What is Product Led Growth and how to implement this strategy in the work of your company + cases?

PLG (Product Led Growth) is a growth strategy that relies on the product itself to drive growth by focusing on user adoption and engagement. User actions and activity influence the acquisition of new users, retention, and revenue. The goal is to turn users into product evangelists who will spread the word about the product to their friends and colleagues.

Growth can be slow in the early years of a PLG company as community building takes time, but they can eventually scale faster.

Who uses Product led growth?

Those global companies that are showing amazing growth today are companies with a Product led growth strategy.

Some of the more prominent companies using this strategy include:

??Slack is an enterprise messenger that is using PLG's strategy to accelerate its growth. They started by simplifying registration and making changes to the product to make it more product-friendly and get users on board quickly. Slack also used viral marketing, allowing users to invite their friends and colleagues to the messenger. This created a network effect and accelerated the spread of the service. Slack also allows users to use a free version and monetizes through paid plans with advanced features. Thanks to PLG, Slack has been able to become one of the fastest growing messengers for businesses and earn more than a billion dollars annually.

??Dropbox: A file sharing app that made it convenient and easy to store and share documents. It used the PLG strategy by providing its users with free access to basic app features and limited data storage options. This made it possible to attract a large number of users who became potential payers for the advanced version. In addition, Dropbox actively leveraged referrals from its satisfied users, a key element of the PLG strategy.

??Miro is a virtual whiteboard service that allows teams to work on projects remotely in real-time. The company uses a PLG strategy to attract and retain customers. In the first stage, Miro offers free use of its service to attract the maximum number of users. Then, as customers become more familiar with the product, they are offered paid plans with additional features.

??Zoom: a video conferencing service that gained huge popularity during the pandemic and became an essential tool for video communication in both business and personal life. Starting with the creation of a free plan for small groups, Zoom moved on to integrating with other programs and offering the product in a SaaS format. This allowed Zoom to attract more users and grow at an intense pace, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when many people had to work from home and communicate with colleagues remotely.

??Canva is a design creation service that offers users a free and paid version of the product. Canva has made its product so simple and intuitive that anyone can use it without any special design skills. The free version of Canva includes a limited number of features, allowing users to try the product and upgrade to the paid version if they want additional capabilities.

??ChatGPT is one of the most successful implementations of Product-led Growth in the development of intelligent assistants. I wrote more about this in a separate post.

Who is Product led growth suitable for?

Before we get into the finer details, it's important to understand that Product-led growth works best for SaaS businesses with transactional sales and affordable pricing.

But I believe that every business can benefit from these product-based growth principles because they are applicable and useful to almost any business, SaaS or not.

First of all, because PLG is a reaction to consumer behavior and preferences. PLG works best when the team has a healthy mix of product-related skills such as product management, design and data analysis. It is also important that the product is at the center of all decision-making processes.

A culture of experimentation and continuous improvement is also a requirement, with the team constantly encouraged to try out new ideas and strategies to drive growth.

??Ask yourself: Do I have the right mix of talents to implement this model?

??Technology: PLG works best when it has the tools and resources to track and analyze customer behavior, usage and engagement data. Ask yourself: Are you ready to invest in the tools and resources needed to track and analyze customer behavior, usage, and engagement data?

??Budget: PLG works best when there is a healthy investment in product development, customer support and technical infrastructure. Ask yourself: Can I justify this investment? Where do I need to make sacrifices?

??Marketing: PLG works best with scalable marketing strategies such as content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media marketing.

??Ask yourself: Do I have the right marketing strategy in place to successfully implement PLG?

??User experience: PLG works best when the product is intuitive, easy to use, and solves user problems

??Features: PLG works best when the features included in the product are competitive and unique

??Performance: PLG works best when the product is fast, reliable and scalable to handle growing usage

??Why do you need a strategy? Product led growth

??Because paid traffic is getting more expensive every year. The auction is overheating. At the same time, due to super high competition, more and more products are becoming free. It is becoming more difficult for businesses to make money, the economy is deteriorating.

??Users no longer want to talk to sales managers. They want to test! Study the product yourself, get your experience working with it. This is the only way they can understand whether this product is good for them personally, for their company or not. And only after gaining such experience, they will be ready to pay for the product, "get attached" to it.

??Entrusting the fate of the product only to the sales department is too expensive and time-consuming. And there is a gap between the product team and the sales team.

How to implement the Product led growth strategy?

For the Product led growth strategy to work, users must quickly understand the main value of the product.

Work through the common message and all the advertising texts about the product. In them, you should emphasize the end users. Be sure to show real examples of how your service solves some pain points and needs. Let everything be clear, understandable and transparent. Create the right expectations for your product in people.

Give users time to rate the product, enjoy it for free. Let them see the value in it. Here you have to choose between Free trial (free access to the full version of the product, but limited in time) and Freemium — free access to the main part of the product forever.

I talked about it more detail here.

Simple and useful onboarding. The faster the user can start working in the product, the better. Do not require the person to enter credit card information from the first seconds, do not make the registration too boring, save him from complex settings. Let the user start doing something right away.

Again, a deep product-oriented strategy may not be right for every business. However, that doesn't mean you won't benefit from exploring the elements or lessons you can take from this model to apply to your business.

I am always happy to share my knowledge and help others achieve success. If you need a digital marketing consultation, I am happy to offer a free 30 minute session to assess your needs and help understand how I can be of service to you.

You can find details and registration on my Topmate profile, feel free to contact me!

https://topmate.io/konstantyn_soloviov