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Foreign to be sharing three strategies I use to generate 1 billion in self serve revenue for our clients. Two years ago I made a massive discovery that changed everything. I sat down and analyzed every single client we had ever worked with, which was 324 plus clients at that time. And I uncovered a simple truth. The most successful companies, they weren't just product led, they actually had built product led organization. And if you're relying on surface level product led growth tactics, choosing between free trials and premium models, you're just tweaking your onboarding flows and making your pricing transparent, then you are leaving millions on the table. Today I'm going to be breaking down three battle tested strategies that helped us generate over a billion dollars in self serve revenue for our clients. So let's dive in. Strategy number one called the bullseye strategy. And it's essentially about becoming the obvious choice in your market. You see most companies fail before they even start. The reason why is because they're just not even the obvious choice in their market. And it's highly commoditized. And here's a reality check to just ask yourself is how clearly are you the obvious choice for your ideal customers in your market? Now if you hesitate answering that question, we've got some work to do. Which is okay because I got five questions here that are going to help you really clarify if you're the obvious choice in your market and if you're not, how you could become the obvious choice in your market. So let's dive in. The first question is which market can you own and hit? It's not every market. It's not just we're going to be this for everybody. Maybe one day you can become like Canva and be like hey, we're going to make it easy to design for everyone. But first you got to start off with a very small market and own it. So which market can you truly dominate? Second question is where do you play best? Now I want you to define your ideal customer, your core problem and your key marketing trends. Where do you stand out? Which customers do you work the best with? What does that look like now? What? Once you get clear on where you play best, then you can start asking yourself some really challenging questions like how will you win in your market? Because even if you just get the first two questions, you're clear on which market you want to play in, you know exactly who you're going to go after. But what is going to make what you do hard to copy. You need moats that will make it very hard for people to eventually compete with you. So what are those two or three modes? Now I can link to about 15 other possible modes you could do, such as speed and innovation. A branding mode could be how you differentiate with your product. You create some special ip, but really try and think about what are those things that really make what you do hard to copy and reinforce a defensible moat in your business. The fourth question is all about what's your winning picture? I want you to define a one year vision with quarterly milestones. So what does that one year picture look like of success? What is the quarterly picture of success look like for your business? And even get very clear on what does this month's picture look like for success. And then you can zoom out and ask yourself what is the end game for this business? Is it to IPO, is it to just build, you know, get to 10 million in a recurring revenue and pay yourself 1 million a year as a founder? What is that endgame that gets you excited and the rest of your team aligned? And this is what I'm signing up for. That sounds like a great end game. It's crazy to think like in sports you have football, you have the super bowl and tennis, you have Wimbledon and you have all these kind of games where it's like, that's success, it's winning that particular tournament or something like that. Now in business you just don't have that. So you have to create your own end game. So get clear on what that looks like. Now the last question to become the average choice in market is what strategic choices must you make? And this is a lot of times really just saying no to particular things. So no, we can't pursue that market, or no, we're not going to be a multi product company, we're going to be a single product company. We're no, we're not going to have more than seven employees, something like that. Whatever thing you come up with there is this strategic choice you usually have to make. And many of them, they'll have to make wherever it's not clear, wherever you deviate from the first four questions. So if you realize you're going after a different market, okay, we got to make a strategy choice. We're just focusing on this market for how you'll win. Okay, we're just focusing on these three moats for the next year and we're not going to pursue anything else, not going to invest anything else. And so that gives you insane clarity and focus, which you need to become the obvious choice. So those five questions will really help you become the obvious choice in your market, but it means nothing if you have a terrible free model. So let's go to strategy two, which is all about how do you build an intentional free model. So I want you to kind of think of your free offering like playing Super Mario. So when Mario grabs a fire flower, he transforms bigger, stronger, and he's basically ready to take on anything. It's complete badass. And so you always want to pick up that flower whenever you're playing Mario. Now that's exactly what your free experience should feel like for, for your users. And the most common mistake most companies make is really their free offer. Somebody picks up that flower, your free offer, and it's like Mario without any power ups. It's not exciting. You aren't able to really do anything you couldn't do. But let me tell you, when you think of whenever you signed up for ChatGPT or some of the recent AI products, it's almost instantaneous. Go gratification. It's like, no, imagine a world without this. Now it seems different. And surely your product has something unique that you should be providing in that free experience to allow people to say, wow, there's a clear for. And after that free experience, there has to be tangible value. It can't just be, let's click around in this free trial and explore the feature set. No. What can this free product do for me? People have attention spans like nats, so the faster you can get to the value, the better on that end. So share a quick story of a company that made this mistake and then course corrected. So Tetraf is a free Wikipedia tool and initially they had a 14 day free trial. And if you know what a Wikipedia tool is, it's as soon as you add your documentation as a company, you start onboarding employees, it becomes really valuable. And it's like when you don't have it, it's very hard to onboard new employees and get them up to speed on things. And so they were wondering, why are people not upgrading in the first 14 days? Well, turns out it was very much like a Google Doc folder where it's like, okay, start creating your documents and everything else, put them all in this one place and then share it with employee. But they're like, what could you realistically do in 14 days with that? So they had the wrong model. And as a result, not many people are signing up. Not many people were investing the time to go through everything. But whenever they switched to a free model, they saw a lot more signups. They saw a lot More upgrades and their churn also reduced significantly. So that's the power of getting a free model like right? And that's what I want for you as well. So if you want to go through four steps, this is how you can design a free model that actually works for your business. So step one is I want you to map out your user journeys levels. So take a step back and ask yourself what is ultimate success for this product? How can, what is the main job to be done? What does that look like? And then I want you to break it down into three different levels so you have your beginner level which is like, hey, I did something cool. Like in Canva, it's I created my first graphic in ChatGPT. It's I got a really and detailed response to one of my prompts that blew me away. Maybe think of something that I didn't even think of at. So like it's smart at the end of the day. So think about what is that beginner level. And then also what's the intermediate level? What is something else out there where you say okay, that's the next level up. That's when in Canva it's like, okay, I want to have branding guidelines for the rest of my team to use. I want to onboard my team. And so, okay, great. You have those extra features that enable you to be fantastic at growing your team. So think about the beginner milestone, the intermediate milestone and break it down into levels because we want to gamify this experience people to sign it. Now step two is I want you to identify the challenges that hold your users back at each level. So we take Canva with designing that graphic. Well, what are the challenges? Well, if you don't have a template, that's really hard to get inspired of, like what should I design for this poster? But if you're scrolling through 10 great looking templates, well, it's just a matter of picking one. And then if I didn't have a template, well, okay, editing and designing one could be very hard. So it's like we could save you with creating a template and we could also make it really easy if you're, you're starting from scratch. So you just have to edit the text and that's all. And you have a beautiful looking poster. So second step is just identify what are all of those challenges that get in your user's way of accomplishing that level. Then the third step, I already touched on it, I couldn't help myself. But that is where you design solutions for each of those challenges. So to re go through that example of canvas. Like if I have writer's block or designer's block and I don't know what to design, give them templates, make it easy where they can just edit the text. Now the fourth thing is this is what you're going to do. You're going to structure your model around what you have to give people away for free in order to get them to that beginner outcome. That's it. It's not about, hey, is this a free trial? This is a freemium model. It's like, no. What does it take for your user to get to that next level? Let's give that away. Brilliant idea. Ads. You can take full credit for it when your free model actually works. So if you want help with your free trial or premium model, just designing an intentional free model for your business. I'm actually hosting a workshop on March 19th at 11:30am Eastern and I'll help you personally craft a high converting free model for your business. So if you want an invite to that, I'm sending it out on the product led newsletter. So subscribe product led.com forward slash newsletter to get an invite for this event and in case you missed it, for future events as well, that's where I share all access to all my events. So we got two out of the three strategies. The third one and last one is the bowling alley framework. And this is all about creating frictionless onboarding so your users can get the value fast. Now every friction point in your onboarding equals lost revenue, so you want to tighten that up as fast as possible. I want to show you an example. So take snappa.com we found out that 27% of their users never made it past their email verification step. So as soon as you sign up, they were presented with the email verification step and most of them just never got into the product, which was crazy. So let that sink in. Over 1/4 of all potential customers lost before even getting into the product. So the fix was actually very simple. We just simply delayed verification to the second time they logged in if they hadn't clicked verify my email when we sent it, since the next time they logged in they were just asked once again, okay, please verify your email before you log in a second time. But the first time users they could just go straight into the product and get to value. Now the result was astounding. They saw a 20% MRR boost in just one months. The founder couldn't even believe it. It was so cool. And so the bowling alley framework works and I'M going to share exactly how you can apply this to your business. The first thing you have to do is define what is the first strike. Once again, this is very similar to what we talked about in the beginner outcome of your free model. What is it that you're going to give away for free? The first strike is just what is that first moment where they feel like, I get what this product is all about. You need to nail down what that looks like. For Canva, it's designing that first professional graphic where you feel like you're in a little bit of a designer, even though we both know you're not. You can fake it. It feels amazing. And so define your first strike. Gotta go through what that looks like. Second step is you gotta build the straight line. So this is the fast path to achieving that first strike. What you have to do first is go through that journey with yourself and see, okay, what is the best path in your product to get to that point. And then you gotta label every single step. A red step is just, you can eliminate it. A yellow step, you could delay it. And a green step is you're gonna keep this. This should be your straight line. Should only be green steps at the end of the day. And so most onboarding flows, you can eliminate about 40 to 60% of unnecessary steps. So just, I recommend cut the the fat. Even if you just do this step alone, you will see a boost in your free to pay conversion rate, guaranteed. Now the third thing you got to do is you got to add smart product and conversational bumpers. So product bumper is something intuitive where it's just, hey, click here to go through this step. Click here to go through that step. Now, most people I have realized, have abused product bumpers like tooltip here and they just tooltip people to death. Scary. And what you need to do is just go back to what was on your straight line. What are those green steps? And make it easy, no brainer steps, for people to go through that straight line with those intuitive tooltips. Whether that's a product tour, a little checklist, or anything else like that. Now you would think, okay, we've done a great job. We've created a straight line. We got product bumpers. It's easy to do in the product. We're good. No, you will still have people that fall off that straight line. And wherever they fall off, if it's from the email verification step, which you should remove, or it's from getting to first, the first strike, and they haven't got to that step yet we need to bring them back to the straight line wherever they left off. And so whether that's an email, it's a text, something else, we need to bring them back to that next step in the product so they can achieve the first strike and then they're going to be way more likely to upgrade in the product. And so that is how you can implement the bowling alley framework into your business. So now that you know the three battle tested strategies that have driven over a billion dollars in self serve revenue for our clients, it's time to just put them into action. So once again, if you want access to all our free events and implement this with us, make sure to join the product led newsletter@product that.com for newsletter. I hope to see you in the next podcast and YouTube video. And remember, there's three ways whenever you're ready, we can help you scale your product led business. The first one is just to start with reading the product led playbook. This is our exact playbook for how we help our clients grow their self serve revenue from zero to over eight figures in pure self serve revenue. The next thing you can do is join Product Academy. This is the number one program for building a product led go to Market motion. So if you want to get some help, get the templates resources you need to do this on your own, then that is the best program for you. And then we also have our flagship program which is working with a product led implementer. This is where we air you with the product led implementer who can help scale your business to eight figures and beyond and will work with you in the trenches to actually do it with your business. And so I hope this is helpful and let me know in the comments what is one strategy you're going to implement today.