https://www.listennotes.com/e/56cbe8327abe4e16871f4437bc4a5c3d

I think there's an old way and a new way of starting startups. It's happening right now.

So let's get into like when is it actually right for you?

You happen to have a large organic social media presence in your target market is relatively far more attractive than if you do not have that.

When your product sells itself, it scales way easier.

What is up, everybody? We just did this whole intro backstage and we didn't realize we were backstage because we're messing around with new webinar. Technology, welcome to another episode of Unf*ck My Startup. This is a killer topic near and dear to my heart, product-led growth. If you know anything about RB2B, you've seen my agonizing struggle with it. I probably should have hit Wes up before we launched. He's probably gonna nod his head when I say that. I've been completely obsessed with PLG since I was in the email newsletter space and was a a fledgling competitor to MailChimp and watch them go from zero to a $12 billion exit over the course of about 15 years, straight PLG. We've gone from zero to almost 5 million in 12 months, which is not bad, but nothing like that. So when Fortune 500 companies and New York startups want to build a killer PLG motion, there is one guy they call. It is Wes Bush. His playbook has helped generate over 1 billion with a B, guys, of self-serve revenue. And today, this man is here to break it all down for us. Thank you for coming, Wes. And with me is my co-host, Pete Crowley.

We were joking last week that Adam's background looks like Milchicks from Severance. So I don't know if anyone's a Severance fan. It's freaking spot on. All right.

Wes, thanks for joining us, man.

Yes, sorry about that little internet issues, but thanks for having me.

Before we start, today's episode is brought to you by the RBDB Insider's Newsletter. I think there's an old way and a new way of starting startups. It's happening right now. I think Wes would also shake his head or nod his head to that. If you want to watch us crush it and or crash and burn in gory detail, sign up for that newsletter. And plus, you'll get updates on all.

The content we have every week. Let's move on to Wes Bush, the man of, the hour, exactly one hour. He's the man for. So Wes, PLG, you are the PLG guy on LinkedIn. Your company is called Product Led. I don't think there's any more PLG person than you. So my first question for you, and I believe you have some slides to bring up, but I'll let you do that. My question, what is PLG and when is slash is it not right for you? So we'll start with what is PLG for folks who don't know anything about product like growth to start.

Yeah, so I want to do a.

Quick- Hold on, can I jump in with a really corny joke before we start? This guy literally wrote the book on PLG. I just dropped in the chat. Okay, go ahead. Thanks.

And it's free, hence product-led from day one. But for everybody else too in the audience, let me know, like, do you know what PLG is? Because if you do, I'm just going to like accelerate, go through that pretty quick. Uh, but if you're like, no, no, I've never heard of this. I want to learn more about PLG. I'll go a little slower on this section. So, just drop in the chat. Hell yeah. If I know what it is. And then type two, if you're like, I don't know what it is. Tell me. All right. So you got some people that know what it is. Adam pitch next week. You got it, Ray.

Actually, I was thinking about, I had no idea what it was.

Let's start there. Yeah. It's like, why do people not want pitch stop? Maybe it sounds like it's good, they're gonna get hurt.

We're trying to be maximally offensive in every branding term that we do.

I like it, it resonates. Cool. So for everybody, here's what PLG is at the end of the day. If you have thought about like, okay, have I seen PLG in like different startups? A lot of people in SaaS, they're like, oh yeah, this is like this new thing. It's like a free trial, it's a freemium model. ow, you have definitely seen product growth in action, like whether it's cologne, perfume, or something like that, where you're like, Hey, I like tried it on. I got to see what it was all about. I got to try it before I buy it. Now, what a lot of people think is that like product growth is just a free trial. That's all it is. You go to Costco or something like that. It's a free sample. That's all it is. And I thought, for a really long time that this was just product-led growth. It's like your pricing, you know, you have to have a good onboarding experience, gotta get people to value, then there's your model, like what the heck you give away for free, and then there's your offer. And so for a long time, I thought this too was just product-led growth until we had helped about 324 plus companies implement PLG. And at that time, a lot of our like best customers I thought were, you know, these senior product executives and leaders that were implementing PLG in their companies. And so then I did this big analysis of everybody who is successful, who wasn't, and actually 80% of our customers were these senior product execs and 20% were founders. And the 20% that were founders were generating over 80% of the results. So I was just like, what the heck? and what is going on. And so I started really going through understanding like, what are the founders doing differently? And what actually kind of came out of that is that in order to build a successful product led business, you actually have to go behind the scenes and really have the right team that has the right capabilities to support this. You got to understand your ideal user better than anybody else in the market. You actually have to tie this into your strategy of how is A product led approach going to help you win is having a free moat really key for you to win is having an amazing user experience key to how you're going to stand out, become hard copy. And then there's the data side of things. Like do you understand what's actually going on in the product? A lot of companies that try and do product growth, they don't have that. So it's very hard. And of course you've got to have the right growth process. And so the big kind of takeaway here is in order to get product growth right, It will only be as strong as your product-led organization. So like that bottom half is the 80/20 to really make it work for your business. You got to lock that part down as well. So what I'm more about is less about like PLG is the real end-all, your product-led organization is super important. It's really about the integration of the two. And so to me, that's really what I believe product-led growth is and why it's super important. And so why really care about that at the end of the day? It comes down to three things. And I know Adam's a huge fan of this. Like when your product sells itself, it scales way easier. Your RBDV is an awesome example of how quickly you guys have been able to scale with that. And then you can also build a big business with a tiny team. This is fantastic because as you scale, your product gets more and more efficient, and then you can really unlock more profits. every single year for your business. And so that's truly why a lot of people think about product led growth. But one of the things I'm really excited to, to kind of go in a little deeper and a little bit is just, what do you give away for free? Because we can talk all day about product led growth, but we have to lead with something. What is that free experience that people can, cannot bite their teeth into and get a good taste of what is our product all about? And so I don't know, Pete, if you want me to dive into right now, is it right for you or if you want to touch on something before?

Yeah, so let's get into when is it actually right for you? I know you shared that graphic of the different variables that you want to line up, but I think it's tough for folks to look from the inside out and say what variables could be rearranged, whether it's for my offering, my tech stack, whatever it might be, to actually unlock this PLG motion. This is the perfect place to get into.

Sure.

Yeah.

So, one thing actually at the very top of this, I can jump into is just about eight years ago, Forrester did this study and they were like analyzing a ton of B2B buyers. They're like, okay, out of all these B2B buyers, how do people prefer to buy? And so they found out actually that three out of every four B2B buyers would prefer to self-educate versus talk to someone in sales. So I was like, That was eight years ago. It's a long time. What does it look like nowadays? This is why I ran our own research and product led. I was like, holy, this has changed. 97% of people, if asked like, Hey, I want to try before you buy, they're going to say yes. It's just like going to a Costco with a sample. You're like, Hey, do you want to try this pizza?

Like, yes, I have given the option. Definitely.

Given the option. Exactly.

So let's give the option, right? Let's get into, like, yeah, when is it, oh, sorry, you're continuing on. I'm gonna let you flow. I'm sorry.

Yeah, no, no worries. I just wanted to share that research because it's so interesting. But ever we ask this question, like, is it right for you? It's thinking, yes, is it right for me? But it's also take a step back. What does your market actually want? People want this experience to be able to try before they buy. And a big part of that is deciding, okay, what do you give away for free? So, I will give you a decision-making framework. A few questions you should ask yourself if you're going to gain clarity on is this right for you or not. So yes, Bethany, love that you love the Costco pizza. All right, so what is the vision for your company? Super important, super basic at the same time. But if you think of something like Canva, it's like, Hey, you know what? Canva, it's their whole mission is to make it easy for anybody to design at the end of the day. So how are you going to do that with a sales-led motion? It's like, I don't see a world where those two things kind of interact. It's like it has to be self-serve to some degree in order to enable that. So if your vision is not super clear, it's going to be hard to figure that one out. Um, so get clear on that. The second question is who's your ideal user? So I was working with this one client. A while back and he was targeting folks in the HVAC industry. So like plumbers and, you know, you know, a lot of people that do the handy work and everything. And so he had a really, really hard time making PLG work because his audience at that time, they just wanted to hop on a call. And so that was a big challenge for them to, to overcome. So it's really important to just kind of go through who's your ideal user? Can they actually get set up? see success on their own. If not, okay, that might be a little bit of a red flag of maybe we need to give them the way they want to buy, which in some cases it actually is the call option. The other thing is question is, are you in a highly competitive market? So if you're in a very commoditized space, this is like, yes, you should have the most efficient go-to-market motion in your space. I was just talking with Marie who just hit 2 mil ARR for tally.so earlier this morning. And they're going up against like Typeform, Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, a ton of different options. And even if you look at the AI space right now, you have Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, everything, it's all product-led motions. Why? It's the most efficient way to scale. So if you're in a bloody red ocean, you got to think about, I need to have a product-led motion for the most part. So if that's like you're, you're vibing with those first three questions, like, yes, the vision makes sense for this. Yes, I, my ideal user could use this. Yes, I'm at a highly competitive market. I got like three out of five of the things. There's two last ones though. So the last or fourth is, can someone quickly experience the value of your product? So if it's like I have to, assistant: jump over like, or like, if you think of a ladder where the first rung of the ladder is like 12 feet up or something like that, it's like almost impossible unless you're a freak of nature like me, that's really tall. Or you're like, oh, I got it. Uh, but for everyone else, it's like very difficult to get to value. If that's the case, okay, maybe it's not, your product isn't ready yet, but if everything else is still yes, that could be an option for you to, to do, but you do have to have an experience where it's easy for your products get to value quickly. The last part, this one's not like a be all, end all, but a lot of early stage product led businesses, they do best if they're single point solutions versus somebody that's trying to do everything all at once. There's very few cases where it's like, Hey, we're like HubSpot, we have a, you know, self-serve motion, which with HubSpot as an example, although you can get started for free, just try figuring out the pricing. You have to basically talk to them and figure it out. So there is downsides to the multi-product side. That does not mean you can't make it with product led. work, but, those five questions should give you a bit of clarity if this is right for you or not. So in the chat, just type in, hell yeah, this is for me or still not sure and why? Because I want to see how I'm hidden home for you on those questions.

And can I add, can I add one more thing real quick? Let's just do what I've experienced. I think if you happen to have A large organic social media presence in your target market freemium, PLG, whatever you want to call it, is relatively far more attractive than if you did not have that. I think it's attractive anyway, but like the ultimate dream in my opinion is like big viral content brand versus big viral offer, which is kind of what I was trying to do with RBW a year ago. I mean, it's like a, an additional sort of like, it's not part of the checklist. It's just like a real bonus if you happen to have it. Yeah. I think that's like, it makes the.

I mean, that was one thing we launched RB2B. It was like, well, we have this massive audience. We were not in a highly competitive Market. We were the, we were the first movers, at least on the B2B side from website identification. And it was like, well, where's our maximum point of Leverage? It's probably the, at the time, 90, 000. followers that Adam has or 80 or whatever it was. And that was the decision we made. Now, we ran into some, some interesting things along the way, but number 24, I think, like, or not, sorry, number four, can someone quickly experience value from the product? I think that is like the, I think that's like the foundation of the pyramid.

Right.

Because, I mean, RB2B is an example. People can log in, install the script all of a sudden within minutes they have website visitors flowing through Slack.

Right.

And even if they don't know what to do with those, at least that magic moment is very obtainable very quickly. I've been in businesses before where that is not possible. So it comes down to like finding that magic moment or what a magic moment could be that can be kind of obtained very quickly from from the users. That's that's kind of how I think about it. I really want to get into what we should give away for free. I think that's where a lot of people I don't want to speak for everyone. but they're probably looking at this and saying, well, you know, my, I think, who was it? Jamie just dropped in. What alternatives do you suggest for freemium free? There's a 12 week onboarding. So that's what I'm excited to get into in the next section is for folks who don't have as easy of a, or a quick as of a magic moment to say the RBDB or similar examples, what can they use? What can they give away for free? What can they quickly create? We'll get into all that in part two, but I think now is a good time for the second audience segment, the namesake of the show, Unfucked My Startup. So if you missed out on the pitch slap, but you would like to present your business to the 137 folks that are in here, and get some advice from the panel, please raise your hand. Again, this is not as much like the pitch slap. This is talking about the problems that you're having and trying to get advice from the folks here. We got Cameron. Cameron said he missed out on the pitch slap. So Cameron.

Yeah, so Cameron, this is a reminder, I'm stuck and I need help. You're not trying to book demos with the audience. So do you still want to come up for that? It sounds like his hand's still up, so it sounds like yes. All right, let's bring him up.

All right, and Cameron, while we're bringing you up, if you could, please drop in your URL into the chat. That would be great. Cameron's in a nice freaking booth there. Sound isolated.

Yeah, I set this up a couple days ago.

Nice.

It looks like a new studio area.

Looking good, brother. We got the same panel guy, it looks like.

Yeah, you use my dad as well.

Yeah, I didn't know he was your dad. He's also our video producer, I guess. Did you know that your dad's producing the video?

No way.

Did you know your dad's name is John Ealy?

Hello, son.

Small world. All right, just drop my URL in the chat there. So we're AQX. We basically do voice AI for two things. One is a website voice bubble, which you can see on our website. I'll share that here. And the other one is AI phone agents, essentially. So we're a platform that lets you build them. This is kind of what the dashboard looks like. Basically like five clicks and you got an agent set up. So biggest problem we're having right now is just getting users in.

Well, I'm going to ask, is there, just with going with the theme of the show, have you experimented with any sort of free offering? I see there's try for free down here under traditional services. Is there anything that people can get in and actually try and kind of get value in?

100%. So yeah, we have this starter plan, completely free, gives you basically unlimited access and 30 minutes of like talking per month. So you can get in and basically build your own agent without paying it anything. No credit card and you can basically build it, test it out, connect it to a calendar, make sure it's something that you like. And then if you like it and you want more minutes, that's where you can upgrade to the paid plan.

That was the issue that you're not getting enough people to even sign up for that, or is it once they sign up, they're not really fully setting it up, or is it a combination of both?

So we're fairly new and we don't have really even much website traffic yet. So my job right now, I'm basically growing our social media channels, growing our SEO, and basically just getting that off the ground so that we actually get some reach, right?

Next question, who are you trying to sell to?

So primary market for the voice bubble is going to be e-commerce stores with revenues somewhere in the range of 500k to, I mean, up to 10 million or whatever. Main value add there is increases conversions, kind of like what I think it was Nico who was on earlier. And then for the other one and kind of combined, we're looking to partner with agencies to essentially bring it to their own clients, because essentially what we've identified is the main blocker for this service is typical like business owner that would use this, it's like a dentist office or something like that. They don't have like the time or knowledge or know how to really set up an agent, even though it's like fairly simple with this platform. That's sort of like the implementation gap is there. So we're essentially being like the partner to the agency owner to fulfill that implementation gap for them.

So what's in it for the agency?

Revshare.

I don't know how much depth we want to get. First of all, do you have any sort of like, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen stores yet, or are you literally like a zero customer situation?

We have a couple.

Kind of get- how'd you find them?

Sorry?

How'd you find them?

Pretty much all direct outreach.

I would, and I would be just trying to get in for, so like, this is my experience having grown a company to over 20 million ARR that sells to these stores, these Shopify stores. The agency channel is going to be incredibly difficult until they know your product is killer for the actual brands. There's probably 40,000 Shopify apps. They're not going to waste their time unless it's like, this is super hot. And I think there's a little bit of an incentive problem. The products that really take off in the agency channel are products where they can implement the tech and then enables an ongoing recurring service that they were not providing before, like Klaviyo email marketing, a web dev agency can install Klaviyo and bill the customer 3,500 more dollars per month to run their email program. So this is probably not that. That's what I found. So I would focus on trying to wow these brands first. And dude, it's just a dogfight to get in front of people. I mean, if you can get customers to refer you to customers, if you can, go to physical events, meetups, like whatever, just get anyone and everyone to use this for zero or more dollars and provide you feedback and improve the product until they're like, this is fucking dope. And then if enough of the right people in this world think it's dope, it's going to spread like wildfire. But it's a long road to get there. I've been down it. It took me a long time to get there. I got there. It was amazing. When I got there, it took three and a half years. so like, you know, but that, in my opinion, that's the game you're playing right now. Anybody else have any input?

Yeah, I have one thought. And this kind of goes back to, Andre had a question about like, hey, when should you worry about PLG? So it's controversial because I'm the PLG guy, but I would still say like, do founder-led sales everything for at least like those first like 10, 30 customers. get the wheel in motion, start getting the revenue in. And even if it's like, hey, try for free, we'll set you up a free trial on this call, we'll onboard you, go through how to get set up, get to value, and go through all the other things that you need to really succeed. Then you're going to understand them so much better and how to make them successful a lot faster. Because a lot of times founders just worry about, okay, since I like building product, let me just keep doing that. And it's like, okay, no, we got to get out there. Get those customers and then we could roll this out and scale it up with PLG later on.

100% yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Ryan also dropped in a, I think just a great, great little anecdote that we should all keep in our minds. Go find the absolute best customer, the one you wow the most, and then just look for 10 people like them. Don't look for more. Don't try to get a thousand people. Don't automate 40,000 emails a day. Don't spend five grand a month on ads. Just zone in and get in front of the next 10 people. My last thing too would be explore different types of buyer personas. Often our assumptions on who's going to be the buyer does not turn out to be who the end buyer is. We're dealing with that at RBB. Markets change all the time and yeah, just be a real, real explorer of customer discovery is my big takeaway. Cameron, we're going to send you some swag. Thank you for coming on.

Thanks Cameron.

Wish you the best of luck.

Thank you guys.

Really appreciate it.

Great feedback.

I'm gonna drop in your URL one more time so everybody can check out AQX.ai and Wes, the moment we've all been waiting for. If I am trying to start a PLG motion, what the heck do I give away for free? And guys, Wes actually has like a legit template that's really nice and laid out and will help you actually evaluate What the heck you should give away for free. So let's move on to the next section. You want to reshare your screen?

Yes, absolutely. So I'm going to give everybody the free template. We're going to go through this example with RBD2B, since hopefully you're familiar with it.

If you haven't signed up for free, that's the plug. I'm giving the plug for you guys.

Heck yeah. Here you are. By the way, that's RBD2B.com, guys. RBD2B.com. Yes. I'll drop it in the chat. Cool. So y'all got access to this. This is exactly where you're going to see. I just kind of copied this for RBD2B. The first thing, actually if we zoom out here, you got to ask yourself when it comes to what do you give away for free? There is a few questions I want you to ask yourself, which is what is actually unique about your product? So if you think of like RBB, the really cool thing that actually stood out to me a ton was like, Hey, I could just see like the LinkedIn URLs of the people that I don't even know that are on my site. How cool is that? So really think about that for your product. what is the thing where people are going to say the same thing? Like, how cool is that? Because we have to actually showcase that in our free product or else people are going to sign up and be like, yeah, it's okay. And you're like, oh, you hit the best stuff in your product. So of course they don't come back at the end of the day. And so I'll give you a quick analogy when you were thinking about like, how much do you give away for free and everything else? So, Pete, were you going to jump in?

Yeah, let's make sure those slides are shared. I can't see them. I don't know. Maybe someone else can.

Okay.

Oh, there we go.

Yeah. Here we are.

Ah, perfect.

So everybody likes Mario, so I'm gonna give you the Mario analogy of what to give away for free. So if you think of Mario, he fixes up this flower, becomes badass, can spew fire, can do cool things. Now, most free motions are just like this. You pick up the free product and whoopie, you can't do anything different. You're like, still Mario 1.0. so that's what we want to avoid. It has to actually have some sort of transformation. Like we can beat the next level. We might not be invincible. Like we're not like some of the AI startups right now where it's like, everything's for free. You have everything you need for life and they don't cap anything and stuff like that too. So really just think about where's that perfect level of free? What we're really aiming for is to make our free motion feel like, Hey, you know what? I'm able to do something useful that I couldn't do before. And so when we go back to RBB, what would you say is that beginner level? Like something where I can get a tangible outcome? Like is it just seeing who's on the website? Like I think that's a piece of it, but is it to eventually book meetings? Like what would that, like, oh my goodness, this is so cool. piece be for RB2B?

So in my opinion, without a doubt, and there's like a bunch of bad parts of this down the line, but the moment you install the Pixel and then Connect Slack, which takes probably under three minutes, and you see that first contact come into Slack, in particular if it's you, you're like, holy shit, this is fucking unreal, you know? So that was the moment we built everything around and didn't make progress for a while past there actually, but we'll continue with the exercise.

Okay. So we have seeing someone, it could be yourself or yourself on the website and getting their LinkedIn profile. That's a good idea. Okay. Now, do we still feel like that is the be all end all, that's the beginner outcome that we want to drive people towards? Or is there something else that we're trying to see? Like, Hey, what else could you experience? Because if I go here to your pricing, you pick 150 credits every single month. It refreshes. So what was the kind of logic behind that? Like, what were you hoping people could achieve?

I wanted a male chimp style 90% of the market gets to use this for free offer. And we would like continue to build features for the larger companies. Again, there's some backwards things about this is a great example to like, talk about my original hypothesis and it was wrong about it also. So, so that was the original plan. It was just like, you know, in terms of consumption, nine out of 10 people would just have it for free. That was the original plan.

Right. Okay. Now, I hear you on that. Now, if we're going to redesign like a more intentional free model, what would you say is something where people would have to What could they accomplish that would be something really impactful for them and their business? Is it booking more meetings from the people you find on LinkedIn? Is it something else?

So, I'm completely rethinking this entire Slack delivery thing because originally what we were selling people was these are leads and book demos with them. The idea is that it's only a prospecting tool, right? It turns out if you have a large sales organization, a long sales cycle, there are like many other reasons you want to know when someone's on the site besides just a net new contact to book a demo with. Many.

So.

I actually think that a better delivery mechanism is getting this signal delivered to the inbox. It like literally sitting on top of Gmail, you can click a label that says web visitors and everybody you've had an email thread or is a named account in the CRM. There's an email in there teed up that has a couple options. Like one is like talking about the pages they looked at, like specific to that visit. And one is more general just I'm checking in. So rather than a booked demo, I think the dream outcome is actually like Nobody has to do anything and a message is served up to you to just reach out to these people who are hitting your site for various reasons based on what they did. Hypothesis, don't have the product yet.

Yeah, and just for everyone who's listening, going through this activity as well, the main thing I'm trying to draw out here is what is that Mario difference? So if we think about like that level one, is it, you know, okay, I can see someone on my website. That's really cool, actually. It's quite unique. I don't know too many other tools that do that. So that's like, okay, could be something that's interesting for people. But there's also, like you said, Adam, like, it could just be, hey, plug in your CRM. We'll show you what accounts are actively going on your website. We'll ping you when that happens, and then it makes a lot of sense for you to reengage with them. on that level. And so this is why I spent so much time on just like, what is the promise of what that looks like? So let's just- By the way, there.

Was one more part of that last example you just gave, actually teeing up the messages to go out using AI is, I think, a huge part of this beginner thing, right? Because it's like, reps are super busy. They don't want to have to think about what to say to these people. It's a weird thing anyway. They were on the site. They didn't fill out a form. It's like, dude, just like, tell me, based upon what they looked at, what I should say. Tell me who I should send it to and tell me what I should say.

So, so sorry.

Keep going. And I think so we're gonna have to challenges to overcome too. Like, this is something we ran into with the first version of RB2B, where, like, our free offer was so powerful, we had, like, I don't know, a thousand signups and like 12 paid customers or something, like really bad economics, right? There was too much value and then there was nothing to like evolve into that was at all attractive, which probably remains a concern going into this next iteration challenge.

Yes. And this is actually why, like if we go back to the order of like how you think about these things, like I always start with companies of like, what is your strategy? Like when I was talking with the founder of Tally, they spent four years just working on their free model. So that's their moat. It's just like we are going to have to win with the best free mode, best user experience, and then a very disruptive pricing play. So that was their whole claim to flame. Claim to flame. Flame. Fame. My goodness.

Too much Mario slide, bro. Too much Mario slide. you got flame on the brain.

Too funny. So let's talk a bit about that. So getting more conversations with prospects. So if we think about like challenges to overcome here, what might be one of those? You mentioned like drafting the message. So I see who's interacting on my site, but okay, I gotta write a message that's, I don't want to come across as like creepy. Like, Hey, Adam, I saw you're on my website and you didn't fill out a form. But like, how do we draft that in a way that's going conversational, they want to engage. So that's one challenge. What else?

Look, with what we were originally selling, there was this horrible challenge of like the distance between a site visitor, which is traffic and not really a lead, and booking a demo, which is the process of nurturing that traffic to becoming a lead, and then subsequently having enough sales game to actually convert them to a demo. So that was the huge initial challenge. Somebody mentioned there may be some additional complexity of integration or onboarding with this Chrome plugin situation that we're talking about two different things right now. You know what I mean? We were talking about old and new. But definitely the biggest problem. So there were two problems with old. Number one was actually that we were selling leads and demos and that is hard no matter who you are. And if you're early stage and you don't know how to book a demo anyway, this is not going to be helpful for booking demos. So that was issue number one. And then issue number two was we were really pushing this Klay integration and just the actual implementation of that was like incredibly difficult. And I think the Klay integration is great for a certain type of company, but most people are not that type of company. Okay.

So I like that. And what we're going to do for everyone who's following along in your own template is you're going to find at the very bottom, there's like this magnitude level. I like to think about this as like earthquake level. where it's like five out of five, it's like boom, everything's flat. Same thing when it comes to user challenges, like five out of five, nobody can overcome that challenge. It's really hard. One, it's like barely feels like an obstacle. It's like navigation issues. So every product, when we think about like, when we get clear on the hero promise, what that is for our business, every product has about anywhere from two to five, killer challenges that prevent them from doing anything, making it really, really hard to access that value. So I'm going to pick a couple here just for the purpose of examples to get going on this. But what would you say is the magnitude of drafting the initial message for people?

Okay, so I would have said this was not a scorched earth type problem, but I was corrected by our users. It, and it's not that they're not smart enough to do it. It's that they're, they're busy and they're like, dude, like, I don't have time to like think about what to say to a first time site visitor is a perfect lead. So I would say it's like if zero is scorched, is, is the earth is flattened, it's like a one or a two man.

And it was very surprising. Okay. So put two. So that's still a pretty good one. Um, this is one from my own personal experience using RVD, like the noise to signal ratio. was this one was quite high actually. So I always hit the limits since we have a lot of traffic. And I was like, huh, I don't have time to source all of these leads. And I think at that time you were actually working on addressing this issue. So this might be completely fixed. I gotta retry it, but I'd say that's like a four. So we have something like if they don't see the right leads, the ones that are in the CRM as an example, everything else, that that's quite hard. So this is where we get to thinking about, I call it the triple bypass cake. Sounds very unhealthy, but if you know this concept, this will make you like a Jedi when it comes to making it easy for your users to overcome literally everything. And so if you think about what is actually getting in the way of your users seeing value, I always goes into these three buckets, like product stuff. Like what are the product challenges that actually hold them back? Like you mentioned the clay integration's hard. Okay. So there's some stuff there that needs to be like ironed out the knowledge gap. Okay. So what do people not know? Do they not know how to reach out to people when it's just like, Hey, you've been on my website. Um, how do I spark that conversation? It's kind of like a, a different one. I'm not quite. used to, it's different than cold outreach, it's inbound lead outreach. So it's a little different. They got to learn a new skill set, which is the last piece is skills. Like what skills are they missing in order to see success? And so let's talk a bit about that. So drafting the messages, there's a ton of solutions we could have. And for every one of your big problems, you're just going to go through like, what could this look like for content? this could easily be top 10 examples of how to reach out. A fun one. Well, what else could we do here for helping people draft the messages we talked about? I think somebody mentioned the Rb2B AI.

Yeah, like in the world of AI, we would be, we would be silly to not include our own little message drafting agent.

Yeah. drafting agents. And is there anything else we could add there?

We could, it's kind of content kind of product, but like you could like build into some early interaction with the product, a quick tutorial on, because the message is very, I mean, you don't need, the most important thing is that you send it, right? Like the content of the email is not as, as important as, as actually just getting it out quickly.

So.

Tutorial type, you know, anyone with a link.

Thank you.

Get in there and delete the entire spreadsheet.

Yeah.

Guys, make a copy for yourself.

Start exactly where we are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone make a copy for yourself. and it's yours.

That's why you stay to the end. You get the actual copy. All right. So we got some ideas here. Top 10 examples how to reach out, R2B2B AI drafting agents. The noise signal ratio here is another pretty big one. So what is something we could do there? Is that more of like a product solution?

Yeah, product is like, there's basically two solutions. One is you let the CRM do the filtering for you.

Right?

And the other is you can upload a list of domains into RB2B and that will be the filter. And then we attempted to do an ICP filter, but it just didn't work because the way we built it like Apollo and long story short, it just is too restrictive for the volume of contacts we have. So, yeah, those are the two the two big ones.

Yeah. I'm also thinking like another AI agent to just be like ICP filter. Yeah.

Like look at my, look at my customers and send me anyone that looks like them kind of thing.

Yeah. No, absolutely. So here's the, the mind blowing concept when it comes to really deconstructing what the heck do you give away for free is I'm not gonna overwhelm you with, is it a free trial? Is it freemium? Is it some fancy reverse trial? What the heck is it doesn't matter at all. It's just getting really, really clear on like, okay, what is our hero promise? What does this look like? What are the big challenges that these people have to go through to overcome? Like installing the pixel, it's like, okay, great. Let's do like a Google tag manager one click setup. Make that super easy. There's some basic things we could do to just understand how do we go through it? And When we go back to the community, I know Pete, we were talking a bit about that. So open up and share a little bit about what is your thinking behind the community you're building for to help founders go from zero to 10 mil. Because I want to share how this could potentially fit into your free motion here. Yeah.

So right now we have our RBDA insiders community. There's like 150 members in there. There might be some of our attendees. Give a shout out if you are. Essentially, this is when we launched our B2B, we were getting a ton of questions that Adam was bringing up, you know, what do I send? What do I, you know, they weren't product questions, they were marketing consulting questions. So we started the community. We have a, yeah, we have like our founding member price right now for our first, you know, X number of members. And we are going to give away, we're going to start selling a couple of the courses that we have within the community for $49 each. And we are also going to have like a free sort of, you know, piece of content that people can hopefully fill out, find value in. And the goal is for it to raise some problem awareness for the people filling out that sheet. So it's a combo, it's really content. And then the upsell is going to be the interactive community aspect.

Okay. But what is the main kind of problem you're hoping to solve? with that community?

Providing founders with feedback on going 0 to 1 so that they can avoid the next one year, two years of pain, hopefully not waste a bunch of money on stuff they don't need to, and just get a ton of feedback on everything from their messaging to LinkedIn posts to marketing initiatives from us and the 150 members in there.

Okay. Yeah.

So I would say start instead of scale. Sorry, not to be a nitpicker, but I would say how to start your business, like kind of that zero to 5 million that first, because scaling, what we found is most people, as soon as they start, they're trying to scale. And scaling is really expensive and it's probably not gonna, nothing's gonna scale until you've figured that out. So anyway.

Okay. Yeah. And I'm happy you mentioned that because, like, here, like, that could be part of the, one of the challenges is just like, I don't get feedback on what is working, what's not working, my conversations aren't hitting home. I've tried this, this isn't working. Like, ah, RBTB sucks, but it's like, no, you just didn't have the right approach. You didn't have the right support. We could have coached you on how to do this and got you a lot of value through that. So like that would just be a resource where it's like, this is a community. It's probably not gonna be the whole thing. That doesn't sound realistic, but what are the things that are basically blocking people from seeing success And essentially everything here on the far end is just simply go through finds. What can you offer that's like relatively inexpensive, easy to roll out, and you just see, okay, what is the most effective way of rolling this out for all of these solutions because you don't have to do everything, but the overall to kind of tie this all together, since I know we're running short on time, is really just thinking through. your free emotion, it's not just what goes on in your product. It also encompasses what knowledge and stuff are people missing? What are the skills that we could subset with them? So that's why you're seeing a lot more companies. Like if you think of like Russell Brunson's ClickFunnels, why is he always having courses around everything? It's because it's like you can give people the funnel, but they need more than the funnel to not just start their business, but also scale it. And so the more we approach things holistically, even if it's content or it's a quiz or something like that, the better, more dangerous your free model will be, and it's more effective it will be at helping your users experience value. And when you do that, that's where you see that high free to paid conversion where they're like, I'm unblocked. You helped me solve some of these challenges. And I think for a lot of product led founders, that's actually the hard part. They get like dopamine hits of launching new features and it's like, wait, let's just make it easy. Back to that conversation with the Melanie. from tally.so. She was like, we need to solve more paper cut problems, like the small ones that are kind of annoying, just frustrate users versus the just launching shiny features. So, yeah, I hope you found that framework helpful for launching what to side, what you can do for free.

I know I'm going to use that spreadsheet. Anybody else in the audience can use that spreadsheet too? Anybody? Meanwhile, while they're responding, oh yeah, we got some hands up. We got some BAMS, we got some yeses. Wes, thank you so much for all this incredible teaching you have done us. Where can people look you up, buy your book, get your book for free, get PLG'd, get your help with PLG, where can they connect with you?

Yeah, absolutely. So you can just find out more about what we do at productcut.com, you'll find every book I write, we give it away for free so you can Explore the website, you'll find them all there. And I write every day on LinkedIn just at West Bush. So feel free to connect with me. Let me know what your takeaway was from this and happy to connect.

Sick. Okay, dude, that was great. Next week, this says West Bush on the invite, but we have Brendan Short who built the, what do you even call this? So like at Apollo.io, they have like the PLG flow and he built all of the different funnels that work people down their PLG funnel using all these different tools. So he built the machine that books like 1200 demos a month for Apollo PLG demos. So we're kind of like, you know, bridging one into the next. Sales assisted PLG. Dude, Wes, you're the man. You know Brendan as well, I guess. um, yes.

Yeah. Small world. PLG.

Yes. Rock and roll, dude. Well, thank you, everybody, for coming. How do we get my t-shirt? Nick, Pete, we'll follow up with you. Nick, you're getting a, oh wait, yeah, you got a t-shirt. Yeah, you got a t-shirt. I was gonna say Wes gets a whole swag box.

Wow. That's why I came on.

Yeah.

Well, thank you.

Uh, Nick will follow up with you and, yeah, we'll give you a swag box too, Nick. You're a good sport. and we booked you seven demos, so we're going to use Sarah's words. Nick, I just kind of wanted to thank you, everybody. We will see you next week.

Thanks again, Wes. We're out. I think if we show up to solve on our calls instead of show up to sell, we show up to solve in our emails, show up to solve in our DMs, show up to solve in our posts, right? Teach me something. Build trust that you have a brain. All I'm prioritizing is revenue. That's it. So I'm looking at who we know, who can talk positively about us, who is well connected, and then how do I hit them?