PLG Decoded with Maria Thomas, CPO, Rebrandly + ex-CPO, Buffer: LIVE at Workshop Wednesday

Welcome to another SaaS-ter Workshop Wednesday. We're so excited you could be here with us today. We've got another epic SaaS-ter speaker here for you this week. Thanks to everybody who came last week to AI Day. I know it seems like longer ago, but it was just last week. So yeah, thanks for joining us this week. Workshop Wednesdays are there, you know, back at their usual time following last week's AI Day. So yeah, excited to have Maria Thomas join us today. She is your expert for the day. She's gonna talk about all things PLG. She is the CPO at Rebrandly and formerly at Buffer, Bitly, and Intuit. Maria, you guys might have caught her session at Sastra Annual, but if you missed it, she did a bit of a refresh here to incorporate some of her latest learnings, and we will let her take it away. But just as reminders before we get into it, I know you guys all have your note takers. You know, if they can't record, sorry, but we do record and livestream all of these so you can watch it. This Aster YouTube channel, back at any time. And as we go, as always, please drop your questions in for Maria during her presentation into the chat, and I'll come back at the end to help moderate Q&A so she can answer your questions. So drop your PLG questions in the chat as we go. And without further ado, Maria, I'll let you take it away from here.

Thanks, Amelia. Happy Wednesday, everyone. Happy February. I'm sure we are all Eager to drive our revenue goals for the year. Lots of roadmap plannings, board meetings, and reflecting already in January. So I'm here to help. I'm here to talk about Product-Led Growth Decoded. This session is for people who are just starting out with PLG, those who are trying to optimize it, or, you know, those who are, you know, just trying to bring it on the floor, so to speak, of benchmarks, or really trying to get higher with that. So don't be shy with your questions at the end, and I'll let Emilia monitor them throughout. All right, so a bit about myself. So Maria Thomas here, I'm CPO and I'm accountable for product-led growth and revenue. So I am a type of executive who does not shy away from having a revenue goal. For those of you founders who are early in stages of PLG, One of my top advice for you is find a product leader who is comfortable also owning revenue and growth goals. I do think that that creates the best alignment in the company. I would just— The best alignment in the company. All right, so we'll run through content for 20, 25 minutes, and then I'm really eager to hear your questions. Last time I did a session at Saastr, there was so many questions. I think we stayed for, extra 30 minutes. So I'll talk about PLG Motion decoded, what's, what are myths, and so what are some real best practices, and then talk about practical lessons for how to set up PLG Motion from collaboration standpoint in a company, various lessons learned. And just so you know, I have built PLG Motions from the ground up for SMB customers and then layered upmarket strategy on top. I worked for a company where that strictly had enterprise SLG motion, and we've introduced product-led in addition, so introduced good, better, best and freemium differentiation. I've optimized such motions and to have, you know, variety of experiences, so kind of have seen it go in multiple directions. And again, I've been a frequent speaker at Saastr conference. I hope to see you all at the annual conference in May. All right, I'll start with my probably most important learning as a practitioner of product-led is, you know, as, as tactically we focus so much on product-led growth, being obsessed and really focused on converting every single product signup into a paid subscriber. So we, there tends to be a tendency tactically to over-index on paid subscribers, paid subscribers, ARR, only, but my firm belief, and that's how I like to set goals for growth teams, is that you really have to think about the flywheel. You really have to think about your users' potential to expand your growth. And that comes from treating every single signup, not only your ideal customer profile, not only the one who converts, you know, as a potential opportunity to tell someone else, via word of mouth, through community, through Reddit, you know, through dark social or social, that this was an amazing product experience and this is a great company with very clear value proposition. So again, I just wanna remind everyone that PLG is not just strictly about that optimizing conversion rates only. It's really about the flywheel. So let's dive into some further PLG myths and how to demystify PLG and set it up for success in your company. All right, let's get into it. Okay, PLG myths versus PLG success. So, so in terms of setup in your company, a lot of times the founders or execs set it up that strictly product team owns product-led growth motion. And to a degree, of course, it's true, and that needs to be— I already talked about how important it is for product teams to, to have a revenue metric. But you really, really have to be aligned with marketing for that to be successful. In other words, product team will not be successful if the primary CTA on the home, on the homepage is talk to sales, right? So if the marketing website says talk to sales, guess what? The product-led growth motion may not succeed. You need to have a meaningful pipeline into product of product signups. Another common misconception is that, again, we only strictly think about conversions after user got into product. My firm belief is that PLG really starts with brand awareness or your organic channels. We'll talk about importance of focusing on owned channels and recency bias here, everyone, but I just rolled off Buffer where for 4 years that I was there, we We spend like the, the minimum amount as humanly possible on paid advertising. So organic works, owned, earned channels really work in terms of bringing tremendous pipeline to your product if you really invest in brand awareness and organic. Another common misconception is that North Star metric is strictly revenue. I'm here to share learnings from running freemium products where North Star metric of MAU is really crucial. It's not just paying customers. It's your active users who are going to promote your product for you. And then, you know, on the flip side, we have setups where PLG is everyone's accountability. And to a degree, it's— yes, that's also true. But you have to make sure that certain individuals in the company are actually directly accountable for your PLG metrics. All right. And then going a little bit deeper here, and again, my advice here is how to set up team structures, goals, OKRs, KPIs for you. Teams. So here's the slide about goals. Again, what we've seen in legacy growth motions is that you need to have every single sign-up to convert to paid. You need to start thinking about every single sign-up as an opportunity for a future or delayed paid customer, be it if they use your free product, they may come back 6 months from now, may come back 18 months from now. PLG motion requires patience and humility. And you will be incredibly surprised if you stick with it is how often your, your previous signups come back in waves back into your product during those typical seasonality waves of New Year, a bit of tax season, and then back to school around September timeframe. I see it all the time. Reactivations come back, previously signed up users come back. Again, every user does not necessarily need to buy. They need to become your evangelist. Every interaction is an opportunity for delight and to bring more users to your product. All right, so now let's go deeper into marketing and product collaboration around PLG. So in SaaS, we for years have all witnessed and experienced a— and I'll call it what it is— a battle between sales teams and marketing teams, right, where marketing teams are Hey sales, I'm sending you so many leads. Sales team responds with, well, these leads are the ones that I can't convert. So with product-led growth, we've now opened a new frontier of that level of, I'll call it constructive or positive conflict between product teams and marketing teams. So now product teams are really challenging marketing for the quality of leads, and that's the right way to think about it. Some practical advice for how to set it up. Make sure your marketing, product, data, and finance people are meeting every single week to discuss data and experiments. If you're just starting, start here. Weekly workshop, review data, review what's on the roadmap, discuss, discuss, discuss, and get people talking to each other. Make sure they're not in silos. Product marketers are incredibly important to successful product-led motion. They need to be in the single product roadmap and strategy meeting, full stop. There's no excuse for product marketing basically not being part of the product team or product management team. In my, in the teams that I've set up, product marketing would be part of product teams, and I think that that's the most efficient way to do it. Again, if you're just getting started, keep it simple. Give your marketing team a goal of deliver new signups. Keep it simple until you get better insights around cohorts, ability to really segment your signups. Just start with new signups, keep it simple, but then of course establish control metrics for, but do they activate and do they ultimately pay? Product teams focus on activating, retaining, and converting new signups. All right. And one of the things as a product leader that I have really embraced is that, and, and a superpower is digging in your data and understanding not only customers who convert to paid, But what about those who don't? So that's a tip for superpower. If you want to really get great at your product-led growth motion, make sure you're analyzing those people who are viable businesses based on data enrichment that hopefully you've implemented in your product signup but are not converting. What is that telling you? Are you— do you have negative attrition features that are turning off these customers, or what's going on? All right, PLG advice for go-to-market teams. So owned and earned channels. Again, a bit of recency bias, but Buffer wrote books on how to not spend a lot of money on paid advertising and rather really leverage your community, your content marketing, your launches as a way of acquiring new users and social. So north star for go-to-market teams, signups, control metrics, signups that activate and convert. There's so much content here, team, but just hear my quick pearls of wisdom. Content marketing— there's so much debate right now about is it quality, is it quantity? Of course it's both. Of course you want to be authentic. No, you don't want to write your blog posts or content marketing strictly with AI. You will get penalized for that. But don't overlook quantity. That's my learning, is that minimum twice a week blog post is what's going to help create that machine. And you'll make some mistakes. You're not going to have a win with every single blog post, but that quantity really, really matters in terms of reaching your users with thought leadership and bringing them to your site. Another tip is that it's not just about product signups. Create an inbound flow for newsletter signup. Newsletter could be a great unlock for you. And you'll have basically a huge secondary database of people you can come back to and then later convert them to product signup. I think community is essential. That's— I've done this in a couple of places. You can start with using Slack or Discord as your tech stack for starting up community. And my response to a typical question or feedback that, but we don't have time for community or it's too much of investment right now. Is that trust me, your community is already happening on dark social. It's happening on Reddit, it's happening in your mobile apps reviews, and unfortunately it's the negative feedback that your prospects might see. So embrace community and start having a positive conversation with your customers. If you're marketing to developers, that's absolutely essential to be in the places where developers are present. We all know that social media converts. Amazing how well LinkedIn has done. Continue investing there. And please, please do adjust your voice and tone and messaging depending on the social channel. If it's TikTok or YouTube Shorts, it's, it's going to be quite different than people you're reaching on LinkedIn, especially in B2B SaaS. Don't be shy about, or don't always overlook the opportunity to customize your voice and tone for the right audience and the right channel. Product launches need to be about new user acquisition. As a product person and someone who's accountable to roadmap, Too often our features are focused on retention and don't— and we product people don't spend enough time thinking about how product launches can drive actual acquisition of new users. So as, as go-to-market teams, work with your product teams to make sure launches is what drives new user flywheel for you. For product teams, the— my top advice for product teams, if you're on the product side, is that That flywheel is not going to build itself. You have to help your marketing team. Again, we often see product teams pushing back on marketing team and saying we're too busy building product features, product value. It is essential to go pre-signup with value. So demoing your, your products before someone gives you their email, helping drive website traffic, getting into the technical details of SEO, or what have you, whatever drives demand for your, for your marketing team. Make sure that part of the EPD, engineering product design capacity, is allocated to help marketing drive that demand. Again, flywheel not going to build itself. Don't just wait for marketing team to give it all to you. Help them. North Star is MAU, control metric, launches, features that drive new user acquisition. Data is absolutely, absolutely essential. There needs to be reliable data infrastructure and data that you can trust, right? I've been wrong so many times in terms of implementing experiments and thinking that I'm right about this or that hypothesis, and then ABCD tests have helped actually unlock the truth. On the UX side, it's 2025, it's consumer-grade. We're in the consumer-grade phase, team. Notion, Canva, Slack— look, look to those companies for inspiration. There's no excuse for keeping your products looking dated. UX needs, needs to be really slick, really polished. You know, all the successful latest and greatest SaaS companies all have that really high bar for UX. Notion, of course, was a prime example of founders perfecting their UX until they even went to market. Good for them. And then growth accountability concentrated with specific team and across EPD org. So Question here for you. Do you have someone who is a growth product manager on your team? I do recommend having someone who lives and breathes data, really thinks about every single experiment, and are directly accountable for growth success. All right, here are some other lessons learned in PLG-first or PLG-second companies. One of my advice is please, please, please keep it simple for your— for users, for prospects, and yourself. Or you will drown in complexity. It is very tempting to start optimizing too early. For example, having customized pricing for various geographic regions or having a differentiated trial for every single Good, Better, Best plan. A team, you may drown in complexity if, if you start layering these additional layers too early. I say keep it simple. Have one trial, stick to one price point for now. If you are not comfortable yet with reliability of your data, make sure to make decisions that are more driven by strategy as well. But again, I've just seen too many times that people start over-optimizing into complexity before they're ready or before it's even necessary. Make sure that you've reached benchmarks of standard paid conversion, standard activation rates. If you're below those, you know, don't overthink it. I think that's, that's really my key advice here. My second top advice, especially through the product lens, is analyze your new user activation rates. So very often we see, well, my activation rate is 30-35%. Is it though? I really challenge that number because if you're— if the activation rate is supposed to mean that this user is activated and is primed and ready to ultimately purchase your paid subscription. And if that's true, you are our next unicorn, if it, if that's actually 35%. So what I suggest is refine your activation metric to be a little bit less generous. You know, too often product teams say, well, you know, as long as a user just, you know, created a, invited the first team member or connected an integration, they just did one thing and they're already activated. It's probably too generous. Reliable data accessible across organization, robust data stack. This is just my perspective of tools that I endorse and some others that I'm starting to get wary about. So BI tools that I personally endorse strongly are Mixpanel, really great to democratize, it's a great tool to democratize insights across the team. ChartMogul, of course, assuming you're using Stripe. But it's a fantastic tool and saves you a tremendous amount of time on revenue, MRR, ARR analysis, and then segment for your data stack. Client-side analytics, observational metrics. So these are tools like Pendo, like Smartlook, session replay tools, really useful for observation, but they may not be as valid for true A/B test analysis. Please keep in mind that Client-side analytics tools are ad-blocked by— for 20 to 30% of users these days. So I see too many teams relying on those tools for A/B testing, and if they're 20% wrong, you're— and if you are seeing a 1% margin improvement, then, you know, I would really question the results of that test. Practical advice number 4: on the UX side, I strongly encourage if you have a lot of people in your pipeline, hiring pipeline, choose from, hire product managers, designers, front-end engineers from consumer companies. They already understand all the dos and don'ts of amazing consumer-grade. And given current market, you can find some incredibly talented people. And I think it's a superpower to have really polished, modern UI and UX in your product. All right. And then finally, I recommend leading and inspiring everyone in the company to step into each other's functions. For example, is your go-to-market team testing product, helping with QA, using product firsthand, dogfooding, or drinking our own champagne? You know, are they using it for every single launch? I would inspire that, that work by go-to-market teams. EPD teams, engineering product design, or R&D teams, as you might call them, they can be help— helping creating amazing thought leadership content for your content marketing teams, or building in public and sharing your team's progress on social. So definitely inspire everyone to make sure that functions are not just staying focused on their specific area, but are going beyond that. All right. And I think we are— we're now at 22 minutes. So I think this is going to be probably the meatiest and meaty part of the conversation. So here are some of the top questions that I get asked around product-led growth. Many of the questions around strategy, and quite often around selling to the executive team or the board. Why is it the right time right now to introduce PLG motion? So those questions come up quite often. Are we ready for PLG, or are we too early? A lot of times I get asked questions around methods. You know, for instance, how can I possibly do try before you buy? My product is too complex with the setup work. Or again, community always gets— typically gets neglected and teams don't spend enough time on it. And then pricing and packaging, of course, you know, that's a common topic that comes up for us. So I will click back here and just share my email for those who interested to get in touch and come back to the slide here, or we can stop sharing, Amelia, depending on what you prefer, and jump into your questions.

Yep, we can stop sharing your slides. Some people are asking how to get the slides. We'll, we'll share those, guys. So we'll write this up on saster.com, and you'll be able to get the slides there. And let's go to Q&A. Hold on.

Sharing.

Okay, there we go.

Cool.

We've got a few questions in from the livestream. If you guys have any other questions, please drop them into the chat. I'll ask one from the livestream, then we'll come back to some of the Zoom questions. First one being is, how do you measure the impact of organic social channels? I think they mean content. Community, social, TikTok, some of the things you mentioned in a PLG motion.

Yeah, absolutely. So content again, keep— so your blog is— its primary job is to bring traffic to your website. So one of the pitfalls, by the way, I see is purely architectural. Make sure that your blog and your website domains are deeply integrated so that you're actually benefiting from all that traffic to your blog posts. It's a bit technical, but I'm sure some of you understand what I mean. So, but that's, that's key. Just make sure that it's actually driving traffic to your website. Confirm, confirm, confirm. Second, don't drive people from your, from your content just to signups. Get them to sign up for a newsletter, right? Keep the email in the database. Social, you're growing your followers. I do a lot of thought leadership as a human, as well as a CPO of Rebrandly. And it's incredible how much social networks promote and encourage authentic content that's coming from people, right? I'm sure you've all read about founder-led, founder mode. There's also all of us operators and execs can lead a lot of traffic to our company launches by being authentic and very present on social. LinkedIn now has great tools for actually driving signups, right? Like you can enable that on your subscription. So It's not just brand awareness anymore. It can be quite quantitative. Hopefully I'm answering that question. I'm happy to move on to the next one or go deeper on that one.

Yep, we've got a few in the Zoom and then we can go back to the live chat ones. So Ashok, I'm gonna— sorry if I said your name wrong, but I'll bring you up if you want to ask your question live. I'm gonna unmute there.

Hi guys, sorry about that. I was just wondering, I mean, I actually am part of a venture capital fund. Many of our companies would eat, you know, they are trying to figure out whether to go with product-led growth or sales-led growth. Uh, what would your recommendations be? What would be kind of like the benchmarks and things you're looking at in making that determination?

Great question, uh, comes up a lot, and I think it's probably one of the most important questions you should answer for yourself or for the companies that you're leading and advising to. So, all right, here's what I would say. The most important rule of thumb is that you need to have product market fit. Investing into full-blown PLG motion before you have product market fit is not the right approach, right? Make sure you actually have traction. Make sure that you have tens of thousands or tens of thousands of people coming through your funnel, because otherwise, you just simply don't have enough traction to drive a motion that's primarily focused on quantitative optimization and volume, volume, volume. In terms of, for companies who are sales-led, are strictly sales-led, and again, as I shared, I worked for a company where with much excitement and hesitation, we have introduced, and simultaneously hesitation, we've introduced PLG. And it's very understandable, right? So let's say I'm an investor or CEO or founder, and I have a pretty successful sales-led motion. And then I keep hearing from everyone, let's, let's now introduce PLG. The number one pushback that comes up is that, oh no, this is going to cannibalize our enterprise sales. And this will be a race to the bottom. And we will now trade dollars for cents. We will now give away our product value. Why my sales team is so successful at closing really large ARPC deals. So valid concern, but then think about it this way. I would almost consider it as a risk mitigation strategy, because if you are not thinking about introducing PLG, someone else will. Someone else in the market will come from the bottom up, right? So if you, if you only thinking tops down and not thinking about PLG, someone's going to take that market share away from you. You are basically leaving that opportunity on the table. And then once you've decided to commit to PLG, be patient. It will not immediately materialize. You'll make some mistakes. There will be some back and forth. You're going to have 2 steps forward, 3 steps back, where you will question your own sanity as, wait a minute, now that we've introduced PLG, our sales motion is starting to slow down. Eventually it will stabilize in a really successful business because PLG eventually will strengthen your sales pipeline. That's what it's supposed to do, right? It's supposed to give you more leads, not fewer. So in the short term, it's always very stressful and nervous, you know, when people introduce PLG to SalesLed. But, you know, give it 6 months, you know, at least minimum, right? 3 to 6 months and be a little bit patient and start watching the early signals, how, product-led is actually strengthening your sales motion. Ashok, did I answer your question, or do you want me to go deeper into anything? You absolutely did.

I'll drop you an email also and be in touch. Thank you.

Of course.

Thanks for the question.

Cool.

We'll go on to the next one. Courtney, I'm going to bring you up to ask your question live.

Thank you. Yes, I'm just curious. You've spoken a lot about content marketing. But I would just love any insights you might have on the best promotion tactics once you're ready to launch your PLG motion, particularly for a SaaS company that's been primarily sales-led.

So primarily sales-led, and you are— your best— the best promotion tactics that are more product-led-like, is that the idea here?

Yes.

Yes. Okay. So organic, organic in general. So, all right, I'll— and not necessarily in the order of priority, but I'll just go through the list of all the possible things you can deploy. So like I already said, you know, authentic humans within the company. Can you get everyone in your company, every salesperson, every engineer to share on social about a particular launch? Make sure you are announcing product launches in the right communities. Is it Product Hunt for techies, right? But marketers are, you know, rarely in Product Hunt. Is this a developer product and you need to promote it in GitHub? Is that a marketer product and you, you may want to announce it through marketplaces. So it's just making sure that you are focusing your efforts on where it's going to drive the most traction. If you are marketing primarily, let's say small businesses or creators, are they really going to read your PR press releases, right? Or do they really care about G2 reviews? You know what they really care about is your mobile apps neglected reviews in app stores. That's where I keep mentioning to everyone that, you know, when people say, well, again, like, we don't have time for community engagement, your community exists, but it could be on Reddit and it could be negative. So don't neglect, you know, all these channels and make sure that you're engaging positively with your user base and with prospects. I also, you know, another successful tactic is Be generous with your— be it your paying customers or your most active customers. It's always great to trade value. So one of the successful techniques is to make sure your most active or maybe highest paying customers get access to feature first, right? So that's a successful beta program implementation. And get their feedback, make sure that they feel heard, you know, if they respond to you, you know, approach it as a gift, right? Like, hey, here's beta access to this latest feature. We'd love to hear from you. All of that can help drive momentum.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Thank you. Of course.

All right, Kara, I'm gonna bring you up next. We've got a few more questions here. You wanna ask your question live?

Yeah. So how do you set realistic goals if you don't have any analytics on how to reach those goals? Great, great question, and it does happen, and it happens more often than we sometimes imagine. So, so here is, you know, in the absence of maybe granular data or really deep insights, you know, start analyzing your basic, basic, basic conversion rates. Example: website traffic to product signups. Is it below 10? Is it above 5? Is it above 5 and below 10? You know, is it below— if it's below 5, you know, you, you really need to focus yourself on that area. If you're somewhere between 7 to 10%, you are doing pretty well. You can obviously optimize that further. On the conversion of product signups into active users, are you in the 20% range? You know, okay, then you're doing fairly well. If you're far below that, then you are just, you know, it's just a really leaky bucket and you are signing up a lot, but they're not sticking around. So you don't have that early retention that can possibly convert later. So, and then with monetization, you know, you need to be converting, you know, minimum 2% of your new product signups. So this is people who are signed up in the last 30 days into paid subscribers. If you are not, so this is again, this is advice for those who may be lacking like really deep insights or amazing data infrastructure, you know, follow best practices. Focus on onboarding. Make sure your checkout experience is well optimized. Don't overthink it. Don't layer complexity, as I already mentioned, but optimize the most obvious critical paths for, for your product experience. How, how, how good is your product signup? Right? Are you asking your users, you know, 17 screens of questions, creating a lot of friction? Defriction experience. Do things that are obvious to you as a user. One of the things you can do, and I'm here to endorse LogRocket, we're actually in pilot with them, great observational tool that with AI feature will actually tell you where your, your biggest dead ends are in your onboarding flow. So you may not have the best data, but by observation, testing, and deploying observational tools, and it doesn't have to be LogRocket, there are plenty, Pendo, SmartLook, etc., you know, they— Clarity, a great product from Microsoft— they can in a nice way show you 10 top dead ends that your users are hitting when they're just trying to use your product. So what I'm trying to say here is that you don't need to have all the best-in-class data insights to get going with PLG and optimization. I hope this helps.

Okay, let's bring up Billy who's got the next question.

Hi. Yeah, thanks for being here, Maria. I really appreciate it. As you speak about PLG and also the transformation over the years to like an enterprise offering and not letting that enterprise offering sabotage your PLG or vice versa. How do you make that jump? When do you do it? How do you naturally— yeah, what's the strategy between the timing and execution?

So is the question about— so there's two ways to answer. I'm just trying to understand what you're asking. Are you asking how to convert your product, your PLG-acquired customers to enterprise, or how to layer SLG motion on top of PLG?

Either or both.

Okay. All right. Okay. Let me start with the first one. So product-led. So let's say that you have a product-led growth motion and you're signing up your users onto your typical, you know, good, better, best pricing plans, but they have not spoken to a sales team just yet, right? So the question is, how do you get them to talk to sales, right? So, well, what I recommend is thinking deeply about your pricing and packaging strategy so that your PLG customers can at least get a taste of the additional value that unlocks at the enterprise level to get them to go talk to sales and click the talk to sales button in product. The typical foundational levers for product qualified leads to sales is that, A, it needs to be easy for someone in product to find a button that says talk to the sales team. It's really that simple, you know, that needs, and that needs to be a seamless experience without re-asking someone questions one more time. You already probably have all the information about them and how they use the product. So make sure that that's in place. Make sure that your RevOps team or your sales, you know, whoever's overseeing sales pipeline are harvesting every single new product signup who's coming through PLG and analyzing, oh wow, we just had a big logo, a really big company who signed up for our most basic plan and are paying us, you know, $30 a month. So that, that should be immediately considered as an opportunity for you, for someone on the sales team to reach out and at least offer to chat with them, right? So it goes both ways. You want hand raisers from product who are really eager to talk to sales because they've gotten a taste of value from the enterprise plan, perhaps. And then you want to go into your user database and harvest those signups and turn them into sales leads. So that's how I would think about it. Again, in terms of pricing and packaging, make sure that you have a clear ladder of how someone can progress from product-led to enterprise, and that it's not too big of a jump, and that you're not maybe like red roping almost talk to sales too much. Make it really easy to talk to your sales team if they're available. In terms of your second— the other question is, when is the right time to go upmarket? That's, you know, that ultimately comes down to your strategy. You know, introducing sales-led fundamentally changes the company. I think that's one of the most important things that people need to realize. Maybe start small, you know, start, you know, with one, maybe two sales reps who are starting to answer questions about product and features and see if there's there there in terms of really selling them greater packages. And then you have to understand your value metric. And again, like, can you actually sell this product at, you know, $20K, $40K, $100K, and $1 million down the road? So that's a really big strategy question, you know, as far as what— when is the right time to go upmarket? Ultimately, it's when you already feel that you have a well-established PLG and you've already got as much value out of that market, and that's the point at which it makes sense to open up the next, the next cycle of growth for your company.

Thank you.

Of course.

All right, Girish, I'm going to bring you up next to ask your question.

All right.

Hey, Maria, thanks. Good insights and overview. I've gone through PLG, SLG, hybrid motion multiple times. Uh, it's so— I have two, two questions. They're distinct. The first one is, um, at startups— I wouldn't say early, early stage, but fairly established startups— it's having— you had mentioned multiple persona like growth PM and others. It's, it's actually not that straightforward to have what does this person actually do, because shouldn't the PMs be doing their job right? Shouldn't the demand people be doing their jobs right, shouldn't product people— so, so the— how would you— what are the— like, in a, let's say, a smaller startup, yeah, what are the must-to-have personas? Because my CTO can do a decent job too, right? So, so I just wanted to get your guidance on that. Is the first question, that is for a startup, that's one. And the second one is, when— for me, what worked well in terms of driving up signups Right. So if you say it's— I absolutely agree, activations are the, are the North Star metric. So we used to promote, actually we used to have run ads for signups and that worked very well. This was perhaps a couple of years ago.

Mm-hmm.

It was a complex B2B product, uh, enterprise product on in observability. So ads were the most number one channel that contributed to signups. I'm curious, What's working today?

Okay, like you've been listening. Yes, because it changes week to week in this new—

correct, correct. Yeah, so just wanted to get your perspective on two distinct questions.

Thank you.

Absolutely. Yes, so let me talk about the team first. So the question was, um, you know, does it really make sense to have people with a dedicated maybe growth focus? And shouldn't really, you know, isn't it just again like, isn't PLG everyone's accountability? And Whoever's driving demand, they need to focus on what they need to do, and the product person needs to focus on what they do, and engineers need to focus on what they need to do. So here's my advice. I will speak— let me, let me just use product managers as an example. Let's say you are, you know, very small and only have one product person in your company, and you're asking them to make sure that your product is stable. That, that you are driving innovation, that you're introducing new features, and always, well, you are watching subscribers, smooth billing experience, signups, and what have you that is, that is growth related. I don't think that that's sustainable. That can certainly work for a period of time, but I firmly believe that within your EPD organization, you need to have some resources who are laser-focused just on that, just on growth, and just really thinking about it as a product, as a user experience, end-to-end. Are emails going out on time? Are subscriptions done right? Are the price points all correct? Are people setting— and just really obsessing about it. I guess my concern when we say, well, growth is everyone's accountability, is that, you know, PMs will always still gravitate to building value over growth. So hire people who are very, very passionate about growth specifically, and really understand that it's, it's very similar to value creation in a more traditional product management sense. So I hope I'm answering your question. But that will be my advice, you know, if you can afford it, hire people who like obsess about growth, and make sure you have that mindset throughout all your teams. And like you said, At the end of the day, everyone within the function needs to be accountable to these goals as well. To answer your second question, boy, it's such a moving target right now. As we all know, Google Search, SEO, SEM is getting— you know, we're going through really quite a roller coaster of, you know, and the journey of understanding how algorithm changes every day. Right? So as, uh, uh, ChatGPT, as AI tools are rising as the source of truth for so many users, I think all of us have the same question is how do I get, uh, my product, uh, to show up in AI searches and not as much maybe on the, um, in just purely, uh, Google searches. Um, again, you know, it's just a flavor of a week at this point. Um, the current, the latest trend that I'm seeing is that suddenly Google is promoting perhaps obscure properties that you might have not been paying attention to. So various apps that you've built on Google platform, extensions, mobile apps, right? So things that were not showing up on page one are suddenly showing up on page one. So again, I don't have, you know, any more pearls of wisdom on that one other than you need to have people really focused and concentrated on an extremely fast-moving target that we have right now in SEO. It is all my empathy to marketers and those accountable to that metric. It's really, really tricky these days.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate it, Maria. Of course. Cool.

I think we have time to sneak in one more question from Patrick. So I'll bring up to ask your question if you're still on the Zoom here.

Yep.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

Yeah. Hi. Great talk and great insights. Thanks for taking the time to share. So maybe that's a very Quick question. So any advice on different paths that we need to take if our company is focusing on SMB and self-service and so on and so forth, or if our company is focusing on large enterprise deals, right? So is there any practical tactical advice that we need to take a little bit different paths on PLG, or, or you feel like that, that's all the same basket, right?

Uh, yes. Um, and you know, there's definitely nuance. So, um, look, if you are If you are serving, if your product is for people whose price point is below, at or below $10,000 a year, you can be easily 100% PLG company and not worry about sales, right? And the $10,000 ARPC rule, and kind of as a simple rule of thumb, is simply because that's what a typical credit card swipe will get you, right? Like, it's hard for someone to spend $20,000, $30,000+ using a credit card. So at that point, you do, you do need to have a sales motion. What I would say is, you know, making that choice of having PLG versus SLG, and is it applicable to you if you are serving enterprise? I think I would ask myself, if I'm serving enterprise, am I serving more horizontal enterprise markets or very verticalized and very specific? If you're going after a very narrow slice of a market at enterprise, PLG may not be the right fit for you. And if you are strictly closing really large deals and you understand your market and there are like 35 of them, your top preferred ideal customers out there, invest all you need and want into a great sales motion and have dinners with all your customers, right? That's what I would say. But if your strategy is to capture market share, if you're about market share, then I think you need to start thinking about product-led growth. And again, thinking about it through risk mitigation that someone else will come from down below, right? So again, if you're only thinking about enterprise, enterprise, enterprise, and not thinking about PLG, someone else is building that product right now, if you're going after ultimately the same market. So that's how I would think about it. I'd say think about PLG earlier. That would be my advice to companies, not to miss that opportunity.

Thank you.

Awesome. We have made it through all the questions in the chat. I know there were a lot of them. So thanks, Maria, for all those insights. For folks who want to connect with you, what is the best way they can do that?

Yeah, so I'll drop this in the chat here also. So mgstomas@gmail.com. I'm also quite active on LinkedIn. Find me there and very open to questions and happy to chat anytime.

Awesome. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks everyone for joining. We'll see you again next week for another live Workshop Wednesday, and we hope this is helpful and see you there next week. Thanks again, Maria.

Thanks.

Thanks everyone.

Thanks, Amelia.