TymeX’s Approach to Product-Led Growth
How We Landed on Product-Led Growth (PLG) — And Why It Just Made Sense
Author: Michael Jon Wissekerke
So, picture this: It’s late 2018, and we’re gearing up for the launch of TymeBank. There’s excitement in the air, right? Everyone’s buzzing, we’re getting our first users in to open accounts online and at our kiosks as part of a soft launch 3 months before the brand launch, and it seems like everything’s moving in the right direction. But about a month after the first users start coming through the door, reality hits like a Cape Doctor cold front. It’s sharp, and we weren’t ready for it.
We’re trying to measure what our users are doing, but it’s like trying to herd cats. Data’s sitting in silos, scattered across systems that aren’t talking to each other.
We had usual suspects: Google Analytics and Tag Manager measuring clicks and page and screen views on the frontend as well as backend system data landing on our data warehouse at the time, but the big question — the one that really mattered — was: How do we tie this all together into one clear picture? It felt like we were trying to piece together a puzzle, but half the pieces were missing.
Even though we were doing what was considered “best practice,”. The data wasn’t giving us the full story. There were gaps big enough to drive a bus through.
Funnels Are Great… Until They Aren’t
We had all the classic thinking: bring people in at the top, encourage them to sign up, and get them to convert. Easy, right? But as we dug into (still in siloed systems) the data, it became clear this approach wasn’t working for us. People aren’t linear. It’s like trying to pull someone away from a group huddled around the braai (South African word for “Grilling”) — they’re going to get distracted, chat with someone, maybe grab a drink on the way.
The point is this: they take their own path.
People dip in and out, they explore different parts of the product, and some come back a week later. The funnel wasn’t showing us the whole story — we were missing the bits that mattered most.
Eventually, I had to face it: Funnels only tell part of the story, and sometimes the most important parts get left out. It took time to realize this — because you don’t know what you don’t know, right?
The Turning Point: My own “Aha!” moment
By early 2021, it was time for a rethink. I started looking at what other high-growth companies were doing — especially the ones that had really cracked it. Product-Led Growth (PLG) became a recurring theme, and the more I looked into it, the more it made sense.
PLG rethinks growth. It’s not about marketing tactics or sales funnels — the product itself becomes the driver of growth. Make the product good — really good — and people will keep using it. It’s such powerfully simple thought, but easy to overlook. And better yet, they’ll tell their mates (as an example of a word of mouth loop) about it. Instead of pushing people through a process, PLG lets the product do most of the heavy lifting for you. It’s about earning growth, not forcing it.
And honestly? It was one of those moments where you look at the way you’ve been doing things and think, “Why didn’t we see this sooner?”
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Why Product-Led Growth Hinted at Something Better
Once I wrapped my head around PLG or at leats my conception of it, it was clear this wasn’t just a trendy new product model. Here’s why it made sense:
The Nuance of “Loops Over Funnels”
With funnels, there’s a start and an end — it’s all very linear and rigid. But with loops and cyclical thinking, it’s fluid and continuous.
People use the product, they engage, and their actions add more to the inertia and momentum to the system which is the input to the next loop. It’s an ongoing cycle, and that was the real change for us and how we thought about and how we did things.
Don’t get me wrong, funnels still have their place — they help us understand certain stages and segments of the process.
But loops are about systems thinking. Every user action influences the product, creating a ripple effect that drives inertia and momentum. This shift made us see the product as part of an interconnected system. It wasn’t about just getting people to sign up and move on — it was about making them love the product so much they come back again and again and again, and in some ways contribute to the system itself.
It sounds subtle, but it changed how we conceptualized our product offering. The product wasn’t just a tool anymore — it became the center of our strategy, optimized as a system of interconnected parts.
Why PLG Became Our North Star
Looking back, adopting Product-Led Growth thinking was the moment things started to make sense. Funnels were, and still are, useful to an extent, but they were too limiting. PLG let us focus on scaling in a sustainable way, with the user experience at the core, and the product driving growth.
Once the strategy was clear, the next challenge was finding the right tools to bring it all to life. And that’s where things got exciting. In the next post, I’ll share how we built the tech stack.
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Product Manager, Product Owner
3 个月Good story. I’m curious about the results after you applied PLG into your works at Tymebank and how the results are different compared to how it was before.
Principal Consultant @ Mambu | Driving Customer Success in ASEAN
3 个月This rhymes so much to the Lenny's podcast episode with Nubank's approach mentioned by Jag Duggal in Lenny Rachitsky's podcast about how Nubank used the Sean Ellis Score to identify the product features which would make the customers disappointed if the given feature just gone away. Since the competitors of digital banks does not follow the product lead approach, this is the edge what propelled both Nubank, TymeBank and GoTyme Bank to the top of the pack. https://youtu.be/8A7wXK2MncQ?si=Bv_-1H2N2jpl4Dbh