Do You Have a Vice President of Free? On Being Customer-Centric

It was the one thing he didn't know, which I know. Just being an old timer is the reason. One of the reasons we have 14 day trials on the Internet is in the old days, the Salesforce sales team, when they were asked to be Focus one to close deals that month, so they forced Salesforce to move from 30 to 40 days. There was no evidence it was better for the customer. There was no evidence that it got usage going or people. They just wanted to close deals the same month. And so my, my real. So, so that's something to be cautious about these metrics and be cautious that they're. Since we're talking to product folks, be cautious that they're customer centric. You know, the, the, you know, that's a Salesforce and Salesforce is very enterprise now. But in the old days it pushed it to 14 days so the sales reps could make close deals faster. What we learned from Slack in Zoom until recently was infinite. Trials work pretty good. So does Canva. Slack and Canva and until recently Zoom were okay, waiting four years to convert. And those are epic companies. Those are epic companies. And these are one of the things that only founders can make these decisions. I wrote this post years ago saying, who's your VP of Free? Because who's got a VP of Free? Do you know anybody that has a VP of Free? I got a VP of growth, I got a VP of product. But who, if you have this massive freebase, who's your VP of Free? I know almost no one that has a VP of Free. Right? And usually it's some kind of collaboration between product and the CEO. Right? They're the VP of Free. But even then you need a VP of Free and we don't have one. And so just think, I don't. There's no perfect answers. But in a world where we're tightening nooses everywhere on trials, we're tightening nooses everywhere, be careful. The advice you get, be careful. The short term advice. For example, another related terrible piece of advice VCs give you is switch to annual contracts. This is terrible advice. Terrible advice, Lenny. Terrible advice from people who've never built products and aren't in the field. Going to annual contracts on a spreadsheet looks great. On a spreadsheet, it looks great. You know what's better? Letting customers pay. They want to pay. If it's you or me buying for ourselves, Lenny, you know, we're still going to put it on a credit card, aren't we? If it's our own personal and we want to pay Monthly, usually we don't know even if it's, we usually want to just try it monthly. Big companies want to pay annually because they have procurement departments. Why force people to go the way they don't want to go? So just start. This is, this is a product audience. Product needs to be the voice of the customer. It's not so much customer success as it used to be. It's not so much sales. You've got to be the voice of the customer together with the founders and push these things. Think about every. I would do the longest possible trial that is still customer centric and understand there's tension. Understand there's tension, right. I say anytime I'm in a board meeting where someone wants or some VC says let's do annual for an SMB where I'm like, no, show me the money, show me the evidence that this is better for the customer. Right. How many times have you gone to buy it something for yourself and it's like 19 bucks a month and that's annoying because it's an unseen credit card charge, but do you want to pay 240 upfront? I mean maybe you do it for a riverside or something, use all the time. But some random product you just discovered, you're just going to bounce. Yeah. So who's going to show the data in the bounce? Right. A related point for like in sales, no one does enough. Everyone does these win loss meetings but no one talks enough about the deals they lost. Everyone talks about the deals they won. All the lore, the tribal lore in sales is how we won the deal. People should be spending more time talking about deals they lost than deals they want. Right? And same thing for this PLG motion is if you make your yes, I know what I'm. I give everyone a pass for 2023. Everyone whose growth plummeted and did things they shouldn't, did price increases they didn't earn, cut the free trials, hid their free editions. I'm going to give you look, you gotta give your team a little stress relief, right? So I'm giving every, every person I work with, every portfolio, everyone a one year pass. But the pass is in the past. We gotta get back to being customer centric and building businesses that have that build to a 1 billion ARR on their own because they're wonderful businesses that are product centric, right. That recur and.