Ben Williams: recommendation

Transcript context

…Do you have a sense of when that focus expanded to an adjacent group, how many years into the growth story that happened, or was there some kind of milestone there? Because I know everyone imagines, yeah, we'll expand, the question is when and when does it make sense and when is it too early. Do you have any insights into that phase? Yeah, for sure. First, I think if we're talking about PLG and the story with Snyk, I actually like that definition of product-led acquisition from Julian Shapiro when you spoke with him, and beyond that maniacal focus on finding product market fit for your product, founders really should be thinking about how their product is going to grow, and that's important of course as you think about taking that next step. So, let's assume in a simplistic definition that you found product market fit as demonstrated by a strong retention, and then the real question is where are the new users for your product going to come from, and founders really should have, I think, strong hypothesis around this, your risk essentially, adopting an if we build it, they'll come approach. So, if your acquisition strategy is product- led, then understanding and being intentional about your early acquisition growth loops I think is an essential founder's responsibility. Dedicating time there to design those loops into the product, it's key. And when I say product, I really mean the whole product experience considering every touchpoint in and out of the core application that your users and customers might have with you. Snyk, for example, believed very early that we could build out powerful content loops via fixed pull requests that we raise on GitHub. New users, they'll sign up for Snyk, they'll connect their GitHub accounts, Snyk will scan their code, will find vulnerabilities, will automatically create Snyk-branded pull requests to fix those vulnerabilities. Other devs in the repo will see and interact with those PRs, and some of them will follow links to Snyk, create accounts and some of them will connect their own repos, and so the loop continues. So, company generated, company distributed content loop, it's actually really powerful for us because it's both an acquisition loop and an engagement loop. Over the course of time, we extended that loop by adding support for other source controlled systems beyond GitHub. We layered on a bunch of new loops, and I think if founders can be intentional about this as you're developing early product iterations, then you're going to have a bigger advantage when the product clicks with the market, and that was built into Snyk as we went along. So, that was kind of ready as we found product market fit. But I think to talk about specifically how Snyk took that next stage, it was a function of when we were chatting before this, we talked a little bit about some of the failed experiences spinning up a self-serve revenue channel, and- Actually before we get there, which I definitely want to get into all that, I love this story you just shared. I hadn't heard of this growth tactic of basically they connect their GitHub account, you find all the vulnerabilities, push a fix, people see that Snyk did this for them and it just provides all this value, and you're saying that was really effective. It's an example of something that worked very well.…

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