Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, definitely. I think maybe we can use a product as a example, right? Think about Zoom how me or you, maybe everyday users, how we get to know Zoom is not necessary through a sales team call me code or email me code and introducing me this, showing a demo of Zoom, and I get to know Zoom, right? It's because maybe Lenny, you hosted a webinar I joined and I get to just use this software already without even knowing it's Zoom. And then afterwards I may one day think about I want to do this myself and I just do that in a sign-up and I already create a host a webinar and I can pay if I need a paid plan or I can use a lot of more advanced features when I, let's say hit the 40 minutes limit, I can already click that and pay and become a paid customer already. So I think the key properties also of PLG products, think about it should have a very low barrier to entry. Usually it has a free version, free trial. You don't need get approval from your boss to use it. You can use it today and then it has some sort of a self-service checkout flow. If you need a better version, you can buy yourself as well. And this product, basically the free product will spread on its own in some way or another. Okay, perfect. I think that was really helpful. I think we dive into some of the meat of the discussion that we have planned and where I thought it'd be fun to start is the common pitfalls that people fall into when they're trying to add a product led growth motion. And so what are the most common ways people fail when they're trying to figure out product led growth? The first of all, as I mentioned, you need to have some sort of vehicle. A lot of the companies, if you go to their website, especially B2B companies, you'll see the biggest CTA is called book demo. They don't have anything else. 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. A lot of companies don't have that. That's the first I would say hurdle or peaceful. And especially if you are a sales lead and you already have all those things figured out, you try to go to add PLG, it's not as easy as just say, add a kind of free trial CTA on your website. You need to build this free experience. You also need to convince your sales team, your existing product team, your marketing team, "Hey, let's try this out." Because before this process is super clean. Everyone only get only selected future leads and sales work on those. But now you need to allow more people in and there need to be more understanding of their behavior data, the process need to change. So it's actually a whole process. So I would say that's first one. And along with that is some companies didn't think it thoroughly and they are just kind of saying, "Oh, PLG is cool, let's do PLG." And then they maybe spend three months build kind of some sort of a very basic free trial and then they think that's it. They think the leads will come, conversion will come, self-service revenue will come. It's not that easy. It's not that simple. It is definitely a entire motion. So I would say you need to commit to it. Maybe you can do some thinking, collecting some data, build your conviction, but to a certain point you need to commit to at least a year or even two years kind of roadmap to build this entire thing out and change the process internally sometimes as well to support that. The last one, I would say a lot of times the company's committed, they want to do this, but they don't know the right way or they don't have the foundation, they don't have the expertise of PLG. Their internal team, they're really good at sales or maybe really good at as the traditional motion, but they don't have this part of expertise and foundation. A common thing I see is that company want to do PLG and they have no usage data at all and they're like, "I will just doing PLG. But PLG I always say is actually fundamentally DLG, data led growth. So when you give away your free product, what you want to get in exchange are two things. One is the broader reach because free product spread itself is lower barrier to entry.…

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