Building a Product-Led Growth Machine: 10 Takeaways from Office Hours with GC Lionetti, CMO at Confluent

A huge thank you to GC for joining us for Redpoint’s Office Hours this week and to everyone who was able to attend; we had close to 1000 people register for the event!

GC’s experience building companies through product-led growth is incredible. He led the rapid expansion of Confluent’s growth, marketing, and developer relations functions as their CMO, and served as Vice President of Self-Serve Growth at Dropbox. He also previously led Product Marketing for the Developer Tools Division at Atlassian.

It was awesome to dive into the differences between building a bottoms-up motion for a productivity tool like Dropbox vs. an open-source data infrastructure product like Confluent. For anyone who couldn’t join the conversation, here are ten key takeaways:

1. Use humans to learn, not sell: In many bottoms-up companies users don’t want to be sold. Second, your ultimate goal is not sales. The ultimate goal is to understand users so intimately that you can systemize what a salesperson would do. Atlassian was obsessive about using humans to learn and building it back into the machine.
2. Customers know WAY more than you think: A customer’s journey may start a year before they try your product. They may have seen your product on Twitter or visited your website doing research on the market. All of those touchpoints matter and are part of their journey to becoming a paying customer.
3. First PLG hire should be analytical: No matter what role you’re hiring for first to build out your PLG engine, their first job will be to collect data from the entire funnel and start to understand it. Data and analytics will be the foundation for future experimentation.
4. Capture a user in one week: GC tracks two kinds of “Aha” moments. The first Aha moment is the actions a user takes that get them hooked. The time to the first Aha moment should be 1–7 days.
5. Track monetization “Aha” moment: The second Aha moment is the actions that suggest a user is ready to give you money. In the collaboration world, this could be multiple users sharing content with each other. In the OSS world, it could be using the open-source project in production.
6. Don’t overthink the metric: Your metrics should be EASY to measure and determine success. Pick it and do it. Don’t spend a bunch of time pontificating about the right metric. “I promise you, you will get them wrong.” -GC
7. Tools don’t scale with you: Most tools only last a year or two before you scale out of them. Choose the right tool for the next 12 months and don’t over-optimize your PLG stack.
8. The data layer is the most important part of the whole stack: The ole garbage in…If you’re not thoughtful about your backend it doesn’t matter what other tools you have. Frontend you will figure out. Backend is critical.
9. The product must be ready for bottoms-up adoption: You can drive millions of users to your product, but if your product can’t activate users, make them stick, and move through the funnel, it doesn’t matter.
10. Experiment, experiment, experiment: Bottoms-up engines are built with volume and experimentation. Set up your systems from the beginning so you can move quickly and experiment.