From 1M to 2M users: 4 steps to scale your growth
Last year, I wrote a blog post on getting from 0 to 1M users, a milestone that took us about 2 years to reach. This week, just one year later, Lucidpress is announcing 2M users. Getting here has meant new strategies and new techniques for scaling our growth after going through the scrappy early stage of the startup journey.
Figuring out how to scale is a difficult challenge for any startup, and in this post, I’ll be walking you through 4 steps we’ve taken at Lucidpress to push on to bigger customers, bigger opportunities, and bigger wins.
Boosting our sales team
Summary: Expanding the Lucidpress sales team helped us reach more customers in enterprise corporations, a key component for our next phase of growth.
Lucidpress is a freemium web-based design and layout tool. Our initial growth was fueled by self-serve registrations in small and medium businesses, so we had little to no need for a sales team. After a while, however, we saw how many users from larger organizations were using us and realized we had a great opportunity to move up market.
Not only that, but after our initial burst of growth, it became harder and harder to keep improving on financial performance. There was a higher dollar amount of income to double each year, and we’d already done all the easy stuff. To continue driving aggressive growth, we needed to start making bigger deals with enterprise customers.
To land those bigger accounts, we needed a strong sales team. Beefing up our sales team has marked the next major phase of growth for Lucidpress, and the same can be said of other SaaS startups.
New opportunities in the enterprise space
Summary: New use cases in the enterprise space have prompted us to develop new features, with the end result being a more powerful, dynamic product.
The shift from self-serve to enterprise is a fluid time for the product. You’re suddenly exposed to use cases and feature requests that never would have come up with self serve customers, simply because the needs are so different.
As soon as we put our product into larger companies, requests began pouring in for enterprise security features, distributed documents for scale, and features to keep documents on brand as they’re passed around a team. Advanced template locking, our newest feature, is a direct result of that feedback from enterprise customers. Template locking helps companies ensure all marketing and sales materials created across the organization remain on-brand.
The advanced template locking feature has paved the way for a number of corporations to adopt our product when they may have not done so otherwise. The amount of deals the sales team can close relies to some extent on how well the product team is able to build the features that enterprise companies need.
It’s a really fun time for us because the horizon is so much bigger. It’s kind of like building a product all over again. That’s what keeps good product managers and product teams coming to work every day — being excited about understanding new sets of customer problems and trying to figure out how you’re going to solve them with elegant design, empathy, and great products.
Using cutting-edge technology
Summary: Key to growth is keeping the team motivated with challenging, interesting projects, Also, using cutting-edge technology ensures our customers have the best experience possible.
Having new problems to solve is a welcome challenge for us at Lucidpress, and as a team that produces an online design tool, we’re committed to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on the web.
At Lucid Software, our core purpose is to solve hard problems in technology together with exceptional people, and there have been a lot of projects where there may have been a technically easier, less boundary-pushing solution, but that wasn’t going to be fun or interesting, so we chose the route that pushed us.
From a product management perspective, it’s really important to keep the team happy, engaged, and interested, and using cutting-edge technology is a great way to do that. A passionate, invested team is crucial to continued growth.
Most importantly, as champions of our customers, technology allows us to deliver exceptional experiences. At Lucidpress, it’s on all of us to be on the lookout for the latest and greatest technologies and to be thinking critically about how we can leverage them to our customers’ benefit.
Learning from mistakes
Summary: One costly mistake helped us develop a new technique that will help us catch mistakes before they happen.
Pushing boundaries and building new experiences will naturally result in mistakes, and we’ve made our share. But the lessons learned from mistakes are some of our most valuable tools as we refine our processes and optimize for growth. Specifically, a development story we took on around our onboarding process resulted in a costly mistake, but also some lessons and discoveries that will be hugely valuable moving forward.
A key focus at Lucidpress is increasing user engagement from the first moments someone spends in the product, the goal being to provide value to a user as soon as possible.
I spent several days watching user sessions on Inspectlet and noticed there were a set of five actions that were typical of customers who had a successful first experience. Knowing this, we decided to build an onboarding experience with tool tips that would guide new users to those actions. We planned it and estimated it at 8 points, meaning roughly 8 full days of work for one person.
It turned out to be 3 times as much work as we estimated, and on top of that, it failed.
Our biggest mistake was that we waited until the very end to user test it. We know it’s important to test early, but with this particular feature, we thought we had to build the whole thing before we could get meaningful feedback, which seemed right at the time, but in hindsight was totally wrong. The first time we did user testing with a workable prototype, it became obvious within seconds that the way we thought someone would interact was completely different from what actually happened. That was just on the first tool tip, and we had built six.
What did we learn?
- Use Codepen to get early feedback.
In hindsight, we should have used a tool like Codepen to build an interactive prototype to test out a single tool tip. Most people didn’t even notice the first tool tip, and we didn’t need working code to see that. We could have just showed them a still image and asked them to click on it, and we would have learned right away that it wasn’t working.
- Conduct a research spike before fully committing.
Now, when we have stories over 5 points, we conduct what we call a “spike” before we start building. A spike is a preliminary investigation conducted by one developer. The developer takes a couple points to look into a few different ways to build a new feature to determine what will and will not work. Spikes keep us from spending a ton of time on one solution before we realize it’s the wrong direction.
Looking ahead
In the design industry, big incumbents have long been the standard, but with the advent of web technology, there are a huge number of design tools popping up everyday. It’s a booming space that’s ripe for disruption.
We’re excited to be in the midst of all this change, and we can’t wait to have new problems to solve, new things to build, and new experiences to learn from.
The best part about growing is the opportunities to create solutions that haven’t even been thought of yet. My final piece of advice would be to keep looking ahead, because that’s where all the fun stuff happens.
About Vicky Thomas
Vicky Thomas is the Head of Product Strategy at Lucid Software, makers of top-ranked productivity apps Lucidchart and Lucidpress. Prior to joining Lucid, Vicky was a Product Manager at Adobe, where she was responsible for simplifying the Marketing Cloud implementation process. She is passionate about bringing new ideas to life with teams of exceptional people.
Originally published at www.lucidpress.com.
