MBA1293 Must Read: Product-Led Growth by Wes Bush

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Hey O welcome to the $100 Building a Better Business every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a must Read episode. On our Must Read Episodes I share with you a book that I've read that has greatly influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways, its insights and why you should read it too. Today's must read is Product Led Growth by Wes Bush. Every so often I come across a book that is exceptional that I really really recommend to people that reads like a page turner, like a novel. Product Led Growth is one of those books. It really caught me by surprise. The author Wes Bush I've known on Twitter for some time, read a few of his blog posts on other sites and in fact he answered one of my questions when it came to a freemium model business on Twitter and I just heard on Twitter about his latest book and I had a long flight ahead of me to Toronto, downloaded it on my Kindle and couldn't put it down. Product Led Growth is a fantastic book for anybody who's running a SaaS business software as a service business. It Shows you how you can use your product as your number one marketing tool. He gives concrete examples, great case studies and an actual blueprint on how to implement what he teaches. There's so much I want to share with you in this episode. On this must read episode. Product led growth. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, Product led growth by Wes Bush was a fantastic read. As soon as I finished this book I ran to Amazon. I ran to my computer and wrote a review on Amazon because it was that good. It was such a good book. It's one of the best how to books I've read. Usually. I love reading biographies. Those are really easy to read. I zoom by them, they're engrossing. I can't put them down. But how to books a different story. They're kind of hard to get through. You're taking notes, you're kind of trying to comprehend how this applies to your business. But this how to book was refreshingly easy to follow and was written in a personal way. I really love the way Wes wrote this book. It's not a long book. Like I mentioned, I read it in one sitting. You know, I took a quick break, I had a meal. And that helps with you fully comprehending an idea and knowing how to implement it. So what is this book all about? Well, it's about how you can use your product as your number one marketing tool. He gives countless examples of SaaS companies software as a service. Companies that use a free trial or a freemium model like a free plan to get people to experience their product as quickly as possible, as easy as possible. Because they'll fall in love with that experience and and become a buyer quickly. One of the biggest takeaways I gotta this book is that the quicker your potential customer can experience what they would pay for experience your product, the quicker they could do that, the faster they're gonna be convinced that you're gonna help solve their problem. Because at the end of the day, when somebody signs up for a software, they want it to solve a particular problem. And if you could solve that problem as quickly as possible, as pain free as possible, and through a free trial, through a free plan, they're gonna be like, yep, I'm sold. This is what I'm looking for. Sign me up. Now obviously there are gonna people that sign up for a trial or sign up for a free plan that don't convert to buyers. Happens all the time. I know this firsthand with our SaaS company. Webinar Ninja, our webinar platform. And the important thing is, is you learn. Now, why are they not signing up for a paid plan after they experience your product? Well, it's one of two things. One, either it's not a good fit for them, it's not gonna fit their needs and of course you can't, or the product experience wasn't good enough, it didn't win them over. You need to improve that experience and we all can improve in some way. And this book covers how to do that, how to have a seamless onboarding experience, how to support a new user who's trying out your product, how to make sure that they get a win as quickly as possible from your product. Now, this book doesn't beat around the bush. It actually goes straight to solving problems from the get go. It actually tells you at the beginning, let's find out what kind of business you're running, what kind of software you're running. Let's find out what your market is. Let's find out if it's better for you to offer a free plan, a free trial, or maybe this is not right for you at all. Maybe you shouldn't be offering free trials or free plans. Maybe you shouldn't have a way for them to experience a product from the get go. In the book, Wes explains, hey, some business models are not meant to have freemium entry level like meaning that a free plan or free trial, maybe they have to go through a hoop or a call or a demo call to actually get onboarded and you know, make a choice to buy this product or not. But for the vast majority of the book, he goes in deep. Why and how a free trial or a free plan can really help your business grow, hence product led growth. Well, one of the things is, you know, one of the horizon costs in business is customer acquisition costs. The costs of actually earning a customer, getting somebody to sign up for your product and paying you money. How much does that cost you? Whether it's through ads or you know, SEO, through writing blog posts, how much is that costing you? Whether it's in time or money? Well, if you have an easy way for them to see for themselves if your product is a good fit for them, hence a free plan or free trial that's easy to sign up for, then your cost per acquisition will drop because hey, it's a no brainer. I can just sign up in two seconds and see for myself. I don't have to guess or read anything or watch any videos. I can get my hands dirty and play around and if they are won over, if you can win them over in that moment when they first experience your product, you have a buyer. But this book is not only about free trials and free plans and what's best for you. It's also about pricing. How to price your product, pricing strategies, how to simplify your pricing, how not to confuse your buyer, how to add on expansion revenue, meaning how do you get more money from each customer, whether through upgrades or add ons? He walks you through all that I mentioned. He goes through onboarding, onboarding a new customer, how to keep your customers so you have a high retention rate, costs so much to get a customer, you want to keep them. He actually provides email scripts for you to use in your company. He provides a lot of tips in this area, but I want to share one that really resonated with me. It's called sending Usage Review Emails. Usage Review emails showcase the value of your product to your users. For example, mailchimp showcases emails that you've sent. The video hosting company Wistia highlights who watched your videos for how long. FullStory delivers the daily or weekly log of the top users who interacted with your website. So these companies are sending out emails to their users to remind them the value of their product. Remind them, hey, this is what you're getting out of this product. This is what you're paying for every month. They're reselling the product to them and showing them data, real facts of how they're actually benefiting. This is incredibly powerful, especially if you have a product that you know does something that's meaningful for their life or business. Whether it's health stats or the number of emails the app have collected, or in my case, how many people have registered for a webinar. It's such a simple little thing that can be done in your company that can make a huge difference. And that's kind of the theme of the book. He doesn't actually offer advice or offer tips that are really hard to implement. They're actually quite easy and most importantly, they're quite effective.

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To wrap up today's Must Read episode Product Led Growth by Wes Bush if you have a software company if you're thinking about starting a software company, big or small, an app, a plugin extension, you need to pick up this book. It's one of the most helpful books you're going to have. And in fact, even if you haven't gotten started yet, it's probably better to read now because it's going to set up your mindset and set up the priorities you need to focus on before you get started. Like I've been running my SaaS company for five years now and now I got to undo a few things or change a few things that are going to require a lot more work than if I just did it from the start. But still, it's worth it. I will do those changes because I I know it will help our company. But I want to wrap up by saying what I love most about this book. This book puts your customers first. It really puts the customer's best interest in mind first. Because when you have a company that's product led, where the product is the way you sell your actual business and you make your money, it's how you market, then you force yourself to create a superior product, you see all these holes that you really need to fill. I remember when I was going through this book and I was like, okay, we're considering going through the free plan and this is something that our team is working on and we're like, okay, obviously this is gonna be in a restricted plan. What is it gonna look like, all that stuff. But I thought about all the other things, the onboarding, how are we gonna have to fix some things? And it made me realize, wow, this is really improving the whole experience and the product. Because I have this mindset now through this book. Rather than seeing it as an isolated thing, seeing it as like, hey, free trials are something completely different from the philosophy of the business. No, the whole business is product led. Highly recommend you pick up this book. Product Led Growth by Wes Bush. I picked up the Kindle version was really, really good, but I am thinking about picking up a couple paperbacks because hey, they would make a great gift to some of my friends. All right. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit us up with a rating and review on itunes. We read every single review, and it helps us know what you love about the show. Also, hit subscribe right now to get all the updates automatically. All the latest episodes get downloaded to your device so they're ready for you when you're ready to listen. We're on every app, whether it's Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcast, Overcast, the Google Play store, everything. Hit subscribe right now. Now, before I go, I want to leave you with this. When I picked up this book, I jotted down a whole bunch of notes, and some of those notes were things I need to implement. In our business, obviously, we have other plans. We have other, other things we're working on. We have a roadmap. We have plans already going on. But I had to readjust those plans because I saw how critical some of these things are that I need to implement. I need to reshift my priorities. Sometimes that's not easy because you have to also communicate that to your team. Hey, guys, we're changing things because I realize as your leader that these are some things that are a little bit more important than what we're planning on working on, and that's totally okay. You got to stay agile. You got to stay flexible, and that's good news. You kind of caught something before it happened. I see. Running a business like, you know, you have a bunch of resources, time and talent and money, and there's only so many things you could do at one time. So you need to make sure you prioritize. And you gotta triple check. Hey, if I change this priority, is it gonna help the business overall? Yes or no. So that's a tough decision sometimes. But when you have to make it, you gotta make it and communicate it to the team. Just sharing a little bit of my experience reading this book. I hope to see you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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