Like many companies, Jebbit wanted to transition from sales-led to product-led. Our company had a successful top-down sales track record, but I didn’t think Jebbit was living up to its full potential.
Our journey to product-led growth (PLG) was bumpy. We had setbacks and failures, but eventually, Jebbit found success. This article will touch on are the main takeaways from our experience:
- Getting Aligned with a Product-Led Growth Strategy
- The First Stages of PLG
- Our Product-Led Initiative
- Making a PLG Task Force
- Our Product-Led “Aha!” Week
- New Plans, New Challenges
- Advice to Enterprise Leaders
Let’s start with an overview of Jebbit and why our company decided to release a free version of our product.
Introducing Jebbit
Jebbit gives marketers the tools to create quizzes and interactive experiences (without touching a line of code) to capture customer data. If you see, for example, a 5-question product recommendation quiz on a website, chances are Jebbit powers it.
Our team sold to Proctor and Gamble, Expedia, the NFL, and other large businesses. Then, after eight years of sales-led motion success, Jebbit released a freemium version of our product.
Why?
Two events pushed me to go for a product-led model:
- Jebbit worked on a deal following a typical enterprise path. We met a mid-level marketer from a large retail store at a conference, and he loved Jebbit and wanted to champion our product. After several meetings, it came down to 80 percent of the decision-makers on board with Jebbit, but the other 20 percent were undecided. What their marketer said was eye-opening:
“I have a great strategy. I will use a free quiz platform to make a quiz and use that data to prove to my boss why we should sign this contract with you.”
It hit me: why can’t our company have a free version to try?
- I listened to an interview with Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot. Halligan spoke about the future selling – that end-users will drive industry, not chief information officers or executive-level managers.
The interview, coupled with everyday experiences, made it clear how to maximize Jebbit’s potential.
In November 2019, we decided that 80% of the company’s engineering resources and focus would be dedicated to the enterprise version, while the remaining 20% of our time and resources would develop a new free version.
Getting Aligned with a Product-Led Growth Strategy
Getting buy-in on the free version wasn’t easy.
The sales team at Jebbit was very skeptical when they first heard about a free version. Our product team was excited, but they also acknowledged that the project would be challenging.
The enterprise version of Jebbit has many templates and experience types. After a customer builds their product, they can embed it on their website, email, app, or paid ads. However, when our team started developing the free product version, we focused on one specific use case and onboarding flow.
The first version of our free product was a quiz to put on a company’s homepage. Site visitors could take the quiz, get matched with a product or service, and the company might capture a lead.
Our Onboarding Challenge
As a sales-led organization, Jebbit was used to signing an enterprise deal over a two- to four-month sales cycle. Our team spent an hour onboarding a new customer in person or Zoom to teach them how to use the platform. Then, they were available to answer any questions they had before taking their product live.
Onboarding was our main obstacle as we started working on our free quiz. Here’s the challenge I gave our product team at Jebbit:
- I want a user to be able to sign up, not speak to anyone, build this quiz, and get it live on their homepage without talking to us.
- Ideally, this process needs to happen in 30 to 45 minutes because marketers at small companies are busy.
Eventually, our team overcame our challenge, but the process didn’t happen overnight. It took a lot of trial and error.
The First Stages of PLG
I didn't have complete buy-in to try out a product-led model because some executives and the sales team were skeptical. So I created a small internal product-led growth (PLG) task force, and my goal was to explain my initiative through successful action.
Our PLG task force included five people from product and marketing: the chief marketing officer, vice president of product, one marketer, one product employee, and myself.
We met every week and dedicated about 20% of our time to the effort. Eventually, our PLG task force also pulled in a few engineers to help build our first free quiz.
Of course, creating a product team and introducing a PLG strategy will be different for each company. As the CEO of Jebbit, it was easier for me to implement our PLG task force than it would have been for someone who is not in a leadership role. I had enough buy-in from my management team that I could advance with my vision, and they supported me.
The free quiz took us over a year to create: three times longer than planned. It was also much harder than we expected to build a great onboarding flow that’s easy for people to use.
Nevertheless, in June 2020, we got our first big win (more on this below). And with this success, our PLG task force was also able to build faith from the sales team and other skeptics.
Our Product-Led Initiative
As mentioned above, our Jebbit PLG task force started on a single-use case – a free quiz embedded on a company homepage to match a consumer to the right product for them.
There are the variables our team considered when choosing our first product-led initiative:
- First, we looked at the use case data about what our enterprise customers do a lot. The use case we selected for our free version was one of the top three.
- Next, we wanted a use case that was easy to explain. In product-led growth, all you have is a landing page or quick video to demonstrate the value proposition and draw in the consumer.
- Then, we considered how to get the best exposure. Since the free quizzes will showcase a “Powered by Jebbit” icon, what use case will get the most attention? Large companies spend big money to ensure their quizzes on their homepage are custom to their brand in the enterprise world.
Making a PLG Task Force
The mission of our PLG task force was to create a free quiz builder so that our customers could create a free quiz.
We knew:
- The product would attract many smaller businesses that would inevitably sign up.
- We would launch through Shopify. Launching on Shopify doesn’t happen overnight; you have to build the page, feel confident, and get it approved. We didn't go live on Shopify until November 2020, about a year after we started.
The first step of the PLG task force’s game plan was asking friends and family to be our beta users. In January 2020, about two months after launching the free version on Shopify, we were eager to see how the 25 beta testers interacted with the quiz. Unfortunately, no one could figure out how to use it: the experience was demoralizing.
Our next course of action was to learn from our mistakes.
We talked to some beta users and pinpointed where they got stuck during onboarding. Some people didn’t know where to click or understand the logic behind setting up the outcome logic (answers to the five questions) to match the quiz-taker with a product or service.
Our PLG task force was small, and we only had two engineers, so updates to our free quiz builder happened slowly. A few months later, in March, we tested the improved version and saw a small improvement. Out of the 20 beta users, five of them got the product live this time.
In June 2020, we finally felt confident enough to invest in Adwords to drive more people to test our free quiz builder on Shopify. By November of 2020, more than 800 people had signed up for our free quiz builder. We had a lot more real data and used it to make minor tweaks that improved the user experience.
Analytics are Important
Jebbit works with a suite of analytics dashboards that we’ve built since our PLG task force started. Today, we look at the number of accounts created daily, who made “x” amount of edits in their experience, who put their experience live, who has more than a thousand people completing their quiz, etc.
These different levers help our team understand which users the sales team should call, which ones are worth reaching out to, and who is getting stuck. This helps us fix the problem.
Our Product-Led “Aha!” Moment Week
In June 2020, two events in the same week led to our product-led “Aha!” moment.
To begin the week, an unknown user who runs a small e-commerce brand logged in to build a quiz. In 40 minutes, he designed the quiz, set his outcome logics, and embedded the quiz on his website. Later, he tweeted about Jebbit and how easy it was to create the free quiz.
Seeing the “powered by Jebbit” words on the website of a person we had no prior relationship or emotional ties with was small but very rewarding.
In June, another user from a more prominent mid-market e-commerce brand booked a call with one of our sales reps. By Monday, when that sales call took place, the user had spent over ten hours on the platform, built out multiple different quizzes, and was sold on Jebbit’s services.
It was a one-call deal: the customer not only signed a paid contract, but they also skipped all of our paid tiers and signed up for the enterprise version. This customer signup was the first time the sales team had benefited from the efforts of our PLG task force, and they wanted to learn more about the free quiz.
How Jebbit Changed
After our “Aha!” week, Jebbit started to see successful conversions and revenue driven by this free quiz. The once skeptical sales team and others in management began to lean into a product-led model. Our data proved that our free-account quiz attracts small and medium-sized businesses and big enterprise brands, leading to more significant conversions.
Product-led growth is no longer a 5-member task force: it’s integrated into the everyday business of Jebbit.
On our homepage, you see our quiz that asks you some questions and matches you to the Jebbit version that’s right for your business.
New Plan, New Challenges
With this new business plan comes new tensions. Here are a few examples:
- It’s a challenge to balance our product roadmap, prioritize, and decide what features need to be built for paid and free versions.
- Pricing is another challenge. Alongside the freemium version, the company needs to highlight the value and benefits of paying for advanced Jebbit features.
Advice to Enterprise Leaders
Going sales-led to product-led isn’t going to be an overnight success. I thought it would take Jebbit about one year to develop a successful free quiz builder, but it took twice as long.
I recommend starting with a specific use case and a small task force. Along the way, your team will fail, and small wins are opportunities to learn, improve your strategy, and gain the approval of team skeptics.
Once your product-led task force starts seeing success, remember to be proactive about sharing that news and data. All departments need to be in the know for the company to integrate a product-led strategy in the long term.
