Hey Everyone!
Last month I posted about how our learnings on growing to $24k ARR (view post here).
Up until now, we’ve had a sales-led go-to-market strategy which has worked (and is still working) well for us.
So naturally we’re going to scrap it and try something completely different (product-led growth).
We’re planning on taking a freemium approach where we offer a base version of our product to our intended user for free.
This is a newer area for us as a founding team so I’m keen to crowdsource some knowledge here from the community:
- What’s worked well for you, what hasn’t
- Are there any frameworks/guides/books you’d recommend
For some context (NOT PROMOTION), we’re a SaaS management, procurement & adoption platform. Our customers are businesses that spend more than $150k per year on SaaS.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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i think the term product led growth means different things to different people. but, i’ll assume what you mean is something like hubspot where feedback and discussion with the client leads to matching the right product feature and if the feature doesn’t exist (and theres enough clients saying they want it) developing said new feature.
presumably this is to reduce having to have a lot of OPEX in sales ppl and commissions and to enable you to scale faster. also we can assume the ideal is a great product since you’re building to what the masses say they want.
firstly - doing one doesn’t mean you need to exclude the other, so if one wheel is working well, why bother replacing it for now?
Next, you need to first consider if your customers would be willing to accept a product-led growth approach to sales - are they willing to wait for the new product? can they tolerate bugs and a sub-par experience?
Finally, is your engineering team geared for this? can they work sufficiently fast? are they sufficiently resourced? do you have scrum and aglie cycles setup with a truly talented Product Lead who can filter the noise? and with that do you have enough dry powder at your disposal to survive and hire?
(context NOT PROMOTION -i (get paid a lot by a VC to) advise a shit ton (50) startups, most in b2b)
Product Led means designing the product features to pull the user towards wanting to pay for important features. It requires a lot of micro experiments and a good understanding of your core value proposition. You need a product leader who is skilled at testing ideas quickly to figure out a formula that works. In the meantime - don’t stop selling. $48K ARR is very small so you haven’t learned too much yet.