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Welcome to the Product led podcast. The show where we break down what it really takes to build, scale and grow a product led business. In today's episode, we're diving into one of the biggest challenges every founder and growth leader faces. How do you consistently pull the right growth levers? Week after week, you'll discover a powerful three step framework, expose, explore and exploit that will help you identify your single biggest growth bottleneck, uncover the best solutions and double down on the winners so your business can scale faster. We'll also walk through a real world example, show you how to avoid the squeaky wheel trap that derails most teams, and share practical ways. You can start applying this process immediately with the Growth Copilot. So if you've ever wondered why your growth feels random or how to turn actions into measurable results, this episode is for you. Let's jump in.
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So how do you actually pull the right growth levers to grow faster every single week, again and again? It's a really tough question to go through because, well, a lot of times you don't know what is the bottleneck for your business. You don't know, hey, what is actually the root cause of our slower growth? And you usually don't have a really good way to identify, okay, what are the best solutions that we should actually go through and address? So in this short video or podcast, if you're listening to this, we're going to go through how to actually pull the right growth levers in your business every single week so you can grow 10x faster. So let's dive in, shall we? So the main outcomes for today, three things. One, we're going to expose what is your single biggest growth bottleneck in your business. This is going to be really easy for you to find with our process. Really hard if you don't have a process to find that. The second thing we're going to go through is really just exploring now what are the best possible solutions to tackle this. And last part is we're going to exploit this. So if this is a big growth opportunity, there's not just going to be, oh yeah, we did this little experiment and boom, big results. You're going to have to actually double down on some of these things and so we'll go through what that actually looks like and how do you think about this? And so what's really fantastic about this is this is not just content. We also created a growth code pilot GPT where you can actually go through this. And we'll link to it below in the show notes or on YouTube where you can just use this as well to make it way easier for you to actually go through this same process. So the very first problem to really think about is, well, what is preventing you from seeing success and pulling those growth levers every single week? So the first thing that I've noticed founders fall into this trap again and again is just the fact of the squeaky wheel syndrome. And we all know what this looks like. You have a specific problem in the business and it's like the one crying the loudest, it squeaks the loudest. And you're like, oh, that's a pretty big problem. I have to focus on that. And the answer is, well, sometimes, but most times that's not actually the biggest problem in your business. And so you would be better focused on some of the other problems that actually are the true bottleneck. And so as a result of this, by focusing on the wrong things, most companies, only 14% of companies actually experience month over month growth, whereas 86% of companies, it's kind of random growth or they're not growing on a monthly basis at all. And so the question I have for you to really just munch on is how well do you think your company translates action into results? Because the very core of a good growth process is this equation, which is you should be having very closely tied results to the actions you put into the business. So when you work on specific things, you see, okay, there is a net difference in this business and we are improving on this area. But how do you do this? How do you consistently translate results into or translate action into results? Well, I want to share with you one of the frameworks we just created to make it so much easier for you to go through. So the framework is the 3x framework. And so it really breaks down into three steps. The first one is how do you expose what is the core bottleneck? So we're going to get clarity on what is success, what does that look like? And then we're going to diagnose, like, what are the actual root causes here? And then step two, explore is all about a process where we're going to explore what are those best solutions for you to solve that specific bottleneck in your business. And then the last step is all about how do you exploit this? How do you maximize the return on your time invested in, in this as well. So for the very first step you're going to go through, how do you actually clarify what success looks like? So you must know obviously what success looks like for your business. And so what this could be for your business. If you're trying to hit a specific revenue milestone, it could be, hey, success is getting to, you know, let's say adding another 20,000 monthly recurring revenue this month. It could be 50,000 or it could be 100,000. Doesn't matter. But what is success for you? The biggest thing that matters to you in your business, and we're just going to define that as your North Star. It's not really North Star, but for the purposes of this today, that's the North Star we're driving towards. And so you want to get really clear on what is that output. So success, and then where are you at today? So if you look at the last four quarters in your business, or, sorry, four months, where are you at? So if your goal is to add, you know, 50,000 new monthly recurring revenue this upcoming month, but the last four months you've been averaging about 30,000. Okay, there's like a 20,000 mrr gap that you have to fix. So we want to get really clear on what is the gap between you actually hitting that success criteria, because then we can get a really nerdy and go through how to actually diagnose this bottleneck. But what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go through this with a real life example and we can go through it. So one of our clients is really focusing on how to actually grow their business. So I'll give you like a lens of how to look at their business. So they are a B2B software business and they help a lot of photographers really see success with their portfolio. So they can send a portfolio of the photos they took to a client and then they could upgrade to print the photos, get more access to some of the premium photos if they sell per photo. So I'm going to share a really simple example of what this looks like for a real company. So the name of this company is cloudspot. It's one of our previous clients and they help a lot of photographers create these magnificent online portfolios where they can send it to their clients and they can upgrade for more photos and all that fun stuff. So these are all hypothetical numbers and not showing anything proprietary. But for their website, let's just look. Website visitors is 50,000 this month and the number of signups was only 444. So they had a 0.89% conversion rate. So this is crazy low. I've seen as high as 75% signup rates. We're not going to go for that as the baseline here, but even like, hey, 10% world class if we got this to 3%. Okay, we're, we're doing about average here, so let's just go with this. Now if this is not your bottleneck, you could always go through. Okay. How many of those trials actually saw, you know, success setting up everything in the onboarding? How many of them actually got to a first strike, a key usage indicator where they experience like a lot more value and then how many people became a new paying customer as well? So what this reverse funnel actually helps you do is just pinpoint, okay, where's the biggest bottlenecks. But for the purposes of today and keeping it blazing fast, I'm just going to pick this as an example to kind of show you, hey, this is the biggest bottleneck. So success for this company, they want to add, you know, 50,000 new MRR. And the biggest bottleneck is they, they actually just don't have enough people signing up and they have a very low percentage of people that are going from, you know, visiting the website to actually signing up for that specific business. So what do we do? That is the whole purpose of diagnosing a bottleneck. But what many people do is they just go right into, okay, let's explore solutions. However, the problem here is we don't actually know what is the true problem here. So what I'm going to do, I'm just going to pull up the growth copilot and I am going to fire it up and see, okay, what is the issue to kind of get a little bit more help on how do we actually understand what is the biggest bottleneck in the business. So I'm going to say the same thing. Success is adding 50k new MRR. The biggest bottleneck is not having enough websites visitors converting. So out of 50K users, only 444 sign up each month. Okay, so we've got that and now all it's going to do is help me figure out, okay, what is actually the root cause of this. So we can go in here. It's got the success, the baseline and the gap. We need more signups. Looking at reverse funnel, the traffic is 50k the signups. So we're at a 0.9% conversion rate. And, and the top bottleneck. Yes, it's just restating it now to just make sure. Yes, that is it. And then we can go into, okay, bottleneck discovery. Why is that the biggest problem? Yes, the root cause, the where. Why? So we know people are getting stuck at the like signup stage. Why could this be an issue. So there's a lot of things here that could contribute to this. The team. Is nobody actually owning this? Is there like a system problem? Are we actually tracking the right stuff? Like, it could actually be higher and maybe for whatever reason, there's actually a lot more signups or sometimes it's even less signups because we did not track things the right way. So if we could check that, that would be super helpful. We could sign up for the overall experience of this company and see, okay, what does that look like? Is it really hard to sign up? Could there be too many forms? Could there be. Yeah, just a lot of friction there. Could the value prop not be that strong? There's so many things here, but let's say nobody owns it other than the founder and there's too many forms. Okay, so I'm not saying that's the case, but for you, you have to do your own digging to be really like the detective of what is actually causing this issue. Because most people just, like I said, focus on the solutions, but they don't actually know what is the root cause. You can save so much time and energy if you just get really clear and get clear on that root cause. So the primary root cause, this one, let's pick experience, and that's a little more practical for this example. So, okay, we've got the diagnosis here. It is. The experience of the signup is really brutal. There's a lot of steps here that we have to go through. And so the core checklist is just make sure you go through your funnel. Understand, okay, where are you losing most people? And find the area where you're dropping off the most amount of people in that flow. And. And then just do sanity check. If you moved this 1 metric 10% with the rest of the business, grow Even more than 10%, if you can look at that, then that is really a big factor for you. And so before you move on to the next step, just get really clear on, like, what is that top bottleneck for your business? And then we can move on to step two, which is all about how do we explore what are the best potential solutions for this? So how this really starts off is we're going to go through and just ask, okay, what are some of those potential root causes for this? And then we can go through, why might that be the specific case? What are some good hypothesis as far as what that looks like? And what that basically looks like is this. It's because we've observed this specific problem or we see, hey, there's a lot of friction. We believe this is the root cause is driving this problem, which is preventing us from growing or getting more signups in this case. So we have here a list of potential solutions and we can just go through a lot of these and see. Okay, do any of these make sense for us? So we could remove non essential form fields. Yes, that's a quick win add sso, Google Slack, Microsoft login. That is huge. The impact could be 10 to 30% potentially. And you know, it takes one to five hours of dev time. That's awesome. We could rewrite the signup page to highlight immediate value and add elite social proof. That's also very good. Promised line effects show blurred product behind signups. Honestly, these are all good, you pick. So if this were my company, I would actually implement all of these because they are going to do it. But it's a matter of, okay, which one's going to have the highest Left first? And ChatGPT rightly pointed out, it's actually removing the unnecessary form fields and then, yeah, rewrite the signup page to emphasize instant value and then adding elite social proof. Okay, great. Let's start with one. All right, so we got our experiments pointed out and we've generated the solution. Now we've prioritized and scoped the solutions. What you'll find here is that you and this is already baked into the GPT. It's going to start looking for experiments that are, you know, high impact, they're easy to test, so minimum amount of time and the cost is as low as possible. And it's also going to search out for non conventional ideas because you probably have thought of a lot of those conventional ones. So it puts everything into three buckets. So the quick wins experiments and long term bets. And what you should be thinking about is develop a portfolio here of ideas to test against. So the thing I like to do this is kind of a low risk portfolio, if you will. But 70% of quick wins, there are those things where it's like, hey, it's not going to have this like, you know, incredibly high upside unless it's stupid. Like you have like 20 form fields to sign up for your product, but it's going to be some low lift things that will over time add up to a lot of additional value in your business. And then experiments are just things where you're not 100% sure if it's going to work. It kind of sits in between a quick win and a big bet. And then a big bet is like, hey, this could go just as wrong. As it goes good. So we got to really test that, monitor it closely to make sure that this is the right thing. But it's more about like conviction in that sense. So we have our experiments boiled out here and it's got the hypothesis of what this looks like the definition of done, which is really important. Most experiments don't have this and it leads to a lot of scope creep. And then you got the primary metric you're trying to improve. The past threshold is something that we wanted to have inside the GPT which is just what does it look like if it were successful. So if it gets to, you know, 1.8 conversion rate, this is amazing. Like we should roll out this copy everywhere. We should make sure like all our other form fields have this best practice in place because we just doubled the center of the business as far as getting new customers in the door. So key dates we got that part. As far as what that looks like, you'd always add that risk mitigations, you could always go through that. But that's good to at least spend a little bit of time thinking about. And you just got your task checklist. So you can always move this into whether you use notion or like some sort of experiment board. But yes, you can just answer the final question. So I am the DRI direct responsible person and can you commit to a two week. Yes. Okay. So it's just making sure that I got the right thing and can execute on this. So we have kind of gone through step two, the explore stage. There is just a couple non negotiables that the GPT will go through which is make sure one person is responsible for this. And ideally you're managing this in some sort of notion board where it's like to do running, review shipped you have those four statuses and then timeline when is this due by? Is there anyone else involved? Helpful to ask that. And then break down all the tasks that are involved, key dates, milestones, action items. And blocking up enough time to actually execute on this is super important. So now you've gone through that, now we can actually exploit this and launch this. So yes, let's go through this next part. And what's a little different in the GPD case is, well at this stage it's just about you actually launching this. So there is a bit of like a delay here. But if it does pass this test, it will recommend what you should do. So if it's like you've beat the past threshold, great. Scale it out. Improve the simplified form to 100% of your traffic, you can move it to the ships, you can document the learning to share this with the rest of the team, like how big of an impact this had. And then you want to systematize this and make it a big part of your company operating system. Like, hey, even your marketing operating system. This is how many form fields we should have. We shouldn't have any more. We should improve reducing friction for our users. If it's like borderline successful, you might want to still keep form, sure, but adding supporting tweaks. So just what are some of those ideas? And if it fails, there's like no or very low lift. And let's say the, the quality of the signups goes down, okay, you can kill it, roll back to the original form and go back to the drawing board because maybe this wasn't the root cause. There's something else that we have to go back at the very beginning. So yes, we can always use this and continue to use this to get like more plans of like, how could we double down on this? But that is what you would do to really exploit this. And this is actually where I find a lot of growth folks don't focus enough time on which is just how do I double down on this? Because if you find something that works okay, roll it out everywhere. If you have a campaign that works, okay, spend, you know, $100,000 a month promoting it. If it's working, that's where the biggest opportunity is for you to really see a lot of success. So to really recap here, the whole 3x framework is focused on three things. One, exposing what is your biggest bottleneck in your business, to explore what are all the potential possibilities for how you could solve that. And three, make sure you exploit the winners for what that looks like for your business. And so if you want make sure, grab a free version of the growth copilot to actually go through this for your own business. And let me know in the comments or reach out on LinkedIn Westbush to really just hear, how was this experiment for you? What were your takeaways of implementing this process in your business? And so one final thing is we just launched after going through our own growth pilot series. We realized one of the things that a lot of people had like a little bit of contention about when it came to working with us at product LED is like, hey, I don't necessarily want to hop on a free PLG game plan because they just thought it was a sales call. So one of the big solutions we came up with is how do we actually create a really simple way where if anybody wants to engage with us, it's super low risk. You can have a one time kind of product where if you just want to see how we work, how we could help you. That's why we decided to create a product led roadmap offer. And so we just launched this. And so if you're interested in breaking through your PLG growth plateau in 14 days, what we'll actually do, it breaks down into four steps. So first we'll, we'll do a full product led assessment on your entire business. We'll look at your onboarding, we'll look at your pricing, your offer, everything to just see, okay, is your PLG motion firing on all cylinders and what is the true bottleneck for your business. And then we will design your personalized PLG roadmap for your business. And so we'll recommend, hey, you should totally recommend doing these things. 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. And you'll have a growth plan that's directly tied to improving your business and attacking that bottleneck. But what's really important when it comes to creating a roadmap is not just saying, hey, look at us, we came up with this brilliant roadmap that's not that helpful. What is helpful is getting the rest of your team bought in to hey, do we agree that one, this is the biggest bottleneck and two, this is one of the best ways we could attack it together so that your entire team rallies behind this approach. And so the last part is we'll definitely have a accountability call where we can actually make sure, hey, if there's any other execution hurdles you have that you can go through it. And so what's really cool about this is the roadmap is absolutely free if you decide to work with us and actually implement it inside your business. But if not, at the end of the day it's very low risk, way low fee way for you to just see, hey, what would it look like if I had an expert in PLG take a look at my business and understand how could we grow faster. So if you're interested in learning more about the product led roadmap, make sure to head on over to productled.com forward/roadmap. And I'm excited to work with you and have my team really understand your business better to see how we can help you grow faster. So if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to like subscribe wherever you are and let somebody else know how they can grow faster as well and share that DVD with them. Thank you so much. Happy growing and to wrap things up. Thank you everybody for listening to this version of the product podcast. Make sure to rate review this on wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple, Google, you name it, Spotify. I'm going to read every single one of those views and that's how I know how to improve this. Also, if you want to stay in contact with me and learn what is going on in the world of plg and every single week get the best actionable deep dives on product led growth. Make sure to head on over to productled.com forward/newsletter I am personally writing each of these deep dives every single week and you're going to get a ton of it. So make sure to head on over there to productled.com forward slash newsletter.