Mastering Product-Led Growth (PLG) with Wes Bush | Online Webinar Workshop

Everyone, welcome back. My name is Ehan. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Super, super excited for all of you to join us today. We have these global events usually on Wednesdays, sometimes on Mondays. We just get really good speakers and let them come and present some of their knowledge and learnings. We have an excellent, like, I am super, super excited. I haven't like stopped smiling all day. We have Wes Bush. This guy literally wrote the book on product-led growth. He's been gracious enough, he's gonna be giving us a presentation today, a little bit of a workshop, telling us some of the best practices of product-led growth. If you don't know what product-led growth is, don't worry. Hopefully he'll briefly explain it and kind of go into some of the details, but it's a really, really important topic to understand within product management and within the different software, like soft digital software spaces. With that being said, you know, we're just waiting for everyone to join and trickle in. We've had about 350, 400 people people sign up, we expect to get big, 150 to 200, so it should be a good event. Yeah, let us know in the chat where you're coming in from. I see NYC, I see Buenos Aires, wow, Munich, Philippines, Calgary, represent Canada, Montreal, Seattle, Dubai, New Orleans, South Florida, San Francisco, San Diego, Brooklyn. So very, very international crowd for everyone. All right, so without further ado, Akshay, do you wanna bring up Wes? And like while Akshay is doing that, I'm just gonna go over some housekeeping-ish stuff. You folks will see there's a Q&A button on the right-hand side. Use that to feed us your questions. Wes will do about 20, 30 minutes of content. We'll jump into questions after and we'll do about 20, 30 minutes of questions after. This kind of webinar is done, you'll break out into different tables. You know, you can jump onto a table. I'll be on some tables. Some of my team members will be on the tables as well. If you want to ask about FI, you know, feel free to network with each other, learn from each other, discuss what you've learned, and, you know, keep that networking going. Awesome. While we're doing that— awesome, Mr. Bush is there. Hey Wes, how's it going?

Good. How are you?

Good, good. I am beyond excited, you know. Thank you so much for taking the time to jump on this. Anything you do is usually like very insightful, very useful. I've definitely learned a lot. I think I picked up your book when it was like v0.5, like it was in beta or something. I remember the PDF copy, there's typos. Yeah, but your PLG Slack channel was like 5,000 people. I don't know how big it is now, but it must be huge.

But that's like 15,000. It's huge now. Wow.

Okay. So popular guy here. Awesome. Wes, you have an international audience here. Let's kind of get things going. Let me just run this poll here for everyone. So obviously Wes thought this question would be helpful, but like, if you, do you plan or plan on having a self-service option for your product? Let us know because this will help him I guess adjust the presentation accordingly. Wes, I'm not going to give a formal introduction to yourself. I'll let you self-introduce to yourself. But in the meantime, what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove myself from the stage. Do you want to get your presentation queued up? Let everyone do the vote and then the stage is yours.

Awesome. Well, thanks. A little bit about myself. I'll give you the high-level view of it. But for the last 7 years, I've been basically working with B2B software companies and I was always hired as the growth guy, figure out how can you get more leads for our sales team or how to get more people to learn about our product. And so about 7 years ago, I was working at these B2B SaaS companies and what I was in charge of was really just getting leads for the sales team. And what I was doing was promoting guides, white papers, and then I was asking the sales team, you know, how are these leads kind of shaking up? Are you getting a lot of people following up with them? Are they, how are those leads performing? Are they converting? And I had always kind of hear like, oh, there's a lot of resistance. They don't really want to talk to us that much. And so I was always like, is this really the best way for us to really go through and kind of sell and promote our products? And so I always had that kind of like, in the back of my head, it didn't feel like the, the normal way or even the way I'd purchase products. And so it wasn't until we launched a free trial at the company I was working at called Vidyard where I was able to see, you know what, this actually could work and could be a way where people could try the product for free and, you know, be a great way for people to see the value before they made the purchasing decision. But the first time it, it actually It didn't work. And yeah, me, Mr. PLG, it didn't even work first time. I made so many of the mistakes. And then it wasn't until the second time we tried that where it was a freemium product. It was a simple Chrome extension. You could simply click it, start recording in Chrome, and then that thing blew up. It went from 0 to 100,000 users very quickly. And that was like the first epiphany 7 years ago for me when I started to realize Oh my goodness, there's something to this whole product-led thing. And it wasn't called that at that time because it was way before even we knew about what PLG was all about. But that's when it started to click for me. I was like, okay, I get it. And since then, ever since then, I've been hooked on this whole concept of product-led growth. How do you build a product that sells itself? There's a lot of misconceptions about it. And what I'm gonna do here is I actually built A, or I'm gonna build like a kind of custom workshop presentation since I know a lot of you are founders and you gotta think about how to build a product-led business in a way that, that obviously works. It's gotta be simple for you to do and there's so many myths and misconceptions about it. So I'm happy to, to dig into this because it's gonna be a lot of fun. Now a question for the Founder Institute team, what were the results? From that poll. Can we see what that looks like? I'd be super curious to see what did everybody kind of vote as far as do you plan or plan to have a self-serve option for your product? And do you have the results from it yet?

Yeah, I threw it up on screen. It's about 88% of the audience so far. They plan to have a self-serve or they currently have a self-service option.

Cool. Thanks for jumping in there. I still see the question. I'm like, okay, fun. All right, cool. So I'm gonna share my screen and we're gonna go through this live and we're gonna have a ton of fun. So there's 5 things we're gonna go through today. This is the, what I call the 5 best practices for building a product-led business. So the very first thing we're gonna go through is understanding what it really means to be product-led. And then next we're gonna go through like what actually changes if we become product-led. What are some of the big organizational changes we need to make as a business? And then we're also gonna go through, uh, why does this matter? What should we consider about it? And then I'm gonna go through some very tactical things you could do to actually make it work. We're gonna We're gonna go through the 6 main steps of how do you actually implement, roll out a successful product-led business. Even if you already have rolled it out, there are some really big core things that if you don't get right, your model just won't work. You won't get your users turning into happy paying customers basically. And so I'll just end on the 2 big mistakes you really need to avoid. So if that sounds good. Thumbs up. I'm excited. Let's dig into the very first thing. So know what it really means to be product-led. So a lot of times when I talk to folks regarding this question, um, there's a lot of different definitions. So I wanna hear your definition, um, in the chat. What do you think it means to be product-led? Like what first comes to mind for you? I know this is always fun because there's so many different definitions and don't worry in the chat if you're like, I'm not sure if this is right or not, just put it here. Yeah, Rob, thanks for jumping in there. You win the award for first. So no sales team, all focus on the product, 80% at least. Cody, product sells itself, don't need an outbound sales team. Product is driving the pipeline. It just means you have a good product. Design, let the product drive the Sales, not the salesperson. Marketing built into the product. Product is the CEO. Awesome. So I love it. Thank you everybody for jumping in there. If you haven't already, just quick type it in. So what I'm gonna try and do is get everybody on the same page about what I believe, I think it means to be product-led and what are some of the big things and impacts it means for your business. So product-led growth, if we were to define it. In simple terms, rapid growth is simply en, you use your product, is the main vehicle to acquire, engage, and retain users. So at a high level, that's really all it is. That's it. It's just getting those people to or using your product to acquire, engage, and retain users. And I think this part is kind of understated when you think about it. It's like, okay, what does it mean to actually acquire people? Well, that's where we see the free trial, freemium models, where it's like, okay, the product is doing a lot of the acquisition. When it comes to the engage part, what do we mean by that? So when it comes to someone actually signing up for that free model, Well, when they go into the product, the product is actually onboarding people. It's actually helping people see the value. It's showing them, okay, go here, go there, see the value of the product. Check done. Okay, great. So it engages people as well. And then for the retention, it's really focusing on that. And it's also doing a great job in expanding users as well. When it comes to, oh, upsells, these users are very effective at using the product. Maybe they would find this other part of the product useful. And so you can also use the product to upsell. So that's really when I think of like product-led growth and being product-led, um, at its core, it's, is really using your product throughout your entire business. So it's more than a free trial, it's more than a freemium model. Now, when it comes to really being product-led as a business, there's one big shift that you need to make as a business. And that's why I got this fancy little, I don't know, what do you call this? Hexagon. So when it comes to the two main kinds of go-to-market strategies, uh, I'll just start with this one. Sales-led. Fun, right? Okay. So I always like to compare and contrast sales-led and then product-led. Um, but do know this, the reason I do that is so we can paint two pictures. Um, but There's like a spectrum here. It's like product-led, sales-led. It's not just black and white. So when it comes to a sales-led business, if we were to say the fundamentals of business have not changed when it comes to being product-led or sales-led, the fundamentals of business are the same. Do we agree? You still have to acquire people to your website regardless of if you're sales-led or product-led. You still need to engage people. Show them the value of the product and you still need to retain them, of course, if you're gonna have a sustainable business. And so if we look at this and we say, all right, a sales ed business, you need to acquire people. All right, so you got that. You still got that component of your business. Next up, what usually happens in a lot of sales ed companies is once you acquire somebody, the next thing you gotta start doing is you gotta focus on this fancy thing called monetization. Which is a fancy word for saying make money. All right, great. So you got monetize, acquire, monetize. And then the next part of a sales-led business, once you monetize them, anybody in the chat take a guess what it is, the kind of the next step in a sales-led business. You acquire them, you monetize them. Yeah, there you go, retain is pretty close. The reason I'm gonna use engage or retain, you basically got that. You're gonna like engage slash retain people. But I'm just gonna use engage for this one to keep it simple. But you're all on this right part. Yeah, the service, Rob as well, renewal. Basically keep 'em happy, show them the value of the product. That's what you're gonna do. So when it comes to this difference between a sales-led and a product-led company, What do you think is the main difference? If these 3 elements are the same, what changes? All right, you gotta help me out in the chat. What is this? What is the big kind of shift here? Yes, it's not a person doing it. Daria, engage before acquire. Interesting. Engage is first. Swap monetize and engage. Jose, yes, you got it. Yes, the order changes. So the reason I see in the comments, there is some people thinking engage goes here and then it's acquire. The reason it's more like this is because you still have to get people to your website. There's no way avoiding that part. But what really changes is we need to prioritize the engagement part. And what's, what I've realized, and back to my story that I kind of introduced myself with, hey, you know what, I did this sales-led thing for a long time and then we had a free trial, it bombed. And then the free version worked. The reason I, I kind of start with that is because the very first version where we just had a free trial, we didn't do that much work to make it good at this, which was the engagement part. And so in that first free edition of our free trial, it was a video hosting analytics platform. And basically, although we thought we were being product-led, we had a free trial. What was basically happening is this: we had a free trial here. That's basically where this magical free trial was. But what, why it wasn't working is because, well, okay, we acquired people, we dumped them into the free trial and they had 14 days to do a bunch of things. They had to upload their video, they had to put their video on their website, they had to integrate their video with their marketing automation platform. And then beyond that, they had to finally look at the analytics and then they could see, oh my goodness, Maria, you watched my video and how awesome is that? That was the aha moment for that product. And in 14 days, that was very hard to do. And so we just kind of jumped from acquire to monetize. And what happens is the sales team started looking at those free trial folks, said, wow, that product team doesn't know what they're doing. Let's go in and save those users. And they started once again, just kind of treating this free trial as a way to monetize. We had not fully embraced engage. Before. And so I wanna ask you a question. So when a product looks like, actually, let's go with this. It's acquire and engage. Let's say you download an app on your phone or something like that. That app, it's really hard to get to value. What do you typically do when you download that app? You can't get to value. Put it in the chat. I wanna know what is the first thing you do? Whenever that happens, I'm sure this one will be quick. First thing, yeah, delete it. Find a replacement. Delete. Forget it. Yeah, totally. And you're not mean, but you're acting like it. You're uninstalling, you're deleting it, you're forgetting it, you're looking for alternatives. And if I was just looking at your responses, I'd say you're pretty ruthless. No value, no time. And it's Not that you're mean or anything. That's just how we are, how we work. When we can't get the value, we just say, forget it. All right, I can find a better alternative here. So when it comes to being product-led, you need to have a really great way to engage people. And when you do, that is truly when your product is able to sell itself. And so if I was to sum up this whole, what does it mean to be product-led, and leave you with one thing, it's basically this. Your end user's success will ultimately become your success. And why that is, is because if you acquire people, you serve 'em, you give them a ton of value, they're able to access the value of the product, in whatever that free model is, your odds of actually converting them skyrocket. So does everybody agree with that theory as far as now we're on the same page about what it means to be product-led? And tell me in the chat, is this making sense? Is this kind of hitting home for you? Is this a simple way of kind of describing it? Because I know there's a lot of different definitions of being product-led, but truly I believe this is a simple way of looking at it. Maybe oversimplified, but if we were to take nothing away, this one-liner is the secret to being product-led. Awesome. So thank you everybody for engaging. Got a nice square there. Cool. So what changes? This is the second part. In the chat, what do you think changes? We made one big change. This is all we changed. We basically went from here having acquire, that's still the same, and then monetize, we had that part, and then we had engage. So there's one big change. What do you think this, this changes in your business if you were to implement it? I just wanted to share in the chat. I'll write down some of the options. We're gonna kind of create this together because there's so many things here that changes. Whenever it comes to making this one shift of prioritizing engagement over the acquisition side of things. So type in the chat, what are some of those first things that come to mind? And then we can go through those things. Yeah, so the, the UX, UI, the KPIs. Yes. Onto some stuff here. KPIs. Totally. Yeah. When it comes to engagement, those metrics, so much more important. You really do have to align them with user success milestones, talking to customers, org chart, yes, totally measuring engagement, absolutely. I'll jump in with a couple here too. So your funnel, that thing changes. So a lot of companies before, it's like MQLs, Now it's more like PQLs. Yay, people are getting value on the product. Back to the metrics part. Those are super important. Measuring product behavior to understand friction points, where and when a user starts paying, delivering value before getting paid, trial to customer. Yes. So those things are all very important. But here's the thing. This is kind of like an iceberg and It seems like it's one small shift, right? It's just prioritizing engagement. But here's where I try and push this further. I try and say, actually, it's much more than that. It's also your mission of your company. It can also impact your vision of your company. Now, when you think about it, it's like, well, okay, let's look at the most popular about pages of some of the most successful product-led companies, what do you typically see? It's, well, okay, we want to make what we're doing, let's say Zoom, we want to make communication frictionless. Okay, great. Like that's making it accessible. That's making it easy for anybody to really experience the value of the product. That's making the price of it also accessible. And so it impacts a lot of things from the vision to the mission. And it can, yeah, impact the business model. Absolutely. I saw that in the chat as well. And I like the interaction that's going on here. I see some people are upvoting some specific ones, so keep doing that. If something else or somebody else writes something in the chat that resonates with you, because this is gonna make it more interesting, that's for sure. It also impacts your strategy. So how do you do business? What is your, your basically approach to win as a business? Companies that prioritize engagement before monetization, part of their strategy is, okay, let's make it effortless for people to get to value. Let's make it super easy because we make it effortless for anybody to get, anybody to get the value. We can really go after more of a dominant approach. to building our business. Whereas something more sales-led might be, you know what, this is more a differentiated kind of strategy as a business. We might actually go after fewer customers that are bigger, uh, but we're gonna do something a bit more complex for them. So maybe if that's your approach, sales-led is, is actually the right approach. Um, but if it's not, then it's could be more product-led. So those are some of the big things of what changes. Um, just going through my list here. So I think that makes, most sense as far as where we can leave off on there. So know what changes. It's KPIs, your org chart, it's your funnel, it's your mission, vision, business model, it's your strategy. At a high level, those are some of the big things that changes. Now, why does this matter? I wanna hear your take. So this whole big shift to being product-led, what are some of the big reasons why you think it matters? Once again, I'm leaning on you for the answers because I think this is way better than me just being like, I know the answer to everything, which is so not true, and it makes it way more engaging. So yeah, customer service because it requires a total mindset shift. Yes, you're bang on. I'm trying to see who wrote the mindset shift. That one was gold. Ah, I can't see it. There's somebody in the chat. But I'm gonna put it here as number 8 because that needs to be underscored. Your mindset shifts. One thing we've realized even at ProductLed when we started implementing this as part of our strategy is we started to say everything, our one-word strategy is value first. And it's so clarifying and it changes the mindset of everybody on the team because now we start thinking, well, Is that value first? Is that value first? And it's funny, it's so easy to think of like what's best for the business, but when you start switching it, it's like, well, actually that changes a lot of things as far as how we approach it. So I'm gonna go through why it matters. Nicola, salespeople are a pain. I was one. Love it. Predicts the longevity of your business, different skills, capabilities. Also impacts your burn rates and runway. User-centered design and services priorities, scalable approach. Yes. So there's so many big things that I could list here. A lot of them are like, basically I could sum it up as build a quote unquote better business that's more sustainable. Oh, I think down can cover a lot. Which this one, I'll say this one's about you. You've been selfish. Sorry, I'm terrible. Just calling you selfish, ruthless. I'm having fun. Hope you are too. So yes, this one totally about you. But why does it matter? So for your users, Why do you think it matters to them? For people signing up for your product, why does this kind of matter for them? I see some people are saying like user-centered product design and services, that matters. But from a user perspective, why would this matter to them? Yeah, more value. Totally. Less friction. Absolutely. They get value earlier with less friction. Get the problem solved quicker. Yes, less risk. Totally. This is true. So for a user, basically everything is better with this model. Feel free to quote some bad things that might happen here, but I'll outline some of the other subpoints. It's like less risk for them. So that's great, right? We got less risk, get the value, which is awesome. And a big part of that is like we're just creating less friction. We don't like that stuff. So we're not gonna have friction for signing up. We're not gonna have friction for getting the value. We're not gonna have friction when it comes to actually upgrading. And a big part of this is transparency. Ooh, fancy word. Which goes back to this part I missed, which we're gonna add: core values. Core values change. I'm gonna point out one here that's usually a part of most product-led companies, which is transparency. So transparency in everything you do. And you can immediately tell, yes, for users, that's a big part of it. Product-led companies are a lot more transparent. Their pricing is transparent. Transparency. Let's kind of riff on that one. So pricing, that stuff's transparent. Product, that's also transparent. Can everybody else think of what else is transparent when it comes to product-led companies? What else strikes you as like, oh wow, that's really good, transparent? Because ultimately this comes down to, yeah, less risk. There's functionality. Thanks for pointing that out. But there's a lot of great things for the user's engagement model for sure. Awesome. So we know why it matters. I wanna get to the interesting stuff because I know there's a lot of founders on here who are kind of like me, maybe a little impatient, and you wanna just get to this question, which is like, how does this thing work? So what I'm gonna do, I am gonna map out the 6 steps. And I'm not gonna write them all out because I'm lazy. I'm gonna paste 'em. But I'll go through these one by one and you're gonna know the 3 main phases of how you actually build a successful product-led business. So the very first phase is just how do you get started? Now, even if you have what you would call a product-led business or you have the self-serve model, please go through these steps as well. But the very first thing starts with aligning your team. So we talked about the what changes part. So there's basically two big things here, your mission and vision, that you really need to align your team around. So when it comes to your specific business, let's go with this, mission, vision. Should be the other way since vision is the bigger thing. But what is your, your vision as a business? Is it to make what you do accessible to the world? Is it to make it really easy so that anybody can do anything with your product? Um, now I know a lot of you have software companies. If you don't, that's totally fine. But, um, when it comes to like a lot of software companies and like their typical mission, it's like, okay, we want to enable you to do something. We're gonna empower you to do, be able to do something. You're gonna have some ability that you didn't that you didn't have before, especially just think of like ChatGPT. Now you can do so many different things and write the first draft of any blog post or whatever, whatever your kind of use case is. You can do so many of those things very quickly. So get crystal clear in your mission, vision, what does that look like? And then when it comes to building your strategy, there's 5 questions that I love going through and I'll go through each of them, but We're not gonna answer them here, but I'm gonna leave you with them to just kind of ponder on later and kind of go through what does that look like for your business. So the first thing when crafting your strategy is you need to know what problem do we solve. That one's really key and a lot of people skip it. I know I did when I started my business and if you skip it, you're gonna get solutionitis and you'll be like, oh, we have a solution for everything. And then people just don't care about it. So get crystal clear on what is that problem that you solve. That has to be part of your strategy and you gotta be aligned as a team on what that looks like. The next thing is who is your ideal user? So this is very similar to your ideal customer. A profile. The reason I use user is because in a product-led company, you're typically crafting your product for the end user. So I think it's really important that you prioritize like who is that end user, even if they are not necessarily the buyer, but that the ones who will get you access to the buyer eventually. So really get clear on who that is. And if you're just starting out and you're a founder, don't try and get too many ideal users. Because that will really make it hard to grow your business. So the next thing is what is user success? You gotta get clear on that one. I see so many teams like run full tilt into this whole product-led process and because they don't do this, they, they don't know what is end user success, so they fail at engaging users. So that's really tricky because when you fail at engaging users, As you know, you'll uninstall it, delete it, you'll forget the app, you will not come back because your organization was not clear on what is end-user success. And if you tried in acquiring everybody, all these different ideal users, engagement's really hard. So as you can hopefully see, there's reasons why we have these questions. What is user success? Very important not to skip that. Uh, the next thing is how will you empower your users to win? So I'm gonna give you the cheat code on this one. I have thought a lot about this and I've analyzed a lot of product-led companies and I've come to believe that it really comes down to making it effortless. And I love this word. Because there's basically, when it comes to your model here, let's apply it. How will we empower our users to win? So let's say we make it effortless. Get started. Okay, great. Don't like the size of that one. So let's make it small. All right. Cool, so we got effortless to get started, and then effortless to get the value. And then we have effortless to actually upgrade. So at a high level, those are kind of the ways that we really empower our users to win. It's all about being effortless and doing that as well as we can possibly do it. So the last part of your strategy is what capabilities must we have to win its business? And for a lot of product-led companies, it's really about value first. How do we do that? How do we get people to value as soon as possible and building that as a, a muscle within the business? So the next kind of phase, I won't go into it as in as much detail, not because it's not as important, but because I find Most people need to focus here on the strategy component because if you skip that part and you don't really align it with your mission and vision, everything else moves slower. It's really weird. Like if you don't have a very clear strategy, very clear mission and vision, what ends up happening is when you get to the build phase, it just feels like you're going through like mud, walking through mud because you're, You're not clear on who your ideal user and customer is. You don't know like what to give away for free. What does that user value? You don't actually have a compelling free offer or anything like that. But that's kind of the main reason. So if you're to build this, you gotta get super clear on who your user is. What is their job to be done? How do you really help them? And then the next thing is really designing your model. So what do you give away for free? How do you package that? And then the step 5 is really activating it. And where I find most people overcomplicate this is just by like trying to do too much. And really it comes down to 3 things that you need to really activate this. You need a simple offer. So what is it that you're gonna give away to people for free? What is it that they're gonna sign up for free? You need simple onboarding. and you need simple pricing. Really, at the core, once again, it all ties back to those 3 things. You get one thing to activate here, it's your offer, simple offer. And for here, you need simple onboarding. That's how you're gonna get people to engage. And then for here, It's the simple pricing that's really gonna have that profound impact of making it easy for people to really understand and make that decision if this is right for them. And then the last part is just optimizing your model. This shouldn't be anything surprising, has to be here, but you just need to optimize your model. So those are really at a high level, those are the, the main 3 phases and 6 steps you need to follow. We call this the product-led method. It's what we're working on, but it's really just to make it easy for you to implement product-led growth in your business and actually have like a, a plan of attack. Now as I, I wrap up here, I know we wanna get to Q&A and that's the fun stuff, but the big thing is there's two big mistakes that I see so many companies make whenever they become or try and become more product-led and implement these things. And the first one, Why it's not letting me type over there, but who cares. Not having clear offer. This one's so big, and it is deceptive in how big of a problem it creates. So if I go to your website today and I'm not sure what the heck it is you do, and I sign up for your free offer, no amount of onboarding, even the best onboarding, the best pricing and all that stuff, it doesn't matter because I, I just don't know what you do. So you get really clear on who this product is for, uh, what is that success look like, what problem are you solving. Having that clear offer that solves that problem, um, makes it way more compelling. So that's like standard marketing 101, but I've seen so many companies like focus so much on their onboarding and their, you know, engagement strategy when they just don't have a good acquisition strategy and it's not very clear, like, what is your free offer? The next thing is not knowing what to give away for free, also known as your product-led model. So, oh, that's why that's happening. Cool. Nice. All right, cool. So this one is, I'll tell you the symptoms that will show up in your business is you'll start to find a lot of times that maybe your free-to-paid conversion rate isn't so high. And so then you start trying to solve it with onboarding and getting people to what you think value sooner. But what happens is you actually weren't maybe giving away the right thing for free. And I'll, I'll kind of end on the story at Vidyard with that free trial, that first one we launched. What happened was we weren't giving away the right free thing, and it sounds so obvious now. But when we were in the thick of it, we just didn't know what we didn't know. And so we got slapped across the face with this mistake and it just didn't work. And so what happened in that case is our, our initial product was solving very kind of complex problems and people had these beginner problems, which was before they could upload a video to Vidyard, they needed to actually create a video. And so when we solved that and we gave that away for free, that's when the floodgates of users opened up. That's when we were able to step on the hypergrowth pedal and grow faster. And so really understanding what to give away for free is such an important concept. And that's one of the reasons why I get productled.com. That's why we focus so much in our programs. Like here's how to understand what to give away for free because it is so important to focusing on. So to really wrap up here, I'll go over the 5 main steps of what we covered for the best practices. And this is kind of the, the 80/20 of how to build that product-led business. One, get on the same page on what it really means to be product-led. I'd encourage you to actually do this with your team because it's, it's so important that you're on the same page of what that actually means. Just like in the chat, we're all on different perspectives. And then get clear, like what changes in your business? What are some of those big changes? And then know why it matters. So what is your compelling why? Why are you doing this? If you're changing your approach, this is even more important because you gotta have some compelling reasons beyond just it's, it's about us. It's about your users. That's part of the mindset shift to being product-led. And then 4, know how it works. What are some of the big meaty things you need to do? Use that 3-phase process. And then lastly, know some of the big mistakes to avoid. So that's a recap for today. I hope you found that this workshop was helpful. You learned something. In the chat, actually, since I'm always curious to kick off the first question for the Q&A, what was your biggest takeaway from this workshop? I want to know in the chat, so just drop it there and we'll go through the rest of the Q&A session. Yes, Matias, total mindset shift.

This is great. Thanks so much, folks. If you enjoyed Wes's— I've learned a lot. I've probably read his book twice, but you know, as you go through those frameworks in real time, Wes, I think this is a very interesting format. We've done quite a bit of these. I think this is the first time we had someone go through that structure like on Figma, so appreciate you doing that. Uh, let's kick off questions. So folks, if you jump over to the Q&A tab, we're going to do some questions there. Please upvote the ones that you think are the most relevant. We'll be at— well, let's do about 10-15 minutes of questions and then go from there. So Wes, I'm gonna cue this up for you. Um, B2B SaaS healthcare, can you use PLG as go-to-market? Bill from San Francisco's asking.

Cool. Yeah, great question. Um, I'll give you a healthcare analogy to think about this one. So if your tech is something like the equivalent of a heart transplant, like if you took out this Product, like it would kill the patient or something like that. Like, or kill the business. Like they'd have all these loose records and all that stuff. If that's kind of like the tech you're building where it's like very central, needs to kind of be top-down installed. That's actually something where I'd be like, okay, red flag as far as like being your go-to-market motion. But here's the thing, I've also seen a lot of healthcare companies Navigate this in a really great way that is still in my degree product-led, although it's maybe might not come across that way from the initial kind of onset, but in your kind of sales process, you just really get people to go through that free version of the product. You have a free pilot, you set it up, and there is ways to really give people that taste and understanding of. What is this protocol about? How can it really help me without necessarily having like a fully self-serve touchless free experience? So that's something to consider is it doesn't always have to be black and white, like completely 100% self-serve. But there is different ways you could approach it so that you're not kind of like, I mean, that person rolling it out is doing their own due diligence and they can understand like, check done this, this will help us. And kind of move forward. But great question.

Awesome. Thanks. Let's just quickly burn through these. If I have anything additional, I'll add to it. But Francois from Joburg is asking, what's your perspective on pricing when you're doing PLG and self-service?

Yes. So this is, even when I was writing the book on product-led growth, one of the biggest kind of things where I realized, I was like, oh my goodness, this is a humongous part of building a product-led business. And it all kind of comes down to that drawing I was kind of going through here, which is like monetize. It's a part of the business. But when you consider the differences between like a sales company and a product company, you have to build a capability around pricing. That was back to the strategy part. Like you must build a capability around your pricing. Monetization strategy because it's so important. Here it's kind of like, okay, you sign up for a demo and then we kind of like, you know, go through that monetization process. Maybe we have custom pricing or something like that. You don't have to build as much of a capability around it, but here it's front, right, left, and center. It's like, I might not even sign up for your product if I see the pricing is ridiculous. So understanding like value metrics and what you're giving away for free That's really, really important. And so that's really where I would start. I think it's chapter 9. I'll put in the chat as well, but the book is completely free, but I think it's the pricing chapter and it goes through basically how to actually apply it to a product or business. So I hope you find it helpful there and it's free, ungated.

Awesome. I love the fact that so much of Wes's content is ungated. It's really reflective of everything that he talks about. I'm gonna bring up this question because I think you briefly talked about it in the start, but like, I think people are a little bit more confused on the whole free trial, freemium, and PLG. If you wanna like elaborate a little bit, I think that could be helpful specifically in this case for June.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So June, great question. I think this like talks, a lot about the parts around like the strategy, the mission, the vision, and those other components that do change. So when it comes to like what those were, it really was like, you know what, your KPIs would change. Like there is the go-to-market side of things as far as like that motion. There's also how do we organize our team around even this acquire, engage, monetize. So that's really important to also consider regardless of if you're B2B or B2C. This one you obviously know, essence, it's pretty similar, but these are kind of the big ones. And also the strategy and the mindset are some of the big things that not a lot of people think about, but like, what are some of those big mindset shifts that someone would have to consider? It's like, okay, value first. You, you have to believe in that and you have to believe in this in order for this whole model to, to kind of work. So. Those are just at a high level, some of the big changes that I would really recommend thinking about and worrying less about B2C versus B2B differences. Because what I'm seeing in this whole evolution of product-led growth is there's becoming a lot less overlap between the two, or a lot more overlap other way.

Yeah, not to dwell on it, but I'm reading a lot about how SaaS companies are evolving and some people is like the golden age of SaaS is done and all that. So maybe that's something we can think about for later, but 100% agree with you. I'm just gonna pull this one to Dari here. Dari is asking more about like how do you optimize your strategy as you're, I guess another way of putting this is like you have an assumption of you're building out all these funnels of how you're building out product, and all these product journeys, but obviously, like, it's an assumption things are going to change, right? Like, like you gave video as an example. There's V1. Okay, we didn't hit the— we didn't hit it on the money. We had to iterate. So like, what are maybe some of the things that you can tell to some of our audience? Like, you know, how can they preempt that or like make that, uh, that, uh, iteration softer? Because obviously it's more expensive to do these iterations over time, right? And our audience composed of early stage, some bootstrap founders. So like, well, yeah, I hope the question there is clear, but like, how would you be looking at these product journeys and iterations as a bootstrap founder is another way of thinking about it.

Yeah, that's great. Um, so whenever it comes to this part, I always like to kind of like take a step back and look at like, what are the first principles here? Like, what are the things that aren't gonna change? And when I look at like different industries, And like, okay, let's look at like the AI macro trends. Let's look at the low-code, no-code tool movement. Let's look at like PLG, product-led growth, all these things. Like, what do they have in common? Like, is there anything? Like, they're all kind of seemingly different, but it's like, what do they have in common? It's like, people want their value faster. Okay, great. We can take that and say, is that gonna change? Is that like, are people still gonna want that in the next 10, 20, 30 years? Yeah, the, like, the amount of tools and stuff we're gonna be able to do in the next 10 years is crazy. And it's gonna be way faster to do everything we're doing currently. And so it's just like, if we can understand the problem that people are trying to solve and get crystal clear on that problem, and then everything else becomes easier. And that's why I include that as like one of the questions as part of the strategy. And it's the first one actually. Because I find a lot of leadership teams and early stage teams just don't get crystal clear on what that looks like. Because when you're clear on that, it's like, okay, people struggle with this problem. How do we get there? And what are some of the ways we could get people there faster? And so that's really the, I mean, maybe it's a roundabout way of answering that question, but I really just wanted to understate it because I think it's so important and it's easy to miss. But just get clear on the problem and then craft that solution around it to solve that problem as fast as possible.

I think that was a really good response. I'm gonna throw you a nice one that I really enjoy. I like this question. How do you scale PLG? Is this a marketing thing or is this, I would say, a referral mechanism? I guess that's also marketing, but I don't think I've studied your content quite a bit, but I don't think you've ever talked, come across about the scalability portion, and I think this is a very interesting kind of question. So like, what's your thoughts on this?

Yeah, no, it's awesome question, Alice. So when it comes to scaling it, there's a lot of different ways you could approach it and it is not the same as you would consider like, okay, the sales-led model is you would hire more salespeople and for every salesperson they have a specific quota and then you hire a manager, you kind of grow, uh, more linear. Based on that. So scaling a product-led company is actually, this is back to one of the, the benefits of it too, is it doesn't have to rely as much on people. So if let's say your product-led model is converting, let's say 1,000 signups per month or something like that, and you have a growth squad focusing on your free-to-paid conversion rate and you realize it's only at like 2 to 3%. And your goal is to get it to 5%. So like you might only get 1% in like a month or two or a full quarter of a sprint. You get it up to 5% or something like that. And that growth compounds and that's because your product is doing a lot of that heavy lifting that adds a lot of efficiency as well. And so as you kind of scale up, you might realize like, okay, great, we got 5% conversion rate. Now our other problems are, or our highest leverage point is we just need more people going through this product. It's acquisition related. And so it's definitely not It's not as linear or as to think about like a sales model versus a product-led one. But it really is back to that. I wish I had time to kind of go through that optimization process because when you go through that, you might start to realize actually this is more of a people problem. Like we just don't have somebody in-house who is really looking at the data side of things and understanding some of these opportunities. Like that's the lowest leverage opportunity. And it's really just looking at that, like what is that lowest leverage opportunity or highest leverage opportunity. Here I am mixing up words. But yeah, going through that part and then scaling up based on where are those gaps on the team.

Awesome. Let's do a couple more and then wrap things up here, folks. So Matias, best thing, but I don't know if you brought this up. I know we jumped straight into software companies, but like what are, I dunno if you can give a very brief response, like where is it that PLG is not the way to go? For certain businesses, or are you heavily saying that every single SaaS business should be PLG?

No, I actually say like not every business should be. A lot of it comes down to what is your game that you're playing? Like, are you gonna be playing like more of a dominant strategy as a business where it's like you have the best product, best price? If you're actually gonna win in that category, I'd take a strong stand and say you have to be product-led because you're gonna be competing against so many other competitors. It's gonna be competitive red ocean. Product-led go-to-market motion is way more efficient than the sales-led motion, so it's just gonna win better there. Where a sales-led company actually might have more of an advantage is let's say you're at a very small kind of total addressable market. Maybe there's like 100 Fortune 500 companies that you're going after and your product's just cater to those specific needs, it might actually make more sense for you to have that kinda sales approach where it's like, okay, we're just solving this problem for really big organizations and we're just gonna go after these people. That would be a scenario where it would make more sense. The other one for a lot of folks here, if you're early stage, is I actually recommend you do a lot of the like onboarding manually. I have seen so many founders benefit from this where let's say you have a free trial on your website where it's more of actually a request a free trial. Your first time you're rolling this out, people can book a call with you to get onboarded for their free trial and you help them or you walk them through what are the steps to get the value and you can actually watch them go through and see where they mess up. Where are some of those mistakes? And then you can build that plan around Oh, okay, they struggled here. Let's make that easier. Let's cut out that process. Oh, we have to like manually create this account all the time. It's like, let's automate that. And so that's really where I would, I would kind of like tell people, it's like, okay, early stage, try and do things more unscalably to figure out what is that scalable model to grow this up. And then if you're thinking about, okay, strategy-wise, know what kind of game you're playing as a business to kind of wrap up.

I think that's a great, as you were talking, I was thinking about, I was working at a SaaS company, a cold emailing platform, and it was very interesting. They were getting leads every day, day in, day out, day in, day out. And it was like people would sign up and they would abandon straight away because they're like, we don't know how to use the product. And then we started getting them on the phone. We kind of had like salespeople be more like support. And support people. And like conversions started to happen just by saying like, hey, I saw you sign up for the product, like how can I help you? And then we would give them a curated experience saying, okay, this is what— because like any other SaaS product, there's like 40 different menus. So it's like, hey, this is what you need to know in the next like 14 days of your trial. If you can send out a campaign, you know, and get value, great. So we were trying to like manually push them. And then obviously that that info gets funneled to the product team to kind of build out more and more stuff. I think, yeah, that was a great response and I wish somebody told me that like 4 or 5 years ago as we were thinking. We're just here, we have about 4 minutes left. I think like a good question to end on is like, you know, something a little bit more like, you know, you've been in this space for about 6, 7 years now or maybe even longer. From your Vidyard days and beyond. You know, I was talking earlier, I follow a lot of people like Jaco from Winning by Design, and they're talking about this golden age of SaaS. Like, where do you personally see like a lot of these early stage SaaS companies going? Because I can tell you my perspective is that now being in a like leadership role, it's like we got way too many SaaS products. And like, I'm getting like every single product beyond get onboard, we get scrutinized, like why are we doing this? Can we not do it with another product? So I'm kind of seeing like a lot of these products, whether they like it or not, enter parallel industries. I'd love to get your thoughts like on like where you see the future of SaaS going. I don't know how much you are gonna share, but yeah, then we can wrap up.

Yeah, no, for sure. So you're absolutely right, there's like a ton of SaaS companies and I think that pace is only going to increase because what we're realizing on one end is the barrier to entry is getting lower and lower every single year. It's getting more easy. There's great places like Founders Institute to kind of like start and build these companies as well too. So like there's a lot more support, not just like it's easier to actually do this. And then there's a lot more creative ideas as far as like, okay, okay, let's try this out and let's build a company on it. So I think there's gonna be a ton, like you mentioned, of those smaller SaaS companies. What I think is gonna be really, really important is to win is you're really gonna have to, to build something that really does solve like a meaningful problem because there's gonna be so many SaaS that are developed where it solves not really a super important problem. And those SaaS are gonna be like not that big. And why? It's because it wasn't solving a really big meaningful problem. And so I think that part of the strategy is so important. Back to, again, that question, it's like, what problem do you solve? Does it matter? And really kind of going through that part and activity. To get clarity on there. And so I think like as really the space evolves, it's gonna get really awesome in a lot of ways for the consumer because it's gonna be like, if this isn't customer first, I'm not signing up. I'm not going to really go through this whole process. So it's gonna be a lot more product-led companies for sure. I know that for sure because I see so many SaaS companies from day one now are starting product-led. But I think the next evolution of this is really gonna be product-led companies versus product-led companies. How do you win now? And what does that strategy look like? And I think what's gonna happen, and I was writing about this earlier, is gonna be more like free monopolies and where it's like a bunch of SaaS might have to like, you know, band together and create free tools that are completely free and they monetize them through some other different ways. But it's just a part of extending their free motion so they can really tap into other industries and give their products away for free. So it's gonna be like a lot of adjacent opportunities. And I've seen this with companies like ConvertKit giving away a landing page product for free that kind of taps into their email marketing tool. So it's like complimentary products that also extend their free motion. So I think we're just gonna see a lot more of that. And the good thing as consumers is. It's more free stuff, but I think the bad thing is business owners and founders is it means the barrier to entry is higher because competing against free is hard.

I think that way you answered it amazingly, man. Like very, very, a lot of nuggets here, folks. I hope you take some of this into consideration and process it. We're at the top of the hour here. Wes, thank you so much. Everyone, if you enjoyed Wes's chat, his workshop, his Q&A session, his thought leadership, Show us some love, give them heart emojis. Yeah, okay, we got some claps, thumbs up. We'll be sending out, some people are asking about the follow-up. We'll send some stuff out within the next 48 hours with a recording of this. Everything lives on YouTube as well, fi.co/youtube. We'll send out Wes's LinkedIn as well. So hopefully he'll join. You can connect with him there. But let's wrap things up. We're gonna end things. Everyone can jump into the networking tables. I know Wes has to hop off, but Wes, thank you so much. I hope you— it seemed like you had a lot of fun, but it is.

This is great. Thanks everybody.

Awesome. Well, we'll wrap things up. Uh, thanks everyone. We'll see you in the networking session.