30]: Importance of understanding the root cause of business issues
[7:00]: Breakdown of the nine components measured in the Assessment
[12:30]: Relevance of the Assessment for pre-revenue businesses
[17:00]: Plans for creating in-depth guides for each component
About Wes Bush
Wes Bush is an exceptional entrepreneur, renowned bestselling author, and the unparalleled authority on product-led growth. With an unwavering dedication to his craft, Wes has transformed the lives of over 500,000 individuals worldwide, captivating them through his groundbreaking books, captivating podcast, and influential thought leadership on the subject of product-led growth.
Links
Wes Bush on LinkedIn
Melissa Perri, the author of the book "The Build Trap" joins Wes Bush to talk about the concept of the build trap, which is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. They chat about the importance of focusing on products' value rather than just shipping features.
Melissa also shares the signs that indicate a company is in the build trap, such as not knowing the expected outcomes of their products and lacking a product strategy. Melissa provides insights on escaping the build trap, including the need for a good organizational design, a strong product strategy, and effective product operations. She emphasizes the importance of a cultural shift and the need to practice new behaviors to build a product-led culture.
Key Takeaways:
[3:00]: Discussion on the concept of the build trap and its scariness and signs that indicate a company is in the build trap.
[10:00]: How to address the build trap and escape it.
[18:30]: Importance of a cultural shift and practicing new behaviors.
[22:00]: What a simplified version of a strategy for early-stage companies looks like.
[30:00]: Introduction to the concept of Product Ops and its importance for product-led companies
[39:00]: Why transparency matters in product-led companies.
[42:00]: Benefits of developing good habits early on in a company's growth.
Links:
Melissa Perri’s LinkedIn
Melissa Perri’s Twitter
productinstitute.com
melissaperri.com
produxlabs.com
In this episode, Wes chats with Teresa Torres about her book, "Continuous Discovery Habits." Teresa is an expert in product discovery and has crafted a practical guide on continuously uncovering customer needs, pain points, and opportunities to build successful products.
Wes and Teresa explore the key concepts of continuous discovery and the importance of forming product trios for effective collaboration. The podcast covers essential habits and strategies to kickstart a successful continuous discovery process, ensuring teams remain focused on achieving desired product outcomes.
Key Takeaways:
[2:06] Wes and Teresa speak about the core habits for success.
[5:06] Teresa discusses the idea of the product trio, comprised of a product manager, designer, and software engineer, emphasizing the benefits of cross-functional collaboration and decision-making.
[8:02] Teresa highlights the importance of context and organization structure in kickstarting continuous discovery habits, depending on roles and team dynamics.
[17:09] They speak about user research and the main questions you need to ask in your customer interviews.
[28:26] How they approach product launches.
[31:54] Why using story drawings to provide structure is important to her process.
About Teresa
Teresa Torres is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises, in a variety of industries. She has taught over 12,000 product people discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy and is the author of Continuous Discovery Habits.
Links:
In the competitive world of SaaS, businesses struggle to attract new customers. However, there's a winning strategy that can help you outshine your competitors: shift your focus to your existing customers.
In this episode, Liz Pearce, GoDaddy's VP of Marketing, takes us behind the scenes to reveal how the powerhouse company attributes its success to relentless evaluation of customer value.
Liz delves into GoDaddy's comprehensive strategy for elevating customer value across their range of offerings, spanning domains, websites, and productivity tools. Emphasizing the importance of understanding the customer journey and delivering personalized recommendations, she unveils GoDaddy's culture of experimentation and data-driven practices. By harnessing customer activity metrics, they fuel significant growth.
Key Takeaways:
[1:10] Liz Pearce background and experience in startups
[3:55] Variety of products and services offered by GoDaddy
[5:30] Meeting customers at different stages of their entrepreneurial journey
[8:15] Understanding and analyzing customer behavior
[10:35] Segmentation and personalized recommendations based on customer needs
[12:30] Mapping out the typical user journey and analyzing different entry points
[14:15] Scoring customer value in the first 30 days
[16:45] Progressive onboarding and providing suggestions based on customer actions
[19:00] Product example and its positive impact on customer engagement
[20:20] Importance of testing and experimentation.
[21:40] Guiding people and giving suggestions to increase customer value
[22:10] Importance of pricing and customer success in increasing customer value
[23:35] Helping customers overcome activation hurdles
[25:00] Culture of experimentation at GoDaddy and how it drives growth
[26:20] The impact of small changes and experiments on customer experience
[27:30] Measuring and optimizing the product funnel to drive growth
[39:00] Celebrating experiments and learnings within the company
[31:20] Suggestions for small companies to start with customer conversations and feedback
About Liz Pearce:
Liz Pearce is a seasoned professional in the startup world, driven by a passion for entrepreneurship. With a background in marketing, she has successfully navigated various roles within startups, including project management software and B2B-focused augmented reality ventures. Currently, Liz serves as the VP of Marketing at GoDaddy.
Links:
Liz Pearce | LinkedIn
ProductLed Podcast
Welcome back to our PLG False Starts Series. In this episode, host Mario Araujo interviews Leah Tharin, a fearless product leader who candidly discusses her "spectacular failures" at Smallpdf, a platform with over 50 million active users.
Leah shares two specific failures that emphasize the importance of testing assumptions and considering all variables in product development. She reflects on her confident yet ill-fated decision to launch an untested idea, despite investing significant time and effort. Additionally, she reveals the intricacies of a partnership with Miro, an industry rising star, which went astray due to oversight and misalignment.
Throughout this insightful conversation, Leah generously imparts her experiences, insights, and invaluable lessons learned from these failures. Tune in for a candid exploration of the highs and lows of product development.
Key Takeaways:
[0:10] Introduction to the podcast and guest Leah Tharin
[2:03] Leah’s past experiences and failures
[3:21] Failure 1: An experiment on improving technology for document conversion at Smallpdf
[4:40] Clarifying the experiment's goal and the assumption of improved technology leading to success
[6:24] Lesson learned about not being overconfident and the importance of testing
[8:34] Failure 2: Discussing the team's excitement and the collaboration discussions, but ultimately receiving a rejection from Miro
[12:57] The mistake of not understanding Miro's priorities and feeling personally responsible for the failure
[14:32] Emotional impact of the failure and the importance of being specific and vulnerable in sharing failures
[15:19] Discussing Smallpdf culture and how leadership and the ecosystem reacted to failures
[15:51] The importance of trust and how their team stood behind them
[16:27] The fear of admitting failure and the importance of overcoming it
[17:08] Acknowledging imperfection is crucial
[18:28] The impact of embracing failure
[19:18] The hierarchical perspective while growing
[20:26] Understanding customer needs and market dynamics are crucial
[23:48] Shift from passion to factual analysis in managing ideas
[25:05] Ask questions to investigate the context behind ideas
[28:00] Impact of empathetic and nurturing leadership
[33:31] Pressure and challenges faced by growth leaders
About Leah Tharin:
Leah Tharin is a tech veteran with over 20 years of experience, having founded four startups, including two with notable setbacks. As the Head of Product atJua, Leah drives end-to-end Machine Learning in Weather solutions. Notably, Leah led the scaling of Smallpdf's core product, amassing 50 million monthly active users in just three years. Specializing in B2B product-led growth, Leah offers straightforward, actionable insights to fellow industry professionals.
Links:
Leah Tharin | LinkedIn
Leah’s AI-Tea blog
Wes Bush designed the ProductLed Method™️ with the primary objective of assisting SaaS founders in rapidly scaling their self-serve revenue. In today’s episode, Wes provides an insightful high-level overview of this method, offering a fantastic introduction to its principles, significance, and practical implementation strategies for your own product-led growth (PLG) business.
Unlock the secrets of the ProductLed Method™️ as we dive into its three phases and nine dynamic components to discover why this method is the ultimate game-changer for scaling.
For a deeper dive into this PLG methodology, head over to the ProductLed blog and explore How to scale your SaaS business faster with the ProductLed Method™️.
Key Takeaways:
[0:10] Introduction to the ProductLed Method™️ principles
[1:22] Brief intro of Wes Bush, his knowledge, and PLG accolades
[2:00] Well funded and bootstrapped SaaS founders benefit from the ProductLed Method™️
[3:01] Rise of PLG in the SaaS industry and growing interest in the ProductLed Method™️
[3:48] Development of the ProductLed Method™️and the identification of the 9 main patterns
[6:06] Importance of vision, user, and model in the ProductLed Method™️
[7:10] Three components of the growth engine: offer, experience, and pricing
[10:34] Summary of the growth engine components and their significance
[11:56] Introducing phase three of the ProductLed Method™️, focusing on exponential growth and scaling the approach
[15:20] Wes Bush’s new book on scaling a product-led business will be released at end of 2023
About Wes Bush:
Founder of ProductLed, Wes Bush is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and the #1 expert on product-led growth. He has empowered more than 500,000 people through his books, podcast, and thought leadership on product-led growth.
Links:
Wes Bush | LinkedIn
The ProductLed Method
ProductLed | LinkedIn
Open source software is freely available to use, modify, and distribute. By learning how to integrate it with your product-led growth (PLG) strategy, you’ll unlock innovation and success for your business. In this episode, we are joined by Nikhil Nandagopal, a co-founder of Appsmith, who imparts his insights and experiences in building team tools with open source.
Nikhil delves into the hurdles associated with growing a PLG business, open source technology, and the delicate task of balancing the requirements of both the vocal minority and the silent majority.
Key Takeaways:
[2:00] How security and data are core parts of open source software
[3:30] The importance of having a core product or market insight to base your PLG strategy on
[5:45] Advice on integrating open source into your PLG strategy
[7:30] Benefits of open source
[8:15] How to make open source easy for developers to try out and use your product
[10:00] Leveraging your community to drive growth and how to measure success in open source
[12:30] The future of open source and PLG
[15:00] How open source will continue to play a role in PLG and how it will evolve in the future
About Nikhil Nandagopal:
Nikhil Nandagopal is a co-founder of Appsmith, the first open-source low-code platform for developers. He is a software engineer and entrepreneur with 10 years of experience building apps.
Links:
Nikhil Nandagopal’s LinkedIn
https://www.appsmith.com/
In this episode of the #howigothere series, Maja Voje and TK Kader discuss the different GTM strategies, with an emphasis on growing your business organically. They discuss the importance of understanding the math behind generating revenue, messaging, and personas, and the concept of an early majority. You’ll learn how to create a content strategy that resonates with your target persona, and why building relationships is an essential part of the process.
You’ll also hear about the SaaS flywheel of acquisition, activation, retention, conversion, and re-engagement, as well as the law of averages.
Key Takeaways:
[02:30]: The importance of understanding your target audience and creating a buyer persona
[05:15] How to create a content strategy that resonates with your audience
[09:00] The role of social media in growing your audience organically
[12:45] The importance of building relationships with your audience and creating a community
[16:20] How to measure the success of your go-to-market strategy and make adjustments as needed
About TK Kader
TK Kader was a Founder of ToutApp and SVP of Strategy of Marketo where he worked on go-to-market strategies. He now runs Unstoppable, where he works with SaaS Founders on their GTM. TK also wrote an Amazon best-selling book Unstoppable- Performance Blueprint for Unstoppable CEOs & Founders.
Transitioning to Product-Led Growth involves continuous iteration and learning. While successful case studies and impactful experiments are often highlighted, it's essential to acknowledge the behind-the-scenes reality.
Behind each success story, there are often multiple failed attempts. In our "PLG False Starts" series, we uncover the untold stories and failures behind Product-Led Growth implementations, offering valuable insights. Today, we have Kyle from OpenView joining us to share his learnings. Kyle is an accomplished professional dedicated to helping OpenView's portfolio companies achieve exceptional growth and establish themselves as market leaders.
Key Takeaways
[0:57] The two most common pitfalls when attempting to incorporate your PLP concept.
[5:28] Kyle provides an explanation of the role of the operating partner at OpenView.
[7:50] What are Kyle's observations on the shortcomings of PLG and their reasons?
[11:05] Why is it detrimental for representatives to label every free user, and what approaches can companies take instead?
[18:25] The recommended Playbook by Kyle for companies in their early stages.
[22:39] How sales can be utilized to discover and expand into other teams within an organization, boosting business growth.
[34:19] Does Kyle believe in implementing custom tiers to facilitate strategic and more meaningful conversations with sales?
About Kyle Poyar
Kyle Poyar's dedication to helping companies achieve product-led growth, optimize pricing and packaging, and develop effective go-to-market strategies has solidified his position as a trusted advisor and industry influencer. His contributions to the tech ecosystem have helped numerous companies unlock their true potential and establish themselves as leaders in their respective markets.
Profile
OpenView
Kyle Poyar’s LinkedIn
Kyle’s Newsletter
Get ready for an exciting twist today as we dive into a reverse interview featuring Mariam and Wes. This episode is a real treat as Wes takes on the role of the guest, chatting with Mariam, the CEO of Softr.
Here's the big question: what ties all of these “no code” tools and AI together? Throughout this episode, we'll unlock the connections between these categories, uncovering the common threads and patterns that bring them together. By understanding their similarities, you'll gain valuable insights on how to adapt to these trends and seize the many opportunities they present.
Key Takeaways
[3:52] ProductLed represents the future of purchasing, shaping how people will make their transactions.
[7:01] The engagement factor brings about significant transformations within companies, altering their culture in the process.
[8:22] Key questions to consider before implementing product-led growth as a strategic approach.
[14:54] It's crucial to align your business model with the success of your users.
[18:41] How can you effectively segment your users and empower them to achieve success?
[26:12] Your success is intertwined with the success of your users.
[27:35] The transition from traditional to modern tools within the organization.
[31:25] What’s ProductLed going to look like for the next ten years?
About Wes Bush
Wes Bush is an exceptional entrepreneur, renowned bestselling author, and the unparalleled authority on product-led growth. With an unwavering dedication to his craft, Wes has transformed the lives of over 500,000 individuals worldwide, captivating them through his groundbreaking books, captivating podcast, and influential thought leadership on the subject of product-led growth.
Profile
ProductLed
Wes Bush on LinkedIn
Do you think you have the necessary experience to develop in sales? Are you interested in learning more about onboarding? If so, this podcast can assist you in creating a personalized onboarding engine for sale.
In today's podcast, Wes Bush welcomes Vicky Kharlamova, Growth at Miro, to share some insights and experiments that helped her successfully build a personalized onboarding engine for sales.
Take a seat, unwind, and listen to this podcast if you're interested in successfully building a personalized onboarding engine at your company!
Show Notes
[01:53] Vicky explains how a great onboarding process begins and ends.
[02:54] Learn the four things that are causing other companies to struggle with operationalizing onboarding.
[05:09] Personalized onboarding is a key in assisting you to achieve success in your company.
[09:48] Using templates can help you solve your particular problem!
[12:42] Vicky shared the big principles and suggestions for successfully creating personalized onboarding.
[15:40] Two kinds of approaches that will work the best for your users.
[21:24] Keep an eye out for the tools, features, and templates you'll need to provide your users!
[22:55] Customer onboarding also works better in terms of building your onboarding experience.
[27:42] Take note of Vicky's mistakes to avoid that could help your company consider creating a powerful onboarding experience.
About Vicky Kharlamova
She aspires to help the world's most popular online whiteboarding platform for team collaboration grow by running experiments and developing innovative solutions. She enjoys her work because she is curious, creative, and brave enough to take responsibility and learn by running many experiments, gaining business results, and solving complex user problems all at the same time.
Profile:
Vicky Kharlamova on Twitter
Vicky Kharlamova on LinkedIn
“How can I grow as a developer?” “Are there any methods for becoming a successful developer?” If you've been thinking about becoming a developer and have similar questions, this episode is for you!
In today's podcast, Wes Bush welcomes Jeena James, a member of the WebPageTest by Catchpoint team, to discuss strategies and tactics for creating a successful product-led strategy for developers.
Are you ready to learn how to build these strategies? Then sit back, relax, and start listening to this podcast right now!
Shownotes
[06:55] Build out value experiences!
[09:21] Ensuring that your platform is accessible to all users and continues to develop efficient features will attract acquisitions!
[09:53] What should your first revenue-generating goal be?
[13:15] Discover who your end users are and how they actually impact your platform!
[16:29] A simple experiment with your platform without modifying any coding can have an impact on the user's experience with your product.
[18:03] Why should your platform have a light version?
[20:28] Keep an eye out for your target market1
[22:43] A smart way to determine whether your platform is effective is to let users use it.
[26:45] Pay attention to the three Cs and how they can influence your platform.
[33:00] When your user speaks and shares about your platform, you'll know you have a community.
[34:34] Watch and observe how people are engaging with your platform!
[33:00] Learn more about Jeena Jeans' business Mission and Vision, which can help you in developing a successful Product-Led Strategy!
About Jeena James
At Catchpoint, Jeena oversees the WebPageTest business unit and coordinates the activities geared toward developers in the areas of product, engineering, marketing, partnerships, and operations. She has more than 15 years of experience working for Google and a SaaS startup, where she advanced the growth of a global business by creating partnerships and product-led solutions that improved developer experiences.
Profile
Jeena Jeans on LinkedIn
WebPageTest by Catchpoint
In the business world, product-user fit is frequently overlooked. Do you think your company is a Product-User Fit firm?
In today's podcast, Wes Bush welcomes Jordan Woods, founder of GoodGrowthCo, to share insights and recommendations on achieving a Product-User Fit company that you can use to grow your business when it comes to product-led growth.
If you're interested in digging into how to achieve Product-User Fit, then sit back, relax, and start listening to this podcast!
Show Notes
[05:36] Product-User Fit requires you to actually find a problem that resonates with the person at a specific organization.
[06:12] Learn the two things you should know before establishing your growth engine.
[08:07] What is the main distinction between Product-Market Fit and Product-User Fit?
[11:23] Do you think your business is a Product-User Fit company?
[27:11] In developing a Channel Strategy, make sure to interact with your users so that they can use your product and find value in it!
[30:08] Be aware of the two types of users you have as they will have an impact on your product.
[31:58] Learn the steps that can help you start achieving your Product-User Fit!
[34:32] Dig deeper into your product's problems and push a solution about it.
[37:31] Listen to Jordan's advice for business owners to get clarity on their problem and achieve Product-User Fit in their company.
[41:14] Pay close attention as Jordan Wood shares his top tip for a company considering "How do I achieve product-user Fit?"
About Jordan Woods
He works with technology companies of all sizes to create a long-term growth engine for their products, with a focus on B2B and prosumer (B2C2B) products. He previously led growth teams at FullStory, Cypress.io, and interviewing.io, where he was responsible for acquisition, activation, and revenue growth.
Profile
Jordan Woods on LinkedIn
GoodGrowthCo
Is it necessary to measure the impact and success of a PLG strategy? If so, what are some of the top key metrics to concentrate on for your Product-Led motion?
Wes welcomes Claudiu Murariu, CEO and founder of InnerTrends, in today’s episode. He's here to provide insights and assist you in gaining new knowledge about the top product-led metrics you should track in your PLG business.
If you're curious about what will happen next on this topic, sit back, relax, and listen to this podcast right now!
Shownotes
[05:16] Claudiu Murariu shares the company's common mistakes regarding what should be tracked!
[06:02] Claudiu advises that you should know the number of qualified visitors coming to your website.
[08:08] Making an efficient sign-up intent is one of the acquisition metrics rules, as it piques the interest of qualified visitors in your product.
[08:50] That ‘Promise’ is a hack that will significantly impact your company's metrics; stay tuned to know why!
[11:27] Listen carefully as Claudiu Murariu explains how to track qualified visitors.
[13:00] Watch out for the company's common mistakes in activation and onboarding.
[13:39] Onboarding refers to people who sign up for the first time, but according to Claudiu, it is a critical part of your marketing strategy. But why?!
[15:27] The first thing to look for in tracking that onboarding motion is your visitor’s intention.
[21:04] That North Star metric is what we need to hit, but we never target sign-ups to get there!
[23:54] Watch out for the company's common mistakes regarding product engagement retention.
[28:19] What are some of the most common revenue mistakes and metrics that should be tracked?
[31:20] Take note, as Claudiu Murariu provides some specific benchmarks to consider to grow your business.
About Claudiu Murariu
Claudiu Murariu is the CEO and Founder of Innertrends. He presents at conferences and events for products worldwide and has already had the privilege of doing so in Beijing, Hong Kong, Russia, Hungary, and Romania. He aims to keep setting higher standards for gaining data insights and promoting business growth.
Profile
Claudiu Murariu on LinkedIn
InnerTrends on LinkedIn
There are numerous ways to grow your business as a startup, some of which you may be unaware of. Do you know that a Product market fit is one of the most critical components of success?
In this episode, we are pleased to have Sean Ellis, the author of Hacking Growth. He's here to impart strategies and information we can apply to our businesses as he begins to share insights into how he expanded Andela in his capacity as Interim VP of Growth.
If you're interested about what will happen next on this topic, sit back, unwind, and enjoy this podcast right now!
Shownotes
[03:15] Plans should be made at an entire company level!
[13:00] When it comes to growth, marketing is all about what you do.
[13:48] Product market fit is probably the most critical component in success!
[17:19] Sean Ellis says he is motivated to succeed by asking himself why the business is not expanding, what is not working, and how he would address those issues.
[18:38] Sean Ellis says that it is essential to be very assertive while as a startup, but why?
[22:21] Instead of being impatient at work, choose to use a patient approach to drive the critical changes!
[23:35] What are these significant categories that Sean Ellis is referring to? Follow along to find out!
[33:54] You can't be great at everything, so choose where you want to excel.
[37:23] Pay close attention as Sean Ellis elaborates on a mechanism that you must create to make changes in your business.
[41:00] Everything must be focused on the opportunity's cost-effectiveness!
[43:28] You need to budget time, resources and try new things for your business.
[45:55] Transparency within a company is essential!
About Sean Ellis
He focuses on his area of expertise, helping companies develop their early growth cycle. With each business he works with, Sean embeds full-time with the founding team to build a growth flywheel based on a deep understanding of the company's unique product/market fit.
Resources:
If your company has recently attained product/market fit and you'd like to discuss working together to develop your initial growth cycle, you may contact Sean at the links below!
Sean Ellis on LinkedIn
Sean Ellis on Instagram
Sean Ellis website
Hacking Growth
Andela
Even though PLG is widely known in the SaaS industry, only 25% of businesses use it. The question is, why are so few firms in the SaaS industry utilizing PLG?
A better support experience can be a crucial driver of success for PLG-focused businesses. In today's podcast, Wes Bush welcomes Joe Andrews, Chief Marketing Officer of SupportLogic, to share knowledge about the most critical component in PLG that you are missing.
You can sit along and listen to this podcast to dig deeper into the role of support experience in PLG with Joe Andrews.
Shownotes
[02:31] PLG depends on offering a proactive service experience.
[05:47] Investing in that support experience is one key lever to make that transition grow faster!
[07:03] Learn step one that most companies are not doing today on how to deliver proactive support from their customers.
[08:08] Are you a business considering moving to a PLG model?
[13:00] Engage before you monetize!
[18:22] Why is Joe Andrews saying that AI is an effective technology tool for quickly improving customer service throughout the customer journey?
[22:08] Does it differ if we only use traditional overreactive support for customer input?
[29:28] Noncustomers are an essential constituent for gaining experiences, so treat them as if they are customers!
[30:15] In the PLG model, you must give full support to maximize customer retention and growth.
[32:08] How can we unlock the insights from the customer support experience via customer signals?
About Joe Andrews
Joe is a marketing executive with many abilities and practical experience at significant organizations and high-growth new firms. He focuses on B2B with a wide range of buyer roles and industry segment coverage. Joe Andrews also has expertise in team development, market research, messaging and positioning, pricing and packaging, PR and analyst relations, sales enablement, and customer marketing.
About SupportLogic
SupportLogic integrates with your existing systems by releasing customer insights locked away in your CRM and offering practical suggestions that can be implemented throughout your entire company (support, product, engineering, sales, and customer success) to enhance the customer experience.
Profile:
Joe Andrews on LinkedIn
SupportLogic
Do you know that a marketing tactic based on the community's influence is increasingly serving as the driving force behind business and product success?
Wes warmly welcomes Guillaume Moubeche, founder and CEO of lempire. His firm creates the finest products in the world and supports business owners all over the world in building profitable and successful enterprises.
In today's episode, we'll dig into what benefits can community-led development give to your product-led business. Head to this podcast right now!
Shownotes
[01:06] Why is Guillaume Moubeche passionate about the connection between the led-growth and product-led growth?
[06:25] Make a product sample for the community.
[06:56] Putting the results on display gives customers a clear, practical way to interact with your product.
[07:51] Bring the spotlight to your community!
[09:36] Who are these brand-new users, the lurkers and the power users, Guillaume Moubeche is talking about?
[14:55] Did Guillaume Moubeche expand his business due to the product or the number of people he was garnering?
[17:16] What methods did Guillaume Moubeche use to garner people for his community?
[23:09] Which key determinants of productled growth influence community-led growth?
[27:23] Try to put less weight on what you are trying to accomplish with your product.
[30:11] Guillaume Moubeche shows how he manages the lack of product knowledge or underdeveloped skill sets in his working force.
[37:45] Put effort into your community, invest in it, be consistent, and reward people for using your product.
[41:50] Pay attention to Guillaume Moubeche's big reasons why his community platform is essential.
About Guillaume Moubeche
In the previous four years, he co-founded two businesses: one that he built up to $600,000 in recurring revenue before selling, and the other, which he is now working on and has a $10M+ ARR, is now worth more than $150M.
Guillaume started in 2018 with no real networks and little to no knowledge of technology or digital goods. He studied and experimented for years since entrepreneurship just appealed to him. He decided to share their firm's strategies to attain such significant success after experiencing many failures and achievements to aid more individuals in doing the same.
Profile
Guillaume Moubeche on LinkedIn
Guillaume Moubeche on Twitter
lempire
lemlist Family
We frequently hear expertise and insights about growing your product-led businesses in the global market. But what about tackling a different view of the discussion that will blow your mind?
In today's podcast, Wes Bush is here to discuss a different approach of ideas and insights about how to be successful in building an unsuccessful launch of a product-led growth motion! You read that right!
Are you beginning to wonder what will happen next in this conversation? Then take a seat, unwind, and start listening to this podcast immediately!
Shownotes
[01:11] Do it alone!
[01:50] Make a free trial of your unfinished product and launch it with high sales goals on day one.
[02:23] Don't create a team to work on your product-led growth plan.
[02:40] Never train your staff on any subject involving your product.
[03:16] Assume you know it all.
[03:33] Keep your business's reasons for making this shift a secret.
[03:53] Don't prioritize early initiatives well.
[04:32] Avoid following any framework or anyone so that you can spend more time simply making mistakes for people.
[04:46] Don't create the strategy as a leadership group.
[05:27] Focus on large-scale revolutions!
[05:38] Do not perform good optimizations because most product models were perfect at launch.
[05:56] Make sure you don't measure the user's success.
[06:17] Concentrate on various user and ideal consumer kinds.
Profile
ProductLed Podcast
Wes Bush on LinkedIn
Wes Bush on Twitter
ProductLed Community
Business-to-business transactions occur between businesses instead of between a company and a single client. In this episode, we will learn about B2B marketing, covering concepts, ideas, and suggestions in the area, as well as how Dave got successful in the marketing field.
Pierce welcomes Dave Gerhardt, founder of B2B marketing media company Exit Five, a former brand officer at Drift, and chief marketing officer at Privy. Dave is here to share knowledge that will help us build a successful company as he did.
Are you interested in learning more about the strategies that can help you develop as a startup in the marketing field? Take a moment to listen to this Podcast now!
Shownotes
[03:56] How did David Gerhardt's experience in working with businesses help him gain a depth of knowledge about marketing?
[04:34] Dave recommends launching your marketing-related blog or Podcast to gain additional knowledge and a deeper grasp of the industry.
[13:28] If you have the budget to do it, it's an excellent investment if you know how to use it correctly.
[15:12] Does producing merch have an impact on your company?
[17:39] David Gerhardt shares what excites him most about marketing and brand-building.
[18:46] What impact does the audience have on a company's growth?
[19:18] Find out what David Gerhardt recommends for audience building for your business.
[22:33] Stay tuned and learn for yourself as David Gerhardt presents two demand generation tactics.
[25:14] How possible can make companies transition?
[28:48] What would happen if you didn't invest money to expand your audience on someone else's platform?
[34:56] David Gerhardt covers product-led growth's underrated but effective strategy.
[44:31] Learn from David Gerhardt's advice to give you the courage, stamina, and guts to succeed in the product-led business industry!
About David Gerhardt
He is a former Drift Chief Brand Officer and Privy Chief Marketing Officer who now focuses on consulting and the development of exitfive.com, a network for B2B marketing experts. He also conducts 1:1 counseling with a limited number of high-growth B2B firms; his book Founder Brand was launched in 2022 and quickly became the #1 best-selling Amazon in marketing.
About Exit Five
Thousands of B2B marketers sign up for the Exit Five Community every day to exchange practical advice, get feedback, and talk about the most successful marketing strategies right now. By listening to the Exit Five podcast, you could enhance your B2B marketing. The host for the event is Dave Gerhardt. Visit exitfive.com to engage with thousands of B2B marketing professionals by joining the community.
Profile
David Gerhardt on LinkedIn
David Gerhardt on Spotify
David Gerhardt on Twitter
David Gerhardt Amazon
Exit Five
A SaaS provider manages the databases, servers, and software that enable the program to access the internet, most commonly using web browsers. In this episode, we'll learn how Andrew Davies used his firm to make a $200 million product-led acquisition and how to effectively leverage his insights to steer your business journey.
Wes welcomes Andrew Davies, Paddle's Chief Marketing Officer, to share with us the ins and outs of the business to how Paddle made a $200 million product-led acquisition. Andrew is here to help us uncover insights that will help us establish a successful product-led business that you can utilize!
Want to learn more about the most effective approaches to increase product-led acquisition? Listen to this podcast right now.
Shownotes
[02:06] Andrew Davies gives an overview of Paddle.
[03:34] Why did Paddle decide to make a $200 product-led acquisition?
[08:23] Andrew Davis shows his enthusiasm for a combined organization in the SaaS sector that serves as an efficient method for their firm to grow.
[09:10] Giving the product for free makes it stand out and offers customers a range of experiences.
[09:38] Marketers must have first provided their customers with something of value!
[15:06] Are there any significant changes in moving to a product-led business?
[16:18] What are the things that starters should know about besides customer engagements?
[21:30] Andrew Davies reveals the enormous advantages of making their acquisition.
[23:54] Reaching the stage of learning about the combined companies!
[25:30] What are Andrew's ways to increase the product's popularity among customers?
[28:52] Andrew Davies shares how to acquire a product-led business in today's generation.
[31:42] Knowing the difference between sales-led and product-led.
[35:00] Learn how to make chaos in business shorter!
About Andrew Davies
Andrew is the chief marketing officer of Paddle, a SaaS platform that enables over 3000 product-driven companies to sell products worldwide. Before this, he co-founded and developed a B2B personalization SaaS acquired by Optimizely, where he headed corporate marketing as the company expanded by acquiring and integrating four other companies.
Profile
Andrew Davies on LinkedIn
Andrew Davies on Twitter
Paddle
Focusing on delivering genuine value through your product is what it means to be product-led. We'll learn more about product-led business in this episode and apply tips for maximizing its potential that can effectively guide you on your journey in the industry.
Nathan Barry, the founder and CEO of ConvertKit, is here to share his insights on how he was able to create a 30 million+ product-led business.
Eager to know more about the best method for growth strategies? Nathan Barry is here to assist us in learning the keys to enable us to build a successful Product-Led Business that you can use!
Shownotes
[01:06] What is a successful product-led company?
[03:06] Getting close to your customers will drive them to use your product and boost their interest.
[6:00] Is it possible to employ non-creators in your business?
[09:05] Does it profit your business to allow customers to utilize the product as a side hustle?
[10:52] Be as close to the product as possible!
[13:07] Find inspiration from another industry by finding what works and doesn't for them.
[13:34] How does receiving positive outcomes transform your business?
[24:19] Avoid creating unnecessary friction in your organization.
[27:17] What is the authentic competitive advantage that a product-led company needs to gain?
[42:07] To attract customers who may be an excellent trigger for future purchases, give out a high-quality product for free!
[47:12] Make your product accessible during inevitable inflation and competitive marketplaces.
[48:26] What is the biggest challenge a product-led company may face in the process?
[50:24] To win your customers, invest in creating a simple, convenient, and viral product!
[52:42] Nathan Barry discusses this generation's most immense opportunities for a product-led company.
About Nathan Barry
Nathan is a creative individual, product designer, author, speaker, and the founder of ConvertKit. He is passionate about creating the best products, iPhone applications, and such that transformed his journey in the drive. Nathan is an inspiration to starters with whom he freely shares his strategy to convert ideas into a successful business drive.
Profile
Nathan Barry's website
ConvertKit
In this episode, Wes will dive into discovering the key to and the right practice in business growth. Get ready to step out of our usual perspective. Instead, shift your mind to think the exact opposite to create a unique product-led approach.
Show Notes
[0:48] What is inverse thinking?
[3:05] Set a terrible first impression!
[4:00] Provide a Facebook sign-up experience.
[6:38] How can you nail your product-led business model?
[8:25] Make the product's adoption experience more difficult.
[11:58] Let people experience the product in a harder way.
[12:50] Use technical jargon and build endless features.
[13:57] The product's price should be hidden and confusing.
[15:40] Looking for support? Do not provide any way for people to reach out.
[17:00] Entering a new product-led transition, but not making a significant change.
[18:56] Do not make the cancellation experience easy; make it tricky.
About Wes Bush
Wes is a multi-talented individual who helps business teams get their best product-led results. He is passionate about working with diverse people around the globe to empower teams to turn their product into powerful growth.
Links
Product Led Podcast
Wes Bush on LinkedIn
Wes Bush on Twitter
Product Led Community
Chris Walker is the founder and CEO of Refine Labs, a forward-thinking demand creation company that questions the conventional quo in B2B marketing.
Chris specializes in wide areas including marketing strategy, commerce, engineering technology, and content strategies. In this podcast, he will give us insights about Refine Labs and data driven strategies on sales marketing. Come on in, you don’t want to miss it.
Show Notes
[0:09] What led you from engineering to sales marketing?
[1:13] Diminishing returns in advertising and importance of content creations
[3:13] What is Refine Labs and what makes it different?
[4:50] How companies executed marketing and developed sales?
[6:52] The authentic framework and concept of company
[15:50] Time management and consistency
[19;55] Adopting to change in business
[21:08] How can people change?
[22:12] Relative demands between Refine Labs and other companies
[24;30] How marketing solves demand and sales problems?
[27:06] Growth Movement of ProductLed
[31:37] Tactics in business
About Chris Walker
Chris is a seasoned businessperson who is constantly looking for methods to improve on already successful products or services or to develop novel ways to promote oversaturated goods. By marketing execution, he is able to create demand strategy and research for clients.
Profile
Refine Labs
Chris Walker’s Linkedin
Chris Walker’s Twitter
Chris Walker’s Instagram
Ben Williams is the VP of Product (Developer Journeys, PLG) at Synk. He joined Synk over a year ago and spearheads the product management for Product Led Growth and helps the company propel towards its growth trajectory.
He’s on the show today to give us an idea of how they strategize their growth, identify growth loops, and maintain well-balanced communication at Synk that made a big impact on their success.
Show Notes
[0:39] What got him into the world of PLG?
[2:01] Talks about Synk’s first premium
model
[4:35] Why is it that their first iteration wasn’t that successful?
[6:31] Initial problems that they’ve had to address that contributed to their success
[10:33] How do they try to centralize everything and tackle specific problems within their team?
[18:08] Focusing on a user’s path to value rather than their path to revenue
[19:13] How did they utilize their product to acquire more users?
[26:47] It is critical to develop a high-level PLG strategy.
[33:1] On team-based accountability for achieving outcomes
[38:43] How aligned leadership is important
About Ben Williams
Ben is a highly motivated, enthusiastic and energetic product and growth executive with years of expertise across a wide range of industries. He specializes in product leadership and management. and is always passionate about excellence and doing better.
Link
Synk
Profile
Ben’s LinkedIn Profile
Francis Brero is the co-founder and CPO of MadKudu. A data scientist obsessed with leveraging science to improve efficiency and effectiveness, Francis converted to sales along the way. He shares how he helps B2B SaaS companies get the most out of their inbound pipelines by automating the high-cost, low-leverage work of researching, qualifying, and engaging leads.
Show Notes
[00:43] Rollout a PLG or enterprise motion
[03:27] Misconceptions around enterprise sales and PLG
[11:18] The difference in the level of understanding of the value proposition
[17:36] User-centric versus holistic view in an enterprise potential deal
[22:30] Compensation for high-touch and low-touch
[24:40] Recommendations for implementing enterprise sales in a product-led business
About Francis Brero
Francis Brero is obsessed with leveraging science to improve efficiency and effectiveness. He is a data scientist converted to sales along the way. Currently, he helps B2B SaaS companies get the most out of their inbound pipelines by automating the high-cost, low-leverage work of researching, qualifying, and engaging leads.
Links
MadKudu
Top 10 Learnings About Free Trials
From Open-Source to Enterprise
Personalize Your Buyer Journeys
Profile
Francis’ Linkedin
Gina Allman is ProductLed’s content specialist. Her diverse background goes from finance to marketing. Despite the disparity, Gina can still draw the line from those various disciplines and apply it to marketing and product-led growth. She shares how she creates original content for the blog even when there is not much to find out there.
Show Notes
[00:58] Researching for content is not an easy task
[03:58] The 50 best PLG examples and what stood out the most
[08:37] A major principle of PLG is a great user experience
[10:08] What made other companies stand out
[14:28] Two key takeaways for freshly transitioning businesses
About Gina Allman
Gina Allman is a content specialist at ProductLed. She has held positions in a variety of disciplines, including finance, marketing, and content writing.
Link
ProductLed
Profile
Gina’s LinkedIn
Hila Qu is the director of growth at GitLab, a developer platform. GitLab offers a powerful platform that enables developers, engineers, and teams to build, release, and deploy very efficiently. The company started as an open-source product, but it became a PLG business as it has the criteria to be one. Due to its large free user base, GitLab was able to launch a PLG motion. Data on how users utilize the platform also allowed them to understand which features they use and what behaviors indicate that they are likely to convert to potential PQ. Hila provides details on how she created all these from scratch to grow GitLab and gives the six steps to launch a PLG motion.
Show Notes
[00:47] What GitLab is and how they started the PLG motion
[08:44] How existing sales motion works before getting into the PLG side of things
[17:18] Aligning on the customer journey and funnel design
[31:00] Organize the right teams the right way
[36:07] Recommendations for infrastructure and tool stack dependent on company size
[40:45] How to identify the highest ROI focus area for PLG efforts
[46:28] Anticipating common challenges and building the PLG culture
[49:56] Hila’s advice for starting a PLG motion
About Hila Qu
Hila is a uniquely talented growth leader. Prior to her current role at GitLab, Hila worked at Acorns, a financial technology, and services company that specializes in micro-investing and robo-investing. At Acorns, she founded and developed the growth team into a 20+ member team, drove the customer base from 1M to over 4M, and launched two new product lines. Now at GitLab, she leads their growth product team that has since generated over $1.5M incremental ARR from growth product initiatives & experiments in just the first six months. Needless to say, Hila lives every day in the world of growth, retention, analytics, and products (some nights too).
Link
GitLab
Profile
Hila’s Linkedin
Torben Schulz is the founder and COO of Rows, a platform that allows users to create applications using only spreadsheet skills. Of course, not everyone can code, but everyone knows how to use a spreadsheet.
From that idea, Rows was made. Its user-friendly interface as a web app makes it easier for people to automate data, create reports, enrich spreadsheets, and other functions. It is a server-based spreadsheet with integrations and web requests. Their mission at Rows is to make things efficient for the user to become more productive. Torben tells how this upgrade from existing spreadsheet software earned them 30,000 users in less than eight months.
Show Notes
[00:40] An upgraded spreadsheet for the business-minded
[04:30] A horizontal productivity tool in contrast with its vertical counterpart
[09:35] Use cases: should you tackle things one at a time or all at once?
[15:33] Looking through the selection stage of the main use case and double down on reporting
[21:02] Improving virality to ensure user retention by revolving user experience around sharing
[27:46] The people behind Rows who make the decisions and what to do next
[34:39] Looking at user growth instead of monetization to focus on the right initiatives
[37:01] Keep the resilience and discipline until you hit gold
About Torben Schulz
Torben Schulz is the founder and COO of Rows, a platform that allows users to create applications using only spreadsheet skills. He is a former management consultant, and being a solid spreadsheet user led him to build Rows.
Links
Rows
Profile
Torben’s LinkedIn
Elena Verna is the interim head of growth at Amplitude. This digital optimization system enables organizations to see and predict which combination of features and actions translates to business outcomes. Amplitude is the brain behind more than 45,000 digital products at over 1,000 enterprise customers and 23 of the Fortune 100, helping them innovate faster and smarter by answering the strategic question: “How do our digital products drive our business?” Discover how to apply the product-led framework to your career growth with Elena’s unique perspectives and insights.
Show Notes
[01:09] A quest to make an impact and how to make linear growth into an exponential curve
[08:08] How listeners can replicate the framework to grow their careers
[11:37] Select the winners by experiencing a lot of failures
[13:53] When is it time to change one’s career path?
[16:47] Implementation of growth principles: how to acquire, retain, and monetize
[24:29] Focus on creating frameworks to solve problems instead of coming up with pointed solutions
[32:07] The problem is that we’re afraid to actually publish solutions
[36:01] Relevant topics that are worth communicating about
[39:09] Where does Elena get all her ideas, food for thought, and concepts?
About Elena Verna
Elena Verna is the interim head of growth at Amplitude. Elena is a well-known legend in growth communities. She has co-created some of the most successful growth stories in the last decade, including Miro, Mongo DB, and Survey Monkey, and helped dozens of companies as an advisor, interim CMO, and head of growth.
Links
Amplitude
Profile
Elena’s LinkedIn
Elena’s Twitter
Esben Friis-Jensen is the Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Userflow, a no-code builder for in-app onboarding and surveys that allows SaaS businesses to be more product-led. Userflow is 100% bootstrapped, and with just 3 people they have achieved 400+ customers and a 7-figure ARR (annual recurring revenue). Let's learn how they have been able to do this by having a product-led growth approach that focuses on the UI/UX of their product as well as building the strongest product possible.
Show Notes
[2:59] Do they just need a growth person, and how did the whole idea start?
[5:35] Product-Led Growth facilitates the retention of direct customer feedback
[8:13] What are the first big initial steps that he took to scale up his business?
[11:43] You need to have a lot of integrity and certainty in what you’re doing.You need to believe in the product that you’re selling
[14:15] How does he differentiate SEM from SEO?
[17:12] What’s the next big step that he took to 5x the business?
[21:12] Esben walks us through how he refines value propositions
[33:26] The more open your messaging is, the more different kinds of users you will have
[42:44] How does his company maintain customer focus?
[50:12] Esben’s deliberate game plan for his business
About Esben Friis-Jensen
Esben Friis-Jensen is the co-founder of Userflow, a no-code platform for building onboarding guides and product tours.Before working on Userflow, he co-founded an application security platform called Cobalt. Additionally, he has a background as an Accenture consultant with more than three years of experience in test and deployment management of global IT implementations.
Links
Userflow
Cobalt
Monday
Profile
Esben’s LinkedIn
Andy Mowat, CEO of Gated, is an expert in building sales and marketing engines for world-beating companies. Gated works with existing email setups, making it fast, simple, and effective to use. It also reduces inbox volume by an average of 43%, making your inbox more productive and peaceful. What’s even more exciting is that their teams are rooted in wellness and clear communication, which promotes the company’s overall healthy growth and success.
Gated recently experienced a 30% month over month user growth, and Andy will explain the steps that led to this success.
Show Notes
[1:32] His goal is to help reduce the noise of emails.
[2:19] What are some of the first things that he did to build the user engine for his company?
[5:19] Social proof becomes one of the easiest ways to short-circuit any mental barriers.
[7:26] How does he monitor things in his business?
[11:26] How did he build this 30% month over month user growth engine?
[18:30] Start talking and listening to people.
[32:58] Understanding users' criteria is beneficial.
[34:00] Customize your charity by allowing domains and allowing donations.
[36:41] A recap of the top 5 things that he did to achieve 30% MOM
About Andy Mowat
Outside of emails, user engines, and such, Andy Mowat is an advisor to growing SaaS companies. His collection of Keanu gifs will completely shock you, not to mention his love for the outdoors and adventures. Andy is not only a team player but also a family man. He is loved by many, especially by his colleagues, who can vouch for his outstanding performance in his areas of expertise.
Link
Gated
Profile
Andy’s LinkedIn
Daryna Kulya, Co-founder of OpenPhone, is with us today. She enjoys serving consumers with the best customer experience by creating products that suit their needs. OpenPhone is an app built for teams and individuals so they can level up and use their phones for business anywhere. It’s everything that you and your team need in a phone system! Daryna gives us an overview of how they were able to come up with this unique vision and how they skyrocketed from 0 to 1000 customers.
Are you on the lookout for a business phone? If so, then catch her on the show and stay tuned for more.
Show Notes
[4:47] They want to be a part of an environment that is a lot more inspiring and that allows them to make progress.
[5:50] The reason why they joined Velocity
[6:47] Why did they initially give their product for free?
[9:42] People should be getting value out of the product, so see if that’s true
[12:54] They always knew that OpenPhone would ultimately end up being a product that starts with one person in the company and then scales to the whole team
[19:26] One of the most fundamental lessons learned was that a lot of times you overcomplicate things unnecessarily.
[23:17] Dayrna shares some of the biggest milestones that they have achieved throughout the years
[27:08] How were they able to build a team and what did that journey look like?
[34:27] Biggest leadership mistakes and lessons learned from the presence of scale
[35:57 Dayrna’s advice on delegation, building a business, and scaling it up
About Dayrna Kulya
Daryna Kulya is the COO and co-founder of OpenPhone. She was previously a product manager at Vidyard, where she helped to establish and grow Vidyard GoVideo (ViewedIt). She also worked at Deloitte's Digital Innovation Lab, and helped them with their prototypes and innovations.
Back in 2014, she established Product Hunt Toronto, one of the city's largest product events and the world's first Product Hunt community-run meeting. But what’s more interesting is Dayrna is adventurous. She loves hiking trails in her free time.
Link
OpenPhone
Profile
Daryna’s LinkedIn
Ian Robertson is an innovative thought leader with undeniable skills in business strategy, employee development, software management, and product-led growth. He is currently the head of Product-Led Growth at Boomi and has spearheaded its transition from Sales-Led to Product-Led. Ian has proven himself to be a highly skilled and dedicated leader who always strives to bring out the best in his colleagues and the company. Today he’ll be sharing the big steps that Boomi had to implement during their sprint to achieve product-led growth. You’ll learn so much as we talked about, pricing strategies, operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction. Catch him in this episode and stay tuned for more.
Show Notes
[1:18] What are the big steps that he had to take to be able to achieve product-led growth?
[2:28] Boomi is the way to connect various standpoints in your digital ecosystem to create better business outcomes.
[7:28] What did they cover during the two-week sprint?
[16:12] When they started the sprint for PLG, was the pricing iteration in the works?
[28:09] If you bother to sign up for a trial, you should have a good trial experience.
[30:00] They can now use Boomi for all use cases, not just large use cases, and that allows them to win more deals to reduce the operational debt of having multiple integration platforms and sell more services.
[31:34] We need to align the objectives of the team.
About Ian
Ian has directly led Boomi in terms of acquisition, operations, and automation of teams. He also established a global program management team to support the transition into the enterprise and other multi-organizational initiatives.Ian excels at all tasks and work assigned to him, and he strives to produce the highest quality work possible. He is not afraid of challenges and approaches each problem with new and creative solutions.
Link
Boomi
Profile
Ian’s LinkedIn
Kevin Tate is the Chief Revenue Officer at Clearbit. His expertise lies in strategic marketing, specifically in eCommerce, enterprise SaaS, social media, digital marketing and the like. He has over 24 years of experience in the field and has led several go-to-market software professional services and hardware-enabled SaaS companies.
In this talk, he explains how Clearbit boosted their product-led to a 5x pipeline as well as how the company creates a seamless experience for their corresponding prospects. There's a lot to dig into this episode. Tune in to find out.
Show Notes
[0:36] What brought Kevin to Clearbit?
[1:56] Some of the big steps that he took in order to get to where he’s at
[4:12] Kevin talks about MEL’s (marketing engages leads).
[8:24] Creating the weekly visitor report
[11:06] What type of problem space do they want to help companies explore with these tools?
[18:41] What metric do they use to reach out to people?
[28:56]. How to further accelerate your pipeline growth?
[31:19] Try to make your tools as accessible, available, and convenient as possible.
[32:07] How can you identify the best person for your ICP and prioritize your best accounts better?
[34:07] The importance of having a portable segmentation approach
[36:28] Kevin’s recommendations in nailing the company’s segmentation process
About Kevin
Kevin Tate is a charismatic leader who likes to work swiftly to adhere to the vision, mission, and goals of his company. With over 24 years of experience, Kevin is well-seasoned to help people fully succeed when they deep dive into the market. He is currently the Chief Revenue Officer of Clearbit, an investor, mentor, and business tycoon at heart.
Links
Clearbit
Profile
Kevin’s LinkedIn
Ognjen Bošković is the head of growth at CXL, globally known as one of the strongest communities in the growth, CRO, and digital marketing space. Ognjen is a brilliant marketer, one who truly understands growth marketing. He does his very best to increase lead generation and revenue with his strategies.
In this interview, we will reveal why growth loops are the new funnels and how the CXL has become one of the strongest players in our field, relying on content marketing.
Show Notes
[2:45] How did your career lead you to CXL?
[7:53] From his experience, how does he balance his time and resources between content creation and content distribution?
[13:39] Experimentation is key in figuring out what type of content are you looking for
[14:10] Consistent output is the secret to growth metric
[17:48] Product-led companies sometimes hesitate to invest in investing a lot into content marketing due to the perception that the ROI is insecure and it takes a while
[21:49] Focus on building the growth model and understanding how things will grow.
[23:33] The effect of doing proper content marketing is building one of the most secure modes you can build.
[27:20] Growth loops are what make the company grow fast
[29:13] What are some of the super cases that excite him about growth loops?
[33:13] Advice on how people who are new to growth loops should approach growth loops? How can product-led companies manifest growth loops into their daily lives?
[34:15] Look for elements in your product that bring the most value to your users
[38:51] How is the growth loop connected with the customer life cycle?
About Ognjen
As someone specializing in content and digital marketing, Ognjen has proved his expertise. At his previous job, he was able to take their SaaS, ClusterAi, from 0 to $11k MRR in 3.5 months and fueled millions in the agency revenue pipeline. At CXL, he has grown his love and passion for growth loops and has netted $4.5M in revenue. Ognjen is born to do content strategy and has also motivated several people in the long run.
Links
- Executors
- CXL
Profile
- Ognjen’s LinkedIn
Mark Roberge is a leader in the sales world. He is currently co-founder of Stage 2 Capital, the first venture capital firm run and backed by over 300 GTM executives. He is also a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School. Prior to these roles, Mark served as founding CRO at HubSpot from $0 to IPO. He is author of best seller “The Sales Acceleration Formula” which became a guideline for start-up companies in growing their revenue and building a winning sales team.
He’s in the show to introduce to us his playbook which revolves around Product Led Growth for B2B startups. Get ready to learn some insightful lessons from this renowned industry expert.
Show Notes
[0:44] On creating a playbook for his PLG startup
[3:32] The best of class teams have to set up a cross-functional team of marketing plus product and put it under the product
[8:44] How category creation has become such an important part of entrepreneurship
[12:27] PLG tends to focus the organization on usage first as opposed to revenues
[14:03] The reason why free user attention is the hardest metric
[14:49] Pro tip: Find a scalable, cost-effective way to generate users
[16:35] Mark talks about the last part of the value metric, monetization
[18:42] You don’t start there as a seek funding business doing growth.
[19:42] What the best class engineerings do is specialize their engineering teams and product teams by roadmap to improve growth
[21:22] Create your growth team to be cross-functional with both product engineering plus marketing capabilities
[21:36] Set your company up to be data-driven rapid experimentation, an organization that focuses on the Northstar
About Mark Roberge
As the SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services for HubSpot, he has led hundreds of his employees on how to apply data technology and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand. Mark understands the ins and outs of marketing which is also a skill that he loves to share with others.
Links
Hubspot
The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge
Profile
Mark’s LinkedIn
Dale Bertrand is an SEO Strategist, Keynote Speaker, and Business Coach. He has managed marketing programs for Fortune 500 companies and is currently running Fire&Spark. Dale mainly focuses on SEO, content marketing, web analytics, and applying AI strategies to marketing. With over 15 years of experience in developing strategic and tactical marketing campaigns, he’s always on the lookout to deliver quantifiable results to help brands maintain continuous growth in organic sales.
Are you ready to start building a top-down SEO strategy? If you are, make sure to stay tuned to today’s episode.
Show Notes
[1:11] What are the current trends he sees in the SEO world this 2022?
[3:10] Dale explains how google uses natural language processing and algorithms to understand our queries
[6:06] What is purpose-driven SEO?
[7:09] When we’re talking about SEO strategies, the goal at the end of the day is to rank better.
[8:50] What purpose-driven SEO is all about is looking at your brand and its standing.
[11:28] Google’s AI is tuned to find brands that are resonated with online consumers
[14:28] What would he recommend would be the best steps for people to get started in purpose-driven SEO?
[20:22] If you are like-minded and you find a purpose behind your SEO, companies will link to you and will be interested in doing a content partnership
[21:01] Stop thinking about SEO from the bottom up; SEO is not a technical game anymore. You have to move towards targeting content and authority.
About Dan Bertrand
Dale began his career working as an engineer. Moving forward, he has developed search marketing strategies for Fortune 500 companies and startups. Throughout his career, Dale has become a great leader and one of the best SEO strategists in the field.
Links
Fire&Spark
ifixit
Fire Department Coffee
Profile
Dale’s LinkedIn
Email Address: dale@fireandspark.com
Alex Haefner is the Head of Product at Envoy, the workplace platform helping companies manage safe hybrid workplaces so employees can connect, collaborate, and thrive.
Not long ago, before the pandemic drastically changed our lives, Alex Haefner decided to be a part of the Envoy family, not knowing that work-from-home setups would be the next big thing. In this episode, he shares his experience of running a business amidst all the shifts and changes brought by the pandemic. In today's interview, let's find out how he’s been able to re-align the company’s vision and mission, strengthen its pillars, and manage to shift its focus to the right path.
You'll be amazed at how this showrunner handled it. So what are you waiting for? Let's hear his story by clicking on that play button!
Show Notes
[0:46] Alex’s experience of running a business in a pandemic
[4:13] The story of how they built up a bunch of ideas that could potentially build customers and went through trial and error.
[7:28] Time to market is one of the things that they prioritized.
[8:25] When you’re trying to build a future for your company, you have to go out and talk to people.
[12:56] How did the pandemic affect your whole team?
[13:33] Aligning the entire company with their new vision and mission
[14:17] How did he manage to not lose heart and shift the business focus?
[18:55] They spent a lot of time training everyone internally and growing their confidence in moving forward in the right direction.
[22:52] You must have grit and be at ease with challenges. Invest time in taking care of yourself and your mental health.
About Alex Haefner
Alex is a graduate of the University of Michigan. Before Envoy, Alex previously served as a product leader at Yelp, where he led a team of engineers and spearheaded its content teams. In his spare time, he likes to work on personal projects and is continuously seeking general self-improvement.
Links
Envoy
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Profile
Alex’s LinkedIn
Alex’s Twitter
Join us as Wes takes us through what's new at ProductLed: The ProductLed Accelerator.
[00:45] ProductLed Accelerator
[1:05] Most people resist talking to sales reps yet jump at the chance to use a free product.
[3:08] What's new in the ProductLed Accelerator course
[5:19] Where will the ProductLed Certification fit?
[6:52] Sponsored Ad
[8:15] The student journey
[10:20] Live workshops
[11:00] Advice if you're still on the fence
[13:00] Live Session Replay update
About Wes Bush
Wes is the author of the best selling book: Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself and is the Founder and CEO of ProductLed.
Links
productled.com
Profiles
Wes' LinkedIn
ProductLed's LinkedIn
Pierce' LinkedIn
Mona Akmal is the CEO of Falkon AI. She is a product and engineering hotshot whose passion is building solutions to technically challenging problems. She’s in the show today to share data-driven methods such as identifying your product-qualified leads and figuring out what the value of your product is to your end users by using the concept of value metrics. Not sure what your value metrics are? Don’t worry because Mona has got you covered.
So product-led folks, be sure to turn your volumes up because this will be a fun episode!
Show Notes
[1:08] The concept of value metrics which is generally not well understood
[3:11] Three most common mistakes that she sees in value metric
[6:12] A lot of times, value metrics are used to identify atypical behavior of a certain customer population
[8:18] Define value metrics before you even start your user research so that you know which ones are you going to look put for
[8:37] Three key parts of figuring out what the value of your product is to your end-users
[10:43] What are the correct value metrics for a particular business?
[17:55] When it comes to product-led growth for the growth part, how can you make money out of it?
[21:29] Usage-based pricing goes hand in hand with a product-led growth
[23:06] Accuracy and rigor in defining value metrics are key to all aspects of the business
[23:32] Your intuition plus data analysis plus unbiased user research all of them have to play together in harmony to understand your value metrics
[23:46] Coming up with value metrics and throwing them in a lockbox does not result in product-led growth. You have to operationalize these value metrics to see the benefits
About Mona Akmal
In her twenties, Mona decided to migrate to the United States with a degree in Computer Software. She also had her first job in one of the world’s famous software companies, Microsoft. Two decades later, she’s now spearheading Falkon AI with her undeniable wits and talent. Mona is, without a doubt, one of the best Product and Engineering people out there.
Link
Falkon AI
Profile
Mona’s LinkedIn
Mona’s Email Address: mona@falkon.ai
Dan Balcauski, our pricing master, is here to help us understand the value of pricing and compete in the market while generating over-the-top revenues. He delves into the ins and outs of how effective it is to maximize your price to have long-term profitability and move your business forward. So let’s hop on in, explore the depths of pricing models and learn a thing or two from this savvy expert.
Show Notes
[0:58] How to be competitive while still generating revenues?
[2:57] On understanding customer value, psychology and finance aspects
[3:13] What do people typically get wrong about pricing, especially in 2022?
[4:17] How does he define an effective price?
[5:48] How does the entire pricing process work?
[8:49] Using the “jobs to be done” framework to understand customer value
[12:01] What exactly is packaging from a perspective of a software product?
[14:29] Make sure that your offering is clear and the customers understand what might be the best for them
[17:00] Have a pricing committee and internal systems for your product
[18:21] How often should companies change their pricing?
About Dan Balcauski
As the B2B SaaS Pricing continues to evolve, so does Dan. Dan is always passionate about helping businesses optimize their pricing models. He’s always a one-call away when you need help in your pricing endeavors.
Link:
Product Tranquility
Profile:
Dan’s LinkedIn
Mariam Hakobyan is the Co-Founder and CEO at Softr. She’s an engineer turned entrepreneur and has a pang for technology, product, and design. At Softr, she pioneers in building the right product, listening to customers, and building ecosystems for software enthusiasts. She prioritizes the customer’s needs by simplifying software building so anyone can set up businesses without being intimidated by their tech skills.
Today, let’s listen to Mariam as she tells how Softr went from zero to 45,000 users in just a year.
Show Notes
[0:57] What initially drove her to start Software.io?
[1:56] How did she start exploring different ideas for the platform?
[6:01] What did she do to get the product into people’s hands?
[9:20] On pursuing user growth and monetizing your product
[12:20] The passionate software community, the product’s simplicity, and virality got them from zero to 45,000 users
[18:33] Mariam talks about empowering the community, creating ecosystems and a place for people to thrive
[21:53] The importance of being mindful of anything that you add to the platform
[29:04] Understanding what customers value and how much they want to customize?
[29:59] Intuition and understanding of the customers on what types of things are they trying to build
[38:55] Build a great product where people feel like a magician
About Mariam Hakobyan
Mariam is a graduate of Yerevan State University. Her colleagues highly respect her as she is passionate about her job and is always one step ahead in providing service to others. She started her engineering career in her early 20s and is now a force to be reckoned with in her field. But most importantly, Mariam is now a loving mother of two.
Links
Softr.io
Airtable
Profile
Mariam on LinkedIn
Brandon Leibowitz runs and operates SEO Optimizer, a digital company that helps small to medium-sized businesses in getting more online traffic and converting them into clients, sales, leads and more. He has the experience and knowledge to help people build their websites by performing SEO (search engine optimization). In today’s chat, Brandon will discuss how to take advantage of someone else’s R & D, optimizing your search engine and branding your company’s website to keep up with the trends.
Show Notes
[4:09] Think about branding yourself and building trust with people that are coming to your website
[4:30] What are the business lessons that he’s learned throughout the years?
[5:50] How exactly does he optimize his SEO?
[9:32] The importance of text content
[12:14] You have to optimize your website for Google, but you also have to optimize it for people
[12:49] How does he exactly bump up his conversion rate?
[18:49] Quality backlinks are from relevant websites
[19:50] The more significant the website, the more values are they going to pass on
[21:18] Key takeaways that he would like to give out to the listeners
[21:27] On adding good content to your category pages and the importance of making a good site structure
[23:15] To achieve optimization, fix your website and your conversion rates
About Brandon Leibowitz
After graduating from college with a degree in Business Marketing, he dove headfirst into the business world and landed his first job in Internet Marketing. Now, Brandon is a master in the internet marketing industry. Specifically SEO, Google Adwords, Social Media Marketing, Analytics, and more. His primary goal is to help others learn how to market themselves online and grow their web presence.
Links
Schema.org
SEO Optimizers
Profile
Brandon Leibowitz’s LinkedIn
Brandon Leibowitz's YouTube
Brandon Leibowitz's Instagram
Brandon Leibowitz's Facebook
Brandon Leibowitz's Twitter
Brandon Leibowitz's Buzzsprout
Ken Babcock, Co-Founder of Tango and Zachary Dewitt of Wing Venture Capital, is in the show today to give us the nit and grit on how their company achieved 10,000 sign-ups in just less than two weeks. These business connoisseurs will also guide us through how we should target the right buyers and celebrate our end-users success—ensuring that there's connectivity between what you're building and what your customers need. They will also reveal the story behind Tango and how it evolved throughout its first initial launch. Grasp as much knowledge as you can by listening to these two geniuses.
Show Notes
[2:12] Tango helps create a flexible documentation tool that allows you to generate documentation for your workflow. And alleviate your maintenance burden.
[7:13] On optimizing the right go-to-market
[9:23] What other tools is Tango replacing, and what do you need to do for the documentation you are creating?
[15:40] The importance of setting up suitable measurement gates and understanding when to know how things are successful
[16:31] How does the operation cadence work?
[18:18] Being data-driven is important and complementing that with a customer focus
[23:00] Why is it essential to be time-bound?
[23:47] Honing your most active users in the pilot is key
[24:47]On Finding different company sizes and types to understand your customer and your persona
[34:49] Sales vs. Product led is different in terms of messaging
[36:12] There's a different approach to targeting buyers and users
[39:27] What does it take to have your first successful launch?
[45:55] Your end-users success will eventually become your success
About Ken and Zach
Ken is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tango. Before diving into the world of Tango, he spent more than four years at one of the world's famous platforms, Uber. After learning the depths of entrepreneurship at Atomic VC, he teamed up with his co-founders and founded Tango in 2020.
Zachary "Zach" Dewitt is a partner at Wing Venture Capital. Wing Venture helps founders establish businesses around their ideas. In the company, Zach mainly focuses on enterprise application, technology and product-led growth to propel businesses forward.
Links:
Wing Venture Capital
Tango
Product Hunt
Profiles:
Zach Dewitt
Ken Babcock
When you reach that prime of triumph, it’s so easy to count the wins, but what we don’t realize is that it takes years of reinvention to get there.
Justin Dignelli and Peter Zawistowicz are the masterminds behind helping MongoDB drive from sales-led to product-led growth. To give you an overview, MongoDB is an open source database platform that is designed to unleash the power of software and data for developers and the applications they build. In this episode, we got a chance to chat with these two moguls as they look back on their years of helping MongoDB in fortifying its systems, building special product teams and achieving continued success.
Show Notes
[1:46] The genesis of Atlas: Why did MongoDB start incorporating Atlas?
[2:49] What is the main focus of MongoDB?
[6:11] What does their initial team look like?
[13:03] The benefits of incentives and how it drives people’s behavior?
[19:57] How did they come up with their initial wins?
[27:20] What are some milestones that contributed to their success?
[31:46] What are some of the biggest changes that their sales team has to make to reach their company goals?
[33:46] Collaborations and being thoughtful when it comes to making broader changes
[39:33] 5 useful steps in transitioning from Sales-Led to Product-Led
About Justin Dignelli
Justin is the former Senior Director at MongoDB. He helped in expanding and drove the company towards a cloud-first go-to-market. He also contributed to MongoDB’s transformation into a more product-led growth model plus enterprise sales.
About Peter Zawistowicz
The former Growth Marketing Manager at MongoDB. He pioneers in driving demand and growth at product-focused, enterprise software companies (with a specialty in SaaS/cloud). Moreover, Peter has experience with developer-focused programs, product-led development (PLG), digital acquisition, field marketing, and the like.
Links:
MongoDB
Pace App
Profiles:
Peter’s LinkedIn
Justin’s LinkedIn
Krish Subramanian, CEO, and Co-founder of the leading subscription and billing software called Chargebee, will be sitting in today’s show to answer that question. Chargebee is a global subscription management platform that automates revenue operations of over 4,500 high-growth subscription-based businesses from startups to enterprises across verticals, including SaaS, eCommerce, e-learning, IoT, Publications, and more. Krish and his extremely dynamic mind will be sharing first-hand experiences on how they evolve their go-to-marketing strategy over the years and learn how to straddle sales-led and product-led motions together to drive fast growth. He also talks about the trials and setbacks that they’ve encountered and how they move past those obstacles to generate wins.
Shownotes
[0:59] Krish talks about their journey of reflecting on their mistakes and wins at Chargebee
[1:56] What got them into solving this problem of helping subscription companies understand their business much better?
[7:11] The relevance of understanding your subset of customers
[8:42] How do they identify their best customers?
[10:36] Getting that value metric and Northstar metric is the biggest revelation for them
[15:33] On building more features for your most successful customers
[{21:21 Why does he think the pricing is so important to be Product-Led as a business?
[25:03] Your end user’s success will eventually become your success
[30:00] Advantages of having both self-service and pre-sales
[31:15] How did Chargebee evolve the way they structure their teams?
About Krish Subramanian:
Krish Subramanian is the co-founder and CEO of Chargebee, a global leader in subscription billing and revenue management solution for scaling businesses. He is an engineer by profession and a problem solver at heart with over 20 years of experience in the software field. As an ex-consultant, Krish strongly believes that business value is defined by service and experience to the customers and the people. He is referred to as the “nice guy” within the company, the tech community, the media, and his mom.
Profile
Chargebee
Krish on LinkedIn
Krish on Twitter
Simon Belak is a visionary; he speaks with outstanding clarity and has a true leader's heart. Working with Metabase has sharpened his skill in product leadership, and today he’ll be sharing his line of work with us and walking us through how he can build high leverage teams for his former company, Metabase. Product leadership has become an increasingly important subject in our field. It focuses on specific challenges on those leading product teams and is accountable for product performance and customer satisfaction. Someone can do this by leading a team with a product-centric strategy. Product leaders progress through creating cross-functional influence, product work, and scale. Listen to this episode, and gain value on Simon’s insights about the topic.
Show notes
[3:29] The personal growth that he gets from such a different lifestyle is reflected in his leadership.
[4:27] Simon’s definition of product leadership.
[4:47] The fundamental difference between management and leadership.
[7:10] Leadership should be fundamentally about enabling people.
[8:35] To earn leadership, you have to show that you’re always trying to better your team.
[9:57] Taking into account the long-term vision of Product-Led in their company.
[11:17] The evolution of leadership at Metabase
[15:23] Metabase created an environment where people can open up their thoughts and feelings without worrying about judgment.
[18:39] How do you build a high leverage team?
[21:36] How can a person adapt to Metawork?
[23:54] The most value starts after you do Metawork in the long term.
[26:26] The importance of acknowledging how fast the market is changing.
[28:08] Actionable recommendations on developing and implementing new leadership strategies.
[28:13] Interaction between company culture and leadership.
[28:56] Implementing completely bottom-up and very concrete practices.
[31:35] How does Simon get into this business meditative state?
[34:50] Don’t think about solutions. Think about the problem harder. Create a hypothesis about the situation and provide solutions on how you can attest to the problem.
[36:58] Start with introspection sessions.
About Simon Belak
During his time at Metabase, his time was split between data science, product leadership, and producing engineering work. Simon brings complex topics and simplifies them so people can understand them better. He is exceptionally customer-focused and helps you go beyond your boundaries by challenging your beliefs.
Profile
Simon’s Twitter
Simon’s LinkedIn
Justin Bauer is known for his expertise in product analytics. He is always one step ahead in helping companies build better products by amplifying their growth. His primary role as an SVP in Amplitude involves creating teams that establish a deep customer understanding and generate inspired visions to produce unique product experiences that users can enjoy. He’s on the show today to share his insights in building excellent product analytics so you can increase engagement, growth, and revenue for your growing company.
Show Notes
[0:44] Justin’s journey in the institute
[1:47] The most significant milestones, experiences, and learnings along his company journey
[3:59] How do we drive growth?
[9:00] Shifting balance: How did they shift from product-led to an enterprise?
[18:53] Changing the brand of the company as part of going enterprise
[20:33] How has pricing changed for their business?
[21:56] Focusing on the product analytics market by making sure to build the best product
[28:25] How do they continue to build an excellent analytics product?
[28:56] Make sure to understand your consumers because people want to buy from a company that understands them.
[30:44] How investing in high-quality content can produce better results?
[32:23] Always start with a strategy in mind
[37:04] Understanding the Vision Strategy Roadmap
About Justin Bauer
Justin Bauer is the senior vice president of product at Amplitude. In his role at Amplitude, he leads product management, design, education, growth, and analytics for Amplitude's Digital Optimization System. Before he joined Amplitude, he was the CEO and co-founder of Rivalry Games, which was acquired by You42 in 2015.
Profile
Justin on LinkedIn
Justin on Twitter
Amplitude
Jeff Coyle is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of MarketMuse, an industry-leading content planning technology.
Today, he will explain how community management principles can support product-led growth. Jeff also discusses how community drives “sales-led growth” and the importance of employee advocacy in the success of a community. MarketMuse, his platform, identifies content quality issues and creates a channel for content optimization.
Show Notes
[1:10] Traditional product management and traditionally trained product managers do not typically come from the land of social media.
[5:31] How has the community influenced overall product-led growth?
[8:22] The importance of having thick skin is that you can experience what it’s like to have a negative emotion emerge and create more transparent communication.
[15:54] Employee advocacy and its social impact
[23:18] Key takeaways from this episode that listeners should consider.
About Jeff Coyle
Coyle is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of MarketMuse. This company assists content marketers in establishing topical authority, improving content quality, and transforming semantic research into actionable insights.
Prior to joining MarketMuse, he previously operated his own marketing consultancy and managed the Traffic, Search, and Engagement team for TechTarget, a leader in B2B technology publishing and lead generation.
Links
Product Led Slack Community
Profile
Market Muse
Email address: jeff@marketmuse.com
Jeff on LinkedIn
Jeff on Twitter
Chase Wilson is a PLG specialist who focuses on solving product led-growth issues. Chase has just launched his new company, Flywheel, a platform that helps hasten self-serve revenue by bridging in-product behaviour and marketing tactics. And today, he sits down with us and tackles areas such as improving your range of vision by making effective marketing strategies. He will also discuss the significance of user experience and pointers on structuring data. And how the company's perspective has become a game-changer in giving customer experience.
Show Notes
[1:10] Starting Flywheel to solve the product-led growth issue
[2:24] His idea of Product Qualified Leads?
[5:05] The concept of MQL and why is it problematic?
[6:52] Product led growth is highly flexible, and every journey that the company goes down is pretty unique.
[7:08] How does changing your perspective of PQL, MQL, and SQL affect the customer's experience?
[8:41] You need to take the product usage data, the sales interaction data as well as the marketing interaction data and put it together as an overall timeline.
[10:41] Why is it called team qualified leads?
[13:30] Advice to listeners
About Chase Wilson
Chase Wilson is an alumnus of the University of Chicago and is now the Co-Founder and CEO of Flywheel. Chase is known for his determination, creativity, and resourcefulness when it comes to managing his team and marketing insights. Chase’s talent is his capacity to communicate his rare ideas in a way that inspires multitudes. Which makes him a force to be reckoned with in the industry.
Links
Flywheel
Atlassian
Profile
Chase on LinkedIn
Email Address: chase@theflywheel.app
Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus. Pocus is the Product-Led Sales platform that helps sales teams turn their existing users into high-value customers. Pocus combines customer fit and product usage data into a single source of truth so that sales teams can prioritize the best opportunities and take the right action at the right time… all without relying on their engineering team. With Pocus, sales teams can convert more free trial / self-serve users, reach out to the right buyer at the right time, find 'needle in the haystack' opportunities, and save time sifting through data.
Show Notes
[0:20] Alexa introduces Pocus, her benchmark report on sales, and how it captures the findings to gain data.
[1:39] She explains what product-led sales is and how it leverages growth. She talks about the AI of user interaction rather than just traditional sales.
[2:46] On how the Product-led world makes the most out of platforms that generate more work efficiency
[4:21] The takeaway on product-led growth shows that over 97 of respondents have a sales team or plan to have a sales team.
[5:37] She gives us a perspective on what goes on within the sales organization among companies. She also talks about what sales assist is.
[7:27] On the principle of show value instead of just selling on the value
[8:26] Alexa predicts 2022’s take on PLS’s innovation stage at its infancy to accelerate revenue.
[10:37] She emphasizes the importance of focusing on PLG motion rather than traditional sales.
About Alexa Grabell
- As the co-founder and CEO of Product-Led Sales’ first platform specialized for sales teams, Pocus created the 2021 Product-Led Sales Benchmark Report in partnership with First Round Capital → you can see more detail about it here
Links
Slack
Airtable
Asana
Profile
Pocus
Pocus Community
Alexa on LinkedIn
Alexa on Twitter
Pocus Weekly Newsletter
Jeremy's mission is to help startups with the relentless pursuit of exponential growth online. He has launched Conversion Rate Optimization programs for 155+ startups and translated that into a proven and repeatable process to drive growth in your business. This process has generated over $247 million in tracked revenue from winning onsite tests.
As a professional speaker, he has presented over 175 times in 47 states and trained over 42,000 Execs, Marketers, and Growth Leaders. As an entrepreneur, he launched 4 different 7+ figure businesses from scratch.
Show Notes
[1:26] Jeremy introduces the 4-part extensive definition of a CRO that makes it a comprehensive growth process. He breaks the common knowledge about this system and reveals how it is just as important as any other sector of the business.
[3:09] He cites some Product-Led success stories that prove anyone winning a test can change your numbers.
[4:33] On CRO maturity assessments validating wins and transforming ROI’s which is made attainable by in-depth market and customer research.
[5:53] He discusses the two (2) crucial aspects of optimization: research and testing. About 14 different specializations have come together to continually integrate these.
[8:03] Jeremy also enumerates the misconceptions in test hypothesis formulation that hinder 360-degree understanding of customers
[10:34] The efficiency and relativity of time, data, and probability of tests dictate the success of the process. Achieving this mitigates delays and setbacks along the way.
[13:44] On the tech stack to be utilized according to the circumstances of the company. He considers the company’s assets and liabilities at hand.
[15:52] Jeremy emphasizes the importance of compounding lead interest to produce better results.
[18:19] In running a start-up, tracking unfeasible functions and decisions is crucial to know the optimum actions to be made for your business.
[22:00] More leads do not equate to higher quality leads. In order to evaluate the success of tests, both must be present.
[23:14] Jeremy explains the essence of team organization and scaling the business.
[26:20] On the viability of displaying prices - he talks about whether informing the market of the rates is effective or not for most businesses.
Links
Conversion Guides
CRO Course
Profile
Jeremy Epperson on LinkedIn
Erika Zeigyte is the founder of Prosana and a remote teams & operations expert. She is also a certified Asana partner. Asana is a project & workflow management tool that helps ensure lean work management across all team members.
In this episode, Erika shares her expertise in building powerhouse operations inside digital agencies and eComs. She narrates her journey from being a neuroscientist to being a remote business owner and how that shift in her career led her to engage in apps that build work structures. She emphasizes the essence of making actionable plans and maintaining accountability in the workspace.
Show Notes:
[1:44] Erika's 3 milestones: leaving Lithuania to study; adapting back again after her 5-year stay abroad, and quitting a promising project management job to become a personal assistant.
[3:54] A reminder to always work on building a structure & why it's important.
[4:53] Accountability is a must to make sure people do what they should be doing. She proceeds on the process of goal-setting and dismantling it into smaller short-term and more attainable goals.
[9:44] Improving the process first rather than considering replacing someone is what should be considered first. Erika stresses the importance of having regular performance evaluations and meetings with the team members.
[13:14] A standard operating procedure can be refined through Asana to create actionable agendas and maintain accountability in executing these processes.
[17:07] It takes only 3-6 months to fully get the hang of using Asana as the project management platform. With this, one can ask the right questions about getting the project done.
[19:06] Erika started out with Asana as she needed a better way to manage her admin tasks & later on she found it could be used more extensively for her other tasks. Later on, she collaborated with Asana, and became a part of a strong and innovative Asana's community.
[22:43] She talks about her services offered: a course on ultimate team growth, Asana templates, and consulting program.
[24:38] Her Product-led advice is to always test, learn, adjust and repeat. There is no need to be afraid of failing because it only means you're gonna get better every day.
About Erika Zeigyte
Erika is a neuroscientist and remote business operations professional. She is the founder of Prosana. This company builds scalable teams and back-end operations. She provides services that include Business Operations Audits, Remote Recruitment, Asana & Processes Consulting as well as 360 Degrees Back-end Ops Consulting. She also shares advice on remote and international recruitment, streamlined process, communication, goal setting, and leadership.
Links
Asana
Prosana
The Ultimate Team Growth Kit Course page: 25% discount code: TEAMSGROW25
Free ebook
Profile
Erika Zeigyte on LinkedIn
Product-Led Podcast has reached its 100th episode! Out of 99 insightful pieces, we countdown to the top 10 most downloaded episodes. Featuring an all-star line-up of guests, we will hear snippets of these throwbacks, and recall the different journeys that upheld the essence of being product-led.
Show Notes:
[00:45] #10: Episode 87 - User research and the importance of how users use their products with Allison Dickin of Sprig
[1:58] #9: Episode 80 - CEO and founder of InnerTrends, Claudiu Murariu, on the selection of user activation KPI's to meet onboarding goals
[2:59] #8: Episode 85 - Jon Butterfield of Speedinvest on fine-tuning your go-to-market strategy
[4:34] #7: Episode 81 - DoWhatWorks' Andres Glusman gives advice on building growth in skillset
[6:36] #6: Episode 70 - The secret to acquiring over 50 million users by Zach Sims of Codeacademy
[8:59] #5: Episode 82 - What video games can teach you about user onboarding with Emily Lonetto of Voiceflow
[11:00] #4: Episode 83 - Alison Taylor and Trevor Johnston of Jane discuss growing 7-figure SaaS business using Product-Led growth
[13:02] #3: Episode 29 - How to acquire your first 100 customers by your Product-Led company according to Gen Furukawa of Pre-hook
[14:07] #2: Episode 79 - The art of product positioning with the author, April Dunford
[20:54] #1: Episode 28 - The original Product-Led podcast hosts, Wesh Bush, and Ramli John, explain why one should become Product-Led Growth Certified
Profile Links:
Allison Dickin website
Sprig
Claudiu Murariu on LinkedIn
InnerTrends
Jon Butterfield on LinkedIn
Speedinvest
Andres Glusman on LinkedIn
DoWhatWorks
Zach Sims on LinkedIn
Codeacademy
Emily Lonetto website
Voiceflow
Alison Taylor on LinkedIn
Trevor Johnston on LinkedIn
Jane website
Gen Furukawa on LinkedIn
Prehook
April Dunford website
Wesh Bush on LinkedIn
Ramli John on LinkedIn
Loren Elia is the Director of Product Marketing at Honeybook and an experienced marketer with over ten years of involvement in Product Marketing Management, E-commerce, and Digital Marketing. She is a creative problem solver, and her passion leads to product marketing management (PMM) in technology.
Today we will be sitting down with her as she sends us seven helpful strategies that we can use to transition from sales-led to product-led marketing efficiently. She will also teach us to present facts and data while working with the right team. Join us as we give you a ton of golden nuggets to collect in this insightful episode.
Show Notes
[0:39] Transitioning from sales led and product led entails having to realign priorities on different teams and departments
[1:33] Presenting facts , data and be mindful of the people that you are working with
[2:47] Make sure you’re connecting with your teammates
[4:35] PLG makes your company more attractive to investors
[5:05] Difference between Product Marketing and Product Management
[6:26] Strategies that helped her in transitioning and the 7 things that can help you make that transition
[18:18] A quick summary of the 7 points
[19:22] Make sure that your information is readily available for users to consume
[20:46] Understanding your user’s journey
About Loren Elia
Loren's an experienced product marketer with 10 plus years in brand management, e-commerce, and digital marketing. She shows excellent leadership by helping prioritize her company’s business goal and leading an excellent marketing team. Her company Honey Book highlights task management that allows users to view and track various project stages and keeps other documents in one place.
In break times, you can find her munching over chocolate-covered pretzels or mandarin oranges in her office.
Links
Honey Book
Product Led Slack Community
Profile
Loren on LinkedIn
Loren on Twitter
Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, the first product-led sales platform. Pocus enables sales teams at PLG companies to identify, prioritize, and understand their self-serve users to convert them to high-value customers ultimately. In today’s episode, she will share her knowledge about empowering sales teams with data. She then gives her two cents on what are the common mistakes, essential qualifications, and red flags to avoid when you are looking out for the best salesperson to fit in your product-led company.
Show Notes
[00:31] Common mistakes that people should avoid when adding on product-led sales
[02:48] Laying out important roles and characteristics before hiring a salesperson
[06:39] What other things to look out for in the qualification process?
[ 08:16] Red flags to look out for that might not fit in the product sales motion
[13:12] Advice to companies that are switching from sales-led to product-led
[16:39] Do a brainstorm session for all the things that you need in your business
[19:45] Why is it important to shift your mindset?
[20:50] Experimentation and keep learning from your users
About Alexa Grabell
Alexa started the company while getting her MBA at Stanford GSB based on her experience leading up sales strategy and operations at Dataminr. Her goal and passion is for product-led sales to turn their best users into high-value customers. And her company called Pocus, is the best platform to do that. Pocus brings together product usage, customer fit, and buying intent data into one view, with insights tailored to your business.
Profile
Alexa on Twitter
Alexa on LinkedIn
Pocus
A lot happened in 2021—both good and bad—but today’s episode is all about wins!
ProductLed founder and CEO Wes Bush and managing director Ramli John wrap up the year by looking back on some of its highlights. They go through two of the ProductLed Podcast’s most episodes and weigh in on what’s next for the podcast. They also touch on some things from the ProductLed blog, give examples of products that have done well, and share their predictions for product-led growth in 2022.
And because this is the season of giving, stick around until the end for a chance to win a special gift!
Show Notes
[01:15] The Product-Led Growth community’s “wins” in 2021
[04:02] About the most popular ProductLed Podcast episodes and how the podcast is planning to move forward
[09:30] ProductLed’s most popular blog posts for 2021
[14:25] Tools that give sales team product engagement data will gain more traction
[15:20] The days of the "free monopoly" are upon us
[18:00] The point of value is moving earlier in the customer journey compared to before
[20:45] Being "product-led" will be seen as more than a "product thing"
[24:18] Product-led tools are going to explode and product-led companies (or product-led/sales-led hybrids) are going to take the mainstream
[27:20] Leave a review for the ProductLed Podcast for a chance to win a vintage Product-Led Growth hat—and if you don’t want to do that, join the ProductLed cohort!
[29:25] Ramli’s next steps
Links
Product-Led Growth Certificate
How to Grow a 7-Figure SAAS Business Using Product-Led Growth (Episode 83)
How Codecademy Acquired 50M+ Users According To The CEO (Episode 78)
What Is Product-Led Growth?
Product-Led Growth Tech Stack
Shobhit Chugh is the founder and CEO of Intentional Product Manager, a platform that helps product managers and product leaders fast-track their careers to CPO status. In this episode, he weighs in on the challenges of being a product manager and building a coaching business. He then shares 3 ways to succeed in your career so that you can run the job instead of letting the job run you. He also offers some advice on becoming product-led.
Show Notes
[00:38] About Shobhit’s core mission
[01:38] An overview of his journey to product management
[02:48] The challenges of building your first product team
[04:44] A common mistake that product managers make
[08:22] Do your job right, be clear on what will demonstrate your contributions to your company, and have a purpose or a mission that’s bigger than yourself
[12:12] Why Shobhit switched from being a product manager to coaching product managers
[13:48] On building his company remotely and overcoming impostor syndrome
[18:15] Figure out what your customers really need, focus on one thing at a time, and think about the emotional aspects of the product and product-led growth
[21:22] Shobhit’s advice for people who want to get into product management
About Shobhit Chugh
Before becoming the Intentional Product Manager coach, Shobhit Chugh worked as a consultant at McKinsey. He also used to be a product manager for Google’s Crashlytics.
Shobhit’s previous adventures include working at startups like Tamr, High Start Group (now WEVO), and Lattice Engines (acquired by D&B); co-founding Adaptly (acquired by Accenture), and getting an MBA and Masters in Engineering Management at Kellogg School of Management.
Link
McKinsey & Company
Join Shobhit's Masterclass on 5 Steps Product Managers can take to have an Outstanding Career
Profile
Intentional Product Manager
Shobhit Chugh on LinkedIn
Andy Boyd is the SVP of Product Management and Growth at Appfire. In this episode, Andy talks about his experiences building successful growth teams. Andy also shares great insights that will help you make the switch to the product-led paradigm.
Show Notes
[01:00] Andy’s experiences with IBM and Appfire
[04:00] The power of compounding growth
[08:15] Building a transparent, open, data-driven culture
[10:20] Comparing opportunities between companies
[19:15] A sneak peek of Andy’s book on building Growth teams
[21:12] Do things outside of your comfort zone
About Andy Boyd
Andy Boyd is the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Growth at Appfire, the leading provider of apps for the Atlassian ecosystem. Andy currently leads the product management and growth disciplines for Appfire’s full portfolio of software solutions with over 200,000 active installations worldwide. Prior to joining Appfire, Andy was part of the founding team that brought the IBM Watson (AI) platform to market, serving in various Product Management roles, including establishing the first Growth team for IBM Watson.
Links
Product-Led Slack Community
“The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries
“Running Lean” by Ash Maurya
Profile
Appfire
Andy’s LinkedIn
Enterprise Growth Playbook
Nathan Wangliao is the Head of Business Operations at HeadsUp, a tool that helps product-led sales teams identify which customers to focus on, choose the best moments to reach out, and understand how each customer is using their product. In this episode, Nathan dives deep into the 5 key things product-led companies should consider before layering on sales. He also shares his recommendations for tools that can help product-led sales.
Show Notes
[03:08] The history of product-led
[06:05] Nathan’s observations regarding typical PLG companies
[07:05] Do you have product-market fit? Is there a drop in the customer journey that’s really hard to address without having some kind of sales or support function?
[08:38] Has expansion reached the natural limits of your product?
[09:25] Are you trying to sell to a target segment that might not be open to trying out new products even if the product is a great fit?
[10:16] How do sales improve the user economics or the final metrics of your company?
[11:48] The differences between traditional enterprise sales versus PLG sales
[16:10] About front-end and back-end tools for product-led sales
About Nathan Wangliao
Nathan Wangliao is a graduate of Cambridge University where he founded Hack Cambridge (the university’s annual hackathon which is now in its sixth year). He currently works with Momo Ong, one of the co-founders of HeadsUp who has been a guest on the Product-Led Podcast.
In his past life, Nathan was a law student, a consultant, and an army mechanic. He likes to climb in his free time.
Links
Product-Led Growth Certificate™ Course
Slack
Box
Figma
Drift
Amplitude
Mixpanel
Fivetran
Snowflake
Redshift
Looker
Profile
HeadsUp
Headsup LinkedIn
Nathan’s Twitter
Nathan’s LinkedIn
Claudia Zúñiga is the manager of customer experience at Jungle Scout, the leading all-in-one platform that helps entrepreneurs sell on Amazon. In this episode, she shares the lessons the company learned during its transition from sales-led to product-led. She also answers questions from the audience, weighing in on different scenarios like what to do if you have a low acquisition-to-activation rate and how to get new users without paid ads.
Show Notes
[02:20] A little bit about Claudia and Jungle Scout
[07:55] Put your product at the center of the customer experience, help your users help themselves, and be data-driven
[12:52] On building bridges, cultivating relationships, and the importance of research
[16:52] What Jungle Scout’s onboarding experience was like then versus now
[20:08] How to activate free trial users
[22:30] Some of the tools that Jungle Scout uses
[26:38] Try to understand the different customer types
[31:20] How Claudia and her team got the organization and stakeholders onboard with the product-led approach
[35:18] On Jungle Scout’s plans to release a new freemium product
[37:05] What you can do if you have a low acquisition-to-activation rate
[42:35] How to get new users without paid ads
About Claudia Zúñiga
Claudia Zúñiga is used to working under pressure in the high-paced SaaS industry. She likes finding the best resolution by applying creative problem-solving based on data-driven insights with a customer-centric mindset and approach.
Claudia is always interested in learning new things so she is constantly looking for new webinars and online courses—especially those that cover product creation, graphic and web design, usability, data, and analytics.
Links
Pendo
Segment
Tableau
Salesforce
AppUse
WalkMe
ClientSuccess
Gainsight
Zendesk
FullStory
Product-Led Growth Slack Community
Books
Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself by Wes Bush
Profile
Jungle Scout
Claudia’s email
Fred Melanson is the co-founder and CEO of Bliinx, the revenue engine for product-led sales. In today’s episode, he weighs in on the role of sales in PLG companies, how Bliinx engages with its users, and the recent shift among salespersons. He also shares some actionable steps for companies that are looking to switch to a product-led sales motion.
Show Notes
[02:00] Some misconceptions about product-led growth and sales
[04:12] How sales and product-led work together in organizations that combine both
[09:10] When is the best time to reach out to users
[12:10] The qualification metrics by Derek Skaletsky of Sherlock
[14:18] Fred’s observations about salespersons in product-led companies
[17:28] How to measure the success of a product-led sales strategy
[21:20] On getting buy-in, having data to track, and acting on that data
[25:25] Fred’s advice on keeping things simple and providing value for users
About Fred Melanson
Fred Melanson is a McGill University graduate who started Bllinx out of frustration for the current ways to scale business relationships. Bliinx was among the 29 companies that had made the cut for Batch 26 of 500 Startups’ seed program.
Fred likes listening to podcasts while walking his dog in the morning.
Links
How I Built This with Guy Raz
The SaaS Podcast
Sales Transformation Podcast
Millennial Sales Podcast
Notion
Mero
UserPilot
Hugo
Lemlist
Userflow
Mixpanel
Amplitude
Heap
Snowflake
Flinks
Asana
Customer.io
Segment
Census
High Touch
Profile
Bliinx
Fred Melanson’s LinkedIn
Value First: The Product-Led Sales Podcast
Partho Ghosh is the Senior Director of Product and Growth at Hootsuite, the leading social media and marketing dashboard. In this episode, he talks about Hootsuite as a platform and how the company has been structured. He then weighs in on the relation between product-led growth and acquisition, sharing some experiments that Hootsuite has done. He also offers advice on onboarding.
Show Notes
[02:48] How Hootsuite is looking to elevate in terms of product-led growth
[04:55] An overview of Hootsuite’s onboarding approach
[09:50] What the platform has to offer
[14:35] How product-led growth works in the acquisition space
[17:52] About the onboarding checklist and the onboarding funnel
[23:32] How Hootsuite measures success
[28:50] On the company’s product growth team and what needs to be changed
[31:40] Product-led growth takes a village but it’s kickass
About Partho Ghosh
Partho Ghosh is a customer-obsessed, data-informed product executive and product-led growth expert who can create measurable product processes that lead to large-scale growth. He brings over a decade of experience in B2B SaaS, MarTech, and eCommerce—leading the charge for numerous product transformations at hyper-growth startups.
On the side, Partho is a constant connector who has spoken at numerous conferences such as Pendomonium, the Traction Conference, Pavilion, and ProductCamp. He is also an avid scuba diver.
Links
Bananatag
Marketo
HubSpot
Profile
Hootsuite
Partho Ghosh’s LinkedIn
Partho Ghosh’s Twitter
Lloyed Lobo is the co-founder and president of Boast.AI, a fintech platform that helps companies identify, claim, and finance R&D tax credits and government incentives. In this episode, he shares how the Traction community came to be. He then weighs in on community-led growth and the value of making an impact. He also goes into what Boast.AI has to offer and the different phases of product-led, sharing advice for early founders.
Show Notes
[03:02] About Lloyed’s background and the philosophy behind Boast.AI and Traction
[08:20] The company’s big vision
[10:58] The 2 things that transcend companies
[11:28] How to measure impact
[14:12] Build a community and you won’t become a commodity
[16:25] How Boast.AI evolved from a sales-led model
[21:35] What Lloyed learned from the different phases that the company went through
[27:22] Why you shouldn’t do things that scale
[29:00] Lloyed’s advice on transitioning from sales-led to product-led
About Lloyed Lobo
After graduating with a degree in software engineering, Lloyed Lobo went into product and growth while working for a few venture-backed companies. He co-founded Boast.AI with his college friend, Alex Popa. He co-founded Traction as a non-profit initiative with his friend Ray Walia, CEO of Launch Academy to provide resources to help innovators become successful.
Links
eWebinar
MixMax
Contentfly
Slack
Dropbox
HubSpot
Profile
Boast
Traction Community
Traction YouTube
Pedro Clivati is the Head of Growth at GrowthHackers, the largest online community of growth professionals on the web. In this episode, he shares what people can expect if they are looking to start a business around growth. He then talks about the importance of running tests, corrects certain misconceptions about growth hacking, and offers leadership advice.
Show Notes
[01:12] What Pedro learned as a co-founder
[03:35] What high-tempo testing is and why it is important for growth
[07:25] How growth teams should measure success
[11:25] Get comfortable with being wrong
[14:30] Start with a challenge that someone in your team has been thinking of—but didn’t have the resources to work on—and run small experiments in that direction
[15:48] Promote your wins across the company
About Pedro Clivati
Pedro Clivati has a background in marketing and sales, but his foray into growth began when he co-founded Contentools and Growth Boulevard. He also used to be the VP of Global Sales at Contentools, but before that, he worked as a digital marketing consultant.
Links
Contentools
Airbnb
Dropbox
Airbnb Growth Study
Profile
GrowthHackers
Pedro’s LinkedIn
Pedro’s Twitter
Jenn Steele is the VP of Marketing at Reprise, a product experience platform for product-led growth. In this episode, she talks about enterprise marketing, the cross-functionality of it, and what a product-led sales motion means. She offers advice to gather more product signals.
Show Notes
[03:05] Product-led growth versus the freemium model
[05:42] How enterprise marketing can tie in with the go-to-market approach
[08:00] Think about products and platforms that your company already has as ways to get marketing signals
[09:08] How product marketing works in a product-led sales motion
[11:30] Communicate with your product team
[15:35] Start with baby steps like a product tour
[16:55] Once you’ve harvested email addresses from your demo, have it go through the usual steps for your sales team
[18:48] What Reprise does
About Jenn Steele
Jenn Steele’s career has had a lot of marketing leadership roles. She loves marketing to marketers and other executives, growing people and companies, and telling stories (both with and without data). She is also passionate about furthering women in business.
Links
Product-Led Growth Certificate™ Program
HubSpot
Salesforce
Profile
Reprise
Jenn’s Twitter
Jenn’s LinkedIn
Allison Dickin is the Head of User Research at Sprig (formerly UserLeap), an all-in-one product research platform that delivers the 3 key pillars of product research—video interviews, concept testing, and microsurveys. She joins the show to discuss how iterative learning drives website conversions and offers tips so that product-led teams can improve their user research process.
Show Notes
[02:08] Why user research is important
[03:28] The 2 critical phases in the user cycle that are difficult to get customer insight from
[05:13] Ask users questions that are relevant to what they’re doing in the moment, keep your questions short and simple, and only survey as many users as you need
[07:48] How to get good response rates
[09:32] Allison’s recommendations to improve onboarding experience
[12:13] How to phrase your survey questions
[14:30] On multiple choice questions and micro-surveys
[17:32] How to spread survey/research insights within the organization
[19:13] Allison’s advice for people/teams who are doing product and user research
About Allison Dickin
Allison Dickin is an experienced user researcher who blends rigor with pragmatism to guide customer-informed decision-making for digital products. She works with startups to lead qualitative and quantitative research studies. Her clients include Blue Apron, Skillshare, Catalina Crunch, and Microsoft.
Links
Product-Led Growth Certificate™ Program
Sample Size Calculator
Profile
Allison’s LinkedIn
Sprig (formerly UserLeap)
Wes Bush appears in today’s episode to talk about the upcoming Product-Led Growth Certificate™ program. He provides an in-depth overview of the 4-week long program that helps small businesses and large companies transition from sales-led to product-led. He shares the goals of the program, what people can expect each week, and other benefits of joining.
Show Notes
[01:10] Important dates to take note of
[01:32] The main goal of the program
[03:25] The sales-led way versus the product-led way
[04:50] A sneak peek of weeks 1 to 3
[07:28] Why product-led monetization is included in the program
[09:22] What makes the Product-Led Growth Certificate™ Course different from other courses
[11:13] There will be real-world weekly projects
About Wes Bush
Wes Bush is the founder and CEO of ProductLed, the bestselling author of “Product-Led Growth: How To Build a Product That Sells Itself”, and one of the most sought-after product experts in the world. After working for some of the world’s fastest growing companies in the world, today he trains teams around the globe how to turn their product into a powerful growth engine.
Link
ProductLed
Jon Butterfield is the Head of Growth at Speedinvest, one of Europe’s largest seed-stage investors with over €400m in seed capital. In this episode, he weighs in on the common mistakes that investors and founders make when it comes to product-led growth. He then talks about product-market fit and offers advice on data.
Show Notes
[04:40] The danger of premature growth
[07:00] Get your data right first before you launch your product
[10:15] Talk to as many customers and potential customers as possible
[11:20] What to do after finding product-market fit
[15:45] How to breakdown your go-to-market strategy
[18:30] More sales does not necessarily mean more success
[21:20] Look into cultural differences before going into different markets
[22:48] Some examples of product-market fit: Quibi, Myspace, Facebook, and Airbnb
[26:55] Have a data tracking system in place or hire a business intelligence analyst
About Jon Butterfield
Jon Butterfield has started companies across Europe and the United States over the last 15+ years. He specializes in go-to-market strategies, product-market fit, developing growth models and aligning data and analytics to a business’ and customer goals.
When not building businesses, strategies and models, Jon spends time on his second passion, building motorbikes. He also enjoys mountaineering and spending time in nature with his family.
Links
Product-Led Growth Certificate™ Course
OneTap
Airbnb
Profile
Speedinvest
Jon Butterfield’s LinkedIn
Rachel Obstler is the VP Product at Heap, a digital insights platform that empowers product teams to focus on what matters—building the best products. In this episode, Rachel talks about proactive analytics and why it’s key to delivering a great product experience. She also offers advice on product-led growth, highlighting the importance of effective teamwork and making sure that everyone agrees on the data.
Show Notes
[03:05] The advantages of proactive analytics
[04:45] An example of what Heap is capable of
[06:22] About Heap Illuminate
[08:10] The challenges of building your own digital insights platform
[10:32] Data is a way to align different teams in an organization
[13:13] Have KPIs that you review on a regular basis
[15:15] Baseline your metrics especially if you’re embarking on product-led growth for the first time
About Rachel Obstler
Rachel Obstler is a self-proclaimed data geek who specializes in go-to-market strategies and product management. She has over 20 years of experience leading product teams for different companies, including PagerDuty, DynaTrace, and Keynote Systems.
Rachel learned to love recreational ice hockey while she was getting her bachelor’s degree at MIT. She still plays it to this day.
Profile
Heap
Rachel’s LinkedIn
Heap Illuminate
Alison Taylor and Trevor Johnston are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Jane, an online platform for health and wellness practitioners that makes it simple to book, chart, schedule, bill, and get paid. They join Ramli on the show to talk about product-market fit and how customer service is at the heart of a product-led business. They then go through the steps they have taken (and still take) to overcome growing pains.
Show Notes
[01:17] How the Jane app came to be and scaled with just one “customer support” team
[05:34] The signup process is a way to get customers committed and to get them on the product journey
[08:00] Why Alison and Trevor decided not to go with the freemium model
[09:48] About Jane’s high-touch onboarding experience
[12:26] Prioritize loyal customers over sales
[15:23] The evolution of Jane’s signup process
[19:30] About Jane’s org structure and support system
[23:48] The challenge of hiring and helping people develop their careers
[28:05] How marketing and engineering fit in Jane’s org structure
[30:05] Alison and Trevor’s advice for product-led startups
About Alison Taylor and Trevor Johnston
Alison Taylor has been in the healthcare space as a business manager since 2008, and she believes in the integration of work into life and life into work. She hired Trevor’s creative agency to brand her clinic, Canopy Integrated Health, which she opened in 2011.
Trevor Johnston loves doing creative things with technology to create enjoyable experiences and to solve people’s problems. He co-founded Thought Shop Creative Inc. and was its lead digital guy until 2016. Jane is his first app and his first foray into coding.
Profile
Jane
Alison Taylor’s LinkedIn
Trevor Johnston’s LinkedIn
Emily Lonetto is the Head of Growth at Voiceflow, a platform that allows anyone to build voice apps without coding. In this episode, she shares insight on user onboarding, offering practical tips to create a memorable onboarding experience, weighing in on some of the common mistakes companies make when it comes to user onboarding. She also talks about Voiceflow’s early days, along with ways to improve the customer’s journey.
Show Notes
[01:35] About Emily’s sticker store
[02:48] Her experiences with user onboarding
[06:15] Emily’s process for customer activation
[08:54] What people can expect from Voiceflow
[11:23] What Emily did and realized during Voiceflow’s early days
[14:52] Match the level of the user with the level of expertise/technicality that a tool has
[18:30] How product-led growth should scale with every user
[21:28] Examples of apps that have different ways for users to “level up”
[27:06] Design for function over looks and keep things simple
[29:44] Emily’s tips to improve user onboarding
About Emily Lonetto
Emily is the Head of Growth at Voiceflow – a platform that helps designers, developers, and their teams design, prototype and launch voice & conversational experiences. Before Voiceflow, Emily was the second growth hire at Clio, introducing product growth experimentation to the org. Before joining Clio, Emily led product growth at PartnerStack (formerly GrowSumo) YC'15, and helped automate/scale Tilt (acquired by Airbnb) YC'12 massive ambassador and community program across the globe. In her spare time, Emily is a speaker, advisor and cofounder/co-organizer of GrowthTO and currently helps startups tackle early growth strategy with several incubators and advisory councils across North America and Tel Aviv.
Links
Squarespace
Webflow
Duolingo
Jonathan Chang – Artist for AAPI
Twitter for Jonathan Chang
Profile
Voiceflow
Emily on Twitter
Emily on LinkedIn
Voiceflow Community on Facebook
Andres Glusman is the CEO of DoWhatWorks and used to lead growth at Meetup. In this episode, he joins Andrew on the show to talk about his journey into the growth space. He presents the power of experimentation and optimization, sharing lessons that he learned from his mentors and his own failures. He also offers tips for people who are in management or leadership positions and are looking to be successful.
Show Notes
[01:15] An overview of DoWhatWorks
[02:05] How Andres came up with DoWhatWorks
[05:50] How he built his growth skillset
[14:00] Identify key risks, go after it as quickly as possible, and validate your assumptions
[16:58] What Andres did for Meetup
[20:10] An overview of Meetup’s growth journey
[25:15] On winning, gaining momentum, and transitioning to a leadership role
[33:00] What Andres has learned from some of his mistakes
[37:20] His advice for people who are building their growth skillset
About Andres Glusman
Andres Glusman has a background in behavioral science and economics, and he is very interested in growth and experimentation. Before founding DoWhatWorks and becoming its CEO, he spent 14 years working for Meetup. Andres is also a board member at Devpost, a dad, and a casual surfer.
Links
Meetup
YouTube
MySpace
Profile
DoWhatWorks
Andres’ Email Address
Claudiu Murariu is the co-founder and CEO of InnerTrends, and in this episode, he talks about activation and PLG metrics. He highlights the advantages of working backwards and highlights a big mistake that teams make when it comes to “getting people to the promised land.” He also offers advice and tips for entrepreneurs looking to improve their activation and onboarding process.
Show Notes
[01:10] Claudiu’s definition of user activation
[03:05] Marketing a product is like making a promise
[07:10] About InnerTrends’ tool-agnostic approach and tracking strategy
[09:45] What to expect if you include a product guide in the onboarding process
[13:50] The relationship between activation and onboarding
[17:48] The purpose of the onboarding process is to let people experience things themselves
[20:40] Longer onboarding times lead to better retention
[22:28] How InnerTrends calculates the average time it takes for new users to go through the onboarding process
[24:45] How to improve your activation or onboarding experience
About Claudiu Murariu
Claudiu Murariu is the co-founder and CEO of InnerTrends, a software service that makes data work for companies that are looking to transform growth into more revenue. Before InnerTrends, he spent 3 years as a freelancer, and he worked as a web analyst for PadiCode (which he also co-founded) and Avangate.
Because he is passionate about data analytics and obsessed with data-driven businesses, Claudiu has been a keynote speaker for product events and conferences around the world. He is also the host of The Data-led Professional Podcast.
Links
Actionable Metrics Canvas Wizard
Product-led Growth Community
Profile
Claudiu Murariu on Twitter
InnerTrends
April Dunford is the author of “Obviously Awesome”, and in this episode, she talks about positioning—what it is and why it’s important. She dives into some of the analogies she used in her book to explain how positioning works. She also brings up Clay Christensen's milkshake story to break down the 5 components of positioning. She then answers some of the viewers’ questions, offering practical advice for startups.
Show Notes
[03:22] Some misconceptions about positioning, why positioning is important in business, and how it differs from traditional branding
[09:22] Why positioning is like the opening scene of a movie
[16:25] Some signs of weak positioning: total confusion, wrong comparisons, prospective clients don’t think your value is valuable or they think your vision is just a fantasy
[20:25] Define what makes your product special and then figure out what is the best context to frame those qualities in
[25:35] The 5 components of positioning: competitive alternatives, unique capabilities, differentiated value, target market segments, and market category
[27:58] On Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs to Be Done” theory
[36:05] How to convince buy-in companies that positioning is important
[43:18] How to define positioning if you do not have best customer fit yet
[45:08] How positioning influences product development
[50:05] How to position your product or company if you want to cater to different countries
About April Dunford
April Dunford studied engineering in university and then spent the first 25 years of her career as a marketing executive for startups. She has worked as a consultant for more than 100 companies, helping them fine-tune their sales and marketing teams.
Aside from being an expert on product positioning, April is also a mentor, an adviser, and a keynote speaker. She lives in Toronto, Canada with her kids and a small dog.
Links
Salesforce
Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen
Profile
April Dunford's website
April Dunford's Twitter
Zach Sims is the CEO of Codecademy, an online learning platform that teaches people how to code, along with additional skills they might need to upgrade their careers. In this episode, he walks us through the strategies he and his team used to grow Codecademy to what it is today. He also weighs in on monetization, community-driven growth, and internationalization.
Show Notes
[01:26] Codecademy’s mission and how it got started
[04:49] How Codecademy has evolved since its first version was launched
[10:38] On building a brand around the freemium model
[18:08] When is the best time to monetize?
[19:55] On brand, community, and content
[23:53] The metrics that Codecademy uses to measure end-user success
[25:50] On fostering community and why they invest in their learners
[31:27] On the future of education
About Zach Sims
Prior to launching Codecademy in 2011, Zach Sims was a student at Columbia University. He has worked in product and business development/strategy capacities at startups. He also has experience in the venture capital industry with AOL Ventures.
Codecademy has worked with organizations like The White House, the Government of Colombia, American Express, Rakuten, and more. TIME Magazine included Codecademy in its "50 Best Websites of 2012” list, and TechCrunch awarded it the "Best Education Startup" Crunchie Award in 2013.
Profile Links
Codecademy
Zach Sims on Twitter
Momo Ong is the co-founder of HeadsUp—a plug-to-play, end-to-end solution for sales teams to understand and engage their customers. In this episode, Momo shares the insane amount of research they completed before HeadsUp was built, weighing in on the challenges that go-to-market teams face in product-led growth. He also talks about the importance of product usage data and identifies specific metrics that should be created for marketing and sales success.
Show Notes
[01:32] What prompted Momo and his colleague, Earl Lee, to create HeadsUp
[03:42] On the increased need for collaboration within go-to-market teams
[05:55] On the increased need for collaboration between go-to-market teams and product engineering functions
[06:55] Why product usage data is important
[12:28] How go-to-market professionals increase collaboration within their organization
[15:15] On rolling out product usage data beyond product teams
[17:25] Extract, transform, and load product usage data into a cloud data warehouse and then create actionable metrics
[20:45] When product-led companies hire go-to-market individuals
About Momo Ong
Momo is a graduate of Princeton University who used to work on video ads at Facebook. He also held product leadership roles at Beam and FiscalNote (where he met his HeadsUp teammates Earl Lee, Justin Hegyi, and Dev Shah). He really enjoys playing games and thinking about leadership and management.
Links
FiscalNote
Salesforce
Marketo
Product-led Growth Slack
Profile
HeadsUp
Sean Hurley is the founder and CEO of Pathright, a company that helps marketing teams and startups supercharge their growth. In another episode of the How I Got Here series, Sean talks about the challenges of taking “the next step,” what it’s like to work in marketing and growth, and the subtle differences between the two industries. He also offers advice on hiring and how to harness the power of social media platforms.
Show Notes
[00:42] About Sean and Pathright
[04:50] How going up the career ladder inversely affected his happiness and motivation
[07:58] On working with Properly VP of Marketing Jess van Rooyen
[10:50] Why he wrote “Head of Growth Playbook”
[12:30] The growth engine is built by humans—not channels or money
[14:38] What Sean learned from Jobber growth product manager Connor Bradley
[17:05] Four or five channels are enough to scale your startup
[19:42] What kind of content Sean shares on LinkedIn
[22:32] On the nuances of marketing and growth
[29:32] What skills people in the growth space should have
About Sean Hurley
Sean Hurley has been in marketing and the growth space for nearly 15 years. He’s had a couple experiences on the B2B front but mainly focused on B2C products. He quit his full-time job last October 2020 and launched Pathright in February 2021.
Sean is intrinsically driven by the need to understand people and to create enough value that will inspire them into action. He started Pathright to help convert people on different channels and to drive growth.
Links
Properly
Jobber
Profile
Pathright
Head of Growth Playbook
Sean on LinkedIn
Hiten Shahis the founder of several popular software startups—Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and most recently, Nira. In this episode, Hiten talks about FYI and its transition to Nira, weighing in on the importance of access control in the hierarchy of collaboration needs. He also talks about pricing and the emotional aspect of pivoting. Be sure to tune in until the end where Hiten shares great advice for SaaS founders.
Show Notes
[01:05] On the creation of FYI and what inspired Hiten and his team to shift focus
[06:35] The problem Nira addresses
[12:22] The 3 types of pivots: problem pivot, customer pivot, and product pivot
[14:08] The differences between a pivot and a “hop”
[17:32] When is it time to pivot?
[24:08] About Hiten’s team, their approach to product building, and how they reacted to the change in direction
[28:18] On doing product-pricing research
[31:00] How to counter the pains of attachment
[35:05] Lean into your fears
About Hiten Shah
Hiten Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Nira, a real-time access control system that provides visibility and management over who has access to company documents in Google Workspace. He is a founder at heart, having started multiple well-known companies. He has also helped thousands of other people with their startups.
Links
Box
Confluence
Airtable
Slack
Profit Well
Profile
Hiten Shah on Twitter
Nira
Louis Grenier is the founder and host of Everyone Hates Marketers, a popular contrarian marketing podcast that has reached over a million downloads without ads in less than 4 years.
In this episode, Louis weighs in on the importance of radical differentiation in marketing while also explaining the steps you need to take to stand out from the competition, including things like finding a niche and being hyper-focused in your minimum viable market.
Show Notes
[01:01] About radical differentiation and marketing bullshit
[06:14] Challenge your self-limiting beliefs, obsess over your minimum viable market, engineer the differentiation, and then make people pay attention to you in a non-sleazy way.
[09:30] How to overcome your self-limiting beliefs
[15:02] April Dunford’s method for niching down
[19:02] The benefits of being hyper-focused on your minimum viable market
[20:42] Louis’ tips for finding your minimum viable market
[22:33] Look through different lenses to engineer your uniqueness
[26:07] How Louis built his podcast
[35:00] It’s hard to change people’s minds. Go after those who believe in what you believe.
[39:55] How to communicate your uniqueness
About Louis Grenier
Louis Grenier is the founder and host of the Everyone Hates Marketers podcast. Speaking from 10 years of experience in the industry, he believes that radical differentiation is the antidote to marketing bullshit.
He also has an 8-week high-intensity program to help people and organizations stand out without being sleazy.
Resources
ZAG by Marty Neumeier
The Practice by Seth Godin
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
Eating the Big Fish by Adam Morgan
Profile
Everyone Hates Marketers
Louis Grenier on LinkedIn
Stephanie Cox is the president of Lumavate and host of the Real Marketers podcast.
In this episode, she walks us through Lumavate’s journey from being a direct sales-driven company to a product-led one. Stephanie also talks about some of the tools and techniques that Lumavate has applied to find success.
Show Notes
[01:20] About Lumavate
[03:42] The challenges of transitioning from sales-led to product-led
[08:10] Why being product-led is like eCommerce
[10:22] How Stephanie and her team track data
[17:48] Consumer behavior is constantly changing
[19:19] On marketing in relation to product-led growth
[25:13] How Lumavate approaches customers
[28:25] On marketing qualified leads and how people engage with software providers
[37:15] How Lumavate has changed from a marketing point of view
[43:07] Stephanie’s advice for companies going product-led
About Stephanie Cox
Stephanie Cox has over 15 years of marketing experience and was the VP of sales and marketing at Lumavate until she became its president last May. She also hosts the Real Marketers podcast to help out other marketers, leaders, and sales reps.
Stephanie has done just about everything: launched companies, brands, new products, geographic expansion, and more. She has driven phenomenal growth, spoke at conferences around the world, led incredible teams, and she’s just getting started.
Links
Pendo
Salesforce
Sumo Logic
Pardot
Google Analytics
Profile
Lumavate
Real Marketers Podcast
Arpit Choudhury is the founder of Data-led Academy, a go-to place for anybody to learn how to work with data. In this episode, he explains why data is at the heart of being product-led and offers advice on implementation and documentation. He also talks about the different types of technologies and tools that startups should know about and consider investing in.
Show Notes
[01:18] What being data-led means to Arpit
[02:39] Why product-led companies should be data-led
[07:13] On data collection, storage, analysis, and activation
[13:25] Some of the most popular tools and their open-source alternatives
[18:10] On model data
[19:02] Have your data warehouse as your main source
[20:50] Arpit’s recommended tools for product-led startups
[26:38] Implement server-side analytics from the get-go
[29:24] How to overcome “data spaghetti”
[34:00] Create a tracking plan
About Arpit Choudhury
Arpit Choudhury is a non-engineer who loves data and application programming interface (API). He started Data-led Academy as a side project about a year ago because of the lack of educational resources for non-techy people, but now, it’s a full-time endeavor.
Challenge is a word that can be connected to Arpit—he likes to think about the big challenges we face as a society, work on challenging problems, and challenge the status quo. He is also driven by building value and passionate about contributing to communities.
Links
Segment Connections
RudderStack
Fivetran
Stitch
Matillion
mParticle
Hull
Amperity
Snowflake
Google BigQuery
AWS Redshift
Heap
Indicative
Rakam
PopSQL
Metabase
Redash
Superset
Preset
Amplitude
Brave
Profile
Data-led Academy
How to create a tracking plan
Arpit Choudhury on Twitter
Arpit Choudhury on LinkedIn
Sandhya Hegde is a Partner at Unusual Ventures, an early-stage VC firm that provides funding and comprehensive GTM services to early-stage founders. Sandhya leads enterprise investments at the fund, focused on new-age SaaS, data, and fintech. In this episode, Sandhya chats about the role enterprise fits into product-led growth. She touches on the biggest challenges for PLG companies, and shares her #1 piece of advice for founders.
Show Notes
[01:13] Sandhya’s background and how she got started at Unusual VC
[05:09] Something to brag about from what she accomplished in Amplitude
[07:42] What Product-Led Growth is for her and its misconceptions
[10:05] On the misconception that PLG is all about the product
[11:19] How she sees teams work in a Product-Led company vs. Sales-Led company
[15:00] The biggest challenges she sees for Product-Led companies
[21:15] Her thoughts on going ahead with PLG for pre-product market fit
[26:06] Her advice for companies on transitioning to product-led from sales-led
[32:15] Her thoughts on going product-led for complex products
[39:54] On the key focus for getting started with product-Led growth
[44:07] Her thoughts on PLG and enterprise
[49:19] A strong piece of PLG advice she has for founders
[52:40] Where to find more about Sandhya
About Sandhya Hegde
In addition to being a Partner at Unusual Ventures, Sandhya Hedge is currently an investor of four other companies: Webflow, Wonderschool, Flutterwave, and iMerit Technology. Prior to Unusual Ventures, Sandhya spent four years at Amplitude, where she gained significant experience in Product-Led Growth. She earned her BS and MS in Electronics and Computer Science degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay in 2007 and her Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University in 2013.
Link
Amplitude
Profile
Unusual Ventures
Sandhya onLinkedIn
Tom Coburn is the co-founder and CEO of Jebbit, a Boston-based startup. The Jebbit platform enables marketers to quickly build beautiful interactive experiences and drives high engagement by providing consumers with immediate value in exchange for relevant information about their motivations, interests and preferences. During this live session Q&A, Tom will reveal how Jebbit found more success after its transition from a sales-led enterprise to a product-led organization.
Show Notes
[01:08] An overview of Jebbit and how it went from startup to working with big brands
[08:08] How Tom’s PLG Task Force gradually created an onboarding flow that the company was comfortable with
[12:20] On finding a specific use case
[14:09] The initial steps Jebbit took to introduce the free version of its product
[17:57] The challenges they had to overcome during beta testing
[20:00] Analytics help them discover points where they need improvement
[23:00] The start of Jebbit’s success and the developments that took place after that
[28:46] How pricing has shifted since Jebbit became product-led
[31:02] The differences between Jebbit’s free and premium versions
[33:36] On having open dialogues with customers and how Jebbit’s sales team reaches out
[38:34] Tom's advice for sales-led businesses that want to become product-led
About Tom Coburn
Tom Coburn is the co-founder and CEO of Jebbit. The digital marketing startup created the world’s first declared data platform. It was named one of the Top 25 Most Promising Companies in the World by CNBC, and its clients include Procter & Gamble, NFL, and Bliss Cosmetics.
Tom is a student entrepreneur who honed his experiences while doing his undergraduate in Boston College. He is also “Settlers of Catan” enthusiast who made it to the 2015 Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list together with Jebbit co-founder Jonathan Lacoste.
Links Mentioned
On Starting and Scaling HubSpot
HubSpot
Shopify
Profile
Jebbit
Tom Coburn on LinkedIn
Tom Coburn's email
Andrea Saez is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at airfocus. airfocus is an easy-to-use prioritization and road mapping software solution that helps teams visualize priorities, build lean roadmaps, collaborate on strategy, and align vision with the whole organization. In this episode, she will talk about creating a product adoption strategy. She will also give tips and recommendations on doing product adoption and dealing with customers.
Show Notes
[00:58] How Andrea defines Product Strategy and how it fits in the product roadmap
[01:38] How to start coming up with product adoption strategy in teams for her
[02:41] Her suggestion on the product adoption goal to drive around and how to hit it
[04:41] Her way of knowing if a product is already adopted
[07:02] The strategies and tactics to achieve the desired goal or outcome
[09:07] An experiment she had on product adoption
[10:50] On driving product adoption geared towards a buying persona
[12:45] How she measures product adoption on new features
[15:57] How she deals with user issues
[18:21] On measuring loyalty, giving delighters, and creating and developing relationships with users
[26:18] Her advice for the product-led community and enthusiasts
[30:13] Her view on the scope of product adoption
[31:22] Her tips for creating a customer experience journey map across teams
[33:01] How she handles communication with uninterested customers
[36:24] On balancing self-education and personal experience for customers
About Andrea Saez
Andrea Saez is passionate about product management, growth strategies, and community engagement. She loves to learn, talk, and engage with customers and apply product-thinking to scaling companies. She shares her passion through writing and hosting talks and events.
Andrea is the Co-Founder of The Product Dynamic. It is a company that helps teams navigate organizations, defeat cognitive biases and create healthy working dynamics across teams to build great products and drive positive change. She has honed her expertise through her experiences working in various companies such as Evoca, CakeMail, Amilia Technologies, Inc., Brandwatch and ProdPad.
Links Mentioned
Miro
Hubspot
Canva
Profile
airfocus
Andrea Saez on LinkedIn
Chris Hicken is the Co-Founder and CEO at 'nuffsaid. ‘nuffsaid is a company that builds software that centralizes work apps and prioritizes the messages and tasks that help people focus on the job that matters and be proactive. He sees it as a modern solution to information and communication overload at work as the number of apps and productivity tools onboarded increases. With the help of dozens of Customer Success thought leaders, Chris has extensively researched the low-touch engagement model for product-led and sales-led companies. In this episode, Chris will share the interesting outcomes of that research.
Show Notes
[01:15] About Chris and what got him interested in the topic
[04:08] About customer support and customer success and the human-led and digital-led models
[06:03] The research he has done on the low touch model and its impact
[07:37] On deciding on the best approach in implementing the low touch model
[10:12] Why companies have to move towards the low or tech touch model for him
[13:06] On not considering a free trial or proof of concept product-led growth
[14:44] The three levels of maturity he has seen in companies in moving towards low touch
[21:56] On getting on top of resolving product issues at the second maturity level
[25:05] Where he thinks the proactive component fit in at level two
[29:15] On getting into the third level
[32:21] His thoughts about the effectivity of proactivity in level two and three
[34:41] His approach in building his low touch CSM team for success
[38:52] His view on the strategic role of support in low touch model in product-led companies
[42:56] Final words from Chris
[4437:307] Where to get in touch with Chris
About Chris Hicken
Chris Hicken describes himself as an artist. He has worked as a business leader at various companies for 17 years and is currently a board member at The/Studio and an advisor at Peer Collective, TestRigor AI, and Acceleprise. Previously, Chris was an advisor at GitPrime and Study.com, a partner at Inspiration Ventures, the former President and COO of UserTesting, and a General Manager and Head of Marketing at Headsets.com.
He graduated from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo in 2003 with a degree in BS Computer Science
Links Mentioned
User Testing
Salesforce
Salesforce Lightning
RD Station
Survey Monkey
Amazon
Low-Touch Engagement Model article
Profile
‘nuffsaid
‘nuffsaid Blog
The 'nuffsaid podcast
Celebrate the launch of "Product-Led Onboarding," the new book by Ramli John and Wes Bush.
In this special bonus episode, learn:
- The story behind Product-Led Onboarding
- One common myth about user onboarding
- BIG prizes you can win during the book launch
Learn more about the book at onboardingbook.com
You can purchase the book here https://www.amazon.com/dp/1777717701
Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr are the hosts of The Breakout Growth Podcast. In this podcast, they interview CEOs and product, growth, and marketing leaders from the fastest-growing companies in the world. They do this for the listeners to learn from them how to take growth to the next level. In this episode, they will talk about the difference between growth hacking and product-led growth.
Show Notes
[00:38] Similarities and differences of Growth hacking and Product-led growth
[05:06] On the assumption that growth hacking focus on B2C and Product-Led on B2B spaces
[08:39] Another example from Sean and Ethan on conversion and getting value
[10:25] On the right approach to get buy-ins to transition from sales-led to product-led
[12:22] The fundamentals that everybody agrees on regardless of the strategy chosen
[14:35] On figuring out and understanding the people who are not getting the value quickly
[17:57] On doing the upfront alignment and the game plan to push for the future
[20:35] Some of the big success drivers for today’s fastest-growing B2B companies
[23:11] The idea of nailing product-market fit and ways to do it
[25:06] The growth mindset drives the test learning process
[29:06] How they ensure alignment through measuring and the result that people need to have
[31:01] On customer experiences and retention
[33:33] Set focus on the conversion funnel, its improvements, and the payback window
[36:05] On having a growth process even without free trial premium and how they go about it
[37:37] Mistakes made by premium companies that made them go out of business
[42:59] Where to catch Sean and Ethan
About Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr
Sean Ellis co-authors the book entitled Hacking Growth. He is an expert in building growth engines for several highly successful startups, unlocking growth for companies at any stage. He can quickly uncover the barriers to growth in most companies and offer solutions to address these issues.
Ethan Garr specializes in using data and experimentation to drive breakout growth for mobile apps. He helps companies improve their growth trajectories through workshops, coaching, and as a trusted advisor.
He was a speaker on mobile growth at Growthhackers’ Conference 2018 and the Mixergy podcast. He got featured in NBC Nightly News, ABC World News, TechCrunch, and the New York Times.
Profiles
The Breakout Growth Podcast
Product-Led Growth Slack Community
Esben Friis-Jensen is the Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Userflow, the fastest way for user onboarding for modern SaaS businesses. He is also the Co-Founder and Adviser at Cobalt, a modern application security platform enabling businesses to run on-demand Penetration Testing and vulnerability assessments - Pentest as a Service. The goal of this episode is to accelerate learning while transitioning from sales-led to product-led. Esben will talk about the whole transition: What other leaders are doing in this transition and what mistakes they make to avoid doing it again.
Show Notes
[01:09] A brief background about Esben
[03:38] His thoughts when they started the product-led movement
[07:11] Reasons why they started out as more sales-led
[11:15] The challenges they experienced along the way
[15:40] How they fostered organizational change
[18:55] The process they went through to get the rest of the team onboard
[23:32] How they got buy-in from the teams in the process of transitioning
[28:49] First quick wins they had in testing the unknowns
[34:50] More advice on iteration from Esben
[37:42] The next thing for him at Userflow
[39:47] Where to find Esben
About Esben Friis-Jensen
Esben Friis-Jensen is originally from Denmark but has lived in the United States for the last eight years. Aside from Userflow and Cobalt, he has also worked as a consultant in the SAP division of Accenture, responsible for managing the test and deployment of global large-scale SAP implementations.
Link
Product-Led Slack
Profiles
Userflow
Cobalt
Yuliya Malysh is the Head of Self-service and Growth at Miro. Miro is a fast, free, and simple-to-use online whiteboard built to help you collaborate with others any time, anywhere. She has been with the company since 2013, starting as the Self Service and Data Team Lead. In this episode, Yuliya will talk about how Miro applies product-led growth and how it accelerates its growth.
Show Notes
[01:21] The routine Yuliya developed during the lockdown
[04:21] Why is product-led growth important, and how has it help grown Miro for her
[06:26] How she makes her team learn from customers continuously
[11:02] What the WTF exercise is
[12:26] The importance of ‘Time To Value’ and what they do at Miro to reduce it
[15:34] Examples of good friction she introduced to her team that bring positive impact on activation
[18:16] How she encourages people to share the experience with others
[21:09] How she crafts an experience for the multiple-use case for customer engagement
[23:44] On limiting use cases in the beginning
[26:53] Her recommendation on the right metrics to use in tracking product-led growth success
[29:33] How to connect with Yuliya
About Yuliya Malysh
Yuliya Malysh is a visual thinker. She empowers teams to create excellent products and experiences anywhere and everywhere by making visual collaboration possible and easy, making it her career mission.
Links
Slack
Profile
Miro
Andrew Capland is the Head of Growth at Postscript, focused on driving product adoption and engagement. Postscript is an SMS marketing platform for Shopify stores that allows clients to send campaigns, create automation, and drive new revenue for their store to ensure ROI.
Show Notes
[00:53] Who Andrew is
[02:58] How to start a growth team from scratch and balancing it with your main job
[05:29] His thoughts around why companies should have a growth team
[07:35] The process of being a lone wolf to scaling it up
[10:37] What initiatives he executed in the initial phase before blowing growth up into a department
[13:43] Situations wherein he bumped into other teams working on growth and how he handled it
[17:12] How he identifies quick wins to get people’s buy-in
[20:01] How he strikes a balance between improving the user onboarding and looking at the bigger picture
[22:19] What he does quarterly to make sure his ideas are executed
[24:10] About the Full Story Friday and the things he does to do a follow-ups
[28:53] Some mistakes he did that he can tell others to avoid
[31:54] On developing himself as a growth leader and his team to level up
[34:49] Examples of growth playbooks he can share
[38:08] What will he focus on if hired as the Growth head of a company that has not been launched yet
[40:45] His view on doing Growth in a Product-Led vs. Sales-Led company
[44:06] The great lessons he learned on starting and scaling a growth team
[45:32] Something that he is working on that may be useful for growth people or those who are thinking about doing growth
About Andrew Capland
Andrew Capland is an expert of Product-Led and a Growth nerd. He lives, breathes, and loves all types of growth such as product-led, Growth marketing, Growth product management, etc. He is also a busy person as he welcomes his newborn baby into their family.
He has worked all across the funnel from user acquisition, user onboarding, pricing optimization, and retention. He has previously worked in Wistia as Director of Growth and HubSpot as the Principal Outbound Marketing Consultant.
Links
Shopify
Wistia
Hubspot
VWO
Drift
Gorgias
Profiles
Postscript
Delivering Value
You were just hired as the Head of Growth at a startup article
Norah Shi is the Growth Analytics Manager, and Eduardo Gomez Ruiz is the UX Research Lead at Miro. Miro is a digital whiteboard that makes collaboration virtually easier. In this episode, the discussion will focus on the guidelines on how analytics and UX Research can give astonishing insights on forming delightful products that customers will love.
Show Notes
[01:46] What they did before joining Miro
[03:25] The size of Miro as a company and a team for them
[04:57] What it is like working in UX Research at Miro for Eduardo
[07:43] What the Growth team at Miro does and its size as a team for Norah
[11:18] How Eduardo collaborates with other teams
[10:36] Norah’s transition from dealing with data to dealing with people for research
[16:19] The way of researching at Miro
[19:20] Sharing her experience in leading her first N2N research and its benefits
[23:21] His view on the ideal acceptance rate and number of invites to send out for recruitment
[24:37] Their most unforgettable user interview
[27:28] The rewards for the research and measuring customer love at Miro
[30:44] How Norah feels about MPS and trying sentiment analysis
[32:14] His thoughts on handpicking quotes for MPS
[34:22] A walkthrough of the analysis process
[37:53] Her brilliant idea of inviting five teams in debriefing sessions
[40:45] The most crucial part of the tool tech to support capturing insights apart from Miro
[42:08] More about Miro boards
[43:58] Eduardo shares some good resources for the listeners
[44:25] On working, coordinating globally remotely, and the Miro culture
[47:54] What would Norah do differently, knowing what she knows now when she first did her research
[48:38] What Eduardo thinks that Norah has done that adds value
[49:57] Their recommendations on what the listeners can do to start with research ASAP
About Norah and Eduardo
Norah Shi is an expert on Growth at Miro. She has honed her skills from Uber as a Strategy and Planning Senior Associate under UberEats EMEA and PwC as an Analytics Consultant.
Eduardo Gomez Ruiz is an expert in multi-market research studies and international business growth. Apart from Miro, he has worked with Uber, leading the Loyalty program creation for Uber Pro, Google, or Mitsubishi Electric.
Links
- Zoom
- Paypal
Profile
- Miro
Anna Talericois the Operating Partner at Arthur Ventures in Nashville, Tennessee. Arthur Ventures is an early growth capital firm that leads investments in B2B software companies located outside Silicon Valley. She partners with portfolio companies to help them take advantage of strategic and tactical opportunities to accelerate growth and create enterprise value.
Show Notes
[01:04] What Anna loves to do
[02:09] What Arthur Ventures is and its focus
[03:12] Why should people be wary of the traditional SaaS inside sales model
[04:59] The shift of inside sales role in a product-led organization
[08:15] The value-adding moments of the customer journey
[10:36] An example of success in doing high touch in small accounts
[11:42] On motion efficiency
[13:38] Where to start for a traditional product-led organization to build a world-class expansion team
[16:51] When is the right time for a purely product-led company to add more sales assisted motion
[19:16] Structuring sales compensation for a product-led organization
[21:42] The ideal range of commissions for salespeople
[23:58] The role of SDRs in a product-led organization
[26:27] What product-led funnel and product-led growth are for Arthur Ventures
[30:41] Her pieces of advice to product listeners
About Anna Talerico
Anna Talerico takes pride in helping to build and scale software companies and tackling the challenges faced by startups and high-growth SaaS companies. She focuses on the go-to-market, people, culture, and creating significant enterprise value.
She is an expert on handling customers, increasing product adoption, building efficient sales teams, shaping desirable company culture, and most of all, running high-growth, capital-efficient organizations.
Link
- IBM
Profile
- Arthur Ventures
- Anna on Twitter
- Anna on LinkedIn
Yazan Sehwail is the Co-founder and CEO at Userpilot. It is a product growth platform that helps product teams deliver personalized in-app experiences to increase growth metrics at every stage of the user journey. In this episode, Yazan will talk about Userpilot features and ways of doing things relating to product growth. With that, he will also share his perspective about AB Testing and more about product activation. He will also share essential tips and advice for product people that will surely help.
Show Notes
[00:29] What Userpilot is
[01:36] What is involved in conducting AB Testing and how to do it
[02:46] How they got the buy-in from the whole team in the process at Userpilot
[03:37] What is an effective Product Activation experiment for him
[06:14] The impact of activation experiments for him
[07:44] His view on the timing of conducting effective activation experiments
[10:21] His suggestion on indicating aha moments in user activation
[12:57] What he suggests for teams with multiple use cases
[14:47] How to improve product activation for him
[18:39] Pointing out results in using the process
[20:36] Pieces of advice for product people
[22:54] How to know more about Yazan and Userpilot
About Yazan Sehwail
Yazan Sehwail has a vast knowledge of the B2B SaaS space. He is an exceptional resource for strategy, sales operations, and developing scalable processes to improve companies concerning growth. He is previously the co-founder and brand manager at InnerChip. It is a software development firm specializing in enterprise web app development.
Profile
- Userpilot
- Userpilot Blog
Tom Ronen is the head of customer success at monday.com. Monday.com is a global software company founded in 2014. Its product is a simple and super customizable Work Operating System (Work OS), a tool that powers teams to run projects and workflows with confidence. In this episode, Tom will talk about how product and customer success collaborate on monday.com.
Show Notes
[01:56] What monday.com is and its customers
[03:05] The importance of customer success and product teams to work closely together for him
[06:14] On finding the north star for both teams and KPIs to prioritize
[08:00] Who are the ‘active customers’ for monday.com
[10:13] Propagating the culture of transparency in all teams at monday.com
[12:31] Strategies to encourage collaboration from the teams at monday.com
[14:28] The evident effects of the system of doing things at monday.com
[18:00] His advice for product-led leaders and growth people on setting priorities
[20:25] His advice for customer success people in product-led organizations on getting their voices heard
[22:08] How to connect with Tom
About Tom Ronen
Tom Ronen is an experienced Customer Team Lead working for various companies in the software industry. He possesses the following skills in sales, public speaking, management in a fast-paced startup environment. Aside fromHe was previously connected with Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as a Commanding Officer - Combat Patrol Ship Unit for three years and two months.
Profile
- monday.com
- Tom Ronen on LinkedIn
Fung-Lin Wu and Tatiana Morozova are powerful women handling important roles at MongoDB. It is an open-source document database used in many modern web applications. They are behind the successful acquisition and retention alignment. They have proven that working together is possible and will bring positive results to the company, especially on customer activation.
Show Notes
[00:51] Their background and roles at MongoDB
[02:42] How they keep the funnel flow smoothly from acquisition to retention
[04:34] How they measure quality sign-ups at MongoDB
[06:47] Frequency of their meetings to keep track of progress
[08:51] Success metrics and OKRs used across the teams at MongoDB
[11:32] What they do to maintain the alignment of teams
[13:52] A proof of their success in working together
[15:39] Teams they work with closely to ensure Product Led success
[17:45] Their bits of advice on acquisition retention alignment
About Fung-Lin Wu and Tatiana Morozova
Fung-Lin Wu is the Director of Retention Marketing at MongoDB who focuses on driving user activation and engagement throughout a customer's lifecycle. She is passionate about impacting business initiatives through customer lifecycle marketing, digital marketing, demand generation, and marketing analytics. Her experience includes Growth Marketing, Digital Marketing, Marketing Operations, and Marketing Analytics in the technology industry.
Tatiana Morozova is the Growth Marketing Lead at MongoDB. She is a seasonal marketing professional with a strong ability to optimize business processes and scale user growth.
Profile
- MongoDB
- Fung-Lin Wu's LinkedIn
- Tatiana Morozova's LinkedIn
Chris Smith is a Melbourne-based expert who is the founder and CEO of BIG Esports, a consulting firm that helps companies find their authentic voice and set up the right amplifiers to reach their audience. He also launches his podcasts on LinkedIn, where he has over 24,000 followers. In this episode, he will dig deep into creating a competitive edge on LinkedIn and other social media platforms that is super relevant for those who want to step up in the content creation game.
Show Notes
[01:33] How Chris started his passion and building his niche
[03:39] The importance of skills in gaming for him
[05:22] How he manages his time to stay active in social media
[08:12] His recommendations in posting on various social media platforms
[11:22] His creative team and quality content work
[13:12] On finding the right stories for clients he works with
[17:03] His thoughts about B2B influencers and how to find them
[21:52] How his podcasting activities fits his social media activities
[24:54] How he goes about the analytics for his posts
[28:23] The metrics tracking platform he uses to monitor posts
[30:11] His ideas on interesting collaboration on social media along the line of gaming
[34:03] Two things to learn from gaming vertical and other good stuff for him
[37:14] What games got hooked to at the moment
[38:00] On using the Clubhouse app
[39:59] Bits of advice from Chris
[40:48] Where to connect with him
About Chris Smith
Chris Smith is a big expert in the gaming and Esport industry. His passion for esports and continued business growth is what comes first for him. He is into business consulting, management consulting, public relations, and project management. He used to work in marketing and Public Relations for computer-enhancing giants such as Corsair and ThermalTake. ‘Building a strong network of like-minded individuals is where he prides himself as a professional, striving for the success of those who join him in his journey.
Links
- Shield
- Canva
- Clubhouse
Profile
- Chris Smith’s Email Address
- Chris Smith on Twitter
- Chris Smith on LinkedIn
- BIG Esports
David Rostan is Head of Revenue (Sales & Marketing) at Stonly in New York. Stonly is a company that created a unique widget to build interactive guides to lead clients’ customers to activation, issue resolution, and success on their terms. He has previously worked with fascinating product-led companies such as Calendly as VP for sales and marketing and Dashly as Head of organic and product marketing. These companies are known for effectively scaling that improved their onboarding experiences. In this episode, David will talk about the topic at hand -- how to use customer intent to build product onboarding that scales.
Show Notes
[01:19] How David got fascinated in customer intent and product onboarding and scales
[03:45] The importance of tailoring onboarding for different user intent for him
[05:51] His view on the differences of customer intent at different stages
[07:59] What customer intent is for him
[10:59] On ‘asking’ as the first step to meaningfully understand customer intent
[14:39] On testing and seeing what resonates as the second step
[17:27] On identifying the pattern, replicate successes, and observe as the last steps
[23:13] What he does best to scale the business right now
[26:23] His favorite companies using user intent
[29:12] What intent signals he looks for to ensure success for clients
[31:36] The results of the experiments he had on user intent to scale onboarding
[35:27] On how to further use customer intent to scale and deliver superb onboarding experiences
[37:53] Ways on building the empathy muscle for him
[40:26] Where to find out more about David
About David Rostan
David Rostan is a marketing bigshot with a track record of starting up and expanding mobile products and applications on the web in Fortune 100 and start-up environments. He has outstanding experience in leading all aspects of marketing strategy, such as but not limited to customer acquisition, product innovation, customer research, branding, and data analytics, to accomplish business objectives. He has accomplished so much as an entrepreneur. He has launched 3 SaaS applications and grew them via online and offline sales and marketing channels. He specializes in the following fields: digital marketing and strategy, customer acquisition and channel prioritization, customer development and market research, technology innovation and product management, team building or hiring, strategic planning (OKRs), and leadership.
Profile
- David Rostan on LinkedIn
- David Rostan’s Email Address
- Stonly
Matheus Mello is the Growth and Product Manager at Productboard, a product management system that helps product managers understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and rally everyone around the roadmap. In this episode, Matheus will talk about Product-Led experimentation -- running Product-Led experiments in your company through having a clearly defined system. Furthermore, he will share seven worth-noting lessons from his five years of experience in doing Product-Led experimentations.
Show Notes
[02:15] What experiment Matheus finds most exciting and coolest
[05:53] What he thinks works and what does not in B2B that applies to B2C
[08:48] How he comes up with experimentation ideas
[12:32] The mistakes he thinks companies make in the context of growth experimentation
[16:27] His recommendations for companies on starting experimentation
[19:53] Going deep into how good friction is in improving onboarding conversion
[24:05] The importance of getting the whole organization involved in thinking about experimentations
[26:47] His bits of advice for companies on growth experimentation
[28:24] Where to find more about Matheus and Productboard
About Matheus Mello
Matheus Mello is a product management and growth professional who is passionate about building valuable and outcome-driven products. He has impressive experiences in leading growth and experimentation teams, B2B and B2C SaaS, CRO, activation, monetization, and retention. Matheus has accomplished so much in his career. Among these are: assisted organizations forge and grow marketing and product experimentation processes, he made generating more than 100Million dollars worth of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) possible with successful growth experiments, he made utility products the best performing the first-purchase category of Avast in 2018, and has product managed physical and digital products globally.
Profile
- Matheus Mello on LinkedIn
- Matheus Mello on Twitter
- Productboard
This show is memorable as Product-Led Podcast turns one! A great year of featuring world-class product leaders and learning how they grow their business through the product. Get excited as Ramli and Wes make this episode special in celebration of its first anniversary. With that, both will be sharing the Top Three big year-worth of learnings from the podcast. Listen until the end to know what surprise awaits the listeners as PLP’s way of saying thank you!
Show Notes
[01:21] Wes’ biggest takeaways around the podcast
[02:30] Ramli on recalling podcasts on empathy
[04:00] Wes’ takeaway on on-going optimization
[05:23] The triple-A model in Wes’ book
[06:01] Ramli’s takeaway on the importance of working as a team
[09:06] Making PLP better throughout the year and their requests from the listeners
[10:28] PLP’s surprise for the listeners
[11:16] Wes’ thank you message for the listeners
About Product-Led Podcast
The Product-Led Podcast is available on all of your favorite mobile apps so you can listen wherever and whenever. Click below and subscribe on:
- Apple Podcast
- Spotify
- Overcast
- Google Podcast
- Breaker
Understanding your customers and providing the best experience for them on product experimentation is quite a trend nowadays. Companies are now shifting to Experience Optimization.
In this episode, Jean-Yves Simon will talk about how organizations use experimentation today. With this, he will talk on Experience Optimization and go beyond Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). He will also tell us about the kind of technology that you can use to do CRO tests and how customer success in the era of PLG is becoming more product-focused.
Learn today’s trend in the industry! This episode will help PLG practitioners to make better their business through Experience Optimization. Do not miss this episode!
Show Notes
[01:36] JY on building his carer with AB Tasty
[02:11] His view on experience optimization as part of the product development life cycle
[03:14] His opinion on what PLG companies need to put more experience in product experiments
[04:21] Tools he recommends to have a whole experience optimization in companies
[06:20] What the whole experience optimization looks like vs traditional optimization for him
[07:53] What the experience optimization team composition is and its functions for him
[09:46] His important advice on looking at side KPIs and customer success to PLG practitioners
About Jean-Yves Simon
Jean-Yves Simon is a product leader who specializes in SaaS with deep expertise in MarTech and AdTech platforms & Apps, including Display, Email and Data platforms. He is the current Senior Vice President for Products at AB Tasty.
Profile
- Jean-Yves Simon on LinkedIn
- AB Tasty Website
- AB Tasty session at the Product Led Summit
- Segment Website
The pandemic remains to be a global concern. At this challenging time, digital companies are forced into making shifts from sales led to product led to stay in business. However, this is not an easy shift to do. But this did not stop PatSnap from doing it.
In this episode, Jeffrey will talk about how the pandemic triggered the company to make the shift and what obstacles the company encountered throughout the process. He will also share how the company made the shift and how they handled the hurdles along the way. Through the shifting, the company also formed its PLG Team. Jeffrey will put more sense on the team’s purpose and its mechanics, as well as the adjustments they made to make way for the product-led transition.
This episode will give listeners an idea of what it is like to shift gears from being a sales-led company to a product-led one. Great advice from Jefferey awaits the listeners. Do not miss this episode!
Show Notes
[00:50] What triggered PatSnap product-led journey
[02:33] Their obstacles in shifting and how they handled them
[04:21] The Top-Down approach adjustments they made from shifting
[05:56] What Jeffrey thinks is the right move that the company did
[07:16] How they prepared for implementing the shift to PLG
[09:03] PatSnap’s PLG Team
[11:22] The experiments that the company did along with the shift
[12:09] What did not go well in the course of implementing the shift
[13:35] His bits of advice to companies on becoming or implementing product-led
About Jeffrey Tiong
Jeffrey Tiong is the founder and CEO at PatSnap, a fast-growing Innovation big data SaaS companies, that invests over trillions of dollars for Research and Development (R&D) worldwide. The company’s mission is to help R&D thought leaders globally improve by providing a suite of R&D analytic and management tools for businesses, universities, start-ups and research organizations.
Profile
- Jeffrey Tiong on LinkedIn
- Jeffrey Tiong on Twitter
- PatSnap
In a tech company, the road to success is to scale up. After successfully creating a super product and having a base of happy users, the next option is optimizing growth by scaling it up. With this, it is necessary to have a growth team plan and conduct a series of growth tests to scale product usage.
In this episode, Matt will talk about his experiences in working on growth in Drift and Hubspot. He will also talk about how it has helped him evolve with the team to work with various departments and handle multiple roles and functions. He will also share his learnings based on his mistakes and his realizations on what he needs to do to make things better for the company in the future.
This episode will help those who are starting with growth. Listen and get your takeaways from Matt.
Show Notes
[00:50] About Matt and what he does
[01:59] On being a product person with a growth mindset
[02:23] How he started doing growth roles with Drift
[06:06] His story on the 0 to 1 moments early on
[08:49] On the reality of Drift starting with a not-so-clean data
[11:41] Working with Hubspot and his takeaways
[14:05] The importance of focusing on the value for users and the problem at hand
[16:04] On growth team goals and its pressures
[18:29] How he sees the growth version of Hubspot and Drift’s first version
[21:11] How the team and projects at Drift evolved over time
[23:33] How his role changes over time with growth at Drift
[25:18] How the other angle of growth type work influenced him on what he does
[26:51] What skills he focused on to be successful in his role and achieving plans
[28:35] His learning moments
[30:55] What he could have done differently, working on growth, to bring people on the loop
[33:18] About his Growth Podcast
About Matt Bilotti
Matt Bilotti is the Product Lead, Growth & Lifecycle at Drift. Being with Drift for five and a half years, he has watched the company grow from earning $0 to $107M in revenue. He has worked across departments, roles, and functions with his core footing in product-based roles. He wrote a book with David Cancel entitled Burndown: A Better Way To Build Products and he has the Growth Podcast for Drift.
Link
- Product-Led Pro
Profile
- Matt Bilotti on LinkedIn
- Matt Bilotti on Twitter
- Matt Bilotti Personal Website
- Growth with Matt Bilotti
In this special episode, Wes and Ramli will introduce a new and unique product to support companies or teams in climbing up the ladder of success in handling their Product-Led business: the Product-Led Pro Accelerator Program. This program uses a nonlinear approach to learning. It helps in transitioning or scaling up a Product-Led business and being successful through learning from the experts.
Learn more about the program as Wes and Ramli will answer these questions: Who are the target participants/audiences? What are the benefits for those who will be joining the enriching program? What are the four components of the program cycle and other features of the program?
If this is what you need in your business, then, this is an episode that you do not want to miss!
Show Notes
[00:31] The 6-weeks Product-Led Pro Accelerator Program
[03:51] What companies need to consider in joining the program
[05:13] The target participants/audiences of the program
[06:39] What big groups or teams joining the program awaits
[09:01] What makes the program unique
[10:01] The Interactive learning component of the program
[11:18] The “seeing what drives results” component of the program
[12:29] The “doing what best works” component of the program
[13:03] The review component to complete the program cycle
[13:30] Other features of the program in the future
Profile
- Wes Bush on LinkedIn
- Ramli John on LinkedIn
- Product-Led Pro
- Email Address: courses@productled.com
- Wes Bush's Email Address: wes@productled.com
- Ramli's Email Address: ramli@productled.com
Robbie Allan is the Group Product Manager at Intercom, the only suite of customer messaging products designed to drive growth at every stage of the customer lifecycle—acquisition, support, and engagement. In this episode, Robbie talked about the importance of user onboarding for companies, how jobs-to-be-done can affect user onboarding, and his aha moment.
Show Notes
[03:55] How long he’s working at Intercom and how he got started in his current role
[05:30] The importance of user onboarding for companies
[08:54] Why most companies get onboarding wrong
[12:27] His suggestion for teams who want to improve their onboarding
[14:37] Who should own onboarding
[18:18] How jobs to be done can affect user onboarding
[23:24] How the four forces come into play
[27:05] What to do when there are multiple jobs-to-be-done
[30:30] His aha moment
[32:39] When the initial onboarding is done
[37:44] His advice to podcast listeners
[41:03] Where people can find out more about him and Intercom
About Robbie Allan
Robbie Allan is a seasoned SaaS product leader with a top-tier strategy background. He also has world-class B2B SaaS experience and a passion for sales and marketing. Currently, he is the Group Product Manager at Intercom, the business manager loved by businesses and customers alike. Today, over 30,000 businesses use Intercom to connect with over a billion people worldwide!
Profile
- Inside Intercom Blog
- Robbie on Twitter
Katie Mitchell is Head of Marketing at UserLeap, the platform designed for modern user research. Also hailed as the first continuous research platform, UserLeap uses artificial intelligence to help UX researchers and product managers obtain quantitative insights at scale so they can make informed product decisions in just hours. In this episode, Katie talked about her primary responsibilities, their marketing plans for 2021, and her advice to those who want to go product-led.
Show Notes
[00:44] Her main responsibilities right now
[04:07] Difference in her roles and responsibilities
[06:47] He definition of PQL
[08:29] What has been working in terms of her transition into becoming product-led
[13:16] What their plans are for 2021 in terms of marketing
[15:26] The role of salespeople in their product-led journey
[19:20] Her advice to those who want to go product-led
[20:16] Where people can find out more about her and UserLeap
About Katie Mitchell
Katie Mitchell is a curious problem solver and a DC-based marketer. She is also the Head of Marketing at UserLeap. For over a decade, she has worked at various SaaS-based companies across B2B and B2C. She helps them elevate their brands and accelerate their growth. Before that, she has worked with large consumer brands like Campbell’s Soup Company, PBS, and BB&T Bank.
Profile
- Katie on LinkedIn
- Katie on Twitter
- UserLeap
Sam Crowell Richard is the director of the growth team at OpenView, an expansion stage venture firm that helps turn software companies into market leaders. At OpenView, she has helped accelerate top line growth by establishing processes and best practices that support product-led growth. In this episode, Sam talked about the challenges she faced, the kind of problems she loves to work on, and the most important skills she thinks are needed to succeed in growth.
Show Notes
[02:35] What OpenView is and how her role fits in there
[04:01] The skillset that has helped her get to this point
[05:32] The foundation of her skillset
[13:20] What happened when she led the marketing team
[18:37] Challenges she faced when she took on project strategy
[20:41] How she learned how to crossover into the product realm
[26:28] What the vibe is at OpenView
[31:40] Favorite type of problems she loves to work on
[33:22] Trends she has noticed
[35:37] The most important skills needed to be successful in growth
[36:57] Common traps she’s seeing
[38:00] Skills she’s working on right now
[39:24] How she knows if she’s making progress
About Sam Richard
Sam Richard is the director of growth at OpenView. She works closely with portfolio leadership teams to determine and implement powerful and impactful growth strategies. Sam also takes care of onboarding and retention optimization, funnel optimization, and channel/partner strategy. Before joining OpenView, Sam worked as the director of growth and engagement at Dispatch.
Profile
- Sam on LinkedIn
- OpenView
- Dispatch
Aggelos Mouzakitis is a product-led growth mentor at GrowthMentor. He is also the growth product manager at Growth Sandwich, a very prominent customer-led growth agency that helps B2B SaaS companies work through deep customer empathy and win/loss data. In this episode, Aggelos shared what the value gap is, how he fixes it, and what he recommends so companies don’t have to deal with value gap.
Show Notes
[01:05] Favorite road trip he’s been to
[01:56] How he became the growth product manager at Growth Sandwich
[03:29] What value gap is
[06:37] How he fixes the value gap
[15:44] What to do when a product is used for something completely different
[19:30] How big the value gap problem is
[21:32] What businesses that don’t have the value gap problem are doing right
[22:48] What he’ll recommend to companies so they won’t have to deal with value gap
[22:56] One or two pieces of advice he’d like to give to those who would like to go product-led
[28:11] His call to action
About Aggelos Mouzakitis
Aggelos Mouzakitis’s background is 40% marketer and 60% product manager. He is obsessed with user research and jobs-to-be-done and is one of the very few people certified in the framework. He founded Growth Sandwich in 2017 and has worked with more than 100 SaaS companies. He has also trained thousands in person and through his online courses.
Links
- Slack
- Trello
Profile
- Aggelos Mouzakitis onLinkedIn
- Growth Sandwich
The importance of planning in business cannot be overstated. Having a plan can help create focus and unite employees towards a common goal. It also helps ensure time is managed efficiently, resources are allocated accordingly, and the business is prepared for any uncertainties.
If there are two people who knows (and believes) in the importance of planning, it’s Wes and Ramli. In fact, they’ve dedicated today’s episode mainly to planning. In today’s show, Wes and Ramli shared what success looks like next year, their theme for 2021, and their takeaways in terms of planning.
You’ll learn a lot of great insights on planning from today’s episode so don’t forget to tune in!
Show Notes
[02:00] What success looks like next year
[03:07] Ramli’s 2020 review
[05:50] One of their strengths as a business
[06:20] Ramli’s surprise for the listeners
[08:58] Their theme for next year
[17:26] Ramli’s thoughts on planning
[20:17] The importance of breaking goals into quarterly goals
[23:00] Ramli’s takeaways in terms of planning
[24:44] Understanding the brain dump part
Guilherme Lopes is the co-founder and customer success executive at RD Station, the largest SaaS company in Latin America. RD Station helps businesses increase their efficiency and sell more using their marketing and sales tools. With RD Station, you can capture contacts and connect pages, create personalized journeys, and identify the best opportunities. In this episode, Guilherme discussed what prompted them to go product led, what their journey has been like, and what he’ll do differently as it relates to the whole transition.
Show Notes
[03:03] His background and what he’s been up to
[05:10] Their main impetus to go product led
[08:20] Pros and cons of the sales led approach
[13:35] What their journey to product led has been like
[21:17] Ways he built influence to get more people to think about product led
[24:34] Areas of resistance he encountered and how he addressed it
[27:05] How they structure their pricing
[30:32] How they get more teams to get into thinking product led
[33:36] The main reason behind having a low touch and high touch sales teams
[45:17] What he’ll do differently as it relates to the whole transition
[46:52] Biggest difficulty in getting the light version to launch with confidence and how they addressed it
About Guilherme Lopes
Guilherme Lopes has been building apps since 2005. In 2011, they saw this gap in the South American market and decided to build RD Station. RD Station is now the largest SaaS company in Latin America. By combining their marketing and sales products with people who care about results, they have been supporting businesses from plan to execution.
Profile
- Guilherme Lopes on LinkedIn
- RD Station Website
- Email Address: glopes@rdstation.com
Suneet Bhatt is the president and board chair at Boldr, a purpose-driven outsourcing company that provides clients and partners with high-quality and custom solutions. Boldr provides data management, customer experience, and sales enablement solutions. In this episode, Suneet shared how he approaches growth, how his growth journey started and what it was like, and his advice for those who would like to stand out.
Show Notes
[02:56] What he did prior to joining the start-up world
[05:28] How he approaches growth
[08:21] How his growth journey started and what it was like
[15:49] How he was able to pick companies that allows making mistakes
[21:40] Point where he starts to think about moving to other companies
[31:25] His advice for those who would like to stand out
About Suneet Bhatt
Suneet Bhatt is the president and board chair of Boldr, a purpose-driven outsourcing company that provides customer experience, data management, and sales enablement solutions. He was also the chief growth officer at Help Scout where he raised $6.2 million. Suneet is also the co-founder of Dream Village, a for profit social enterprise that’s dedicated to elevating the work of extraordinary and amazing nonprofit organizations.
Profile
- Suneet Bhatt on LinkedIn
- Boldr
- Scholarship Boy by Richard Rodriguez (analysis)
Carlos Villaumbrosia is the founder of Product School, a global leader in product management training. It has an impressive community of over one million product professionals. In this episode, Carlos shared the soft and hard skills great product managers should possess, when’s the right time to hire a product manager, and good UX design resources he’d like to recommend.
Show Notes
[00:38] How his product led journey started
[04:12] What a project manager does
[05:40] Difference between the role of product managers in a sales-led organization and a product-led one
[06:38] How to influence people without being bossy
[07:33] Soft skills great product managers should have
[08:59] Hard skills great product managers should have
[12:07] UX design resources he’d like to recommend
[13:42] When’s a good time to hire a product manager
[15:14] His advice to product managers so they don’t mess up
[16:42] His thoughts on revenue goals
[19:18] Advice he’d like to give
[20:32] Where people can find out more about him
About Carlos Villaumbrosia
Carlos Villaumbrosia is an entrepreneur with over a decade of experience building digital products and global companies. He founded Product School in 2014. Product School is the global leader in product management training. All of Product School’s instructors are real world product leaders from top Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon.
Profile
- Carlos Gonzales de Villaumbrosia on LinkedIn
- Product School
- Product School Resources
- Product School YouTube Channel
Maja Voje is the founder, growth advisor, best-selling instructor, and head of Growth University. Also dubbed as a growth marketing and digital transformation expert, Maja uses the “real world, real results” approach to empower teams and organizations. Maja has also managed digital projects for world-class companies like Rocket Internet and Google. In this episode, Maja shared the story behind her workshops, her prioritization framework, and how she makes sure team are executing their ideas.
Show Notes
[03:01] The story behind her workshops
[05:01] How she runs her workshops
[12:31] The ideal people who should be a part of her workshops
[14:58] Time she gives people to gather data before the actual workshop happens
[18:30] What an agenda of the workshop looks like
[24:24] Her system for voting so the results are not biased
[25:02] Her prioritization framework to make sure experiments are ordered accordingly
[29:02] A good number of ideas that comes out of her workshop
[30:45] How teams can ensure they are executing their ideas
[32:29] Advice she’ll give to the listeners
[34:30] What she wants listeners to do
About Maja Voje
Maja Voje is a globally-recognized digital transformation and growth marketing expert who has managed Rocket Internet and Google’s digital initiatives. She is also a co-instructor in the world’s best-selling online growth hacking course, used by the likes of booking.com, IBM, and Tesla. Maja has also helped raise €20 million in growth capital and has worked with many international companies based in Belgium, Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United States.
Profile
- Maja Voje on LinkedIn
- Maja Voje Website
- Maja Voje on Twitter
- GrowthHackers
Itxaso del Palacio is a partner at Notion Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in software companies with disruptive technologies in AI and ML, Business SaaS, cloud infrastructure, security, and productivity and communications, among others. Before Notion, she has been investing in software companies in Europe for over a decade. In this episode, Itxaso shared her definition of product-led growth, her thoughts on free trial, and the reason product-led is thriving despite the pandemic.
Show Notes
[00:48] What she does for work and for fun
[02:58] One physical activity she’d do for the rest of her life
[04:59] Her definition of product-led growth
[06:18] Different keys of success to implementing a great product-led strategy
[09:51] Her thoughts on free or free trial
[16:57] What a good time to value is
[19:39] Why product-led is thriving during the pandemic
[23:32] Her advice to enterprises that want to launch a product-led product
About Itxaso del Palacio
For almost two decades now, Itxaso del Palacio has worked with startups in Silicon Valley, London, Spain, and Latin America. She is also a partner at Notion Capital, an early stage investor in European SaaS, enterprise tech, and cloud. Itxaso holds a prestigious Kauffman Fellowship and is well connected to the global network of fellow investors. Itxaso holds a PhD in entrepreneurship and is an engineer by background.
Links
- Superhuman
- Zoom
Profile
- Itxaso del Palacio on LinkedIn
- Notion Capital on LinkedIn
Anuj Adhiya is an experienced growth manager, startup mentor, and author of the book “Growth Hacking for Dummies.” Also known as the “Growth Guy,” Anuj was also the former director of engagement and analytics at Growth Hackers and the category lead at The Predictive Index. Currently, he is a core member at Underscore VC and the vice president of growth at Sophya. In this episode, Anuj shared how he transitioned from support to marketing and growth, how his journey in Growth Hackers started, and the skills he thinks are critical to become a successful growth leader.
Show Notes
[05:32] What his first job was
[06:59] How he transitioned from a support role into marketing and growth
[08:52] Kind of things Sean Ellis was evangelizing when he discovered him on Twitter
[12:10] How his journey in Growth Hackers started
[20:09] How he eventually applied the things he learned
[31:10] The most important skills he thinks are critical to be successful as a growth leader
[37:02] His advice to those who would like to build their growth skillsets
[42:37] Where people can find him
[43:35] What’s next for him
About Anuj Adhiya
Anuj Adhiya is a seasoned growth manager, startup mentor, and author of the book “Growth Hacking for Dummies.” He is also the vice president of growth at Sophya. Also hailed at the “Growth Guy,” Anuj is also a seasoned growth marketer with a demonstrated history of implementing principles that result in authentic growth. He is also highly skilled when it comes to extracting insights and growth from quantitative and qualitative data, community engagement, and continuous improvement.
Links
- Growth Hackers
- Sean Ellis
- HubSpot
- WordPress
- The Predictive Index
Profile
- Anuj Adhiya on LinkedIn
- Anuj Adhiya on Twitter
- Sophya
Phil Corson is the senior product manager at 7shifts, an intuitive employee scheduling and management software that’s designed for the restaurant industry. Many restaurant managers have been using the software to minimize the time spent on management logistics and to reduce labor cost. 7shifts also comes with free mobile apps (Android and iOS) to ensure managers and employees have everything at their fingertips. In this episode, Phil shared what their product-led journey has been like, how their shift to product-led happened, and his advice to product-led companies when it comes to PQL.
Show Notes
[02:50] What their product-led journey has been like so far
[04:15] How their to product-led happened
[07:08] Some of the benefits of the product-led team defining PQL
[09:06] Who gathered the data to figure out what tier 1 lead is
[09:47] How their team iterate on the definition of PQL
[17:38] The threshold when a lead becomes valuable for them
[19:18] Changes he’d like to see
[21:00] What he’ll tell himself a year ago if he can go back in time
[21:32] The journey behind the buy-in
[23:59] His advice to product-led companies when it comes to PQL
[25:54] Where people can find him online
About Phil Corson
Phil Corson is the senior product manager and the team lead of the product led growth team at 7shifts. Phil has over 5 years of experience in B2B SaaS and product management. He is passionate about solving problems and bringing value to customers. Phil also has a proven track record for creating million-dollar software products for various industries.
Profile
- 7shifts
- Phil Corson on LinkedIn
- Phil Corson on Twitter
Todd Olson is the CEO and founder of Pendo, a product cloud that provides user insight, user communication, and user guidance for digital product teams. Driven by their mission to improve the world’s experiences with software, Pendo combines powerful product usage analytics with feedback, communication, user guidance, and planning tools to offer an integrated and complete integrated platform for digital product teams. In this episode, Todd talked about the role of sales in a product-led organization, what people need to keep in mind when it comes to freemiums, and the metrics product-led organizations should look at.
Show Notes
[00:35] The story behind the writing of his book
[01:51] How becoming product-led has changed things for different teams
[03:11] How becoming product-led changed things for the engineering team
[04:17] What he’ll tell organizations that want to become product-led
[08:18] The role of sales in a product led organization
[10:22] What people need to think about when it comes to freemium
[12:15] What he meant when he said “product is the new marketing”
[14:06] Metrics product-led organizations should look at
[17:22] How things have changed in terms of delivering products in a product-led organization
[18:30] What product ops is and how it fits into a product-led organization
[19:47] Advice he’d give to those who want to shift to product-led
[20:38] Where people can find him online
About Todd Olson
Todd Olson is the CEO, founder, and the brilliant mind behind Pendo, a product cloud that helps drive software adoption, which leads to more effective employees and happier customers. Some of Pendo’s clients include the world’s leading digital enterprises and software companies including Salesforce, Zendesk, LabCorp, Okta, and Verizon.
Profile
- The Product-Led Organization: Drive Growth by Putting Product at the Center of Your Customer Experience by Todd Olson
- Pendo Website
- Todd Olson on Twitter
- Todd Olson on LinkedIn
Karishma Rajaratnam is the head of growth at ChartMogul, the world’s first subscription data platform is designed to help make consolidate and clean billing data easy. ChartMogul can help businesses understand the dynamics of their business and see where they need to focus their efforts. In this episode, Karishma talked about the marketing channels they have tapped, how they work seamlessly with their sales team, and how the sales team deals with warm outbounds.
Show Notes
[02:19] What ChartMogul is
[03:14] What their primary focus is right now
[03:59] How they work with the sales team
[06:30] Tasks their sales team are currently handling
[07:38] Marketing channels they have tapped
[10:55] What her functions are
[12:42] How they work seamlessly with their sales team
[13:47] How often they get together with the sales team
[15:10] How the company’s sales functions has evolved
[15:15] Their basic version of a PQL
[18:08] How the sales team deals with warm outbounds
[19:04] Tools they use to segment the experiences
[20:47] Piece of advice she would like to give to product-led companies
[22:30] Where people can find out more
About Karishma Rajaratnam
Karishma Rajaratnam is a brilliant marketer passionate about growing the SaaS business. She is also the head of growth at ChartMogul where she leads the acquisition, onboarding, and engagement. She is also in charge of partner marketing, content and customer marketing, and product marketing and GTM. Karishma is also advisor to early-stage founders and works with startups like TechStars, SaasBoomi, and Co.labs.
Profile
- ChartMogul
- Karishma Rajaratnam on Twitter
- Karishma Rajaratnam on LinkedIn
Connor Bradley is the manager of growth at Jobber, an award-winning software that ’s designed to help small home service businesses organize their entire operations, from managing their crews, scheduling jobs, to invoicing customers and collecting payments. In this episode, Connor talked about their growth journey at Jobber, how it started, how they got the buy-in of the engineers, and their future plans.
Show Notes
[01:00] High-level overview of Jobber and how his role fits in
[02:12] How long he’s been at Jobber
[02:46] How his growth journey started
[04:29] How they navigated the lifecycle journey for the first time
[08:24] What their agreement was
[09:39] What the first version of growth at Jobber was like
[10:40] First couple of projects they had10:40 First couple of projects they had
[18:10] Some mistakes they would have wanted to avoid
[19:38] How they’ve honed their growth skillset over the years
[21:40] How he got the buy-in of the engineers
[24:12] Other things that have helped them along the way
[28:50] What’s next for him at Jobber
[29:42] Hobby he has picked up during quarantine
About Connor Bradley
Connor Bradley manages growth at Jobber, a field service management software that is customizable to fit your process. At Jobber, he manages a team of designers and engineers who are constantly experimenting to validate ideas that are tied to growth. With an extensive experience in SaaS, he constantly provides guidance in terms of driving top-of-funnel leads and moving opportunities through to ACV revenue.
Links
- Nuffshoptalk Newsletter
- Jobber Website
Profile
- Connor Bradley on LinkedIn
- Connor Bradley on Twitter
If you want to grow your SaaS product through product-led storytelling, today’s guest can show you the way. Victor Eduoh has been developing authority-building stories that are designed to capture, engage, and turn prospects into product-qualified leads, trial users, and customers.
In this episode, Victor shared the importance of product-led storytelling, how it fits into the different marketing funnels, and how businesses can create better stories for product-led storytelling.
Show Notes
[01:34] What product-led storytelling is and why product-led companies should care about it
[03:18] How product-led storytelling fits into the different marketing funnels
[06:02] How product-led storytelling differs from conventional content marketing
[10:21] How people can create better stories for product-led storytelling
[14:20] What the next step should be after content and empathy
[18:50] Common mistakes companies make
[23:57] Businesses that are doing a great job with product-led storytelling
[28:20] His piece of advice when it comes to product-led storytelling
[31:34] Where people can find him online
About Victor Eduoh
Victor Eduoh is a master copywriter and a product-led SaaS content strategist. His consulting firm helps SaaS brands grow by creating a bespoke and ROI-focused content marketing for them. In addition, he helps companies stand out and acquire new customers using two unique and research-backed frameworks: The SaaS Topic Clusters’ Strategy, and Product-Led Storytelling.
Links
- 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
- Ahrefs
Profile
- Victor Eduoh Website
- Victor Eduoh on LinkedIn
Eric Keating is the VP of marketing at Appcues, a platform that converts new users into raving fans with personalized and automated onboarding, surveys, announcements, and product tours. In this episode, Eric shared his thoughts on removing friction, the most common misconception about product-led, and where Appcues fits into the whole system.
Show Notes
[04:51] The first time he heard about the concept of product-led
[07:04] Why the product-led concept has gained so much traction
[09:44] The most common misconception about product-led
[13:39] How to decide if freemium or free trial is right for your business
[15:33] How they decided whether to go for usage or the 7-day trial
[19:30] When should sales intervene in the free trial or freemium experience
[22:24] His thoughts on removing friction
[24:12] Why enterprise businesses are adopting the product-led strategy
[26:17] His advice for large enterprise companies that want to try product-led
[28:19] Types of businesses that might not benefit from product-led growth
[30:49] How Appcues fits into the whole system
[34:45] His advice for those who want to try product-led
[36:24] Where people can find out more about him and Appcues
About Eric Keating
Eric Keating is the VP of marketing at Appcues. He is also a team builder, company steward, and go-to-strategist. At Appcues, they also developed the Product-Led Platforms so delivering exceptional user experiences at scale is easier. Appcues also aims to help companies deliver product experiences that create scalable business growth and happier customers.
Links
- Hubspot
- Product Led Institute
- Amazon
- Spotify
- Netflix
- Uber
- Superhuman
- Userlist
- IBM
Profile
- Appcues
- Eric Keating on LinkedIn
David Atmaram Satterwhite is the chief revenue officer at UserTesting, an on-demand human insights platform that help companies make accurate customer-centric decisions at every level and at the speed their business demands. In this episode, David shared what their product led journey has been like, the importance of ensuring the whole process is seamless, and why they decided to offer free trial.
Show Notes
[02:00] What UserTesting is
[04:35] What their product led journey has been like
[07:00] Why they decided to offer free trial
[08:20] What is required to launch free trial
[09:55] Why people need to apply for the free trial
[10:19] What they’re looking to implement to offer that touch less free trial experience
[12:31] The UserTesting team’s WHY
[15:29] The importance of ensuring the whole process is seamless
[17:19] Key requirements for teams that are considering product led
[20:20] His advice to enterprise or sales teams that want to transition to product led
[22:50] Where people can find out more about him and UserTesting
About David Atmaram Satterwhite
David Atmaram Satterwhite is passionate about building and leading teams. He also loves bringing great solutions and technology to the market and earning the loyalty of customers. For almost two decades now, David has been the executive in charge of revenue for companies like Good Technology, PubNub, newScale, and UserTesting.
Links
- Yammer
- Microsoft
Profile
- UserTesting
- David Atmaram Satterwhite on LinkedIn
While the concept of a growth leader is new, it is something Andrew Capland knows like the back of his hand. Andrew is the head of growth at Postcript, the SMS marketing product for growing Shopify stores. In this episode, Andrew shared his thoughts on mentorship, the top skills growth people have, and the biggest challenge one experiences when making a transition.
Show Notes
[02:42] How he got into growth
[06:36] Top skills growth people have
[09:00] How he learns how to learn
[12:42] Landmines people that are new in a company should look at
[13:53] How to know when to move on to the next job or next opportunity
[15:54] Impactful books he has taken to heart
[17:25] Biggest challenge when making a transition
[19:07] His thoughts on mentorship
[22:38] How he started giving back
[25:15] His advice to his younger self/others in terms of growth
[27:05] How he gets over the fear of failing
[28:15] Where people can find out more about him
About Andrew Capland
Andrew Capland is the head of Growth at Postsciript, an SMS marketing product for growing Shopify stores. He is also the founder of Delivering Value where he coaches growth marketers and product growth managers. Andrew has spent more than a decade working in the SaaS marketing tech. While he has handled many roles, he specializes in growth.
Links
- Postscript
- Wistia
- Hubspot
- Delivering Value
Books
- Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
- Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box by the Arbinger Institute
- Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson
Profile
- Andrew Capland on LinkedIn
- Andrew Capland on Medium
If you are interested in the psychology behind good product marketing, consider this episode a must hear! Today’s guest is Phill Agnew, the director of product marketing at Brandwatch, the world’s leading social intelligence company. In this episode, Phill shares the importance of behavioral psychology, how brands can avoid the herd mentality, and his thoughts on the use of the scarcity method/principle in marketing.
Show Notes
[02:15] What a lot of studies on consumer psychology suggest
[02:57] What Brandwatch is and what he does as director of product marketing
[03:50] How he fell into the role
[04:50] Why most product marketers don’t understand the customers very well
[06:39] The importance of behavioral psychology
[08:47] What he meant by distinctiveness
[12:30] How brands can avoid the herd mentality
[16:15] What being distinct really is all about
[18:35] What anchoring is and a few examples of anchoring
[23:36] How anchoring can be applied to online businesses
[31:00] His thoughts on the use of the scarcity method in marketing
[33:40] His one (or two) piece of advice for marketers
[36:27] Where people can find him
About Phill Agnew
Phill Agnew is the director of product marketing at Brandwatch. Phill’s experience is in product marketing and he specializes in consumer behavior. Phill is also the host of Nudge Podcast, the only podcast dedicated to consumer psychology. Phill is also a keen writer and an avid public speaker with interests in brand development, product marketing, and entrepreneurialism.
Links
- Nike
- Unilever
- Johnson & Johnson
- Ford
- Crystler
- Land Rover
- Burger King
- Four Seasons Hotel
- Hilton Hotels and Resorts
- Snickers
- Supreme
- KFC
- Drift
- Nudge Podcast
- Product Marketing Summit
- The Ikea Effect
- FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
- The Herd Mentality
- Scarcity Marketing
Books
- Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, and Why by Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks
Profile
- Brandwatch
- Phill Agnew on LinkedIn
- Phill Agnew on Twitter
Today’s guest is Gen Furukawa, the founder of Retainable. Retainable is an amazing platform designed to help businesses grow stronger by reducing employee turnover, increasing retention, and driving employee advocacy. In this episode, Gen shares his approach to marketing, how he started building products, and his thoughts on paid campaigns.
Show Notes
[02:28] How he started building products and what his journey has been like
[05:53] His approach to marketing
[07:49] How he prioritizes who to reach out to first
[10:35] An example of a LinkedIn strategy that works
[14:47] Strategies he has seen that does not work for early stage startup marketing
[18:04] Few things that really worked in Jungle Scout in terms of traffic, leads, and customers
[21:10] Marketing stuff that didn’t work
[22:19] His thoughts on paid campaigns
[25:12] His piece of advice for founders of product-led businesses
[26:58] Groups he’s a part of
[28:35] Where people can find him online
About Gen Furukawa
Gen Furukawa is the founder of Retainable, an innovative platform that helps businesses grow stronger by increasing retention, driving employee advocacy, and reducing employee turnover. He is also the co-founder of Prehook, the perfect customer experience and recommendation engine. Gen is also the co-host of the podcast CartOverflow.com where he interviews interesting guests like service providers, operators, agencies, and SaaS folks.
Links
- Amazon
- Jungle Scout
- Shopify
- Chrome Extension
- Growth Marketing Today with Ramli John
- Product-Led Growth Collective
- Trends
Profile
- Gen Furukawa on LinkedIn
- Gen Furukawa on Twitter
- CartOverflow.com (Podcast)
- Retainable
- Prehook
Over the course of a few months, Wes Bush and Ramli John have been working on the Product-Led Certification Programs. In this episode, they discussed all you need to know about the programs.
Wes is the author of the bestselling book “Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product that Sells Itself.” Wes is best known for challenging how SaaS leaders approach growth. Wes is also the founder of the Product-Led Institute and one of the hosts of the Product-led Summit podcast.
Ramli John is a Product-Led educator and consultant. He is also the host and founder of the “Growth Marketing Today” podcast, where he has interviewed experts like Hiten Shah, April Dunford, and Rand Fishkin. Ramli also helps SaaS companies optimize their retention rates and their user onboarding flow.
In this special episode, Wes and Ramli tackled all there is to know about their Product-Led Certification Program—the reason they split it into two, quick overviews of each program, and the benefits of applying as a team, among many others.
Show Notes
[01:28] Why they split the program into two
[03:59] A quick overview of the Product-Led Transformer Program
[06:24] A quick overview of Product Onboarding
[10:02] How they determine the right fit for the programs
[11:34] How their calls and mastermind sessions are typically structured
[11:59] Their program’s big differentiating factor
[12:36] What their “Expert Series” is all about
[14:00] The benefits of joining masterminds
[15:20] Estimated time people will spend on the program
[16:40] How the certification program is different from the book on Product-Led Growth
[18:04] The benefits of applying as a team
[23:39] Other things they want to touch on regarding the program
[25:15] How people can reach out to them if they have questions
Links
- Patrick Campbell, Founder and CEO at ProfitWell
- Jaqueline Cook, Chief Strategy Officer at Vendasta
Profile
- 6-Week Product-Led Certification Programs
If you’re interested in product-led sales, you’ll definitely love this episode. Today’s guest is the founder and CEO of Dooly, hailed as the fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and effortlessly manage all deals so nothing slips through the cracks. Today's guest is no less than Dooly's founder and CEO, Kris Hartvigsen. In this episode, Kris shares how he transitioned from sales to founder of Dooly, how he sees product-led growth fuelling and helping enterprise sales, and what happens when a product qualified opportunity comes through.
Show Notes
[00:45] How his progression from sales to founder happened
[03:58] What Dooly is all about
[05:27] How he sees product-led growth fuelling and helping enterprise sales
[07:10] How he defines product-led sales
[08:55] What PQO stands for and what it’s all about
[09:15] Why 5 is the sweet spot for them
[11:58] Why they get sales involved relatively early
[13:00] What happens when a product qualified opportunity comes through
[15:51] What he’ll tell organizations that claim they are product-led
[16:59] What the hand off to the sales team looks like
[21:09] His advice to organizations that are transitioning to product-led
[23:13] Where people can find him online
About Kris Hartvigsen
Kris Hartvigsen is the CEO and founder of Dooly, a computer software that captures and actions customer conversations, solves challenges that affect customer-facing teams, and analyzes and acts on them. From administrative work like Salesforce updates to deal supporting tools, Dooly automates the sales process by moving information to and from the customer in real-time. Dooly was built with the users in mind and its end goal is simple: provide users with the freedom to sell.
Links
- Vision Critical
- Slack
- Zoom
- Salesforce
Profile
- Dooly
- Dooly on LinkedIn
- Dooly on Twitter
- Kris Hartvigsen on LinkedIn
- Dooly's Email Address: info@dooly.ai
Unifying product, growth, and marketing is no walk in the park but today’s guest makes it look easy. Vivek Balasubramanian is the director of growth at Wave, an award-winning financial software designed for entrepreneurs. In this episode, Vivek shares how he became the director of growth at Wave, what FAE means, how he got the executive team’s buy in, and the experiments they are currently conducting.
Show Notes
[01:03] What Wave is and what it does
[04:03] How he became the director of growth at Wave
[08:33] How he made sure the executive team knew what he was doing
[10:23] How he makes sure what he presents is predictable
[11:41] Metric he’s accountable for
[12:34] What FAE is and why is the aha moment not enough to define somebody as activated
[17:16] How the FAE for invoicing is related to the FAE for payments
[18:24] How people can figure out their first activation event for users
[20:21] How he got the executive team’s buy in
[22:04] How the product team has changed now that they’ve embraced the FAE framework
[26:02] Number of times they get together to review the metrics
[26:42] Changes and experiments they’ve implemented
[32:40] Interesting thing about data and metrics
[36:11] The experiment they are running
[37:47] How they figure out who needs guidance
[40:19] His advice for growth teams
[43:10] Where people can find him online
[43:43] Where people can find out more about Wave
About Vivek Balasubramanian
Vivek Balasubramanian is the director of growth at Wave, an award-winning financial services software company with more than 250 employees. They are serving entrepreneurs and freelancers around the world. As director of growth at Wave, Vivek is accountable for business activation, monetization, and retention. Some of his specialties include revenue and demand generation, funnel experiments, marketing data management, and leading functional teams.
Links
- Starbucks
- H&R Block Canada
- Shopify
- Zoom
- Trello
- Paul Marshall on LinkedIn
Profile
- Vivek Balasubramanian on LinkedIn
- Wave Website
- Wave on Facebook
- Wave on Twitter
- Wave on LinkedIn
- Vivek’s Email Address: vivek@waveapps.com
When it comes to optimizing the customer experience, today's guest is a pro. Shareil Nariman is Sprout Social’s program manager for customer onboarding and life cycle. Sprout Social is a software that helps organizations of all sizes become better marketers and create the world’s most beloved brands. In this episode, Shareil shared how the onboarding process at Sprout Social has evolved, what their onboarding experience looks like now, and his advice to marketers who want to improve their onboarding experience.
Show Notes
[00:41] What Sprout Social is
[02:01] What the onboarding was like before they improved it
[03:58] First few things they focused on when they improved the onboarding process
[07:38] What a successful onboarding looks like
[09:06] How they defined value for customer onboarding
[11:36] What their onboarding experience looks like now
[13:14] The evolution of their onboarding process
[14:43] What their webinar looks like
[16:17] Some of the things he optimized in the program
[18:23] What qualifies a customer to be reached out to for those one-on-one calls
[19:54] The mechanics of their onboarding guild
[21:15] Things he wished he knew about customer onboarding
[23:04 His advice for marketers who are looking to improve their customer onboarding
[24:34] Where people can find out more about him and Sprout Social
About Shareil Nariman
Shareil Nariman is Sprout Social’s program manager for customer onboading and customer lifecycle. He has spent the last 9 years exploring the customer experience to set people up for long-term success. He has also built programs, hired and managed teams, and worked closely with product organizations and marketing to ensure the customer experience is positive and consistent all throughout.
Links
- Booking.com
- Pendo
Profile
- Sprout Social
- Sprout Social on LinkedIn
- Sprout Social on Twitter
- Sprout Social on Instagram
- Sprout Social on Facebook
- Sprout Social on Pinterest
- Sprout Social YouTube Channel
- Shareil Nariman on Twitter
- Shareil Nariman on LinkedIn
Today’s accomplished guest is a self-taught entrepreneur who ran and grew a marketing agency for 10 years before starting Hull, a powerful customer data platform designed for high growth companies. Firms that use Hull orchestrate their marketing stacks and growth by collecting, enriching, and synchronizing customer data across all their services in real time. In this episode, Romain shared why they decided to offer free trial, the experiments they did and how it affected their marketing, and why they chose to offer free trial as opposed to other options.
Show Notes
[00:50] What Hull is and why he decided to start it in the first place
[04:11] Why they decided to offer free trial
[06:59] What the first attempt looked like for Hull
[11:55] How he identified the end value
[14:00] The main driver behind people not understanding their problems
[17:59] How the experiments they did affected how they market their product
[19:19] Why they opted to do free trial as opposed to freemium or some other hybrid model
[23:19] How they help people get to a conclusion faster
[27:46] What he’ll do differently if he’ll launch the free trial again
[31:20] His thoughts on free trial and product-led growth
[33:14] How he makes decisions
[37:10] Where people can find out more about Hull and what he’s up to
About Romain Dardour
Romain Dardour is an entrepreneur, self-taught developer, designer, and problem-solver. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Hull, a customer data platform that helps brands create meaningful relationships with their customers by understanding who they are, what they do, and revealing novel insights that can help them personalize experiences at scale.
Links
- HubSpot
- Amplitude
Profile
- Hull
- Hull on LinkedIn
- Hull Blog
- Romain Dardour on LinkedIn
- Romain Dardour on Twitter
The entrepreneurial journey of today’s brilliant guest has been an interesting one—from product manager to founder and chief strategist of ProductPlan. ProductPlan is a roadmap software used by thousands of product teams at the world’s leading companies to power their product roadmaps. In this episode, Jim Semick shared what the journey of starting and scaling a product-led company has been like. He also covered other engrossing topics like product-market fit, the role of pricing, and how product management has changed over the years.
Show Notes
[00:33] Why he founded ProductPlan
[02:47] What his WHY was for starting the company
[05:18] How has product management changed over the years
[08:41] His market validation process
[13:00] His definition of product-market fit
[18:56] What the transition to self-service has been like
[21:18] The biggest challenge they have encountered
[24:20] One thing he’ll do differently knowing what he knows now
[27:07] The role of pricing in a product-led business
[28:56] When they decided to have someone in sales
[32:02] How they went about hiring their first sales person
[34:31] How they are different compared to the traditional sales-led companies
[36:50] How their compensation model has changed
[38:29] Where people can go to learn more about him and ProductPlan
About Jim Semick
Jim Semick is a mentor, speaker, and entrepreneur. He has also written books on Product Roadmaps, Product Leadership, and Product-Market Fit. Jim is also the co-founder and chief strategist of ProductPlan, the world’s leading roadmap software. ProductPlan makes roadmapping collaborative, transparent, and easy. Today, leading companies like PBS, Nike, Intuit, and Alaska Airlines has been relying on ProductPlan to guide their product decisions daily.
Links
- GoToMyPC
- GoToMeeting
- GoToWebinar
- AppFolio
- HubSpot
Profile
- Jim Semick on LinkedIn
- ProductPlan
- ProductPlan Blog
- ProductPlan Resources
- ProductPlan on Facebook
- ProductPlan on Twitter
- ProductPlan on YouTube
Creating a great customer experience for Jungle Scout users has been challenging but Danny Villarreal makes it look easy! Danny is the director of customer success and experience at Jungle Scout, the all-in-one platform for selling on Amazon. Danny is responsible for the training, onboarding, adoption, and retention, among many others. In this episode, Danny shared how they addressed the challenges they encountered, the metrics they looked into, and his advice to other product-led companies to improve their onboarding and customer experience.
Show Notes
[00:42] What Jungle Scout is and what his role there is
[01:36] Challenges his team encountered when new users logged in for the first time
[03:26] How he figured out the aha moment for each of the segments that signed out
[05:23] How they customised the experience for the different types of personas that were logging in for the first time
[06:47] How they delivered the live instruction
[07:46] How big the calls were
[08:40] How they got hundreds of people to sign up
[11:06] What the structures of the calls look like
[13:46] Other aspects they’ve experimented to improve
[16:27] Metrics they took into account
[19:08] When their onboarding is completed
[20:32] When they realised the need to translate the onboarding experience for the Chinese market
[23:01] Results they got after they translated the onboarding for the Chinese market
[24:57] How they tweaked the onboarding for the Chinese market
[26:49] His advice for those product-led companies in terms of improving their customer experience and onboarding
[28:13] Where people can find out more about his work and Jungle Scout
About Danny Villarreal
Danny Villarreal is the director of customer success and experience at Jungle Scout, the all-in-one platform for finding, launching, and selling Amazon products. Trusted by 400,000 Amazon sellers, the platform also offers step-by-step guides and exclusive tutorials that teach you the ins and outs of Amazon.
Links
- Amazon
- Pendo
- Alipay
Profile
- Danny Villarreal on LinkedIn
- Jungle Scout
- Jungle Scout on Facebook
For today’s guest, a culture of experimentation is the key to agility. Jon Noronha is the VP of Product at Optimizely and he believes that to move faster, they need to experiment more. At Optimizely, Jon leads a team of product managers to determine new ways for companies to conduct experiments across apps, websites, and every level of the stack. In this episode, he talked about all the essentials of product experimentation—from the metrics to focus on down to building a culture of experimentation—he covered it all.
Show Notes
[00:43] How he became the VP of Product at Optimizely
[05:29] How they go about building a culture of experimentation
[07:33] Metrics teams should take into if they want to experiment
[10:37] How to figure out what metrics to focus on first
[12:10] Best practices around prioritising experiments
[14:42] How to run experiments when the traffic is not sufficient
[17:09] How to structure product experiments in a more scientific way
[20:46] His thoughts on the first principles of experimentation
[23:27] One of the most important things when it comes to democratising experimentation
[27:06] Where people can go to find out more about him
About Jon Noronha
Jon Noronha is the VP of Product at Optimizely, the world’s leading experimentation platform. Optimizely is designed to enable businesses to deliver continuous personalisation and experimentation across mobile apps, websites, and connected devices. Prior to joining Optimizely, Jon was the PM of Image Search at Microsoft. Jon has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Harvard University.
Links
- Microsoft
- Bing
- Netflix
- Amazon
- Slack
Profile
- Optimizely
- Jon Noronha on LinkedIn
- Jon Noronha on Twitter
- Jon Noronha on Medium
Hailed as the first conversational marketing platorm, Drift is also considered the new way businesses buy from businesses. In today’s show, Drift’s head of product lead, growth, and lifecycle shared how the platform built a product that acquires users. Matt Bilotti owns Drift’s entire self-service business unit and is responsible for retention and sales figures on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. In this episode, Matt talked about the importance of market alignment, the metrics the product team focuses on, and his thoughts on product channel fit, among others.
Show Notes
[00:30] How things are in his end
[01:24] What Drift is
[02:16] Why market alignment is important
[04:32] How product co-owns the website with marketing and how it works
[07:32] How their team dynamics work
[09:15] On the metrics the product team focuses on
[13:18] How they’ve evolved into a more unified team
[15:38] What their quarterly planning looks like
[17:40] His thoughts on product channel fit
[23:00] His take on building APIs that people can build on top of
[24:39] The impact of having an end goal in their sign up process
[27:14] The purpose of the last two tasks
[28:46] Piece of advice he’d like to leave the listeners with
[31:06] How people can get in touch with him
About Matt Bilotti
Matt Bilotti is employee number 9 at Drift and he helped make the product a reality. From product manager, he’s now the head of product lead, growth, and lifecycle of the company. Drift is the first conversational marketing platform that emphasized the value of human connection and interaction. The brand is trusted by over 50,000+ businesses to create pipeline and drive revenue. Some of Drift’s valued clients include Smartling, Keap, ConnectWise, Aventri, and Marketo.
Links
- Drift
- Dropbox
- Airtable
- Spotify
- Duolingo
- Evernote
- TikTok
- Shopify
- Salesforce
- Brian Balfour Website
- Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)
- How I Built This Podcast with Guy Raz
Profile
- Matt Bilotti Website
- Matt Bilotti on LinkedIn
- Matt Bilotti on Twitter
- Matt Bilotti's Drift Profile
- Growth with Matt Bilotti Podcast
While making the transition to product-led growth can be very beneficial, it can also be tough. In today’s show, we talked to May Habib, Qordoba’s co-founder and CEO and found out what their experience has been like. Qordoba manages over 2 billion words every day for customers including Sephora, Conde Nast, GitHub, and the NBA. In this episode, May shared how she got everyone onboard the product-led bus, how the transition has affected their approach to selling, and her advice for those who would like to make the switch.
Show Notes
[00:34] Why she decided to found Qordoba
[01:21] Problem they’re solving
[03:55] How they traditionally made sales and why they decided to offer free trials
[06:46] Where the fork in the road came for them
[08:36] First steps they did to ensure what they want to do is viable
[10:51] How she got everyone on the product-led bus
[13:36] How their whole approach to selling has changed
[16:56] When their sales team steps in
[21:31] Why they end up going down the path of usage-based free trial
[24:07] Her thoughts on the cost of a free user
[26:10] The benefits she’s seeing
[27:39] Her one tip for founders and companies that are making the switch
[32:50] Where people can find her if they want to know more
About May Habib
May Habib is the co-founder and CEO of Qordoba, a machine-learning based solution designed to help brands define and scale a consistent brand voice. Qordoba’s platform also integrates with over 100 marketing and development companies and fits them seamlessly into the developer stack. Based in San Francisco, the company is backed by Rincon Venture Partners and Upfront Ventures. To date, Qordoba has helped companies like VISA, Marriott, Postmates, GitHub, and Sephora optimise and release new product copies across marketing, product, and customer support.
Links
- JPMorgan Chase
- How Qordoba launched a successful free trial by May Habib
Profile
- Qordoba
- Qordoba 14-Day Trial
- May Habib on LinkedIn
- May Habib on Twitter
- May Habib's Email Address: may@qordoba.com
A few months ago, Userlist introduced the $9/month starter plan. The plan allows SaaS founders to enjoy Userlist’s full set of features until they are able to hit the first 100 customers milestone. We talked to Userlist co-founder Jane Portman to know the rationale behind the offering. Aside from co-founding Userlist, Jane is also a UI/UX consultant and the host of UI Breakfast Podcast. In this episode, Jane shared how they arrived at the decision to offer $9/month, why they opted not to offer freemium, and why it makes perfect sense.
Show Notes
[01:50] What Userlist is and how it started
[02:13] What their edge is
[04:38 Reason they added the $9/mo starter plan
[07:11] How they intend to move forward
[09:28] Why they decided on $9
[11:59] Why they didn’t limit specific features for the $9 plan
[16:08] The thought process behind their video
[19:05] The core idea for a good UI
[20:46] What they have in the works to help users install the Userlist app
[23:02] One of the reasons they ask for the credit card upfront
[24:36] Any experiments they have planned that they’re excited about
[25:35] Her one advice to founders
[26:40] Where people can find out more about her and Userlist
About Jane Portman
Jane Portman is a UI/UX consultant and she specializes in web application design. She is also the founder of UI Breakfast and the co-founder of Userlist. Userlist is designed as an alternative to bulky enterprise messaging tools. At Userlist, Jane’s primary objective is to provide impeccable UX and help users become exceptional at customer messaging. Since 2014, Jane has also been hosting UI Breakfast Podcast where she talks to industry experts about UI/UX design, marketing, products, and many more.
Links
- Jane Portman’s Post on Indie Hacker
- Userlist Website
- Special 30% offer (first 3 months) for Product-Led listeners
- TinySeed Website
Profile
- UI Breakfast Website
- UI Breakfast Podcast
- UI Breakfast Mailing List
- Jane Portman on Twitter
- Jane Portman's Email Address: jane@uibreakfast.com
While seemingly trivial, the shift from sales-led to product-led is actually a massive one. And today’s guest will give us some insight into what it was like. Giovanni Hobbins is a designer, entrepreneur, and product manager. He co-founded (and sold) Nightly Labs and Campus Bubble. He was formerly built product at FullStory. Currently, he is the head of product at Matcha. In this episode, Giovanni shared their journey from sales-led to product-led including the reason they had to make the transition, how he motivated the team around the shift, and how he facilitated culture change.
Show Notes
[00:50] His background and how he became the head of product at Matcha
[01:57] A quick overview of what Matcha is all about
[04:00] What the transition to product-led has been like
[08:46] What pushed them to make the transition to product-led
[10:54] How he motivated the team around the shift
[12:31] How he convinced the investors and the board to pursue product-led
[13:44] How the shift affected the service component of the business
[15:48] The role support plays in a product-led business
[18:07] How he structures their roadmap and the inputs he looks for
[21:41] Effective way to get everyone on the same page
[25:48] How he facilitated culture change
[26:08] Where people can find him
About Giovanni Hobbins
Giovanni Hobbins is the head of product at Matcha, the content marketing experts for e-commerce and lifestyle brands. Aside from creating a technology platform designed to help marketing teams scale content production and measure results, Matcha also provides a done-for-you content service in the form of data analysis, distribution management, and original content production. Matcha’s mission is to give every brand the power of storytelling so they can can deliver more meaningful customer experiences and achieve sustainable growth.
Links
- FullStory
- Slack
- Zoom
- Amplitude’s North Star Metric
Profile
- Matcha Website
- Matcha Blog
- Giovanni Hobbins Website
- Giovanni Hobbins on Twitter
- Giovanni Hobbins on LinkedIn
- Giovanni Hobbins on Medium
- Giovanni's Email Address: contact@giovanni.io
Over the years, many companies have made the shift from high touch and high friction sales models to product-led growth. Today’s guest made the same transition and shared what his journey from sales-led to product-led has been like. Brennan McEachran is the CEO and co-founder of SoapBox Innovations. He was also 2015’s Ontario Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner. In this episode, Brennan shared what the transition to product-led growth has been like—from the challenges they encountered down to how he changed the team’s mindset, he covered it all.
Show Notes
[00:54] How he started Soapbox
[02:47] How they pivoted into product-led growth
[03:28] What prompted them to pivot into product-led growth
[07:29] How he managed the transition
[11:23] Biggest challenge of the whole transition
[13:32] The experiments he made prior to making the transition and the results he got
[21:35] His advice to those who would like to make the jump
[25:01] What their org chart looks like
[29:15] How support has contributed to growth
[37:09] How he changed the team mindset from selling first to adoption first
About Brennan McEachran
Brennan McEachran is the co-founder and CEO of Soapbox Innovations. Soapbox is the first people platform made to revolutionize management. The amazing tool is designed to help managers coach, collaborate, and communicate with their teams better. Soapbox is trusted by over 100, 000 companies around the globe including HubSpot, GoDaddy, Adobe, Coca-Cola, and Netflix.
Links
- Hubspot
- Chrome Extensions
- Spotify
- Gmail
Profile
- Brennan McEachran on LinkedIn
- Brennan McEachran on Twitter
- Brennan McEachran on Medium
- Soapbox Website
When they redesigned FullStory’s onboarding process, today’s guest scored some definite wins. However, they also made a few mistakes along the way. In this episode, Melanie Crissey shared the six onboarding mistakes they made so you can avoid them! Melanie is FullStory’s product marketing manager. She also serves as product marketing lead for two product programs. In this episode, Melanie shared what onboarding looked like in 2017, how she prevented onboarding from becoming over bloated, and the 6 onboarding mistakes she made and how she addressed them.
Show Notes
[01:57] What FullStory is and what it’s all about
[03:14] Her role and responsibilities at FullStory
[04:27] What FullStory is focusing on right now
[06:51] How having a conversation can help improve the user experience
[08:42] How product-led growth can help traditional sales teams grow the company
[11:57] What onboarding looked like in 2017
[14:21] Her thoughts on activation emails
[16:25] Negative changes she has seen in terms of user onboarding
[17:50] How she was able to prevent onboarding from becoming over bloated
[19:06] How the sales team qualifies the people they’ll call
[20:30] The 6 onboarding mistakes product-led businesses should avoid and how to address them
[25:35] Things she’s excited to experiment with that’s related to user onboarding
[28:20] Her advice for those who are in charge of user onboarding
[29:35] Where people can find her
About Melanie Crissey
Melanie Crissey is a product marketer and customer experience leader. She is also FullStory’s product marketing manager. FullStory is an intelligent platform designed to create groundbreaking digital experiences. FullStory also works by uncovering hidden opportunities to help improve the digital experience. FullStory’s intelligent software can also help pinpoint when, where, and how user struggle affects both retention and revenue.
Links
- FullStory
- FullStory Signup Page
- Every Onboarding Mistake I Made (So You Don’t Have To)
Profile
- Melanie Crissey on LinkedIn
- Melanie Crissey on Twitter
While leading marketing for a marketing-led SaaS company, today’s guest discovered customer-led growth. From there, she used the approach to grow revenue by almost 900 percent! In this episode, Georgiana Laudi talked about product-led growth as well as customer-led growth.
Georgiana is a seasoned strategic and growth advisor and marketing executive. She is also the co-founder of Forget the Funnel. In this episode, Georgiana differentiated sales-led from product-led, defined what product-led growth is for her, and shared her thoughts on pricing and its impact, among many others.
Show Notes
[00:43] What got her to where she is today
[07:08] Why some companies are defined as engineering-led
[10:15] What product-led growth is for her
[14:55] Difference between sales-led and marketing-led
[21:44] Types of companies that fits best for different market strategies
[27:19] The main barriers she sees for those who are trying product-led growth
[36:46] How to figure out the success metric
[42:41] One piece of advice for companies who would like to become more customer-led
[45:55] Her thoughts on pricing and its impact on the company
[47:55] Best place to find her
About Georgiana Laudi
Georgiana Laudi is a marketing executive and strategic and growth advisor. She is also the co-founder of Forget the Funnel, a company that focuses on executive level growth strategy and support for scaling SaaS businesses.
They also help growth and marketing leaders to become more effective through their workshops and trainings. Some of the multi-million dollar SaaS companies they’ve helped include Unbounce, SparkToro, Appcues, MeetEdgar, Saasler, and Calendly.
Links
- Hubspot
- Marketo
- Stripe
- WordStream
- Website Grader
- Unbounce
- Jobs-to-be-Done Theory
Profile
- Forget the Funnel
- Georgiana Laudi on LinkedIn
- Georgiana Laudi on Twitter
To find out how product teams drive growth using data, Mixpanel surveyed close to 500 leading product managers. From the survey, they uncovered the latest trends, focuses, and struggles of product teams across the world. To give us some more insight, we talked to Jeff Beckham, the head of product and content marketing at Mixpanel. In this episode, Jeff shared how their report came together, the key metrics product managers are focusing on these days, and his advice for product teams and managers.
Show Notes
[01:32] What Mixpanel is and what his role is
[02:16] Key metrics product managers are focusing on these days
[04:22] How the report came together
[05:25] Things that have gotten in the way of product innovation
[09:02] Tools that are used to increase KPIs and how Mixpanel stacks up
[10:36] His advice for product teams
[12:00] His advice to product managers in terms of the skills they need to learn
[13:35] How product managers can find the balance
[14:05] Where people can find him and the report once it comes out
About Jeff Beckham
Jeff Beckham is the head of product and content marketing at Mixpanel. Mixpanel is the most powerful self-serve product analytics designed to help businesses understand their users better and to convert, engage, and retain them. Trusted by forward-thinking companies like Microsoft, BMW, Shutterfly, and Microsoft, Mixpanel has provided the support companies need to succeed in their user analytics, from implementation to ongoing support, down to technical consultation, they have it all covered.
Profile
- Mixpanel website
- Report (The State of Product Analytics)
Why is product adoption vital to the success of any SaaS product? For starters, when product adoption increases, churn also plummets. Preventing churn is one of the primary aims of Gainsight PX. Gainsight PX is the brainchild of Michael Alon, a driven consultant and entrepreneur. In this episode, Michael shares what product-led for B2B means, how to build a powerful product-led growth strategy, and what companies are doing to increase product adoption.
Show Notes
[00:59] How he became the founder of Gainsight PX
[03:51] Difference between sales-led, marketing-led, and product-led growth
[07:32] What he thinks is the difference between marketing versus product-led
[10:44] When the best time to talk to users is
[13:07] How he defines product qualified leads (PQLs)
[19:00] What product-led growth for B2B means
[26:10] How one should go about building a successful product-led growth strategy
[32:43] Things companies are doing to increase product adoption
[42:53] Where people can learn more about him and what he’s up to
About Michael Alon
Michael Alon is a serial entrepreneur who’s passionate about designing, building, and launching innovative products designed to drive business outcomes. Michael is the CEO and founder of Aptrinsic. He is also the CTO and founder of Gainsight PX, a leading customer success platform provider that helps businesses secure and surpass the outcomes desired by their customers. Their evidence-based practices as well as their powerful software platform gives clients the insight they need from customer data so they can take the best action at the right time and maximise customer relationships.
Links
- Insightera(Marketo)
- HubSpot
- Slack
Profile
- Michael on Slideshare
- Michael on LinkedIn
- Gainsight
If most conventional CRMs are focused primarily on deal flow, what’s a CRM created for product-led organisations like? That’s one of the questions today’s guest addressed in this episode. Chris Lucas is an entrepreneur, consultant, and startup advisor. He is also the founder of Telemetry and the co-founder of Boardable. In this episode, he shares how he started solving CRM-related concerns for product-led companies, how businesses can deliver the value they promised as quickly as possible, and how one can make the transition to a product-led company happen.
Show Notes
[01:06] How he started solving CRM-related problems
[03:36] How people are solving problems right now using the CRM for product-led companies
[07:20] Why he thinks product-led growth is eating the world in SaaS
[09:25] Why product-led growth has taken over
[10:55] What product-led themes should look like
[13:15] How he makes things actionable for people
[15:42] What product qualified leads (PQLs) are
[17:56] How he determines what the product qualified leads should be
[21:27] What companies should do next after they have identified product qualified leads
[23:23] How teams can hone in on delivering the value they promised as quickly as possible
[26:58] How to make the transition to a product-led organisation happen
[29:19] What’s next for him and Telemetry
[29:57] Where people can learn about him and Telemetry
About Chris Lucas
Chris Lucas is a startup advisor, consultant, and entrepreneur focused on product-led growth. He is also the founder of Telemetry, an insights driven CRM created for product-led companies. Telemetry is also designed to qualify leads and take action so businesses can engage their users in one platform. Chris is passionate about growing teams and scaling businesses and has scaled startups from zero to $10mm ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).
Links
- Formstack
- HubSpot
- Website Gradar
- WordStream
Profile
- Telemetry
- Product-led Growth University
- Chris on LinkedIn
- Chris on Twitter
For today’s guest, the phrase “jobs to be done” carries with it a lot of meaning. And for people to understand the concept better, he breaks the cycle down in this episode. Alan Klement is a partner at Revealed and author of the book “When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become Great at Making Products People Will Buy.” In this episode, he shares what jobs to be done is all about, how he helps people figure out their jobs to be done, and what they’ve achieved using the process.
Show Notes
[00:52] How he became the author of a book on jobs to be done
[02:43] What jobs to be done is all about
[06:53] Two processes that happens that can cause someone to adopt a product
[10:54] How he helps people figure out their jobs to be done
[14:13] The first step in the process for those who want to nail jobs to be done
[16:19] How he gets granular in terms of understanding the needs of the users
[19:07] Best way to describe a job to be done
[21:40] An example of what they’ve achieved using his process
[26:40] What their process is like
[30:15] When his next book is coming out
[32:50] Where people can check him out to know more
About Alan Klement
Alan Klement is a partner at Revealed, a company that helps clients understand and respond to what’s going in the market and helps teams move faster, reduce risk, and increase success. Apart from writing the book “When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become Great at Making Products People Will Buy,” Alan has also dedicated himself to understanding and predicting product adoption. This led him to create DGA (Demand-Generation Analysis), a systematic means of studying and predicting demand.
Links
- HubSpot
- Pipedrive
Profile
- Alan on Twitter
- When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become Great at Making Products People Will Buy by Alan Klement
For today’s guest, product is the new marketing and in this episode, she shares why she believes it is so. In today’s show, Sandhya Hegde, VP of Growth and Marketing at Amplitude talks about how they approach product-led growth at Amplitude, what the good North Star metrics are for product-led companies, and how she builds customer empathy within their team.
Show Notes
[00:47] How she became the VP of Growth and Marketing at Amplitude
[04:53] Why she thinks product is the new marketing
[08:20] How her team’s thoughts around the product has changed
[10:50] Good North Star metrics for product-led companies
[14:49] Why their strategy is collaboration
[17:13] How she monitors the success of the users for their campaigns
[19:40] How they approach product-led growth at Amplitude
[24:26] Her thoughts on dummy data
[27:25] When should sales step in during the initial touchpoint
[30:00] How they use the product to hit their marketing and growth goals
[31:21] Skills needed in a product-led company
[35:27] How she builds customer empathy within their team
[39:18] Where people can find out more about her and her work
About Sandhya Hegde
Sandhya Hegde is the VP of Growth and Marketing at Amplitude, a computer software that provides product intelligence tools designed to help teams run and grow their digital businesses. To date, over 26, 000 companies use Amplitude for product analytics including Twitter, Intuit, Under Armour, Bonobos, Peloton, and Microsoft.
Profile
- Amplitude
- Amplitude Blog
To say product is the new SDR is a bold statement. Our brilliant guest today will share why he believes it is so. In this episode, Moritz Dausinger, founder of Refiner discusses why he thinks product is the new SDR, what the new SDR is in his opinion, and how the hand off is different for product-led businesses.
Show Notes
[00:56] How he became the founder of Refiner
[02:14] Their company mission and the problem they want to solve
[03:55] Why he thinks product is the new SDR
[06:19] How selling changes in a product-led business
[07:35] When should human interaction come into the whole process
[10:00] Where they start on the journey of using their products to qualify users
[13:10] What he recommends when it comes to qualifying results
[14:53] When should companies introduce the traditional MQO with inside sales
[16:19] What the new SDR is in his opinion
[17:48] Trends he sees in the companies he has helped
[20:30] How the hand off is different for a product-led business
[22:15] His advice to companies who want to become more product-led
[24:38] Where people who would like to reach out can find him
About Moritz Dausinger
Moritz Dausinger is the founder of Refiner, a user profiling software that’s built specifically for eCommerce, SaaS, and membership sites. The software is also designed to easily integrate into any sales and marketing stacks seamlessly. If you are looking to increase both conversion and retention rates through better customer data, Refiner might be just what you need.
Profile
- Refiner
- Moritz on LinkedIn
- Moritz on Twitter
For DevOps platforms like GitLab, transparency is crucial as it can provide feedback instantaneously. In this episode, Kenny Johnston, senior director of product at GitLab talks about product engagement, why transparency is important, and how people can build a successful product-led business.
Show Notes
[00:33] How he became the senior director of product at GitLab Inc.
[02:38] How he transitioned from being a web developer to someone who leads product
[04:03] What GitLab is
[05:20] His process in terms of product engagement
[08:56] Where to start when improving product engagement
[11:02] How they handle trolls
[12:53] How they find ideas and potential products from the feedbacks
[15:09] What they look for when analyzing product engagement
[17:03] Common mistakes he’s seen people make when improving product engagement
[18:37] Signals they look out for when pulling the plug
[20:04] Frameworks or methodologies he uses to improve product engagement
[22:49] Why transparency is important and how to make it a reality in the business
[25:37] How people can build a successful product led business
[27:24] Where people can find out more about him and what he does
About Kenny Johnston
Kenny Johnston is the senior director of product at GitLab, a DevOps platform that changes the way security, development, and Ops teams collaborate and build software. The fast-growing, all-remote company has team members located in over 50 countries.
Profile
- GitLab
- Kenny on Twitter
- Kenny on LinkedIn
A few years ago, many noted a dramatic change in the world of buying and selling: companies that have adapted the “product first” strategy were outpacing those that rely primarily on high friction sales models. One of the companies that really went all in on product-led growth is Vendasta. In this episode, Jacqueline Cook, Vendasta’s chief strategy officer shares what made them decide to do it and how they were able to transition successfully.
Show Notes
[01:15] How she became the chief strategy officer at Vendasta
[02:30] What a chief strategy officer does
[03:29] What Vendasta does
[05:24] Trends she saw in their business
[07:36] What made her decide it’s time to take Vendasta to the next level
[09:37] How they transitioned from a sales-led company to a more product-led business
[11:37] How she got the buy-in from the team
[14:54] How their organisation is structured
[18:29] Some of the early experiments she ran
[22:43] Things that need to be in place to maximise the learning curve
[24:29] Things other companies should avoid
[26:49] Some of her biggest worries about going product-led
[29:03] Where people can find out more about Vendasta
About Jacqueline Cook
Jacqueline Cook is the chief strategy officer at Vendasta. Vendasta is a Canadian-based business that provides an end-to-end commerce platform to firms who sell digital services and products to small and medium businesses. The company is also known for their innovation, thought leadership, and rapid growth.
Links
- HubSpot
- Netflix
Profile
- Vendasta
- Jacqueline on LinkedIn
Understandably, different business models will require diverse strategies. In this episode, Jeff Hardison, head of product marketing at Clearbit discusses how he approaches product marketing in different kinds of companies and the things he takes into account when in each of those businesses.
Show Notes
[00:53] How he became the head of product marketing at Clearbit
[03:24] What Clearbit is
[04:52] His experience owning the self-service revenue number
[07:15] How companies can decide between a self-service model or have sales lead the whole sales process
[09:25] Three important things about product led growth
[10:55] What he wants to caution people against in terms of product led growth
[12:10] What to do when the self-serve revenue plateaus
[13:54] The best time to introduce sales into the organisation
[17:35] How to help people understand what they’re getting themselves into
[20:17] How to make products easier to implement
[25:37] How to determine when to reach out to specific people
[27:59] One thing he wished he knew in terms of building the self-service model and learning how to turn users into paying customers
[29:21] His advice to sales-driven companies that would like to try self-serve
[33:04] How his testing process has evolved over the years
[34:50] Why every company should try to start with product led growth
About Jeff Hardison
Jeff Hardison is the head of product marketing at Clearbit. Clearbit is a business-data and marketing software company relied upon by leading SaaS clients like Asana, Segment, and Stripe. Profitable since their fourth month, Clearbit is considered a great example of an exceptionally managed company.
Links
- InVision
- Reflect Technologies, Inc. (Acquired by Puppet)
- HP
- Shopify
- Google Tag Manager
- HubSpot
Profile
- Clearbit
- Jeff on LinkedIn
Contrary to popular belief, user onboarding is not designed to make people become better at using a product. Rather, its primary goal is to help them become better at what the product enables them to do.
With that said, it’s no surprise today’s guest spends a significant amount of time and resources to ensure people have an aha moment the first 7 minutes of their onboarding experience.
In this episode, Francois Bondiguel, head of growth at Deputy shares what they do the first 7 minutes of the onboarding experience, how they’re doing it, and why.
Show Notes
- [01:11] How he became the head of growth at Deputy
- [03:29] What Deputy is in a nutshell
- [04:27] How he figured out the magic number (7 minutes)
- [07:57] How he found out about drop off rate and how he started improving the metric
- [09:35] How they collect information to tailor the user’s experience
- [11:22] How they got people involved and focused on improving the experience
- [15:21] What he’ll recommend to those who would like to improve their on boarding
- [17:02] Experiments they’ve done that didn’t work out well
- [19:35] The impact of introducing the human element in onboarding
- [22:59] When it makes sense to add a human element in the onboarding process
- [26:16] How they approach segmentation
- [28:45] How he built a lead scoring model
- [31:58] How he helped people to an aha moment the first 7 minutes
- [37:35] Where people can find him to know more about the work he’s doing
About Francois Bondiguel
Francois Bondiguel is the head of growth at Deputy, a product-led employee management tool that uses innovative cloud-based technology as well as machine learning and AI to help businesses transform operations and empower employees to work the way they want.
Link:
- OpenView
Profiles:
- Deputy
- Francois on LinkedIn
Frameworks for Selecting and Implementing Product Analytics with Sam Richard, Director of Growth at OpenView
It is reassuring to know that product analytics have reached mass adoption with nearly 80 percent of companies already adopting in-product analytics as well as tracking. In this episode, Sam Richard, Director of Growth at OpenView shares the importance of product analytics and how companies should go about selecting and implementing product analytics.
Show Notes
[00:42] How she became the director of growth at OpenView
[04:08] Her definition of product-led growth
[06:39] Her thoughts on product-led growth being considered a fad
[09:02] How to build a product-led business
[11:25] Where one should start if they want to develop a culture of experimentation
[13:03] How companies go about selecting and implementing product analytics
[15:42] Key questions to ask before starting product analytics
[18:25] Specific metrics she takes into account
[21:35] The power of activation
[23:42] Common mistakes she sees people make
[27:14] Her advice for companies that are transitioning to become more product-led
[29:06] Reasons to start a product-led business and reasons to consider a more sales-led business
About Sam Richard
Samantha Richard is Director of Growth at OpenView where she helps software companies become market leaders. Through OpenView’s expansion platform, they help ensure companies are able to hire the best talent, partner with industry leaders, and acquire (as well as retain) the right customers so they can dominate their markets.
Links
- ServiceTitan
- Oracle
- Costco
- Dropbox
- Amazon
Profile
- OpenView
- Sam on LinkedIn
The proliferation of data-based practices has caused two major changes (at least): it’s raised expectations of data-literacy across all teams, and it’s started to change the ways data teams work. In this episode, Milene Darnis, Product Manager at Heap, shares why feeding product data into your strategy is critical, and how to do it successfully at each stage of your company as you grow.
Show Notes
- [00:39] How she became a product manager at Heap
- [01:42] What Heap is
- [02:57] Why feeding product data into strategy is critical
- [03:43] Business data and product data
- [04:50] Data people should be tracking to make better decisions
- [07:55] Kind of prediction model she would suggest
- [09:04] Why product data is much more important for product-led companies than sales-led companies
- [12:36] How to know if you have gone too deep in quantitative data
- [14:17] Tool categories companies should be thinking about
- [21:01] Most common mistakes she sees people do again and again
- [22:28] Advice for companies who are just starting to gather product data
- [23:55] How people can use product data to make better decisions
- [25:30] Common mistakes people make when gathering data
- [27:50] How she gets her data and finds the best customers who use her product
About Milene Darnis
Milene Darnis is a Product Manager at Heap, where she works on Heap's core technology: autocapture. This forward-looking technology gives product managers around the world the ability to ask questions about their users retroactively, without having to bug developers to implement tracking.
Links
- Uber
- Salesforce
- Shopify
- Redshift
- Snowflake
Profile
- Milene’s Twitter
- Milene’s LinkedIn
- Heap Website
KPIs and metrics are the signals; the inputs to making great decisions. It's not optional. In this episode, Allan Wille, Co-Founder and CEO of Klipfolio, shares the most important metrics every team working within a product-led organization needs to understand to thrive and grow in a super competitive market.
Show Notes
- [02:59] Who Allan is
- [03:50] What Klipfolio is
- [05:06] Key metrics he takes into account
- [07:43] General and admin
- [15:47] How he defines success
- [20:59] How his team defines “onboarded”
- [21:44] A quick look at retention
- [23:33] Product
- [25:19] Trial engagement and conversion
- [25:39] On developing a metric called true trial
- [28:33] The cohort 90d logo retention
- [30:31] Marketing
- [32:22] Why he's not tracking the cost per trial user
- [33:09] MetricHQ
About Allan Wille
Allan Wille is a co-founder of Klipfolio, served as CEO until 2018, and is currently driving culture and collaboration as Chief Innovation Officer. Klipfolio is a SaaS dashboard company with over 11,000 customers—including Zendesk, Aviva, and IKEA. Allan previously co-founded Espial, an internet device software firm that is now publicly traded on the TSX. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and two daughters.
Links
- HubSpot
- Salesforce
- Facebook Ads
- Google Analytics
Profile
- Allan's Twitter
- Allan's LinkedIn
- Klipfolio Website
Welcome to the introductory episode of Product-Led Podcast. In this episode, you'll find out more about the hosts of this show, Wes Bush and Ramli John, and why you should subscribe today!