Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…, "Hey, look what's possible if you pay us $5 a month, $10 a month," and you might even get some extra conversion out of that and some more paid customers. So, in general, that's how I think about it. I like the reverse trial because user growth is important and if you're in a long game where you're trying to grow a business for a decade or more, ideally you're trying to get millions of people onto your product and you can always have that monetization conversation later, but you only get a couple moments where you can say, "Hey, pull out your credit card or let's get on the phone and talk about an enterprise contract," with a customer before you lose trust or lose patience. And so, that focus on helping them discover value and build loyalty to you is much more important. I really like this concept, a super cool name too. I'm also thinking back to some of the SaaS tools I've used that have had this where I go straight into the pro plan and then I'm like, "Oh, I don't want to lose all these features," and then I actually end up buying it. So, when I'm hearing this, it sounds to me like it's a better version of the freemium approach. I imagine there's still many SaaS tools that are very enterprise-y, take handholding, maybe this goes away. I know Elena Verna who's been on the podcast is just a huge proponent of everyone will be product-led, self-serve eventually, but until that day they're still like, I don't know, I think of Retool I think is very hands-on, handhold-y, front I think is like that. There's all these tools that people don't get really quickly. And so, I guess do you still think there's a need for some of these tools that need sales and customer success involvement to stick with just trial at least for now, or do you think they should all kind of find a way to get to self-serve and a reverse trial? I do really agree with what Elena said. I really look forward to the day when self-serve and freemium are possible for every product, but I also recognize that that can be really expensive to build and implement and is not for everyone. So, that's cool too. There are other options. In general, I think freemium and also free trials tend to be most effective when there's something that the person who signed up can actually do on their own without being handheld. It doesn't have to be full functionality. It can be exploring a sandbox or a demo or something they can poke around in and experience value, see that aha moment. That's great. That's a moment where you can give value to that person who's chosen to spend time with your product. If that's not possible, there are different ways to be creative that don't require having premium pricing. You can think about how to use concepts related to PLG and related to top of funnel adoption in different ways. So, maybe you can create custom landing pages or experiences that help showcase value without a full signup or free plan or free trial experience. Maybe you give folks the ability to sign up and while they've sort of signed up as an interested customer, they're not fully experiencing things, they might not even have the option to pay for something yet, but they can learn. There's some resources. There's some education for them to experience. Or, maybe you can think about top of funnel adoption or traffic as being most helpful for extension within customers you already. So, if you've signed contracts with a couple really large Fortune 500 companies and somebody wants to join and signs up on your website from the same email domain, then you can provide an experience for them that might feel like it helps them learn the mechanics that's actually only available to folks who are part of organizations that already have contracts with you. It's a different way of thinking about PLG and not necessarily something you would offer for free, they're already an enterprise customer, but some of those concepts can still have a lot of value and help you grow the footprint of an account in an organization, and those are definitely awesome things to try if you can't offer something self-serve.…

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