LIVE from SaaStr Annual 2024- Workshop Stage - Tuesday

Please welcome to the stage Carl Alomar, Managing Partner at M13. Please welcome to the stage Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and Head of AI at Five9.

All righty. Good afternoon and welcome to SASSTAR. How's everybody doing?

Woo!

Thank you for coming here to listen to me today. I know you could be at the reception. You could be enjoying this beautiful weather. But instead, you've chosen to spend the next 30 minutes with me. And thank you very much. In fact, I'm so excited about it, I want to take a picture. Does anyone mind if I do a little stage selfie? Anyone? Good with that? All right, you gotta all look excited though. All righty, so I'm gonna turn around. Everyone, on the count of 3, go yay! 1, 2, 3, yay! All right, there you go. I'll tweet that later. All right. So again, thanks for joining me today. My name is Jonathan Rosenberg. I'm the Chief Technology Officer and head of artificial intelligence for Five9. And what I'm here to talk to you today about is the kind of things we're hearing from businesses that are buying software from us. We're a B2B SaaS player. I'll talk to you more about what we do in just a moment. But we've been in this business a while, and we've heard all kinds of interesting things, many of which are probably applicable to your software startups and companies as well. So I want to share some of the interesting things that we've heard. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So— put the clicker in my pocket. All right. So the top 10 things that enterprises are demanding from B2B SaaS players. And broadly speaking, they cover areas from AI, data, security, experiences, and we're gonna go through these, and I got a top 10 list for you. So, first is, who is Five9? Just out of curiosity, and be honest, raise your hand if you know who Five9 is. We got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. He's our chief product officer, so I'm glad he raised his hand. Hand. You never know sometimes. So, so who are we? So we are a B2B SaaS company. We're a publicly traded company. We are a billion-dollar-a-year revenue business. We actually just achieved that this last quarter, so that's a great club. Thank you very much. Exactly. What do we make? We make Contact Center as a Service, or CCaaS, software. And that's software that our customers use to handle inbound calls, calls, chats, emails, SMSs from customers. We collect them, we queue them, we interact with the customers, we distribute those calls, chats, and emails to agents. Contact center agents, when they log in for the morning, it's our application that they log into, use, and interact with customers all day long. We're not a labor company, we provide the software. So we're purely cloud company. We've been doing SaaS, and we've been doing SaaS for a really long time. This company was founded long before I started. I've been there about 5 and a half years. My prior gig, I was a CTO for WebEx in Cisco's collaboration business. Before that, the CTO of Skype, so I've been doing communication and collaboration software for a while. So I've only been here about 5 and a half years. This company was founded in 2001, right? I mean, people couldn't even spell SaaS in 2001. So interestingly, as a business, it was way ahead of the market. It went public in 2014. Still a little bit ahead of the market. And if you look at our stock price, it's a fascinating and lately sad story, I'll tell you. But it started out really low until the market caught up with it, and there was a growing demand for contact center as a service software. So that's what we do, and our software is used by lots of customers and companies that you would have heard from, heard of. Alaska Airlines, for example. Ping, if anyone's a golfer out here, or Wyndham. Hotels are just a few examples of the companies out there that are using Five9 software, and we're behind the scenes. So we're not a big brand that most people have heard of, but we're a pretty big contact center as a service and SaaS vendor that's been doing this for a long time. One other note before I get into the top 10. You will notice, of course, every slide has an AI-generated image in it because, come on, we gotta do that. And I'll point out some of them. They're kind of interesting. These are all done with ChatGPT using the GPT-4o model. And honestly, its ability to generate words, pretty good, right? So this mostly got it right. I'll stop for a moment on each slide and point out some of the weirdness if I see them. But, but this one was as a whole pretty good. All right, let's get into it. First item, number 1, ease of use and automation. Be more like B2C companies. So traditionally in the software world, B2C companies have really led on user experience, and B2B companies maybe not so much. And there is, like, a historic reason for that, right? The main reason is that in the B2B world, the buyer of the software, which was the head of IT or the business owner, wasn't the same one who was using the software. And so they were primarily concerned with requirements like security or integration or whatever, and, like, a great, colorful, easy-to-use experience for their employees was not necessarily top of mind. The second reason it's historically been not as good is that if you were an employee of a company and you didn't like it, there wasn't much you could do about it. You were a captive audience to the IT buyer. Now this has thankfully started to soften a lot with shadow IT, and enterprise employees can sort of just go, with a few clicks, they bought their own software. I think this has been goodness for the SaaS industry. It's really helped B2B players do a much better job in building great user experience. That's another big reason why. And the third one is that the IT guy, like, they cared more about things like security and integration and compliance and so on and so forth. Now, like I said, this has been getting better, and we consistently see improved demands for increased usability and ease of use for software. What's new, and that's really interesting, is that we're seeing increased demands for improvements on the configuration side. So, and what that means is when you look at a lot of B2B products, they require a lot of configuration and setup. In fact, for products like ours, there's a whole process, we call it an implementation, where someone has to go in and configure and set it up. Like, you know, there's an IVR tree. So dial, press 1 for support and 2 for sales. Like someone has to set that up and configure the agents. In fact, in a lot of, B2B products, and ours is in this category, the complexity of the configuration often exceeds the complexity of the feature itself. And there's been user experiences and UIs for doing that. And let me be honest, like historically, they've not been very good, right? This is where you see a lot of drag and drop UI builders and visual designers that some kind of IT team or often an outsourced organization like a systems integrator would go and use those things. And what we are seeing is real demand for those things to get much better, much easier to use, because you know why? That ease of use translates directly to dollar savings. The faster those companies can go and take those tools and do an implementation and get the system up and running, the more money they're gonna save. So there's literally a direct ROI between ease of use for this type of user interface and improvements to the bottom line. So we're seeing increased demand for that, easier to use, more natural, seamless, and much more recently, AI. Because what we're seeing is that this is a really good application for generative AI that can help people do these designs and configurations because they get pretty complicated. So some of the things we've done, for example, is we started to roll out like a little JavaScript generator. We see a lot of customers do little snippets of JavaScript. For just this one thing that couldn't be done in the UI design and drop builder. And they'd struggle with that. Now they just ask for what they want. There goes the code. Great. Really nice, easy to deploy, easy to implement use case for AI in helping this along. So that's item number 1, ease of use and automation, especially on the configuration side. Be more like a B2C player. Second, data security and privacy. Just out of curiosity, Who here is at a SaaS business that's a B2B SaaS company? Raise your hand. Good. You've come to the right place. You're gonna hear a lot about this, a ton about this, and this isn't exactly new, right? Enterprises have been caring about security for a really long time. Stuff like, is your data encrypted in transit? Are you using TLS 1.3? Are you storing the data in encrypted form? These are not new, right? If you're not doing this, you shouldn't be selling in a B2B in the first place. What is new and what is really interesting is on the data aspect of this, right? And a lot of this I think changed with the arrival of GDPR. When the European Union started to ask companies to take data more seriously, it sort of get a little contagious I think, and like lots of vendors, even if they're not in the European Union, are asking questions. And the question they're asking is, wait, wait, wait, Okay, so you're collecting my data. What are you doing with it? They wanna know that. Where are you storing it? How long are you storing it for? What else are you doing with it? And the most annoying question, who else are you sending it to? Where does it go? Right, because you might think, oh, this is easy. Like, I'm a public cloud SaaS company. I'm using Amazon or GCP, and maybe I'm in like, "US Central, great, that's where the data is." Oh, oh, well, are you consuming any downstream products and services from your public cloud vendor that are PaaS, platform as a service features? Like, are you using an outsourced database? What about a message bus? Are you using like Google's Pub/Sub? Oh, would you know that thing can sometimes send messages and data in all kinds of interesting places. So what we're seeing is that companies are asking us for more and more information. They don't wanna know just who our subprocessors are. They're literally asking for lists of specific products and services that we are consuming from these public cloud vendors, from other third-party data subprocessors. They wanna know every one of 'em, and they wanna know are they following the rules also. And this is really, really hard to track, really hard to track, right? And it's amazing, like wildfire, these new technologies show up, in B2B SaaS vendors, and you better keep track of 'em, 'cause they wanna know. In fact, the ask is like, I want one throat to choke, Mr. Vendor. I want you to tell me all the lists, and I want you to manage those subprocessors so that I don't have to deal with it. So this is a huge, big ask, and if you're in the B2B SaaS business, you're gonna be spending a lot of time worrying about this particular problem. That's data security and privacy. Next. Very similar to ease of use, seamless and hyper-personalized customer experience. Now, what this means obviously varies depending on the type of business you're in, but I'll tell you a little bit about the business I'm in, okay? And I'm in a business where, frankly, most people think the experience is not very good, right? I gotta be honest. And in fact, I'm gonna do a little, a little quick poll to get a pulse on this. How many of you have ever called contact center? Raise your hand. All right, how many of you thought it was a lovely, joyous experience? Right, exactly. And by the way, the companies that provide those experiences, they know it. And the reason it's not great is all the reasons you kind of understand. The company doesn't know you for some reason when you connect with them. When you connect with them, you get a message, thank you for calling, how can I help you? They don't know your name or seemingly, or why you called. When you sit in a queue, you sit in the queue the same as everybody else, no matter whether you're their best customer or their worst customer. How long you wait also doesn't seem to matter. Who called first, that's what matters, not how much business or revenue you're bringing. When you reach an agent, they don't know who you are, they gotta ask the same questions over and over again, and then you gotta explain your story about why you're calling again, right? I'm sure these are experiences that all of you can relate to. And it's the reason I joined Five9 is because I got sick of it, and I wanted to fix it, uh, 'cause it's really painful. But what they want, what everyone wants, what we're striving to build, and what I think is relevant to everyone is to deliver hyper-personalized experiences. So instead, when you connect with the brand, they know exactly who you are. They know what you've done before. They know why you call. The experience is completely tailored to you. Right? You don't have to hear menus that don't matter. You don't have to listen to things that are irrelevant to your case. Hyper-personalization allows a brand to show its customers that you care. And the reason why, to a large degree, we haven't had those type of experiences is they were really, really difficult and costly to implement. This is an area where I think we've never been in a more exciting time, which is the arrival of generative AI, which allows us and frankly everyone, everyone who's building a user interface for your customers, you're going to have the same problem. How do you personalize that experience to what your customers need? And with generative AI, we can ingest all of this data into the prompt, everything about the customer, and personalize the experiences all over the place. So we're starting to see pressure rising from— to us to deliver greater personalization. And I know you will as well. So hyper-personalized, seamless customer experiences. Really enabled by generative AI. Next one, integration with other B2B applications. Again, not new. This is one of the great pain points of building a B2B SaaS product. You've got to integrate with lots and lots of other third-party applications and services. What we've seen is that the number of those things hasn't gone down. It's only gone up. Right. And so the demands for these things are higher than ever. And that means as you build your platforms, your ability to integrate with more and more of these things at low cost becomes a key differentiator and capability of your SaaS application. Just to give you a sampling of some of the things we get asked for, right, that I'm sure you're gonna hear also. One, identity providers, authentication and login. Gone are the days where you could build a B2B SaaS app and just collect a password and stick it in a database. I'm sorry, no enterprise wants that anymore. They've all deployed large corporate IDPs from vendors like Okta, uh, and they want you to integrate with them. And they need you to integrate with them because they're providing a set of capabilities that are absolutely necessary to prevent the kind of security breaches that are always in the news these days. So things like two-factor authentication, multi-factor authentication, biometrics— these are all baseline security capabilities and you should not be building those on your own. So integrating with an IDP is critical. In fact, these systems, they get better the more SaaS applications connect to them. So for example, a lot of these identity providers and sign-on providers, they have this cool feature where if they see you log in from one location, and then like 5 minutes later you log in from another location, and you would have had to travel like 10 times the speed of sound to get there, but to that location, This probably a problem. That type of feature actually works better the more B2B SaaS applications connect to that single identity provider for the enterprise. So basically in 2024, if you're building a B2B SaaS app and you're not depending on corporate IDP for login, your software's a joke, right? You absolutely should be doing this. And it isn't just authentication and login. We've gotten asked for things like user provisioning via SCIM, right, which is an ITF standard for secure user provisioning, so they can put all the users and user permissions and roles in AD, and those automatically sync to all their systems. If they change a permission in one place, it propagates to everyone integrated. We're seeing a big increase in the number of customers asking for that type of capability. We're seeing requests for integration with SIEMs, right? Security Incident Engagement Management. I don't even know what it stands for, which is these security systems that collect all these events from these disparate systems and give a centralized view to the enterprise. We're getting people ask for us to ingest our, inject our logs of logins and logs out and some other security events into those systems, right? The list goes on and on. Oh, data, that's another one. A lot of these enterprises these days, they're building and managing their own data lakes, often with third-party SaaS providers, and they want you to take your data and connect it to them. And we're seeing all kinds of requests, real-time eventing integration to push that data in real time, remote access to read the data through nightly dumps. All this kind of stuff are being asked for to us that we're needing to provide. And this isn't even to mention the things that are specific to your business. For us, for example, integration with CRM systems like Salesforce is foundational for us to provide our capabilities. So, so your ability to do these kind of integrations is central to your success in building a B2B SaaS application. All right. Ensuring real-time data analytics and instant insight Right? Again, we're in 2024. Great data, great visualizations is now table stakes. And the mantra is actually really simple. If you provide a product and a user can take action in your product, there better be a report and an analytics that shows how well that went. Everything that gets done should be reported on. That's the simple rule. That's what customers want. And it's not like a nightly update where they come in the next morning and they get emailed a PDF report. If that's what you were thinking, I'm gonna dissuade you of that notion right now. They want it in real time. They want it up to date. The moment that interaction with your customer, with the end user, is done, it's in the system, and they can slice and dice the data on countless number of dimensions and get real-time updates. They can drill down and see exactly what all the data is to almost unlimited depth. This is table stakes for anyone building one of these systems, ensuring real-time data and analytics. Next one is a contradiction. One of my great frustrations at Five9, which is that customers want speed and velocity. Of course they want you to be able to deploy features instantly, update your software continuously to give them benefits and bug fixes. But they want to be able to control it. They want to be able to control it? Yes, they do. They don't actually want you to update it all the time. Time. What do I mean by that? Well, remember, you're selling the software to an IT guy or some business owner. They kind of feel like they're the vendor of that software to their own internal users. So the number one we ask, we get, is that they want to be able to see it and test it before it gets rolled out. And it's partly because of these integrations that I was just talking about. So if something that you did in an update or a new feature breaks their integration with their CRM or the security security system, that's a big problem. And they want to be able to test all their stuff. So one of the things we've had to do is deliver like, we call them dev domain, development environments where the customer can have a tenant set up they can play with in the lab and we push software there earlier. So customers get a week or two to play around with it in their own environments to make sure it works and give us feedback if it's not. And this has actually become central to our entire feature development process. Another thing we want, that customers are asking for, is that if we're going to make changes to a user interface that their employees see, they need to know about it before their employees do, right? And the reason is, is the IT department or the business owner, they are basically support for their employees, and they can't help their employees with problems if they don't know about it until the same moment their employees get it. So they ask to see see it in advance, know about it in advance, pre-release notes, be able to see it. In fact, they want to do their own phased rollouts to their employees. We get asked this all the time. Like, can I, can I turn it on for my 5 people on my team first and then roll it out to Department A and then Department B? These are the kind of asks that we get. The final ask I'll share with you, and I really hate this feature the most, with great, great unhappiness. Have we delivered this feature, which is they want the ability to stop all change deployments and new features during certain periods of time. We get this a lot from retail. And if you think about it for a moment, it makes sense. If you're a retail company, Thanksgiving to Christmas, that your entire business rides on that window. And if there's a B2B app that you're using that's central to getting your revenue during that period and it has an outage, you can literally see the dollars exiting the building into nothingness. So, reliability during those windows is critical, and one of the ways they wanna try and manage is by reducing change, as often change is a source of incident. So, innovation velocity, but with controls. Next, responsive hands-on support for uptime. Now, of course, you have to have 24/7 support, that's a no-brainer, One of the things that I think is non-obvious is the support that they ask for for incidents. 'Cause let me tell you, if you're a B2B SaaS vendor and there's an incident, and by the way, you're gonna have an incident, like, it's just guaranteed, you will have an outage, how you deal with it and how you communicate it is almost as important as not having the outage in the first place. So, we see asks like, "There has to be a status portal that shows the uptime of the system." And by the way, that status portal, I don't want to know just like, is your system up or down? As an enterprise, I'm using specific products and services in particular regions. I don't care if that product in Europe is down. If my product in the US is up, don't tell me it's down. It's up for me, or vice versa. So they actually want personalized and customized status to their specific products and services that match what they're seeing. Why do they want that? Do they just want to know? No, because business buyers, they have their own emergency remediation plans that they can pull the trigger on to deal with outages from their downstream SaaS providers. And so they can't take those actions if they don't know. So they wanna know, and they want constant updates. We get asks also for our engineers to actually show up on incident bridges, in our customers' incident bridges, direct connections between our operational staff and their operational staff, These are typically for larger B2B companies that are businesses that buy, but these are the kind of asks that we see. And these are just for incident handling. The upfront stuff, larger customers, businesses expect you to be a partner with them. They want to know that you're gonna help them get it configured and implemented and set up. You're gonna provide business analysts and program managers and technical teams that can configure it and help them integrate it with their own systems. You're their best friend. Your stake is their success. That is what they're expecting. All right, we're gonna just run the last few in. In-country data processing. This is similar to the data and privacy item I talked about, but it's different and it's pretty new. Again, I think starting with GDPR, people are asking this question. And again, this is something where it seems deceptively easy. Oh, I'm running my software in Google US Central. What's the problem? That's where my data is. All my data stays in the US. Well, we are having companies, financial services and healthcare in particular, they want guarantees that the data never leaves the US. So you start to ask yourself, well, but I'm consuming all these PaaS applications and these other SaaS applications from third-party vendors. Does that data stay in the US? And you think even if you consume a service from the same public cloud vendor, right? That by definition, oh yeah, like, I invoke Google's database in my project. Of course, like, that data stays in the same place my project is. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, right? Most of these public cloud vendors have designed these systems for high availability. So they offer these, like, globalized REST endpoints that normally route to the nearest place where the requester is, but if there is an outage or an incident or a hiccup or a blip or a network cut or whatever, Sometimes somehow the data might go somewhere else. And we are getting feedback from customers that that's not okay, that they would actually rather lose a little bit of reliability for guarantees of data staying in country. So we've had to go on a literal witch hunt on every single API that we invoke from our systems to find out, does that API guarantee downstream data stays in country or not? And some of our downstream providers, they're not even sure. Right? They've been building this stuff for years. They're like, I don't know, you know, we're looking at the code and there's this if this and then that, and if this flag is true and then, then maybe it goes left. Right? So dealing with this is a new headache that we're all gonna be dealing with for years to come. Ethical AI and transparency, something totally new that everyone is now asking for. What does it mean? They're not really sure. They're hoping you can tell them. Okay? So largely we think it means a few things. First, it— a lot has to do with the data stuff that I already talked about. Where is the data you're using? Where does it live? How are you using it? How long are you storing it for? Can I as an enterprise ask you not to use that data to train your models or improve your products and services in general? And furthermore, can you guarantee that your downstream subprocessors don't use the data for improving their products and services? This is by far the number one ask we we get. But it's not just that. For anyone who's building and training AI models, or even if using GenAI and doing prompt engineering, you're probably using data to test. So they have all kinds of questions about, are you doing a good job with that data? Is it not biased? Is it representative? Is it, is it associated with the right set of users who are going to be using this product and service? These are the type of things that they're asking for. And the last thing I point out, probably the most important, it's truly an ethical situation. Is the AI being used to make decisions that affect people's lives? If you're a B2B vendor and you're making a SaaS product that's automating something, that's making a decision that affects a person, you really need to care about that. You need to make sure that that decision is clear, the decision was made by an AI is clear, that there's an option for recourse, that if the affected person does not think that was a correct decision, there's some way for them to deal with that. That's really, really critical. And we have this in our product too. So we have this Contact Center as a Service software, and agents get scored on how good a job they're doing. And one of the things we're doing is looking at AI to help score the agents on, are they doing a good job? Did they say hello? Were they polite? Did they thank the customer at the end? These type of things, right? And one of the problems is those scores, they're used for compensation for agents. And so, We have built into our system, and we had this even before AI, a whole workflow where those scores are shared with the agent. The agent can click a button to contest the score. They can listen to the recording on which they were scored. They can argue with it. That gets escalated to a supervisor. It's built into the software. My friends, if you're building software that's using AI to make decisions that affect people's lives, you must care about this. That is ethical AI. Last thing I'll end with, and it is admittedly mildly self-serving. Which is if you're a business and you're supporting your customers, guess what? You're going to need one of these contact center things and your customers are going to be demanding that it's pretty good, that it's not one of these terrible, you know, press 1 for sales, 2 for support things. It delivers a hyper-personalized experience. It gets people to agents. The agents know who the customer is. They're able to get the job done, not have to transfer them around and put them on hold. This, my friends, is also table stakes in 2024. And something you all should be thinking about. So with that, I come to the end. Those are the top 10 things we've been asked about. I hope you found this helpful and insightful. Thank you very much. All right. I was hoping I'd have 10 minutes for questions, but I only got 4. But we have some time for questions. There's a mic right over here. And apparently, you can get up to the mic and ask a question. So ask away. Now this guy got up, and I was wondering what his question was going to be great, but he's just going to get a beer. I can't say I blame him. It's actually pretty hot in here. Any questions? All right. Well, I'll be standing over there. We'll declare victory again. Thank you very much, and have a great SaaStr, everyone.

Please welcome to the stage Maria Thomas, CPO at Rebrandly, formerly Buffer, Bitly, and Intuit. Welcome to Product-Led Growth Decoded. Welcome to Saastra. This is possibly your first session of the conference. I love these. I come back for these almost every year and I get so much energy out of these. And I can't believe that I'm competing with Jason M. Lemkin in another room. And before you all run over there, just, you know, he's talking about hiring the next VP of Sales. So this is more product focused. We're going to talk about PLG, product-led. My name is Maria Thomas and I am the P and often the G of PLG. I run products, product strategy, product organizations, but also growth. I will be sharing experience from 3 different SaaS companies. Insightly, where we layered sales-led on top of product-led. Bitly, where we did the opposite. We added product-led to sales-led, and Bitly team talked about tremendous success they gained from that, from that change. And the last 4 years I spent at Buffer. You may know Buffer is a loved social media platform which has been PLG-first and PLG-only company that is successfully attracting customers to its website absolutely for free. All right, and today's a special day. It's my second day on the new job. I just joined Rebrandly. My crew is here in the room, and Rebrandly is actually a fantastic candidate for product-led growth motion. It's a leading link management software company that markets to marketers and developers. And we've been doing product-led motion GTM for marketers forever, but I think in the more recent years we've realized how powerful it is with developers because they really need to get that value quickly to understand what product can do for them. All right, so I'm actually gonna spend the next 20 minutes with my content. I'll be talking about what product-led growth is, maybe what it isn't. I'll demystify some things, clarify things, talk about how to structure it organizationally, and I'm really gonna zero in on that important collaboration between marketing and product because that's where I believe the product-led growth magic really happens. If you were here last year, I talked about transparent roadmaps and why they're worth it. All right, so let's talk about the term itself. Itself. Product-led growth. The term is certainly not new. We've been doing this in consumer products. We've been doing this in SaaS forever. The, the term was coined in 2016 by an OpenView investor. I don't know if OpenView is here in the audience, but they get the credit for it. And product-led, I think a lot of times companies understand it as, well, what that means is that we just need to add free trial, or That means that we need to add really terrific user onboarding, but it's really much, so much more than that. Others have tried to coin PLG as DLG, data-led growth. And I think data is very important. You really can't run a successful growth motion of any kind if you don't have really solid, reliable data. But I wonder if PLG is really more about the customer and about creating the flywheel. It's about unleashing unleashing your users' potential to expand your growth for you. Every user becomes an evangelist. They spread the word of mouth, or we do land and expand in product-led sales motion, right? So to me, it's almost like CLG, customer-led growth. It's not about whether it's product, product-led, engineering-led, marketing, what have you, founder-led, but it's about your customers spreading the word for you and doing that hard work for you. Again, Buffer, Calendly are not spending a dime on paid advertising because they've created that flywheel and are being very successful with it. Uh, some prerequisites, uh, don't attempt PLG if you're, if you're going after very narrow market. Look, if you're going after 30 logos, by all means, hire fantastic sales team and you will be very successful. Uh, product-led assumes more broader, more horizontal adoption of your product. Um, And also, PLG will not solve your issue if you don't have product market fit just yet. All right, so this slide here just reinforces that point that there are growth efforts in companies and there are successful growth efforts. And I think a successful PLG is much more about turning every sign-up into opportunity to become your future paid customer, to become your future evangelist, Too often growth teams focus on more immediate results. Can we get revenue out of every single signup? Can we, um, if we just keep tweaking pricing, surely revenue will come. And, uh, and it ultimately turns out to be all about funnel optimization. You have to think bigger. You have to really come back to the new user acquisition again, that flywheel that it completes the loop and every customer brings 3 more to the table for you. Um, when I say every user interaction is an opportunity, another way to say it is no dead ends, folks, right? So by dead ends, it could be bugs, it could be missing feature, but it also could be just problems in your process. So let's say you've layered product-led, um, and sales-led, and your very small business customers somehow ended up with a sales team. They still deserve a delightful treatment. Perhaps they need to be handed back to support or back to products, but no dead ends. That's what I mean by every user interaction is an opportunity for delight and to turn them into an evangelist. Let's talk about some organizational misconceptions about product-led. On one extreme, we have companies who think that, well, PLG, that's the product team's problem. Okay? Product leader, go ahead, run PLG and everything's gonna be fantastic. Fantastic. I assure you, as someone who does that for a living, if the marketing website still says book a demo as the primary CTA, not much I'm going to be able to do with product-led motion. You can still have book a demo, but your primary CTA should probably be start a trial, really get into product. And it really depends on that marketing and product alignment. PLG is also organizing it's not only about the product experience. It starts with brand. It starts with every which way you're showing up for your users. It's about how you market to your audience. What metric to use for product-led growth? That's a topic of many heated debates. Of course it's all about revenue. But revenue is a lagging indicator and your control metric. I believe that if you are going with product-led motion, you are probably going after market share. You're probably going after having a lot of customers and a lot of logos. Therefore, I think product organizations, engineering organizations should really focus on something like MAU. If you already have a nuanced framework for metrics, terrific. But if you don't, consider switching from revenue to monthly active users because that's what you're really trying to do. You're trying to get a lot more people to use your product, right? You could always make the executive in charge of product team responsible for revenue, but the team should really be targeting MAU as their core focus. And then another mistake companies make is they say, well, PLG is everybody's responsibility. Tried this. I had multiple product managers and I would ask them, look, 80% of your time you spend on building the next amazing product and 20% of your time on growth. I don't think it works. I think it's really important to have specific individuals who have growth in their title, PLG in their title, and they're really passionate about running 25 experiments per week. I think that's where you get the most success. All right, so now on to more practical lessons from running PLG in the PLG-first company. All right, um, SaaS audience. So, uh, what is the most infamous point of tension than we get in SaaS companies. Unfortunately, it's typically between marketing and sales, right? Marketing team is like, hey, we're sending you all these leads. And the sales team, but I can't convert them. I can't do much about them. So that tension ensues. Well, we've just opened a new frontier. Now those same conversations and battles are happening between product teams who have now been pushed towards monetization. Reluctantly, we step into that role. We typically don't have a sales bone in our body, but we've just been in charge of— made in charge of selling. So now product and marketing are debating about the quality of leads. But here's the unlock. He was like, I literally had an aha moment about this at some point that unlike for sales team, right? Like what can sales team do with poor quality leads or with, well, we don't have a feature. We have to go ask the product team. We have to get on the backlog. When you push us product people to be on that frontier, well, we can actually do something about this. We can add those features. We can optimize the activation flow. We can add value to the product so we no longer have the lost leads. One of the biggest learnings I got at Buffer is that, you know, market really doesn't stand still in social media marketing. It changes every 6 months. Thank you, Elon Musk, for completely transforming transforming our industry. But by really analyzing those, those signups and how they change, we've uncovered that, oh wow, if we only added this feature or this aspect to the product, we can really unleash that product flywheel. Couple of more things on practical advice. If you don't know where to begin with product-led growth, start at the intersection where your user goes from, leaves the website and enters the product. That's where you start in that box. And from collaboration aspect, bring your marketing and product teams together, bring finance, bring data people, and have a weekly meeting where all you do at first is analyze data that's in front of you and then come up with hypothesis and experiments. So again, start somewhere. If you're going to start somewhere, you will learn the most, you will enjoy it the most, you will have the best experiment ideas if you just focus on that handoff from website to product. So that's my advice. Product marketers, any product marketers in the room? Some. Look, I hear you, right? Where do you sit? In product and marketing, right? I think you're your own function. I always make sure that product marketers are at the table, invited always by default at every single product strategy and every single product roadmap meeting, it's essential for product marketers to give input into that process and bring information back to the marketing team. Who is accountable for what? Again, if you don't know where to begin, keep it simple. That's what we did. Make marketing team accountable for product signups. Just keep it simple. Start with just quantity. Just give us more signups, and then we will figure out the rest. We can understand, OK, which high quality, which ones are not. And again, what do we need to build for them to turn them into activated and retained customers? Keep it simple. And then for product people, they will be in charge of activating, retaining, and the paid conversion. Marketing teams. So a lot of emphasis on acquiring users at cost, either through outbound or paid advertising. There are terrific organic channels I give you here that are very, very effective on creating that flywheel. So let's start with content marketing. If you're doing content marketing, folks, if you are sending 2 blogs per month, it's not enough. Look at the best-in-class companies like HubSpot, like Buffer, like Calendly. They are publishing a blog post every single day because it works, right? It needs to be SEO optimized, but it's a very effective and they're pretty inexpensive way to create that flywheel. Community. Now that you don't have salespeople in a conversation with every single new signup, community is your answer for how to get to, how to get that customer feedback. We use Slack, we use Discord. Start, start small and your community will grow. Social media. I'm embarrassed to admit at this point how much time I'm spending on LinkedIn. All my more than Netflix. It's kind of embarrassing. So social media converts, it works. You know, do it professionally on LinkedIn. If you're going to TikTok, by all means hire Digital Nomad who knows how to cater to that audience. And then product launches. If your product launches are not bringing new user acquisition on the day of the launch, my sense is that you're doing something wrong. Your features are not resonating or you're not executing the launch correctly or efficiently. At Buffer, we engaged every single employee in the company at the day of launch. We had engineers sending out posts, building in public. We had entire support teams sending out social. So you're creating that special moment that really, just that day one of launch and just amplifying your message. It gets infectious. Customers enjoy it. They start spreading the word for you. All right. So now advice for product teams. My top advice— anyone in product here? Product people? A lot. Okay, go for product. My advice to you is that you want the flywheel. It's not going to build itself. Help your marketing teams. All right? Help them rebuild the website. Instrument their website server side, not front end side, so that you get the best insights you can possibly get. Consider what small unit of value can you give out even pre-signup. Best-in-class PLG companies are all putting some kind of a little bit of value up front. GoDaddy is doing this, Rebrandly is doing this with domain search. SEMrush is my favorite example. SEMrush, they, they provide competitive intelligence on how your website is doing. Their hook is phenomenal. You put in your website, and then you put in names of your two top competitors, and boy do you want to know what happens next. That hook is incredible. And this all happens pre-signup. You haven't even given up your email address. But that hook is so effective that you sure enough, you're starting that trial, and you're paying them whatever they want because it's, again, it's such an effective taste for the product. Again, North Star, I believe, should be something like MAU. For some companies, it's units of value, right? Like if you're Airbnb or Uber. But active users, I think, is a good way to go for PLG. Launches— again, every launch should be bringing new user signups. Data is a must. Data needs to be democratized and in the hands of every person in EPD, engineering, product, and design. When I joined Buffer, Buffer had 5 people in data science team that were in the silo producing amazing reports. And that really was a slow process to get to value. Since then democratized data, love Mixpanel, love ChartMogul. Again, don't recommend front-end analytics tools, but make data accessible to everyone in the company. You'll get a whole lot more experiments out of it. UX, happy to coin a new term, consumer experience. Consumer-grade UX. So, um, here's a tip. If you really want to transform your user experience, hire people from B2C companies. They do not need to be convinced what a great UX is, right? So your front-end engineers, your product designers, your, uh, your product people look to inspiration to Notion, to Canva, to Slack. They're running consumer-grade UX on enterprise products and being very successful. So that's successful, was it? Growth accountability, who is it sit with? Certainly with leaders, but again, somewhere within organizations, someone with growth in title, PLG title, who's really excited about running that growth motion. That's my learning, that it's not just spread throughout the EPD organization. All right. We're almost at the end here, I think. And some other lessons learned in PLG first company. Company. Activation rate, hotly debated topic. What should your activation rate be? The benchmark is somewhere between 20% and 40%. My view is that if you are approaching 40%, then you are either our next best unicorn or you're probably being overly generous with your aha moment onboarding and that activation rate. Be embarrassed about your activation rate. Raise the standard to become activated user. Why? Because if your user's truly activated, they should have a much higher propensity to retain and convert to paid than everyone else. So if you're just giving them a very simple task to complete, then again, you're probably being overly generous. Encourage PLG crossover across the organization. Hire T-shaped people. Hire product people who've been in marketing. Hire marketers who've been in product. Product marketers, you are in both. Fantastic. And then get the entire organization to do someone else's work. So for example, go-to-market team could be QAing, they could be dogfooding, they could be drinking our own champagne, right? But they will really build that empathy for the customer and really great understand the product. And then again, engineers, many engineers are fantastic writers. They could be building in public and sharing the news with their audience. We already talked about making data accessible across the organization. Product marketers should absolutely be involved in product-level decisions. And then on the UX side, make sure your UX is solid. Look, no growth motion, um, is, um, a replacement for just having amazing product experience. So UX needs to be solid. Hire people from consumer companies. Companies, you will go faster. All right. So these are my practical lessons. And I, as a PLG enthusiast, I embrace freemium. So my advice is free. Please approach me anytime. Happy to share advice, exchange ideas. And now we'll offer any questions. Yeah? Does anyone have any questions?

Yes.

Oh, could you approach the mic, please? Thank you.

Have you seen a PLG motion work when it's not from a bottom-up, it's more of a top-down? SMB, mid-market size.

So top-down organizationally, or— Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think— well, look, I think that most companies currently realizing that it's a successful model. Again, I'm not really here to sell the product-led growth as a winning formula. I think it's important to really understand, is this the right play for you? But I think hopefully Hopefully most executives currently realize that you can, if you're going after again broader market than a very narrow vertical market, then it's really a successful play. It ultimately, you have to be patient. It does reduce your cost of customer acquisition. And again, at some point that flywheel just keeps delivering for you. So have I personally seen an example of this?

I think so. So if the business doesn't have like a network effect.

Oh, I see. Like if it doesn't. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's okay. Again, like that, it's, it's not, it's not an absolute must-have for PLG to succeed. What, what you can't— if it doesn't have a network effect, like a virality of like Calendly.

Yeah.

Again, through concept, like you have to put on the hat of how can I get my users to like, what can they do for me? Can they bring more traffic? To the website? Will they engage with every blog post I publish? Will they engage with my social content? What can they do for you? And through that you can get to an answer. And at least, if nothing else, word of mouth, right? They'll tell their couple best friends. Land and expand for SalesLed, of course.

You mentioned you love freemium, so there's always a balance between the features you put in premium versus what features you need for paid. And then what happens if you realize you've made a mistake and need to correct and do something? So if you've got any shared experiences or stories about that, I'd love to hear.

Lots of, lots of stories. Uh, and this very important, how do you price in freemium? So, um, some of the, I think, I think to avoid these challenging mistakes and the pitfalls, one way you can do it is really think about like for almost every feature, I guarantee you can come up with some kind of consumption-based pricing elevator. Okay, so let's say a lot of productivity tools have campaigns or tags, right? Give your free users 1, 2, 3 tags for free, and then on the 4th one they have to pay. Um, and I've gone through this exercise so many times that people keep challenging me like, well, surely there's a feature that you can do it for. You can come up with it. Sometimes It's maybe on advanced features or just usage-based. And so that elevator allows you to really play with it and not make the mistake of giving out too much value for free versus maybe restricting it too much.

And if you realize maybe you made a mistake, and so current people have too much for free, have you ever gone back and tried to correct that and had problems with customers?

Absolutely.

How have you dealt with that?

Yeah, so I think you realize when you have a Another problem— this really happened at Buffer, for instance— we added feature of notes. And we decided to give it to all the free users right out of the gate. And what we discovered, they actually weren't using them. If they were, that would be a— I would think that that's a success. But the user adoption was much higher on paid plans. So price-value equivalence, you really want to make sure that the free users actually want that value. And if the adoption is low, So we corrected it, and now that feature is a paid feature. Yeah. Of course. Hi. So I was thinking about what you said about Mao and that other things. But in my product, we don't have a lot of things that people can do between the months, because they get credits to do some things.

So what do you think about these metrics that people will not only return like every day or every month, because if you think like in Brazil WhatsApp, it's very famous because WhatsApp people use like every minute, but in like a teleconsultation thing, that's our thing, people don't use it like every day or every month because they, they don't need it like every month.

So yeah, we have like a little bit of, uh, doubts on that. What a wonderful Great question. Thank you for it. So happens, happens a lot. Sometimes we product people, we kind of shoot ourselves in the foot. We're like, oh, let's set up a product that's set it and forget it, right? Like, and the customer never has to come back into our product ever again, right? So there's an example where like, well, where is that monthly active use going to come from? You can take an approach of considering, well, what are the units of value that they are getting even while they sleep, right? Like, are they still— are we still doing something for them in the background? Another way is I already mentioned Airbnb and Uber are prime examples where, look, you're not going to get an Airbnb every weekend. If you are, great, I want to be you. But what they— so what they're going to be tracking is units of value. So how many bookings per year or per quarter that customer got. So that's maybe another way to, to flip that. But it certainly has to has to work for your product. Please don't take this as panacea just because I said Mao. Again, in the absence of everything else, maybe start with that exploration, but has to be nuanced to your product. Of course.

Hey, Maria, thanks for your tips. And I have a question about the content marketing. And you said that successfully— successful companies, they publish it at minimum twice a week, and even better, once a day.

Once a day.

I'm wondering, like, for really small teams or even indie developers, if I make a product, like, I don't think I'll ever be able to publish some content every day. So how do you deal with it? And how does the AI-generated content play with it?

Yeah, I will stay away from advising on using generative AI for content marketing. I do think it needs to be SEO optimized for your business. It needs to be authentic. Ultimately, in the— like, in order to be successful with a blog post every single day, you need 1, 2 content marketers. You can hire contractors, you can maybe find people who can do it at scale for you. But I am truly not equipped to advise on generative AI. I would certainly look to it for inspiration, right? Like, so if you are yourself like, oh, I'm I'm going to start writing a blog post every day. I use Claude and ChatGPT in almost every communication, so I'll certainly lean into that for ideas, use it for idea generation, but then still make it authentic to you. But yeah, if you're really constrained on resources, I would maybe approach agencies who probably do it at scale for a lot of people and they can—

Any recommendation for such agencies?

I don't. I don't. If anyone else Who does, please advise. Yes. Oh, someone has right there in the back. Someone has right there. Yeah. Okay.

Hi, Maria. My name is Adnan.

Hi, Adnan. Yes.

And also including your personal email, that's very kind of you.

Of course. Yeah.

I was interested in your advice of turning every signup into an evangelist.

Oh, yeah.

And specifically how you navigate balancing that with the concept of refining your ICP and recognizing that not every signup will be an evangelist. Evangelist.

Yes, it's a good point. So I guess there will be some of that natural attrition, right? Like where the, the people who are not in UICP are ultimately just in the wrong place, right? Like it's so, so yes, that's a bit of an extreme that literally every single signup become your evangelist, but the ones for whom the product resonates, you know, that's what we're after ultimately. But again, just to flip it around a little bit, what I see a little bit too often is that people kind of start obsessing about ICP and then say, well, we don't want anyone else. Like really look at that, at those signups. And if they are quality signups that are really adjacent or close to your core use case, well maybe you should build things for them and therefore keep, keep adjusting your ideal customer profile. That's how I would think about it. But certainly good question. You know, like literally not every signup will end up to be your evangelist.

Thank you for that.

Of course.

Hi, so my question is more for B2B or SaaS products which involve some sort of an implementation activity before their users can use it.

Yeah.

How should we think about PLG? Is that even workable or not?

Great question. So my first quick answer is consider as much as possible are putting a dynamic working prototype on your website. So many companies are doing this now. In general with PLG, I think the days of really abstract strange personas on our website are gone. And I think users just really want to see what your product looks like. Better yet, they want to interact with it. So you can build interactive demos. And if you don't put them on your website, then send them to your customers. Could there be a pilot test environment that's set up for them? But your goal is to get them to experience the actual product experience as much as possible. I'm very happy to see that so many websites have now taken that notion and are putting fully functioning working prototype, if not even pre-sign-up values, straight on their website. Again, so that you can experience what it is. Good luck.

Thank you so much for all the really operational practical stuff on PLG motion. Strategically though, you know, if you're looking at $20,000, $30,000 ACVs or higher, is it just not something that's going to be in your wheelhouse that you need to be paying attention to? Or you spoke to that a little bit with the other gentleman, but where do you think that frontier is where you need to be uniquely thinking about this strategy?

Yeah, yeah. So I would, so I think $10,000 is is typically like where we think that that's too much to put on the credit card, right? It's just too much, right? Like people don't have those types of credit cards. So, and so what you really— so does this mean that if your contract value is above that, should you not do PLG? I think you still can quite successfully create a product-led sales motion where if you have price point that's below $10,000, you are running PLG, but once they get to that point, at that point they get handed off to the sales team. So again, it's a hybrid, right? Like it's, you know, nothing's, you know, perfectly just product-led or perfectly sales-led. So I think that's, that's what you can do is there's the handoff that happens. Did I answer your question?

No, that was good insight.

Thank you. Okay.

Hello. My question is about the activation, activation Yes, yes. What do you recommend when you have like different kind of functionalities or action that our client can do to choose like a very good activation metric that represents what you want to do?

So you have too many different— do you have like a lot different personas? For who?

Both.

Different personas and different actions that they can take with your platform. Okay, well, the, the just the, the intuitive instinctive thing that's in my mind is onboarding, right? Like you help, help user classify themselves and segment themselves. Are you here for SMS messaging or are you here for email marketing, right? And if they— or are you a— do you have a large team of people or is it just a solo business? So based on that, you can route them to the correct aha moment. Arriving at the correct activation step is very important to think about. As far as thinking through practical advice, the scientific way to go about it is to qualitatively talk to a lot of users to really understand what is it that they— what's the core value that they really get out of your product, right? With Calendly, it's very easy. I need to schedule meetings effectively. And so what they've done by beautifully and all my respect to them, they really just stayed laser focused on that one core use case. Right. But, but if you don't maybe have that qualitative, you can look, you can look at it quantitatively. You can run a data science analysis where you can see, okay, for people who convert in the end, what is the first action that they did? And so you kind of reverse engineer that aha moment, that activation rate. Does that help? Does that make sense? Yeah. OK.

Thank you very much.

Of course.

Hi. I have a follow-up question on the point related to every sign-up that doesn't activate is an opportunity.

Yes. Yeah.

So for those that do activate, they see value, and it's easy to engage and get qualitative information.

Yeah.

But those that don't activate are usually gone.

And we try to reach out, often they don't reply.

So any insights on how to glean what those opportunities exactly are to turn them into?

Yeah. So that's a very typical blind spot I think for product and marketing organizations is that we simply want to dismiss, right? Like those cohorts. So the way that I would go about it is I would still try to understand, are there any other, what can we learn about them? What did they tell us in onboarding through data enrichment? Can you tell, oh, this is a real business. Oh, they look— it looks like they have a team. In fact, multiple of them have tried to create an account, but none of them are activating, right? So, so I'm starting to think like, oh, this is potentially like a really legitimate customer. And then reaching out and speaking with them, or just trying to understand through, through who they are, you know, maybe you can arrive at the conclusion of what value they're seeking. The most effective thing we've done at Buffer is just created onboarding onboarding where they would tell us, I'm here for social media tools, so for TikTok. And these were people who were not activating, right? And we're like, well, how come? You know, we're social media, but our product wasn't strong enough for them for that particular channel. So we started like really building a plan for how we can keep them. So keep fine-tuning your user onboarding so you can ask the right questions to understand who they are. That's how I would do it.

Ask those questions upon sign-up. Have you found issues with— so we did that. And what we found is that 30% of people just click through the answers just to get into the app and garbage data and data out of the problem.

Have you had that any? Well, I think the practical advice is to add the skip onboarding button. I would rather have a little bit less data that's higher quality so that people don't— like, if you don't give them the exit valve, to your point, then they will give you garbage answers. So that's what I was— thank you. Thanks a lot, very good presentation. Great.

When I think of PLG, mostly the motions are towards the end users, the doers, like in Canva for designers.

Yes, yes.

Or Notion for people.

Yeah.

Can PLG work for execs who are reviewing other people's work, who are looking at reporting, who are not doing actual work, yeah, day to day in a platform? That's the first part of the question. Yeah. And the second part is, if yes, are there platforms you know who have used PLG Motion for those kind of personas, the execs, the reviewers who look at reports?

Yeah, um, no. To just to answer your second question, do I know examples where like the C-suite of an enterprise and then you have created some kind of use case that really works for them. I guess through the long-term patient product development, you can get there. But ultimately, the people in the C-suite and enterprise, they're just solving a very different problem. Right? So if your product has a job to be done for the doers and the builders in the organizations or marketers, and so this is the sales team really needs to step in and translate that value of these jobs to be done and look at all these people who are using our product and really explain it to the executive. So again, PLG is not panacea for everything. Sales team has to step in and say, what are you really trying to do is create consistency throughout your organization. What you're really trying to do is you want to have visibility into everything that happens in your organization. So we can help you do that because look at this, we've already have a lot of users. Within your company who are using our product. So it does happen through explanation, I think, more often than not.

And giving it to the salespeople to take it forward. That's the idea, right?

Yes.

Thank you.

Yeah, that's right.

I think I'm your last question. All right. Do you mind if I video this? Because I'm trying to settle an argument with my CEO.

Oh, yeah.

OK, sure.

And I just need some proof.

I could be wrong. So I think you mentioned at the start that PLG is good for, or not good for, if you're too niche. It's good for if you're broad. What if you're somewhere in the middle? Maybe you're focusing on enterprise, 500 to 1,000 kind of users. I notice a lot of websites, instead of that free trial, or you know, you get to use the product straight away, self-serve, right?

Yeah.

That's always a contact us for demo.

Yes.

And then someone's gonna— sales guy is gonna, you know, have scheduled a Zoom call, have an elaborate demo. So I'm kind of telling him we should do away with this and perhaps kind of let them self-serve their way into— kind of like the whole PLG thing, right?

Right.

He's kind of against it.

Okay, I hope he's not here.

But basically there is a lot of engineering work to build that whole self-serve model. Yeah, so we're kind of stuck on that. So is it as simple as do away with the contact us for demo?

Yeah, I look, you know, I think, I think the moment it gets convincing for your executive is that maybe you've already, you know, juiced and got as much out of the sales-led motion as possible. And they're really starting to think about like, what's next, right? So how do we grow? How do we grow from here? So at that moment, you can catch them with your proposal. Another one, it sounds like investment of creating a free trial or a version of PLG is really high. So the prior gentleman, the advice I gave him is, okay, build, build, build like an MVP of PLG, like at the lowest possible investment and see and see if it sticks, right? Like see if it works. Even if it's a clickable prototype, right? But people are like, look, people are really engaging with this. This means that we can be successful with PLG. Trying to think what other practical advice I can suggest here. Again, just don't, like, going PLG is not a revolution, it's an evolution. It has to be step by step. So start taking smaller steps, right, that you can prove out to your higher-ups and to yourself that it's actually going to be a successful opportunity, because maybe it isn't. Maybe the market is really that narrow and niche. And then sales motion is really the way to go. That's a possibility.

Thanks a lot.

Sure, of course.

Sorry, it wasn't the last question. This might be. You mentioned briefly about running community for PLG motion. We always talked about it, but we haven't started yet. If we started tomorrow, do you have any recommendations or additional tips on what are the first maybe 3 things that we should do for running community?

I'm so glad you asked. I do. So I think if you're just starting to try to get the user community started, exchange a unit of value. For example, you get to be— join our Join our community and we give you all of our features in beta version. You get early access. Or give them something, right? Like, I don't know if monetary works, but like just to get it started, right? But once it gets going, pick a really simple platform to communicate with your customers. I think Slack is great. We use Discord. I don't know if Discord maybe works for every audience, but it works well for Buffer. And then what happens is that Community users start exchanging ideas and then product managers are there to answer their questions. And then product managers get a lot from talking to customers. Customers get a ton from speaking with everyone in the organization. So that's where I would begin, but beta is my top tip. So give them early access in exchange for being part of community. And then like ask— keep asking for feedback. Like, "Hey, we gave you early access. What do you think, right? So, of course.

Yeah, so I want to advocate to our CEO that we have a pretty complicated business model where there's like very complex onboarding process.

Okay.

And I actually think when we have a target segment that's fairly narrow, but I actually think we can actually expand our target market by offering a PLG motion product offering. Do you have any advice or examples that we should like reference and kind of look at?

So again, like how to— is this about again the convincing the higher-ups that we should go to PLG?

Yes. Um, but targeting a different segment because I think the sales team needs to still kind of handle the other.

Oh, so like, so you're trying to— so this is a strategy shift, like, well, like let's start target this new segment and for them we're going to go PLG. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, I think I would imagine that should, should be, you know, hopefully an easier conversation to have is like, hey, this is an experiment. Rather than putting fairly expensive sales team on this, we're gonna build an MVP product over here on the side, right? And just see, start testing, like, are we getting traction here? So like, if you're going like after brand brand new segments, for you, I would almost exclusively go PLG again, unless it's a niche and unless it's over 10,000 or 20,000. So I would actually specifically lean into that. If they need inspiration, there's so many examples right now. It's hard to think of a successful SaaS company these days that doesn't do a version of product lab. Thank you.

Hi. There's a lot happening.

With AI in outbound sales, can you give me some thoughts on product-led growth? Like how AI can be used?

What are your thoughts? Like, can you give me some ideas?

So for what kind of sales? Outbound sales?

So, so like for AI, I mean, using AI, they're doing a lot of sales, right? I mean, outbound sales.

Outbound sales.

Yeah.

So, but how is AI going to change whole product-led growth? In general, in general, how AI changes product-led growth? Well, I think it's— I think analytics of product-led growth are going to become a whole lot easier. Suggestions for experiments, insights. Did you know, like if you are in the analytics space, that's— I mean, I would lean into AI so much right now, right? Like help me find out what I don't already know as the product leader, right? So I think AI will tell me like, did you know you have a whole tight group of customers over here and they don't seem to be getting any value? Or did you know that actually no one's using this set of features? So I think AI fundamentally transforms that analysis, and I think growth experimentation will just become much more rapidly faster. We can just iterate much, much quicker on it. Got it.

But what about customer interface? Like, customers are coming in traffic, how does that change? Like a personalized onboarding or something like that? Like some ideas on that?

Well, you know, entering dream mode, but I think it would be amazing if AI started, you know, creating more custom experiences or answering questions for customers in the moment, right? I mean, a lot of companies, you know, we already implemented chatbots in our product that where AI is behind it answering user questions so we can take it to like sort of the next logical conclusion where it will— AI will get much better at educating users through the process. I think that's going to be probably the next big thing that happens.

Otherwise, I think you don't see much of a shift in how product changes with AI, with what exists now, like whatever is happening.

Yeah, I think absolutely. I think AI is going to transform a lot of what what we do throughout, throughout the process and throughout the user experience of the product. Like, I'm a big believer. So yes, thanks so much. Of course.

Yes.

All right, thanks everyone. Thank you for all the great questions. Thank you.