Topics covered: It's warmer now so thanks everybody today I'm going…; Participating Liars you're one of them so just think…; Golden standard this is what we want we want….
Find the ideas you need and go straight to the source.
It's warmer now so thanks everybody today I'm going…
“it's warmer now so uh thanks everybody today I'm going to be talking about three product L strategies that I use to generate over a billion dollars in self-served revenue for our clients and so I am going to try and blast through everything but I want to give you a little hints yes if you know me I wrote the book on product Le growth this is going to involve a little bit of product Le growth in order to get that amount of Self Serve Revenue but here's the thing product growth it's only half of t”
Participating Liars you're one of them so just think…
“participating Liars you're one of them so just think about what that looks like for you because the goal here with the winning strategies you have to be in the position where you're like okay we are the obvious choice in one part of the market so this I kind of ripped off of the book essentialism which if anybody's read it fantastic book you can take a lot away from just the cover of the book because it it is this actually and a bad strategy is a lot like this one where it's like okay we're goin”
“golden standard this is what we want we want people to actually pick up that flower and actually level up they're able to do something that they weren't able to do before they can actually attribute like a a meaningful difference in their life between your product signing up that free product and actually doing something now if you're like uh usually this happens to VC back companies there's the other alternative where it's like you go way too far on the spectrum of what you give away for free y”
“product he was like I don't quite know so then he uh went into mix panel he tried to like rumage through numbers he came back to me was like Wes um yeah we have this one step that they have to do before they go into the product it's the the email verification step and 27% of people don't ever even do this step and go into the product I was like interesting I mean I've seen this before but like that's a that's a lot of people you're missing out on and so we decided”
it's warmer now so uh thanks everybody today I'm going to be talking about three product L strategies that I use to generate over a billion dollars in self-served revenue for our clients and so I am going to try and blast through everything but I want to give you a little hints yes if you know me I wrote the book on product Le growth this is going to involve a little bit of product Le growth in order to get that amount of Self Serve Revenue but here's the thing product growth it's only half of the store which is why I'm here because
after writing the bestselling book on product growth helping over 400 plus companies Implement product Le growth and working with some amazing Fortune 500 companies that I just can't share I have identified that there's this one big idea that if you Embrace this if you embody this in your business it's going to make the biggest difference when you try and build a plg motion but I want to just share a bit of the backstory of like how did I find out about this so over this was about last year I went
through all 324 plus of our customers and I was like okay let's look through everybody we've helped I'll go through their websites talk to the founders talk to everybody we worked with and see what separates like the good results from the people who was like Hey like you tried to implement plg it just didn't work out like what what what happened here and so I realized I was like okay 80% we're senior product folks which was like fantastic that was our ideal customer profile at that time and so I was like
okay that's interesting now 20% of them were Founders so I was like okay smaller subaction but interesting and then question for you out of all of this like data so which group do you think like generate 80% of results yes now why do you think that would be the case because just faster doing stuff they're faster at doing stuff but experimental they experiment a lot more anybody else have any other ideas looking yeah
totally so you're all on to something here there's something going on about what Founders do differently when they're thinking about how do I actually Implement plg into my business and so we'll get to why but the main thing here that I realized is that when I started looking at all of the product folks that were implementing plg they're kind of doing what I call surface level PG and tell me if this sounds familiar I'm sure none of you are doing this but this is what I see a lot whenever it comes to plg is you're kind of focusing on like
four things there's like your model it's like is it a free trial is it a freemium model what's our pricing like okay we got to make something transparent here our onboarding experience and then there's like okay of course we got to have an offer or something to promise people and so is any of that sound like familiar like yes I've done that all right no worries this presentation will be insanely valuable as a result so this is what happens the product folks forgot
everything that supports plg and so what exactly is that well I call this thinking about plg as a product Thing versus just a company thing which I totally get because it's like what is it called Product L growth the product thing is a big piece of this right yes but it's it's more than that so everything below the surface is what we identified as actually that's the 8020 of this if you don't actually focus on
like how does this free thing actually connect with our overarch ing company level strategy of how we're going to win or do we actually have the right team that has the right capabilities to do this or do we have the right product data to understand like what the heck is going on in that product and so we identified that the companies that actually saw a lot of success with plg they were actually building everything below the surface which I call your product L organization and so the kicker here is if you think about like okay I
want to do plg that top level thing those first four pieces your product L growth motion will only be as strong as your product Le organization to the bottom that supports it and so that's really what I'm going to drive home today and what we're going to go through today is what I call the product Le system this is a little preview of the book I'm working on and uh little update five of you are going to get it for free today so uh yeah
before it's even released which is going to be fun so I want to share three of the product leg strategies out of the N that are going to be insanely helpful for you to actually build a product organization and these are going to be really great questions for you just to to think through and really refine your product L strategy so first question how clearly are you the obvious choice for customers in your Market where do you stand on this scale are you kind of like in the the first part we were like yeah
one to two like barely noticeable anybody okay that's fine and that's where a lot of people are too if is is it fairly apparent where you're like I think I think I think we're like okay maybe obvious choice okay yeah and then how many of you are like damn like there's no way a cosom could come into the space and be like we're not the obvious choice anybody there all right so the rest people not
Participating Liars you're one of them so just think…
participating Liars you're one of them so just think about what that looks like for you because the goal here with the winning strategies you have to be in the position where you're like okay we are the obvious choice in one part of the market so this I kind of ripped off of the book essentialism which if anybody's read it fantastic book you can take a lot away from just the cover of the book because it it is this actually and a bad strategy is a lot like this one where it's like okay we're going to expend
energy in all these different directions a fantastic winning strategy is like this where it's like you actually direct everybody's energy into one place so how many people want to be like this one on the right yeah cool all right now these five questions will help you do just that so the first one is which Market do you think you could become the obvious choice in what does that look like I believe every one of you in your
business you can become the obvious choice in a market not every Market but a given Market you just have to get really really clear on what that looks like for your business so that's the first big task try and think about what does that look like for your business now once you're clear on what you can become the obvious choice in the next piece is where do you actually play in your business so I'm talking about like
who is your ideal customer what is the problem you solve what are the marketing channels that you're going to really hone in on dial up and once you're clear on where you're going to play the next thing is how the heck are you going to win in this particular case so I'm talking about how do you build hard to copy Moes and so these are really thinking about like is it you're going to differentiate is it operational
efficiency is it user experience and what we identified there's like these 15 main modes so you got to really think about in your business but less is more what are those top two or maybe three modes that you got to dial in as far as how you're going to win in your business so that's the third thing there's two more the next one is what is the winning picture so when we think about your business what does that one-year picture look like if at the end of this year like what does that look like and also
your quarterly picture like the next three months what does that look like what are your top initiatives what does that winning look like for your specific business but more importantly what is the end game for your business does your entire team know or is it just kind of something for you as a found you're like yeah it's this exit make all the money but what does that winning picture look like for your business and then the last thing is what are some of those strategic choices you must make and back to that first slide where it was like
energy diffusing in all these different directions the really big thing is a lot of times when we feel like friction as a Founder we we're like yeah we're trying to do so many things and all this stuff is usually a result of we haven't made a strategic Choice there we're trying to do too many things trying to focus on too many different kinds of customers we have too many kinds of products and so we just need to bolt it down and make a strategic choice to say no actually we can't do everything we can only do a few
things really well so combined I call that the bullseye strategy framework that helps you really become the obvious choice in your specific market so that's one of the product L strategies that you can use for your business now I want to share two more the next one is the most popular when we talk about what the heck do you give away for free for your product lead motion so I want to go through the model component and so quick kind of quiz how intentional do you feel
like your free model is is it like uh we we just guessed anybody nobody oh okay couple is it you know it's I think it's okay like it's it's kind of working you know somewhere in the five to six okay yeah a lot more people and is it like yes this is perfectly free do not touch it we nailed it okay one person awesome we got a chalk all right so this is so interesting because when it comes to
your free model A lot of times uh I encountered myself in this boat too this is I just guessed my first time I was thinking about what to give away for free competitors had a 14-day free trial we're like great us too and so I want to give you the Mario analogy as far as how you think about what the heck do you give away for free so the first kind of like Insight here is a great free model is just like playing Mario so little Mario over here he uh picks up the flower he goes like much bigger spews
fire he's really cool he's badass all that thing so like that's an amazing free experience now when it comes to like what is most common it's usually something like this where it's like okay somebody signs up for your free trial and they're exactly the same there's like net no difference anybody have like that trial experience where like H yeah that's it's not that fun I mean you do it and then you're like okay but I'm not really going to come back to that product again and again so this is the
golden standard this is what we want we want people to actually pick up that flower and actually level up they're able to do something that they weren't able to do before they can actually attribute like a a meaningful difference in their life between your product signing up that free product and actually doing something now if you're like uh usually this happens to VC back companies there's the other alternative where it's like you go way too far on the spectrum of what you give away for free you just give them everything they
beat the whole game they have no reason to upgrade this was me with Evernote I was like a freeloader user for eight years before they ever got me and uh that's because they just gave me all the features for free so think about that for your product what is that fine line of what you need to give away for free now I'll share a quick example with Tetra and when you actually nail this for your business so with Tetra one of the things that they initially had was a
free trial motion and so if you don't know what Tetra is it's like a Wikipedia knowledge based tool kind of like notion in a lot of ways and so they had a 14-day free trial you would sign up for it and it's kind of like a Google doc it's nice easy to use all those things but then if you just play around with it for 14 days how different is it than like a Google doc you don't really get the value of a Wikipedia tool for your company until you actually start sharing it with a new employee onboarding or
something like that and so people couldn't actually uh get the value out of Teter and here's the kicker and the main kind of takeaway when you think about what do I give away for free is your product's core value needs to shine in this case with their free motion it couldn't shine it was like I would only see the value of tetra when I onboard new people and then they start using the product and so if that's your case and your free product you're like you know our best feature is the the coolest thing about our product nobody can see
that value then okay we got to switch things up so whenever Tetra switched it up they decided okay we need to give a Freeman motion for this product and what you can see here is the number of signups for their switch it started to Skyrocket as soon as they made that switch the number of actually like net new Mr started to grow when you get the right model and then also when it came to the number of upgrades those also started going up as well and there were tension I don't have that graph here but
that also started to increase so I wanted to share the example because whenever you pick the right model you will see more signups you will see more people upgrading you will see more upgrades you'll see less churn at the end of the day when you get it now here's how you can actually decide at the end of this what the heck do you give away for free so the first thing you got to do is this is your user at the other side and you got to think
about okay for them to get to all the way to this side what are the levels I want you to like obsess about this get a little like nerdy gamify this with me there's level one level two level three break down like okay for that user to ultimately get you success let's like chunk this down into a few different levels what does that look like for them and so once you do that you kind of say Okay level one you you're able to do this if it's uh canva you make your first graphic if it's like level three
for canva it's you know what you're you're adding the rest of your team on board you're creating your brand assets all that stuff so you create those levels then the next thing is you got to identify what are all those challenges that get in their way what are all those things that prevent them from hitting level one from hitting level two from hitting level three you map out everything not just product stuff skill deficiencies knowledge gaps all the things that might be missing for them to actually see success in each of those
levels so you map out all those challenges and then what you do is you just try and identify okay what are all the solutions if we think about uh any potential solution what are some of the best ones we could give people to really just overcome each of those challenges at that specific level so once they start level one it's much easier for them to actually overcome and then the last thing is just tighten it up go through what the heck is this called is it a usage based model is it a freemie
model all that stuff get really specific on what this is so people know what they're signing up for on that end so that is the second product strategy that is how you decide what to give away for free and what is paid the last one I want to leave you with real quick is the onboarding component so this is all about how do you actually get people to Value within your product as soon as humanly possible so quick question how easy is it to sign up get to Value and
upgradeing your product is it you know super difficult is it extremely smooth or is it effortless just think about that in your head and we'll get through the framework real quick but first I want to give you a quick example so this is my friend's company snapper.com they got like 10,000 plus signups per week on their website and at that time just kind of talked to the founder Chris I'm like hey like how many signups what do they typically do in the product how many people who sign up actually go into the
product he was like I don't quite know so then he uh went into mix panel he tried to like rumage through numbers he came back to me was like Wes um yeah we have this one step that they have to do before they go into the product it's the the email verification step and 27% of people don't ever even do this step and go into the product I was like interesting I mean I've seen this before but like that's a that's a lot of people you're missing out on and so we decided
on how to actually address this we said okay let's uh you you still need this step okay in that case I was trying to convince him not but they're like we got to keep this step but let's delay it you know the first time people log into this product they don't have to do this the second time okay on that login page if they haven't verified it yet they got to do this step to get in the second time but like let's make it easy for the first time users so as soon as we did this anybody want to take a guess at the percentage of their monthly recurring
revenue of how much it boosted with in the next month of rolling this out anybody want to take a guess 20% yes you got it so 20% bang on you win a prize yes it was 20% and you kept sending the screenshot like oh my God this is amazing I'm so excited for you because you made frictionless onboarding that is the goal when we reduce friction most times you will see the similar
result so that's why more users upgraded we made it frictionless but how do we actually do this for your product there's three things you got to do actually Four let's talk about the first one first one is you see the uh bowling alley this part for what we call it pins yes pins when you strike them out that's called the first strike get very clear on like what is that first strike for your product and the next thing is you got to do is build a straight line so this is a really fun activity to run with your team is what I love to do I
get everybody in one team and say all right here's the game you're GNA find the fastest path to get to Value and you have them kind of all go through jot down every single step and then what you're supposed to do is just find out okay what is the fast path what is the exact minimum number of steps to get to Value and so how you do that is if it's like a red step it's something where it's like hey that's like we could kill it it does not matter we don't need it
yellow step kind of advanced let's delay that step but you're just left with the green steps that's your straight line now once you have your straight line the next thing you got to do is lay on a product bumper so anybody seeing like those tool little things when you log into a product yeah so product bumpers are amazing when you use them right they're terribly annoying when you don't know what you're doing and you just wander around slapping on onboarding tool tips and uh yeah it doesn't drive anybody anywhere so what you want to do is you just use product bumpers every
single time for one of those straight line onboarding steps so that the first time somebody goes into the product it's really easy and you don't have to use oning tips you can just make your product easy to use in the first place but uh that's what you want to do is make it really really simple for people to get to that value but that's still not enough people will still drop off the next thing you got to do is build a conversational bumper and that conversational bumper is could be emails could be texts could be even reaching out to people on LinkedIn if they signed up you found them you're like hey I you
sign up for our products how could we help you I noticed you got stuck in the onboarding could I set it up for you and it's just being helpful for that part and guiding them back on to the straight line wherever they are and so combined that's how you create that frictionless oming experience that improves with getting more people to Value so where do we go from here at the end of this so I want to recap this real quick so remember plg is only half of the story
you need to build a product organization to make this work for your business how you do that is you got to build a winning strategy for your business design an intentional model and then you also have to craft frictionless onboarding for your business and how you do that is you can build a product that organization now for the last part these are like the full kind of nine Frameworks and product strategies you can utilize I did say I had a gift for the people who are fastest on this one
so here's a little challenge the first five people that scan this QR code on the next page you're going to get the free product Le Playbook and this is going to be a fun game here because you ready this book isn't really Le yet so you're going to actually get it tomorrow You Ready set go all right I'm super pumped to share this book with you because I've been working on it for years as Nathan said it's release date October 1st and I haven't shared that
anywhere else so don't tell anybody but uh yes it's coming out so thank you everybody for for attending my talk this was great for bringing your warm body energy because this room is warm now thank you and I think up next we got Steve AV
