Product Growth is hard
How to grow your startup without sales, venture capital, and marketing.
Here is what we have learned:
Product growth is hard
Update: This is the 2 part in a two-part series. Please read the first one: Product-Led Strategy: 10 Growth Cases for SaaS (Part 1).
Moving forward🏄
Concept 3: Fast adoption
The practice shows that minimized barriers on the start of user experience help services win the audience faster and engage it more significantly. Thus, self-learning becomes an integral part of the product and a key for fast adoption.
There are numerous practical ways to implement this principle in your business, such as onboarding mechanics, freemium model, trial system, educational content projects, webinars, and others.
Case #7 — Email onboarding
Email-onboarding has been around for a while. Once again, I want to emphasize the importance and efficiency of this tool and, besides, show how we found our optimized version of using it:
→ We subscribed to 30 newsletters for our core audience and received onboarding emails for a month (Figma, Intercom, Airtable, Asana, Hotjar, Miro, Pitch, Paddle, Pipefy, Mailchimp, ActiveCollab, Typeform, Lokalise, Helio, Zendesk, Chatfuel, Webflow, Buffer, Algolia, Formstack, Zeplinothers).
→ We conducted an in-depth analysis of these emails and created eight emails with several chains of different flows for A/B testing.
→ Our advice is to send a short product video in the first email. In our case, it is called «FlowMapp in 2 minutes».
These emails are the 3rd source of traffic in terms of the number of clicks to the site and Top-1 regarding purchase conversion.
The onboarding chain of emails is often neglected at product launch, but we can see that it works well for the engaged audience.
Case #8 — HELP is always here
I think we can all agree that Help Centers are usually implemented in a separate information section. Still, for web services, it can exist on a separate subdomain or somewhere in the Community section.
It was essential for us that users instantly receive an answer to any question without leaving the app and without being pushed out of context. This is especially important when it comes to the first sessions. To do this, we came up with a side toolbar, which, via API, pulls up the entire Help Center structure.
It allows users to search throughout the Help Center and watch tutorial videos and gifs while working on a project.
We also used this solution to train users for hotkeys. This indicator directly correlates with user adaptation — 95% of paid users use hotkeys while working on projects.
By the way, we are regularly asked about this toolbar and how it was made. It is absolutely custom coded.
You can do it too.
How to implement this concept into your workflow?
“Fast adoption” in the product directly depends on the availability of self-training of users, as well as constant optimization of the approach to provide users with tutorials in the first working sessions.
For us, onboarding of the user is one of the priority areas, especially considering the product’s complication. We try to anticipate and answer questions through email onboarding, educational videos, in-app content.
Concept 4: Value before the paywall
This concept carries the idea that there’s no need to wait for users to pay you to help solve their problems.
Our product designers had been using Figma for a long time before expanding the team, number of ongoing projects, and product features and switching to a paid subscription.
These are exactly the relationships with users that we want to build in FlowMapp.
Case #9 — Forever Free
Cost Free Forever or the basis of the Freemium model.
- 96% of our users buy subscriptions, transferring from Free plan, and on;y 4% from trials
- Upon request, we always expand the standard 14-day Trial if the client needs it (didn’t have time, forgot, had another account, etc.)
- We do not ask for credit card details to start trials or any other sensitive information
- We have simplified the process of returning a paid subscription with all data saved and the ability to come back at any time
- We have a 50% discount for students and teachers of educational institutions
- We provide a product for non-profit organizations for free.
It allows us to organically grow the product audience and offer an “a-ha” moment before a paywall.
Case #10 — Call to Purchase
This case is living proof of the freemium model postulate, which sounds like “sell to users, not to customers.”
In other words, the level of trust of users who are already receiving value from the product is several times higher than that of any different purchasing stage. All that remains is to place purchase triggers in the right place of the product and the time of the user experience.
We have implemented a system of plans standard for the SaaS industry, which differ in the available functionality. When the user runs into the ceiling of his plan, he sees a modal window, which offers all the goodies of the update and the benefits of full access.
In total, the system contains 27 unique messages — depending on the user’s current plan, his quota, the limit he faced, etc.
Around 77% of paid accounts see this communication while having only a free account.
In such cases, UX copywriting is very important. We are redesigning all these pop-ups as this will further increase the conversion to purchase. We are also planning to add emotions (this can be achieved through illustrations).
How to implement this concept?
Modern principles of software and product distribution do now what sounded impossible even a couple of decades ago. “Chairs in the Morning — Money in the Evening” (I bet Millennials have to Google this phrase). Shortly, it can be paraphrased into this paradox: you grow in revenue by providing something for free.
For products such as FlowMapp, which are young enough and do not have extensive resources, the freemium model is a good driver of organic growth and WoM distribution channel’s success.
Lovemarks
In conclusion, I want to ask you: What’s the most effective strategy for digital product growth on the cusp of 2021 (if we can survive 2020 with its quirks at all)?
Set two floors of managers for aggressive sales or become a Lovemark?
We believe that PLG’s strategy and an arsenal of useful principles help with the latter.
Good luck with your product experiments and be brave 🙌
Ping me on LinkedIn or Twitter to discuss new ideas, hacks, cases, and PLG implementation practices.
