Chris Miller: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong. We were definitely like, we need to be more product led. And I think that's actually the nuance here. You asked would I consider what we were doing product led growth? And I think the answer is absolutely, but that's because a fallacy that people, a lot of, I think maybe early stage founders or folks who are unfamiliar with chronic growth or maybe only know about it from an academic point of view, maybe fall into the trap of is assuming that in order to be a PLG company you can use that interchangeably with being a fully self-service business or fully self-service go-to market. I don't actually think that those things are one and the same. I think that most companies, at least the larger, more successful ones that have done amazing things and are cornering their market or category, that we would consider to be PLG companies have a bunch of humans working on really important things on their go to market, and it's more of a hybrid motion. And I think it's less about, again, being sort of myopic about your approach to PLG and having it being really rooted in principles that are, I think very kind of academic or conceptual in nature. But more sort of being pragmatic and saying, "Okay, cool. Who is our customer? What is the product that we sell? How are our customers used to buying this thing? How would they prefer to buy it in the future that they would like to live in? What's the packaging of our products? How do our customers decide? Is it a top down decision or a bottoms up decision? How complex are our building and subscription terms is something that's going to be pretty transactional or something that's going to be fairly considered? How comfortable is our target market with the technology in our category? Are we competing against non-consumption? Are we competing against competitors in the same category?" And if you actually answer those questions, and I think it may be obvious where I'm going with this, but based on the answer to those questions, the conditions on the ground might lend themselves to be more favorable to product-led growth and be more favorable to self-service, right? It's why there are companies that the value prop is just so... Like you don't need a person to sell you Loom. I use Loom and it's so intuitive that I can just decide on my own whether I want to buy it. You don't need a person to teach you how to use even Slack to some example. Like Slack is extremely intuitive. Right? Like you could throw someone in Slack and use a product in a similar paradigm and it can probably figure out the basics on their own. There are certain products that don't necessarily check those boxes. And so I think what you can do is kind of take a more modular approach to PLG, and it's like based on how a customer in the best case scenario might go from zero to one when it comes to activation and onboarding, do we need to have a human involved in that process at all? Or as a backstop? ke based on how a customer in the best case scenario might go from zero to one when it comes to activation and onboarding, do we need to have a human involved in that process at all? Or as a backstop? If the answer is yes, then maybe figure out ways to have humans involved where your cost structure is durable or at least defensible. If that's not the case, then go take a PLG approach to it. And so across our entire business, we've never taken a very pure, everything here for this line of business or this product line is going to be self-service without being able to defend and contextualize why across the entire customer journey this makes sense. And so yeah, we have customers who come in through the product led front door and kick the tires on the product on their own and activate on the product on their own. But then when it comes time to buy the product, they want to talk to somebody and there's legitimate reasons why, right? There are maybe IT and security concerns that they need to get somebody on the phone for. Maybe they're coming for a platform where data migration is a huge fear they have, and that's not something that's easy to do in a self-service environment yet. I think that's going to change over time. But today it's still kind of painful when you're doing rip and replaces. And so to try to brute force that into a sort of self-service motion for every customer writ large would be solving for your business' desires, not necessarily solving for the customer at the end of the day. But we also sell into different segments of customers that are maybe digital natives but not familiar with products in our category. And maybe they're coming from not a competing product, but they're coming from a more rudimentary system like spreadsheets. I mean, I've seen customers using post-it notes to manage their. [inaudible 00:59:25].…

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