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- [00:01]
Caroline
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. If you're a SaaS company with a product led motion or you're thinking about adding one, this episode is something you're going to want to listen to. We're diving deep into the promise and the pitfalls of PLG with none other than Wes Bush. He's the CEO of Product Led, otherwise known as the PLG guy, and the person behind some of the most successful product led growth strategies in SaaS. But here's the truth. PLG sounds simple. Just let users try the product. But making that actually drive revenue, I think is a whole different, you know, can of worms. And this is where most teams struggle. So let's get into it. I hope you enjoy this episode.
- [00:49]
Wes Bush
You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto.
- [00:58]
Caroline
Hi, Russ. Hey, Donna. How do y' all hope everybody's week's been going well. We've got a special guest here on today's show. I'm really pumped about it. You might recognize this face here from LinkedIn, Wes Bush. He's the CEO and founder of a company called ProductLED. So that's the focus of today's show. We're excited to get into it and just for a little bit of context. So at Passetto, we have done a lot of work with dozens of SaaS companies in the last 12 or so months since we've been in existence. And I can confidently say there's really one core theme in many of these companies is that they just have not been able to nail down their PLG strategy. And many of these companies do it. They've got a free trial on the site. And when we look back at their data, which is part of our offer here at Passetto, we can see that the conversion rate to actual meaningful revenue from that free trial is oftentimes less than 1%. For me, that's really concerning. And in a lot of cases we say, hey, if you don't have the resources or the knowledge to build a really solid PLG strategy, like, you're doing more harm than good for your business. And so oftentimes we say, if you've got these two paths on your website for how to qualify prospects, book a demo or start your free trial, go down the path of book a demo, because those prospects always convert to pipeline and revenue at a much better rate. And so that's something I really wanted to unpack. And the reason I reached out to Wes, I saw he did a podcast episode recently with Adam Robinson. I love the material and I thought our community Here at Pesetto, our customers could really benefit from all of that. But in short, I think, you know, having a strong PLG motion can either make or break your go to market performance. And so I really want to unpack that. But before we do that, before we introduce Wes, I took his masterclass on his website, which anybody, if you're interested in learning more about PLG, take the 45 minutes and do it. It's really informative. But there's one analogy Wes uses on there, which is the analogy of when you go to download an app on your mobile device, you download the app, you open it up, and if it's not easy to use and you don't get value from it within minutes of using it, what do you do? You usually delete it right away and never look back. That's just the way humans work psychologically. Or you get value from it right away and you go down the path, you ultimately subscribe, you tell your friends about it, and then it becomes an app that you heavily use. And I think that is the power of plg. When done right, you offer this free trial and either nail it and you bring those trial users to revenue and to become loyal customers, or you kibosh the whole thing right away and you ruin your trajectory and your fate with what you're able to do from that free trial motion. So with that said, I'll kick it over to Wes. Wes, I'd love if you could introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your background and product led, and then maybe we can get into some questions.
- [03:54]
Wes Bush
Yeah, absolutely. Excited to be here. And yeah, also just shared free book as well. That's part of what I love to do, is give away a lot of free stuff. So you can try before you buy it, make sure it makes sense for you. As far as plg, I'm not here to pitch you on plg, to really just educate you to see if it's the right fit for you as well. Because it's not for everyone. But a little bit of my background, how I fell into the world of plg. I was working at this company called Vidyard about nine years ago, we launched a free trial, our first one. At that time we were a sales led company, around 10 million ARR. And let me tell you, that first free trial bombed. We had no idea what we were doing. And Caroline mentioned, it's like, you know, you look at these two funnels, you're like, okay, we have our sales led motion, we have our product led motion, more people are signing up for the product LED one because they want something for free, but it's not cutting it on the revenue side. So we killed it. And then what we learned though from that whole experience is that when people were using video, they actually had to like upload a video. And then we could tell them, oh, you know What, Tanya, watch 50% of your video. That's super interesting. But most people didn't upload video. And so we decided, okay, we need to make that part a lot easier. So we created a Chrome extension and this is called Viewed It Now. Now it's just part of video arts Free motion. And within a couple of clicks you could record a video, send it to anybody, and you could immediately see, wow, you watched 98% of my video or something like that. And you get notified about that. So it had a much faster time to value. And that free product, it took off. And right now it's been used by millions of people. The first year was like over 100,000 people. And people were just sharing that product over and over with other people. And there was a ton of virality into it as well, which played into that. And I was just thinking, what would it take for me to capture that same amount of attention, that same amount of demand with the traditional sales ad approach? I was like, that would cost a fortune to go through that whole approach. And so from that point on, I've just been drinking the product led growth Kool Aid, figuring out ways of how to make this easier. Because back about five years ago, OpenView kind of coined the term product led growth. And I was like, oh, you're sharing amazing examples of Slack, Miro, Zoom, all these big companies that have gone public with plg. How does the average company even get started with PLG and go from 0 to 10 mil? So that's really my whole goal is just make that full journey to get started and build a successful PLG motion much easier.
- [06:27]
Caroline
Love that. And what kind of companies do you normally work with in terms of size and maturity? Tell us a little bit about that.
- [06:33]
Wes Bush
Yeah, so the two main groups there is, I call them the Transformers. There is the sales like company that wants to either bolt on or build a product LED motion to their business because they either just have a lot of enterprise customers, they're like, hey, but we are losing out on the small medium sized business angle. We need to stay competitive in that area. Then the other group is, you know what, we're just always going to be product, but it has to be a part of how we dominate our market. And become the obvious choice in our market. We have to do this. And that's usually the majority of the companies we work with are the ones where it's like, hey, listen, this is. There's no other way to serve this market unless we have this right.
- [07:12]
Caroline
Okay, so before we get into, like, I have a lot of questions around. Why can't companies nail PLG before we do that, though? So you say in your masterclass, about 97% of buyers want to try before they buy. So at face value, this seems like a clear signal that every SaaS company should have a product led motion. What's your take on that? Do you think PLG is for everyone, or is there more nuance behind the decision to adopt a PLG strategy?
- [07:42]
Wes Bush
Yeah, so if you look at, like, the B2C industry, it's like, okay, how many of the apps you're using actually have this strategy already? It's like sky high. Because there's no other way you could make this business model work. Now, when it comes to B2B SaaS, that's where it gets a little convoluted. Right? Because you're like, well, okay, do people want try before you buy? Experiences versus talking to someone, Sales? The answer is yes, they do. The data shows it. Now, can your product, is it ready to be able to do plg? And a lot of times that's where the disconnect is. It's like, well, you know, to solve this problem, it's really, really hard. There's a lot that goes on. There's a lot of, in Fazetto's case, like, data, you'd have to connect and aggregate and screen and really understand what goes on. So could you realistically, just a flip of a switch, get them to value in less than five minutes? No. So because of that, there has to be a different go to market motion. You can't just give them the keys and show them how to do it. One of my favorite analogies about this is if you think of, let's say you're. We're all going to go to an Italian restaurant tonight. So we show up to the nice Italian restaurant and we see the host. They're like, hi, welcome, Wes. So great to see you. And then they say, here's the kitchen, actually, uh, you got to cook your own meal. You got to make the chicken parmesan. And then they hand you the cookbook and you're like, wow, this is a lot. Now, most SaaS products are kind of like that. You want the Italian fine dining experience, yet what you're willing to pay for and what you get is you got to go in there and basically become the chef. And what people all want at the end of the day, and especially I think AI is going to do a tremendous job in this is people are just going to be able to get to the value way faster. It's like, hey, we just want to sit down, we want our spaghetti or Parmesan in five minutes or less. Get me to that point. That's what people want. And if they can try before they buy, that's the golden standard.
- [09:43]
Caroline
So would you say this falls into this term that you use called surface level plg? What is surface level plg? Is that just this idea that people think it's as simple as having this free trial freemium offer and not really considering all of the, you know, fundamental components that go in that to make it successful.
- [10:05]
Wes Bush
So there's pieces of it. Whenever I find a lot of companies go down the path of product, they go, they're like, yeah, this sounds great, I'm sold, let's do it. They usually start with a few things that on the surface it seems like that's completely logical. Like, okay, you have to improve your onboarding experience. You got to make it easier for people to get the value makes sense. Your pricing. Okay, so right now with your sales ad approach, you probably don't have your pricing public. So, okay, we need to create a self serve motion which people can quickly understand your pricing, make it easy. Okay, that seems pretty straightforward. Of course you got to have an offer and decide, okay, we're going to give away some free things away. So let's slap on a 14 day free trial and let's call it a day. And so a lot of companies just do those three or four things and that's actually why it doesn't work. Because then they usually come to us like, PLG doesn't work. My free to paid conversion rate is less than 1%. The only people that convert are the ones we talk to. And I'm like, I've heard that story before. But in this kind of iceberg it's like, yeah, because you're only looking at the very top. There's actually a lot more to this. You gotta make sure you have the right team, the right capabilities. It's like, who's your ideal user? Sales like companies are fantastic at knowing who's your ideal buyer, but your user is actually the person that's like going in the nitty gritty into that kitchen we're talking about and they're really good at cooking the chicken farm. And so sometimes in order for you to make PLG work, you of course have to target those users and make sure those are the ones in the majority of people are signing up for your product because they, they're pretty handy, they can cook and then your strategy, that's really where you go through and make sure, okay, how is this key to how we're going to win as a company? If you think of Canva, what I love about Canva is like can you imagine how else what other potential go to market motion could they have used to help anyone design anything? It's like by nature they have to have a pretty kick ass self serve experience, it's easy to use or else it would be impossible. And then you got to have the right data tooling to understand like are people getting the value or not? Most times when we talk to early stage companies that have gone through and rolled out for the first time, they just don't even know what percentage people get to value. They can tell me they're free to paid conversion rate without a doubt. Can you tell me what percentage of people got the value and how long did it take them? Did I do the first five minutes to take longer? And so I want to share that because it's so important to approach things holistically and if you just go focusing on those surface level pieces, that's where you hit that iceberg and that's where you really realize, wow, PLG doesn't work because you just did surface level plg.
- [12:56]
Caroline
Right? That makes a lot of sense when you see that visual. The one thing that really stands out to me is the data piece because that's what we talk about all the time. And maybe Trevor, you have some thoughts that you want to chime in here for a sec, but the core theme that I've seen with two customers recently who have a self serve revenue model is that they want to understand the signals or the interactions that drove a customer to sign up with their self serve product basically. And the one flaw there is that they just don't have the data to be able to do that. Meaning they can track the revenue and they can track the transactional data in however, whether it's stripe or whatever they're using to facilitate that transaction, but they're not actually looking at those people as buyers in their CRM. Meaning they don't really know what led to that person to convert. And it's like how do you optimize that strategy from that perspective when you don't really know how the person got there in the first place. So I feel like there's like the data layer with what people are doing within the product and time to value. But then it's the other piece of it which is like a precursor to that, which is understanding, you know, why people tried that self serve product in the first place.
- [14:08]
Wes Bush
I think there's like a few things there too. So first off, you can track with lower accuracy as far as like, how do people come to you? Like a lot of times if you have a very good channel set up, like you can set up all the right tracking utms and everything to understand, okay, they're coming from that part. You can also add in a little bit of friction where you could ask them, how did you hear about us? I know Chris Walker is a big fan of that like open field question. And that's another way you could do that to understand, okay, where are people coming from? Which channels resonate most? At the end of the day, if you think of a lot of like marketing channels, it's, it's a holistic approach. It's not just like one channel that probably had the biggest impact. It's like, hey, they heard you on email, they heard you on the podcast. They also saw some LinkedIn posts and then they bought. And so one other piece from the difference of sales at a product that I think is worthwhile to point out here too is that in sales and companies and most of like overall SaaS, it's still sales led. Most people are just focusing on your buyers. So if you're going after, let's say the CEO, the CTO or somebody else like that, whoever's at the top for what makes sense for your product. It's always a lot more expensive to go after those buyers because everyone's targeting those people. That person's usually quite different. It might be a step or two below those people, but they're a lot more accessible oftentimes and a lot more affordable for you to approach so much lower cost monetization costs.
- [15:31]
Caroline
Interesting. So you use this analogy, the 80:20 analogy, where you say 80% of a company's PLG results come from just 20% of the work, which is very fascinating to me. I'd love to dig into that and understand what are those high leverage areas the team should focus on first if they're going to go down the path of, hey, we want to adopt a PLG motion within our GTM.
- [15:55]
Wes Bush
Yeah, so I'm a huge like 8020 principal guy. I study a lot of like Richard Koch's books, which if anybody has studied him, he's super fascinating guys. He like exited his own consulting company, got out for like 10 million. He turned that 10 million over like 30 years into 1.5 billion in just investments. And so he's like a really smart guy, but like he eats his own dog food when it comes to 80 20. So the whole concept, especially when it comes to PLG, is don't try and boil the ocean, don't try and do everything. There's actually we've identified there's nine core things that if you get these right, your PLG motion will more or less work as a result. And so I can go through those nine things. It basically comes down to at the very beginning. And there's actually a order to this which is for people who are nerdy like me. They're like, yes, logic, structure. So we have here the first part is what is your strategy for the business? That's the first thing you gotta go through. How does this connect to how your business is going to win? In the CANVA example I shared earlier, there's no other way they could have done it without appeal gmotion. Now that doesn't always have to be the case. Like there's a lot of companies where it's like they have both appeal gmotion and a sales assist and then they also still have enterprise play as well. If you look at Slack like perfect example, but to get the widespread proliferation of a lot of people using it, it's like, okay, where does PLG fit into this and how does it help you win? Once you understand that, then you can get really focused on who is that ideal user, what does that person look like, what makes them successful, what is success, and more importantly, what are all of the challenges that are going to prevent them from seeing success. So when I shared that Vidyard example, remember many people didn't upload a video. So that was a really big challenge. And so at that time when we launched our free model, it didn't work because it was just a 14 day free trial. We didn't actually make it easier to make a video until we solved that with the new product, viewed it, which that was the free model. We decided, okay, we got to solve that beginner problem, got to make it easy to make a video. When we did that, we actually had an unshakable foundation for our PLG motion. So that's the first three things you should work on. If this is something you want to go down this path and Then the next phase is really just how do you unlock zero touch or self serve customers for your business? Because the whole goal is to reduce friction for both the user, but also for you as the business to serve these people and serve a lot of them for way less time. And so how you do that is you got to have the right offer. And then what that looks like is like you got to go through, tell people, speak to that specific ideal user. Here's what our free model is. This is why it makes sense for you. And then you can onboard those specific people to get them to value. And honestly, this part is the hardest for all product companies. You will never find a company where they're like, yeah, it's really easy to get people to value. Takes like two seconds. Every company, like, back to what we were talking about, Caroline, about that question, 97% of people want this, but can 97% of SaaS companies do this? Yeah.
- [19:12]
Caroline
What would you say to a company that's struggling with retention in the first place and might think that PLG could. I want to like just paint the picture and step back a little bit. So you've got a company, their retention is not ideal. They want to improve the retention, but then also they want to drive up new local acquisition. Right. And so this company has, you know, is thinking about, hey, what if we adopt a PLG motion, get more people to try and you experience how great it is, but really, like, there might be an underlying challenge with the product itself and user satisfaction with that. So what would you say to a company that thinks that PLG might be the path, like a great path forward for them, but really they've got like this underlying retention issue to solve for at the same time.
- [19:58]
Wes Bush
Yeah. So without going into the reams of. Reams of data to the bottom of that answer from a high level, like, there's a few ways to solve this. And like, I always look at Churn from how do we solve this proactively and then reactively. So on a proactive front, the best way to solve Churn is just to make sure you're really clear on who are you targeting. Most companies don't do that. They don't focus. They attract a lot of random people. And then they're like, why did those people churn? It's like, they're not your ideal fit people. Are they? Then the other part is, okay, if we're clear on that, are we really delivering the right value for these people? Are we really solving a core problem that they truly value? They care about they want our help on and everything else. So that would be the part where I really look at, okay, if we could get, if it's, you're serving like companies or users, can we create like a bit of a score here and rate all of our accounts? Red, yellow, green, give them a customer health score and really just understand like if it's green, they're consistently using this product, let's say on whatever cadence makes sense, whether it's weekly or it's monthly or it's daily for your product. And it's like, okay, they're getting a lot of value, they're using a good amount of this. And then you look at those people like, what are those people doing differently? Are they all in our ideal user bucket or not? And then the yellow ones, it's like, well, what's going on there? Is it a lack of us onboarding them? Is it a lack of them not really getting enough support to see success? And one thing I will kind of point out here too is that when people think product led, they usually think like a hundred percent self serve. But that's not always the case. Like one of our clients, Powbox, they do HIPAA email compliance for like mental health professionals. And so if you use Gmail or Outlook, what's really great about Popox is you can just keep using that product, but it's HIPAA compliant. However, there's this one little catch which is in order to set it up, you got to log into your domain registrar, you got to change some DNS, SMTP settings and like the mental health professional is like, ah, this is hard because they don't deal with that issue much. And so what they did, they're like, hey, listen, we'll do it with you. Here's a link to a call, we'll just set it up. And this is for a $29 per month product. But they just do it because their retention's off the charts. So wherever you find there's these like big blockers that are preventing your, your users and customers from seeing success. I just there hug them, go through how can we really help them overcome that next level and do whatever it takes and then figure out, okay, what's a better way to do this scalably. But that's just the initial way I would approach it.
- [22:38]
Trevor
Nice, right? Hey Wes, you just mentioned price and we had a great question from Carl I just wanted to pass along. He asks, you know, what if your product is high priced, you know, 5k to 10k. So how does the any of the strategy Change depending on the price of the product.
- [22:54]
Wes Bush
Yeah. So one of the things we look at in the pricing component is just, well, does it have to be priced that way, like 5 or 10k? Usually in a sales environment it's like, it's pretty common. It's like, hey, it's 5, 10k annually, nobody like really blinks an eye. But when it's somebody that's self serving and they go through, they sign up for your product, they're like, oh, that's a good amount to go through. And so what we always talk a ton about is what is your value metrics and what does that look like? So if it's like per seat, that would be something where it's like, okay, instead of bundling like 5 seats together for 5k, you can start off with 1 seat, 1k. And eventually this will grow into something that is well over 10k per year. But when you bundle it down that way, people can just start off with something that's very small, tangible. And it doesn't always have to be that way. But I will say just after helping a lot of companies with plg, usually having that buffer of like, hey, it could start off a hundred bucks, 250 to like 500. That's usually the range of could we get a plan in that realm that's enough for people to really get started and, and see success. And then we can of course expand it even well past the 10k mark. But having those metrics is a really great place to start when you're just thinking about, like, how do I make that transition?
- [24:11]
Trevor
Yeah, that's. That makes sense. Now I've been curious as I've been listening to you talk. We think a lot about the sales LED side of things on in our business. And I'm wondering, is there a line that you can help draw on where you stick with PLG and where you start to bring in that salesperson into the mix? Like, is there a way to think about that?
- [24:31]
Wes Bush
Yeah. So I would even zoom out and not just focus on sales, but where do you bring in people? That's actually a more interesting thing for me to kind of think about. So I'll give you a really fun analogy since I like analogies and we can map this out together. So when you think of any product, like how to get to value, kind of think about it like a cake. There's knowledge, then there's skill gaps, and then there's also just product gaps. So these are like a lot of the things that will actually hold you back from Seeing success with the product. And so give me an example of a product that you love that we just workshop. That's very common. Anybody in tech would understand Netflix. Okay, and now give me a product like Netflix is pretty self serve. Give me an example of a product that might not be exactly in that way where it's, you gotta either talk to somebody in sales or get some support to get to value.
- [25:28]
Caroline
Thinking.
- [25:29]
Trevor
Yeah, thinking what am I using that fits into that category?
- [25:33]
Wes Bush
You can say like a hopspot.
- [25:34]
Trevor
Yeah, that's sort of what was coming to mind. Something like that. There's a lot of moving parts.
- [25:39]
Wes Bush
Totally. Okay, so when we go back to the first part is like, okay for the knowledge side for Netflix, like what do you need to know before you can get to value here? Not much. So that's great. Okay, great.
- [25:52]
Caroline
Bad example. Let's go with the HubSpot one.
- [25:56]
Wes Bush
Well, I think it'll be fun to go through both of them. This one will be super quick. So you think like skill gaps, like, okay, there's also not much skills. You have to have like product apps like, okay, you have to sign up essentially and find something you like. That's probably honestly one of their biggest pain points still to this day is just, you know, finding something you like on a regular basis is actually quite hard. You're like, I watched your like top 10 already. It's not interesting. It's because that's my style. All right, so knowledge gaps for HubSpot. Well, there's so many things here. There's inbound marketing, like if you don't get that, if you don't understand how to generate leads, that's a pretty big issue. And then there's also like sales process. Like why is your sales process all unique then? There's like a lot of skills here that you would need to have. There's. If you're using everything like building your websites with HubSpot, there's going ahead and setting up your sales team like on how to do it. That's, that's hard. You got to train them on that part. And then there's just like the product stuff of how do we actually get to value on this product. And since the product is, there's so much to it, like there's the marketing, there's the sales, there's the service components as well. There's a ton of things here. And so what I always go down to in helping companies decide do you need sales, do you need like customer support to help people get to value? Is when we go through this. These are all like, I would reframe all these as problem statements. So it's like, okay, somebody like really struggles at inbound marketing, what could we do here? And this might just be, it's a content resource and we're like, you know what, that's perfect. We can just provide a ton of content, provide the full HubSpot academy. Great, that works. And then there's sometimes skill gaps where we could say, okay, this is, let's say it's a five out of five challenge. Most people can't do this and this is really, really tricky for people to get set up and everything else like that. Well, a resource could just be talk to a free sales coach or something like that. And we could offer that either as part of an expansion play or as part of an onboarding play. If somebody really had to do this to get to value initially and then also for getting to value and also getting them to upgrade past like the initial trial, it's like building a business case. If they're a big company and they need to get a lot of people to sign onto this and agree that this is the right tool that they have to do well, okay, this is where it's like bring in our sales team and this is where we're going to help them get to value. And so the reason I love that example is because we all have a different combo of that. I call it a triple bypass cake. It's like some people education products we have a ton in the knowledge area, like for product led, we have a ton of education we have to do before anyone even becomes relatively interested in becoming a customer. It's like I need to know what the heck PLG is. I need to know if this is right for me. I need to know what is the best approach for this. And that's all before should I become a customer or not. So that's all something that really just think about as you're building a product that could be self serve or also still have that sales in motion.
- [29:18]
Trevor
Gotcha. Okay, so in your example there some of the solutions to those problems or gaps that you called out there were things like content and like putting things assets in front of the user. Is that what you would say is generally the first line of defense there? Try and keep people out of it until you absolutely must.
- [29:36]
Wes Bush
I call it the PCR test. It's the best one. You have product solutions, content solutions and then resource solutions. And so every single one of those challenges you're just going through and being like, hey, what Kind of solution. Would this work here? Resources could be anything from a quiz to, hey, you got to talk to Trevor. He's our like in house CTO expert. He's going to help you set up all of this. And that's just how you could kind of approach it.
- [30:03]
Trevor
That's a great framework that makes a ton of sense.
- [30:05]
Caroline
Okay. I wanted to get into a little bit of the behind the scenes. I really want to know from your perspective, Wes. Tell us a little bit about some like the, the real life, practical stories that you've seen with some of the customers you've worked with, why they just have failed. I mean, we've sort of alluded to this in some ways, but if you have any anecdotes or anything to share, I'd love to hear some of that.
- [30:28]
Wes Bush
Yeah. So the two most common reasons are they're either doing a fragmented approach where if we go back to the 8020 approach of like, okay, what should you be doing for your business? It really comes down to these nine core things like your strategy, your user, your model, your offer, onboarding, pricing, and then do you have the right data processing team? And so a fragmented approach would look like, hey, we're just doing the tough, maybe a user, we understand the model, we have an offer and it's okay. Onboarding, that's it. So of course it's not gonna work because you're not actually building the right team, the support structure to do this really, really well. And the reason I picked those nine core things is because it creates a product led organization where PLG is the norm. It's, we're gonna be good at this because we have the right capabilities to do that well. And that's actually part of the biggest challenge for sales at companies is because they want to do poj, they want to have that new go to market motion. But then if you look at their team, you're like, oh, you just have a lot of people in sales, but their user experience, you have one junior person, that's it. Like, okay, if you're going to truly make this easy, you need to invest there and actually build this as a true capability in your company. And so that's where there is a bit of a shift in terms of who do you have on your team. And the second thing that a lot of people get wrong is they do things in the wrong order. So they usually skip. And I would know this, they skip the strategy, they skip understanding the user. They just jump to the model. Oh yeah, our competitor has this 14 day free trial let's do the same. It's the best, easiest thing for a lot of people to go through and it takes a lot of the guesswork out because what they're doing, the competitor must be working right. So they do that, they launch the offer, they do the onboarding, they do the pricing. And so they start at kind of like three to six. And because of that, that's where the majority of the pain comes from because you didn't actually build anything on a solid foundation.
- [32:26]
Caroline
I feel like when I look at that, onboarding for me jumps out as like one. Like with my own experiences, probably the one thing that usually prevents me from wanting to move forward with a particular software or subscription. And I can think about a recent experience I had with a product called heyreach. I think a lot of people would be familiar with that product, but the self serve experience was amazing. You can jump in there and like guided tours to understand like what to do. But I felt you really get concierge level onboarding support even though it's just 14 day trial or whatever it is, I can't remember. But that experience was so memorable. So while I have not actually repurchased or have decided to become a paying customer of heyreach, it left a really solid imprint for me just based on the customer experience I had while I was with them for that short period of time. Yeah, I think that could be overlooked. Yeah.
- [33:19]
Wes Bush
To be honest, like, so I tried two AI coding tools recently. There was like Bolt and then Vercel. And so with Bolt I was like, oh, you know, you go to the homepage and you're like, oh, this looks amazing, so modern. It just looks like I need to type in a prompt and then I'm, I've got a product here. So I'm like making a nice detailed prompt and then hit enter and boom. It's like nothing. It takes me to this gnarly looking page with like a bunch of code. I'm like, oh, I'm non technical, you're scaring me. And with Vercel it was the difference of oh, I built a product LED ROI calculator in five minutes. I was like, that's really cool, especially for somebody who can't do that. And so like you said, that's the make or break difference. People want the try before you buy experience. But can companies deliver on that? That's the hardest part.
- [34:11]
Caroline
So you have the product LED Playbook is what you were just sharing on the screen there. Like those nine components, is that basically the playbook or Is the Playbook something different? Can you explain that to listeners who might be interested in learning more?
- [34:22]
Wes Bush
Yeah, absolutely. So the product LED playbook is our entire approach to how do we help companies build and scale their businesses. And so it goes through those nine components we all talked about. We just summarize that as like, that's the product led system. So that's our unique approach to how do we actually help companies build their product LED business. Cool.
- [34:40]
Caroline
And so for a company that's thinking about going down this path, what should they not do? Or would you ever have a caution to them to not go down the path of plg? Like, what are the reasons you might encourage a company to go down that path? Or the reason you might say, hey, you know, maybe you're not there yet. Here's what you should consider. What is the time investment and resource investment look like from that point of view?
- [35:04]
Wes Bush
Yeah, I think it comes down to five things and these are all kind of equally rated as far as waiting. First one is conviction. So do you have good conviction that this is the right path for you? There is sometimes where I'll go to a founder if they're like, oh, this is amazing. Like, this will help us raise more money. And it's kind of detached from like, what is your business and what is the problem you're trying to solve? Are you trying to make something easier or not? A lot of the founders, like, I'll talk to about one tally. So like they're going up against type, form, Google forms and everything else like that their whole mission. And like you talk to the founder, Marie, and she's like, I just want to make forms easy. I want to make this simple. It's like, okay, you got crazy conviction about this. It's a validated need. You can go down that path. So conviction, you got to make sure this, this makes sense. Check that off. The second thing is commitment. So do you actually have the commitment to see this through? Because this is like signing up for a new sport. And especially if you're going from sales at a product led, it is very much so. Like going from swimming to now, you're going to running. Like there's some overlap, you got some cardio component overlap. But like different muscles, different technique. Everything else is actually quite different. Different tools, everything else. And so the first six months is going to suck either way and you might get some quick wins under there. But odds are your, your first free motion will probably bomb. And so are you okay with having a low free to pay conversion rate to really Eat grass for a little while before you start to figure it out, you build those capabilities. So that's the second thing you got to really look at and be like, do I have commitment for at least a year or two to. To go through with this? And that's why conviction is important, because when you feel like you're not committed anymore, you still got the can rely on that conviction. The third thing is your leadership team. So are they all bought into this? Because there's many times, especially if the CEO is not bought in. I've seen this get derailed so many times. And so got to make sure, is the rest of the team bought in. I have worked with other founders, but they're like, you know what? Not everybody's on the same page. They're not all bought into this vision, and they've actually had to fire them, hire new ones. And because they're like, this is the direction we're going to go, and we need to hire people to actually get it, want it, or else they're going to be putting the brakes on when we're trying to go in that direction. So that's the third thing. The fourth one is just product readiness. So is your product actually ready to go through with this? And if you sign up for your product and it's super clunky, it's hard to use, you might say, okay, this is the direction. But we got to make that easier because right now that'll just be too hard. And the last thing you touched on it, which is just budget. So are you willing to invest in this? And a lot of people, like, whenever they come to us and they're like, okay, I want to work with you and invest in product led growth, they're like, whoa. But it's like 5, 10k per month. Oh, I'm like, okay, okay, wait. This should be a small amount you're investing in plg. This should not be a shock because there's a lot more to this. Like, your product analytics tool might even be that price, depending on how many users you have and everything else like that. So be ready to invest, to actually make it work. So those would be the top five.
- [38:18]
Caroline
I think that resonates a lot with us at Passetto and just what we sell, essentially. I think conviction is one of the things that really stands out to me, and I see this too, with a lot of companies that are, you know, wanting it to shift away from lead generation and make the move to demand generation is I think conceptually, a lot of founders and a lot of Executives want these things to be like a coin operated machine. I think I've used that term honestly in every recording that we've done so far. Because go to market just doesn't work that way. I wish it did. Where you put your coin in and you pull the lever and then boom, you're starting to see the fruits of your labor and your investment, your return on investment. But it's not that simple. And I think same thing with what we are building at Faceto, right? We're helping customers install in their systems basically a unified pipeline architecture to understand all of the things that people are doing leading up to becoming an opportunity and then, you know, going on to become a closed one opportunity and customer. And for a lot of companies, that's a new way of looking at things and it requires conviction and not just like resting on your laurels and doing things the way you've been taught to. It's sort of challenging the status quo, doing things differently and willing to take a little bit of a risk in the short term to get the long term results. And so I think that that is really a core theme across the board for anybody who's wanting to optimize, go to market performance and try different things to generate more revenue.
- [39:50]
Trevor
Yeah. What I am always thinking about is measurement. And Wes, you've talked a lot throughout this about measuring certain things, but I'm wondering if you can get any more specific about. You're trying to have this conviction about doing this. You're spending a year, two years, whatever. What are you looking at to say, yes, this is really actually working? And it probably, I'm guessing it's more than just the end revenue. You gotta know some other things leading up to that. So what would you say about that?
- [40:18]
Wes Bush
Yeah, definitely. So one of the things whenever you're setting your strategy, like we get really clear on is like, could we become the obvious choice in a given market? So even if you're going up against like a type form, it's like, okay, could you become the obvious choice for forms for a very specific type of person? And it's like, okay, you can always carve out a market where you can become the obvious choice. So that's one thing I would always look for. Are we getting closer to that? Like our whole goal is we want to be the obvious choice for SaaS founders that are looking to build and scale a product led business. And everything we do is focused on how do we do that effectively. And every single month we feel like we're getting closer. We're Getting more founders. We're working with everything else. So there's like, some things you're measuring there, obviously, in addition to revenue. You do want to see that ideally early in the day where you're like, okay, people are actually willing to pay for this. Now, when it comes to your product LED motion in the early days, a lot of times you'll have, like, more signups. So that would be a thing you would look at. Okay, from month one to month two, like, if you just had a sales in motion, you should see, okay, there's 30% more signups. Oh, okay, That's. That's a positive signal. And another positive signal would be, okay, people are coming back to this app. We haven't sent them emails to bombard them to come back to the app. They're coming back, they're using this product, more usage is going up. They're clearly doing something useful in this product. And then the other thing is, like, even if you don't have your pricing fully built over itself, serve. Are people clicking to contact us? Are they reaching out, like, hey, how can I realize that to the rest of my organization? They have questions about that. So if you start to see some of those positive signals and when you talk to people, they're like, oh, this app is like a game changer. That's some things that I always look up from the qualitative side and be like, we're rowing in the right direction. And then if you have the product analytics in place, you'd really look at, are people getting the first value? If so, how long does that take them? Are they coming back again and again, and what percentage of them are upgrading?
- [42:14]
Trevor
Got it.
- [42:14]
Wes Bush
Yeah.
- [42:15]
Trevor
I was just going to ask about value. We've said it a few times and I acknowledge that it's different for every product, of course. Do you have some examples, though, that might be easy for the audience to.
- [42:24]
Wes Bush
Sort of wrap their mind around Netflix watching a great show and like, you, you complete it, that would be a signal that they would look at where it's okay. How many people are doing that in the first time? Like when you log in and after you just subscribed and then are you coming back, like every single week? Are you a weekly entertained user? So they would be looking at those specific metrics to see, okay, do we have great retention here, great engagement, and if not, maybe we send them based on, oh, you watch this show. Here's the top 10 most likely ones based on that that you would find interesting. Right?
- [42:59]
Trevor
So it's like active users type Metrics, certain key signals interacting with certain features or whatever. Things that indicate they're really actually using the product.
- [43:09]
Wes Bush
Yeah. Like at a service level, if you don't have like a robust product analytics, you would look at like, okay, are they logging back in the. Ideally, you have something a little deeper which is like, okay, you're doing something useful in the product now. You're not just coming to log in here, you're. You're doing something, whatever that is. Netflix, it's watching a show. HubSpot. If you have the sales side of things, it might be like adding a deal or moving it around to a different part of the deal cycle. And so those would just be the things you would look at and be like, okay, they're getting some value out of this product.
- [43:38]
Trevor
Right. Okay, yeah, it's different for everybody. But I think it sounds like the recommendation is definitely go into it knowing what those things are, having a good set list of like, we want these outcomes and make sure that you can track to those outcomes.
- [43:52]
Wes Bush
Yep, you got it.
- [43:53]
Caroline
I was going to ask about like point solutions that are commonly used for that. Like, I think customer IO is one. Are there any others that come to your mind, Wes, that you've seen to be well received with the customers that you've worked with?
- [44:06]
Wes Bush
Yeah, so there's amplitude. You do need product analytics solutions. So you have that like customer IO is great for emails and some engagements. You usually will benefit from having some sort of user guidance tool that could be like a user flow, an app queues, a Pendo or something like that, which you could actually, hey, go through these five steps and you could get to value. Because initially, when anybody's trying new software, I always refer back to bowling. It's like bowling without the bumpers. And when you're bowling without the bumpers and it's your first time, well, it's actually quite easy to get it in the gutter. And getting in the gutter in this analogy is you never coming back to that app. And so if we can bump them back, that is honestly one of the best things you could do. And the two bumpers, one is a product bumper with just as they're logging into the products, getting into value, but then you also need a conversational bumper, which could be like your emails from customer IO as an example, or could even be like Trevor reaching out. Be like, hey, I saw you logged in, you didn't get the value. Could we hop on a quick call to go through and help me set this up with you? Some of the best Experiences I've had. Like, I was setting up this product called Databox for just like a data scorecard for product led. And I was trying to create this custom metric, and it was quite difficult. There was, like, a formula involved, and I was like, okay, not too comfortable doing this and about to give up. And then boom, exit intent pop up. Would you like us to set up your scorecard for you? And I was like, yes. Okay. Book a quick calendly call and then talk to their technical support specialist. He set it up for me, and I was like, okay, I'm going to upgrade. And so there's ways of creating those bumpers that just makes it so easy for people to get the value that it's like, just help them out wherever they're stuck. It seems simple. It's just most people don't know where do they get stuck? Where do they get frustrated? So that's why the tool has come in really handy there.
- [45:58]
Caroline
Hey, I love your analogies. I feel like you've got a lot of those in your back pocket, which is great. Cool. Okay, well, I think I've got all my questions that I wanted to ask. Trevor. Anything else that you wanted to cover?
- [46:11]
Trevor
No, I think this has been great. Really nice to think about all this from a really well thought out angle. I know I've gotten a lot out of it.
- [46:18]
Caroline
Totally. Oh, we've got a message in the chat. Let's see if there's a question. Oh, great. Tanya says, love the analogies. Yeah, me too. I think they're great. Amazing session. Thank you all. Okay, so that's great feedback. I hope everybody loves the show today. Wes, thanks so much for coming on. Really enjoyed speaking with you. And to everybody listening, Wes has offered his free ungated book, productled.com book. Check it out. I did the masterclass. I learned a lot from it. I found it very, very valuable. So I would encourage others to do the same. If you're in SAS and you know you're considering adopting a PLG motion or you feel like yours is not working, check it out. Wes is the PLG guy, and we're so happy to have him here. So thanks, y' all for showing up, and thanks, Wes, for joining the show today.
- [46:58]
Wes Bush
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.
- [47:00]
Caroline
All right, cool stuff.
- [47:01]
Trevor
Cheers, everybody.
- [47:02]
Wes Bush
Cheers.
- [47:02]
Caroline
Bye.
- [47:08]
Wes Bush
Sam.