The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion

Think about Miro, as an example. If you go through their activation experience and sign up to usage, they ask very limited questions, very targeted. They drop you, kind of, they ask you about your use case, what are you here for? Are here to do a brainstorm session? Are you here to develop a roadmap? And they quickly gave you templates to get started. Just like in maybe five minutes, you finish the entire journey from go to the website and sign up, answer a few questions, and you are already using the template they provided to do the thing you want to do.

From infrastructure perspective, on data tool, my first tool usually, one is some sort of data hub segment, right? This next one is some sort of a product analytics tool. Think about Amplitude... And then you need to have an experimentation tool because, like I said, you cannot just imagine you build everything and everything works perfectly... The third piece I think that's pretty essential, I counted in the infra, is some sort of a lifecycle marketing tool.

You can actually go to any E-commerce website, like, I don't know, go to Lululemon, go to Amazon, make your conversion process as easy as theirs. That should be your goal. The consumers shouldn't be confused about complicated pricing, where to find all of that.

I'm a big fan of finding leverage. I think doing growth is always about finding leverage. If you can always find the area that with relatively small investment can give you the biggest results, that can be such a kind of momentum, can empower you through future experiments and more work.

I think it as a moment, as a first time a user experienced value of your product... For a lot of, especially we're talking about many SaaS product, B2B software, the value of such product is usually either you see a workflow can be supported by this, it can save your time, it can save your money, it can help you make more money, or it just solve this pain point that you never get to solve on your own without a software product.

I think there are two big buckets. The first bucket is product usage data. As I mentioned, a lot of B2B software, they're really lacking in that, because when you sell via sales team, you don't need to know so many details, so granular usage data, all of that. The second bucket is I call this customer 360 database, because product usage data is one component, is the most essential. In order for your product-led gross motion to be successful, you also need to connect that with your marketing teams, marketing campaigns, your CRM, your sales force, who are the customers, prospects, what their stage.

You should probably start with activation. Activation is actually a common good starting place for most B2B software. Because usually B2B softwares are not designed to really get you to use quickly, historically.

When I do this audit, there are so many low hanging fruits usually in this process. For example, one client, when I go to the checkout flow, the kind of checkout form is so confusing. They ask a bunch of questions that only let's say UK customer need. Every other places they don't need to answer, but they ask the question anyway. And I as a US based person is very confused and I drop off at that point.

The key to do that is, first of all, your product need to have a high enough frequency. If you are using this once per month, it's not likely you can build this into a habit... I worked at Acorns. We started as an investment app, and the whole thing is passive investment, passive investing. You bought some ETFs, and then you basically don't even need to check, and you just keep adding money and it will grow, and after 10 years is awesome. It's actually the right investment philosophy, but when I worked as a head of growth, it made a big challenge for me, because think about set and forget it. They don't even need to go back to a product to be successful.

You can actually go to any E-commerce website, like, I don't know, go to Lululemon, go to Amazon, make your conversion process as easy as theirs. That should be your goal. The consumers shouldn't be confused about complicated pricing, where to find all of that.

PLG stands for "product-led growth," a business model where the product itself drives customer acquisition and expansion rather than traditional sales teams.

I think it is easier if you have PLG from early on. If you are pure sales led, you try to add PLG, that's the harder thing to change basically.

PLG stands for Product-Led Growth, a business strategy where the product itself drives customer acquisition and expansion rather than traditional sales teams.

The first step for you to do is submit a form and kind of basically explain yourself to this company, I'm from who and who company and I want to use the tool, can you come back to me and allow me to see a demo of your product? That means the entry point to PLG is cut off. Instead, the first step is you need to either have a free product, free trial, some sort of a low barrier entry for anyone who stumble upon this product to give it a try.

When I interview a growth PM or analyst, I will always ask, 'What is a experiment you launched that has a very unexpected result? And what did you do after that?' So first of all, they have to be launching a lot of experiments to get very unexpected answer... Secondly, I want to know just why it's unexpected. That reveals the deep, deep level of their thinking, how deep they are thinking.