Product-Led Strategy: 10 Growth Cases for SaaS (Part 1)
Hey everybody 👋 This is Paul.
FlowMapp team is working on product development (as, I’m sure, many of you here).
Every day we take care of our users and cope with daily hurdles related to startup growth (this is fun, anyway).
We’ve gathered an exciting experience along the way and decided to share with you the practices of Product Led Growth (PLG), the primary driver of our customer acquisition, conversion, and adoption. And delivery value to end-users, of course.
Since the first product release, we have been working according to this exact strategy but learned its name a lot later (great thanks to OpenView).
This article is based on the speech I gave at the PLG Conference. Here I’ll cover the practical parts of Product Led Growth and explain its main concepts using 10 FlowMapp’s cases.
Update: This is the 1 part in a two-part series. Please read the second one also: Product Growth is hard
Let’s go 🏄
The Product
We are a bootstrapped SaaS startup (productivity tools, online collaboration, UX/UI design). Still, I like the definition of «small team of enthusiasts who are obsessed with inventing collaborative design tools for passionate makers all over the world.»
Our audience consists of 180,000+ users from 150 countries, and among our clients, there are such companies as IBM, Intel, Salesforce, Invision, Accenture, Unicef, Hyperloop TT, Pega, and Kontrapunkt.
This motivates us to go further 🙌
We recently celebrated the 3rd anniversary. We didn’t attract venture capital. Our marketing budget is around $0. Our crucial growth metric is YoY x2,5. We don’t have ads, and we don’t buy traffic or anything related to other paid marketing activities.
In 2017 our core-team consisted of 6 people. In 2020 we grew to 17 people (finally, our Slack chats are full of fresh mems now). The whole team is located in 4 countries (we worked remotely even before COVID).
It looks like we are perfect victims of the Product Led Growth strategy 💁♂️
Addicted to PLG
If I had to summarize our experience in one sentence, it’d be this one: focusing on end users solves tons of problems with acquisition, activation, and retention metrics, while achieving the same results require significantly more resources if other business strategies are implemented.
No chance to skip it.
I recommend learning more about this strategy to the startups that don’t have access to unlimited funding.
How this works
I don’t see PLG as a list of strict rules and regulations. I agree with the companies that deconstruct this strategy into the list of synchronized concepts:
Like Growth Hacking, PLG is a fairly young strategy that consists mostly of practice rather than theory (so, please no holywars, boys).
I decided to organize this article based on the principle of describing our cases for each of the concepts:
- Concept 1: The End User Era
- Concept 2: Demonstrating Value Early On
- Concept 3: Fast adoption (Part 2)
- Concept 4: Value before the paywall (Part 2)
Concept 1: The End User Era
«The End User Era», like «User-Centered Design» & «UX Research», tells us: know your user.
In other words, by creating functionality for users based on a deep understanding of their needs (and pains), you put organic growth drivers into the product that will provide mechanisms for attracting and retaining users (growth drivers).
This challenge has to be addressed at any stage of product development — whether you plan an MVP / EVP or are in the active development phase.
Looks promising, right?
Case #1–50 First Customers
As soon as the number of paying clients reached 50, we decided to pause the main development processes and conduct in-depth interviews with our customers.
We broke it down into two logical parts:
- The «Value» that users see in our product and how it helped them reshape work processes.
- «Features» and discussion about product functionality.
After several weeks of research and countless calls, we finally aggregated all data into one document.
We’ve gathered a lot of useful, exciting, and even unexpected data, and here I want to share with you just a peek of the insights 💡:
- The vision of a new product (User Flow), which ultimately absorbed the first one in about 6 months following the release, became the main growth driver.
- Numerous feature requests have been prioritized. As a result, 4 “heavy usage” functions have been implemented.
- Two new, non-obvious audience segments were discovered. We learned that Copywriters and Sales managers use the product more actively than anticipated. We also learned why they use it.
- We received a surprising amount of communication content, written not by copywriters but by real users.
- Lastly, as a bonus, we filled the pages of the product site with real customer feedback.
The most important part of this research is that it doesn’t let us make wrong moves.
Case #2–16,000 Users Research
About a year ago, we carried out a quantitative study of 16,000 active users.
The goal was to reorient towards a new system of audience segmentation in three dimensions:
- Role (what they specialize in?)
- Projects (what exactly these teams develop?)
- Company size (how many people are there?)
Why was this important? We saw how heterogeneous the audience itself and the projects that people create on our platform. We use this data to define product and functional strategy more accurately and work across multiple communication and content dimensions.
This changed a lot.
We discovered, for instance, that 11% of projects were educational. This knowledge helped us better understand audience segment to make useful offer.
The implementation of this study’s insights is simple and accessible for any digital interface. This is a modal questionnaire, developed in several steps directly after login, in which there is an option to refuse and display data in an analytical dashboard:
Case #3 — Holy Support
Recently in my feed, there was a post from the CEO of a successful company (rounds, exit) who claimed that startups traditionally communicate with end-users on a rare occasion.
We have the opposite situation. We are fans of user communication. My partner & founder (hey, Andrey) and I’ve been the only support managers for two years, communicating with users on a daily basis. Now our ticket system has over 10,000 hits.
Quick and human user support is a tremendous advantage and, for some reasons, entirely not an obvious promotion factor.
In addition to user engagement and public reviews, as a pleasant bonus, you can receive:
- User research (they provide real data, so no need for extra-deep search).
- Collection of issues and feature requests from real users.
- People are proactively testing the product.
- Higher sales through personal communication (usually changing to a more expensive plan or new user entry into the product through a unique promo code).
Why give this all up?
How to implement this concept?
Let’s summarize the first concept:
It specifies that the imperative goal of development is to address consumers’ problems, needs, and pains accurately. This creates the basis for organic growth in your product, the rails of which are the modern methods of spreading the information around the world (i.e., acquisition), as well as a high probability of building a habit of using a product (this is retention).
To keep informed about our users’ needs related to an ever-evolving product, we at FlowMapp research customer processes across all communication channels available to us.
Concept 2: Demonstrating Value Early On
Moving forward.
Undoubtedly, it is vital to keep the product simple and straightforward. However, we suggest beginning by thinking about ways to provide such a positive initial experience that the user will feel the product’s value as quickly as possible.
This is highly likely to result in consistent product usage conversions (whether you call it Product Led Growth or not).
In other words, the goal is to convey the idea of potential value to the user even before they sign up:
We at FlowMapp try to share ideas about the product features using different methods:
- Demo project, which is available to all visitors (N1 point in the site navigation).
- We publish examples of the projects in onboarding letters, product landing pages, Product Hunt launches, and other platforms.
- We are in the middle of designing a new project for publishing client’s works.
- UX and Design bloggers help us a lot by adding us in listings, publishing YouTube reviews, Instagram and Medium posts, and spreading the word about our product using other media channels.
- Partnerships with universities and educational institutions, when users can try our tools before entering the site. We designed a special product plan for these organizations.
This is exactly the opposite pole from conventional advertising strategies for promotion when cold traffic is purchased in large quantities for a landing page (or thousands of installs) → then an agonizing wait at the Amplitude dashboard follows.
Case #4 — Demo project
We build planning and development tools. Without a workflow, they are of no value because it has long been known that “people do not need a drill, they need a hole in the wall, and in the end, they need a beautiful painting.”
It didn’t know from the start that users can feel their work results even before signing up for the service.
If you visit our website now, the first navigation item you’ll see is a link to the Demo project — it contains projects, which are used as an example of finished work at FlowMapp:
It works like this: the user is studying a typical project and inspires to build his/her own. The ideas are born; the task is closed. And everyone lived happily ever after.
Case #5 — Examples
We went further and started posting sample projects on product landing pages, emails, and Product Hunt launches, following the same principle — further shortening the path to early value demonstration.
Result: 70%-80% of paying users to study a demo project or examples before registering.
Case #6 — User Projects Gallery
Get ready for a little teaser. Right now, we are preparing a new section of the site. This will be the place where our users’ projects and their teams will be published.
Here’s a screenshot of the work-in-progress from Figma:
We are not pioneers in this practice, as many PLG companies are already implementing it in practice:
Indeed, each of these projects has its unique strategy that achieves many critical strategic goals, but one of them definitely works for the concept of “Demonstrating Value Early On”.
How to implement this concept?
The Early Value concept focuses on the idea that the faster a user can formulate the potential value of a product in their head, the more compelling the desire to test it will be.
This dramatically simplifies the process of activating users, i.e., the goal here is to give the user a confident promise of inevitable profit.
This is the end of Part 1.
Please read Part 2: Product Growth is hard
I hope this was informative. Ping me on LinkedIn or Twitter to discuss new ideas, growth hacks, cases, and PLG practices, before I start Part 2.
Good luck with your product experiments!
Be brave 🙌
