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Foreign. Welcome to another fun episode on the product Guide podcast. I'm your host, Wes Bush and I am going to be talking a little bit about inverse thinking again today because I absolutely love inverse thinking. It's where we try and approach a topic and we approach it as if we're trying to create the most terrible idea or solution possible. And so for today, we're going to be talking about how you can truly get incredible at unsuccessfully kickstarting your product led growth motion. Now, why the heck would I ever consider the, you know, let's think about how to be very unsuccessful here is. Because everything I'm going to share with you, I have about 14, 15 ideas here is you're going to think about the inverse of this. So for example, the very first recommendation or principle of building an unsuccessful product led motion from the very beginning when you're kickstarting it is just do it alone. So the solution here is product led growth is a team sport. You need to involve your team from the very beginning. Product led growth is cross collaborative. You need a team to really help you execute this and understands the full picture of the business. So maybe that doesn't apply to you if it's just you as the founder, but for many of you listening, you work at larger teams as well. And so you need to be thinking about product growth as a team sport. So that's the first kind of solution. The second, if you're building an unsuccessful product that grows motion from the ground up, you need to to put together a half baked free trial or freemium model and launch it with high revenue targets on day one. And when it doesn't work, you just need to simply lean into this and prove your point that this whole PLG thing doesn't work. And when it comes to picking your product led model, just pick a free trial. It's worked for other people and it'll also work for you. So just go with that strategy. The next thing you can do is make sure you do not put together a team to execute on this. Because at the end of the day, you know what, people have other priorities and it's just not a high priority to have your team or a specific team that's focused on moving this product led motion forward. The other thing too is don't train your team on anything related to product led growth. You don't want them to know anything about this whole new strategy. You want to keep it vague, you want to keep it a little bit elusive as far as what's going to happen, what are some of these big changes and really just emphasize the product will sell itself and leave it at that. It's just enough so that people will start getting concerned about maybe they won't be needed to sell the product. So that's step four. Step five is assume you just know it all and just wing it. This is probably one of the best ways you can do to really practice hubris and really see things through your way, because that is the right way. And the next thing you can do is really just don't communicate why you're making this transition as a business. It's a big change and people just don't really care about why you're making this big transition because you definitely don't want to motivate them. As far as this big change that you're making in the business, the next thing you can do is just don't prioritize early initiatives well. So when you go through and identify, okay, here's the things we need to do to launch a product led model. Don't take the time to to really go through and find out what are those specific initiatives that you could roll out that have high upside and low downside. You want to really pick the ones that have a huge amount of effort to kick off with and a very low downside. Those are absolutely the best things you could focus on in the early days. The next thing you can do is don't follow any sort of framework or anyone who has actually done this many, many times. So you can spend a lot more time just making some common mistakes from people. Other thing is don't plan out the strategy as a leadership team. This is one of those motions that is best lived in just one team. And it's ideally not the leadership team that moves this forward and is all bought in. So just make sure you don't involve your leadership team as part of this. And if you do decide to communicate this to your business, make it known that this is a really big revolution, a completely new way of doing things and not so much an evolution of how we do business and how we're evolving to really meet the modern consumers demands. Big revolutions are more scary small, so you should definitely focus on those. And when you launch the new free model or product led model, whatever that looks like for your business, do not, do not optimize it because majority of product good models, when they're first launched, they always work and so there's just no need to optimize it. Other thing when it comes to aligning your teams is make sure you do not Measure the success of the user. Do not even consider something like a product qualified lead. Do not even consider getting on the same page as a organization around what is user success, what does that look like for us? And the other thing is make sure you focus on many different types of ideal customer types and user types because you want to have a specific onboarding journey for every every single one of these customers and users right from the get go. You do not want to have focus around one particular type of ideal user type. So these are some of the if you look at the inverse of each of these, you're going to learn some really interesting things that will help you actually successfully kickstart your product led growth motion. I'll go through them real quick as the inverse of the inverse so you can see the solution of it all. So number one, if you're going to successfully kickstart your product led motion, you need to do this as a team. Product led growth is a team sport. The other thing is when it comes to picking your model as a business, you really need to start to understand what are the problems you're solving for your user in the first place. What are some of those beginner milestones that you could deliver for free? That is really what you should be giving away for free. Not so much just oh yeah, we do a free trial. Other thing involve your leadership team right from the get go when it comes to building a product led motion. You want them involved. You also want to have the people who are going to be able to shoot this down involved because there are some of the best advocates later on once you get them bought in. And the other thing too is you want to actually train your team on what to do, how to think about this. That's actually one of the whole reasons why we created our product at accelerator. It's not so much like yeah, of course we could just have this as on demand content and sell it for a fraction of the price. But the reason we do this live every single month is because we actually want your teams to start to think like a product led leader. Because we know that that when you think like a product led leader, cool things happen. You have great discussions, you have great disagreements too around what you should be doing to build a successful product led strategy. So that's really important is to train your team on this new way of thinking and really the mindset change that needs to happen to build that successful product led business. And the other thing too is just really going into this with an open mind mind if you're Just assuming you know everything and you're just going to wing it. Okay, you're going to make a ton of mistakes and it's going to be very frustrating. But if you just go into it with open mind, asking for advice when you're stuck, even if it's in our product led community, that's fine. We encourage that. We want you to be like, I don't know what I'm doing. And chances are there's about ten or a hundred other people at least in our community where it's like, yeah, I put my hand up too. I don't know that as well as I would like. But here's what we tried and you can learn much faster. The other thing too is when you're communicating this transition as a business, you really need to get everyone on the same page about why, why are we doing this as a business? What is the main motivation? Maybe you see this as a really great long term play for the business. And I know some CEOs and leadership teams, they're like, yeah, we're becoming product led and we're putting it in our pitch deck and we're going to raise more money because of this. No, I get it, but I have very few companies that I can look back to that I've started with that strategy where it's actually worked. It's more just been one of those ad lib things where we say it and then we don't really follow through because we don't know how to follow through. We just, we're really good storytellers. So the big thing there is you want to communicate this transition to the business and also have clear, actionable steps about what is this overall strategy to your business. The other thing is when you're prioritizing initiatives, please, please, please, the very first ones you pick, you should be able to, especially when you go through your existing customer user journey map, you should be able to find some very good meaty quick wins where like, hey, if we remove this or we did this like, you know, thing that might take us less than a day, we might actually see a massive impact here. And it doesn't even have to involve launching a free model. It could just be as simple as, you know what, we're having our customer success reps reach out manually all the time. We don't get like a ton of responses from our customers who are really like the best advocates of our solution. What if we just had an in app tool when they're in the product, it's going to prompt them to Upgrade to this new plan, which is going to be a perfect fit for them, and just automating some of those things. So that's an example. Just prioritize those early initiatives. The other thing too is focus on the optimization of it. So there's three things that I really see when it comes to optimizing your motion. Once you have it in motion is the first thing is just understand the situation. So like what is happening in your specific business. Second part, what is the highest leverage opportunity? The faster you can find that, the easier it is for you to really optimize it. And then three is really just implementing, executing that highest leverage opportunity. That's actually one of the reasons why we created the product LED scorecard is to help you do that optimization way faster than you would think. And the other and kind of last part of this is really just measure the success of the user and use this metric across your entire organization and tie it to some specific results for every team. So for your marketing team, yes, they'll probably have a signup goal for this, but then also tied to, okay, so out of those hundred signups, how many of them became a product qualified lead or activated? However you want to define that metric internally. But what you're essentially saying is how many of those people out of that hundred actually saw value? And then when it comes to your sales team, you can start saying, okay, now how many of those product leads actually became customers? They're focused on that as well. And then same thing with your product team, they're maybe tied to that number as well. Where it's saying, okay, from a product experience perspective, how many, what was the percentage of people who went into the product actually saw value? And they're also trying to optimize that because it is one of those unifying metrics where when you have all the teams kind of bought into improving this, it starts, some really cool things start to happen where, okay, you're just consistently focusing on helping your users become more successful. And if you've heard me before in my programs, I'm always saying your end user success will eventually become your success. And that really does become a lot more true when you start measuring it. But it never will happen and take place and become a part of your culture if you don't start measuring it and then tying it to people, people's specific results and how they're really improving them. And the last thing I'll end on is just focus on one ideal best customer first. You don't want to be like, okay, we serve everyone. Right away for this free model. No, just focus on one specific type of customer. Even if you have multiple products, just focus on one, build out the user journey for that one specific user, blow them away and then you could start to get fancy with adding multiple types of flows, multiple types of journeys. So this is really the recap of how to successfully kickstart your product led growth motion. I hope you found it helpful. If you did, let me know on LinkedIn. You can find me at Wes Bush. And also if you're interested in a free workshop and how to Kickstart your product led motion in 2023, we are putting together a workshop on that. So just head on over productled.com and I hope to see you on that workshop live. And it's free by the way. All right, bye for now. Thank you for listening to the product led podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a colleague or friends you know who might benefit. We are always looking at which episodes get the most listens so we know which content to create more of. 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