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Ramli John:
Welcome everybody to another live expert session. I am excited to have here, Andrew Capland, good dude, happy guy, smart guy obviously as well, and he has experience leading and growing growth teams at HubSpot, Wistia and Postscript, which is pretty impressive. How is it going, Andrew? How are things for you today?
Andrew Capland:
I'm doing great, man. Although I'm looking at myself in my box here on Zoom and I'm realizing I really need a haircut, man, but otherwise, I'm doing fantastic.
Ramli John:
Awesome. Well, Janelle and Michael, if you have any questions, feel free to drop it in the question or the chat. So, if you want to unmute yourself, you can feel free as well. Andrew, one of the reasons why I brought you in was because of your experience in growth and I've been getting a ton of questions around how does a growth team fit into a ProductLed org? And obviously that you've seen HubSpot is ProductLed, Wistia is ProductLed, and Postscript is ProductLed. I am really curious how your role in growth fits into a ProductLed organization?
Andrew Capland:
Yeah, it's kind of cool. I feel like a ProductLed org is just a really good fit for a cross functional team working on growth. And so, at a more traditional inside sales model or at an enterprise company, you would typically have a head of sales. And all of the leads that come in that marketing generates would go into the sales funnel and the sales team would work those in the ways that they're used to working. And there's a good feedback loop and over time they grow revenue and share that and there's a good accountability on both sides.
Andrew Capland:
But what happens is in a ProductLed org, where a lot of the customers come in without ever having talked to sales, there ends up being this gap in who owns that funnel. Who's accountable for the folks that find out about the website through some marketing stuff, get to use the product through some product work and user experience, and then eventually convert and generate revenue. There isn't really somebody that owned that.
Andrew Capland:
And so, that's what growth has been at the companies that I've worked at. It's been a cross-functional team that's focused on the self-serve side of the business. They're working on solving conversion problems, getting a feedback loop, driving more revenue, and in some cases, really balancing the two funnels so that as new folks come in, you figure out if it makes sense for them to go to sales. Not everyone should go through the self-service funnel and so a lot of it is identifying folks to send over to the other side of the fence, so to speak, and then also optimize, iterate, and hopefully improve the conversion of those in the one-to-many pool.
Ramli John:
I'm going to go there. I'm going to ask you how that fits in because that's another question we get a lot is how do you figure that out, self services sales. But the other question that we get asked a lot is getting buy-in from across other teams. And I've chatted with you about this before, and you have this course that we can share after, but that's a critical skill for growth teams to have, would you say? And if it is, what are some ways to get by and especially... To give you context, a lot of the companies we've been chatting with and part of the program, a big challenge they have is how do they get buy-in across the org for Product-Led Growth? There are some people, especially the sales team who are like, "Ah, you're eating away our lunch." But getting buy-in is such an important skill to have in this case, but especially more so for growth, right?
Andrew Capland:
Yeah. And I think it might be slightly different for companies that maybe are ProductLed from day one, versus those that are transitioning, but we can talk about the nuances there. My experience are working at companies that have been ProductLed from day one. And I think about the process of getting buy-in a few ways. One, I think about it in terms of just building a strong, foundational relationship with those teams, with marketing, with sales, with the leaders from those departments. And when I mean like building a strong foundation, it's not just getting to know them as people, it's really making sure that you communicate to them what growth is and what Product-Led Growth is because a lot of them think they know or they've heard of it, but they're embarrassed to ask. And a lot of the misalignment down the road comes down to just lack of clarity.
Andrew Capland:
And so, when I started at Postscript and even when I was at Wistia, before we realized that we needed a growth team, I spent a lot of time just chatting with those folks and sharing the way I view growth and the KPIs that I thought growth owned and the way that growth operated and how that was different from those other teams, and I think that foundation paid dividends down the road. So there's that side of it.
Andrew Capland:
And then the thing that you can do that I think accelerates that are two things. One, you can get extremely close to the problem. There's a funny thing in psychology where the person who's closest to the problem or articulates the problem the best is usually trusted to have the solution, whether they know it or not. And there's all kinds of examples of this in the real world, but when it comes to working in a ProductLed org, like for me, I got really close to new user onboarding.
Andrew Capland:
I just started watching people use the product for the first time. I saw where they got stuck. I saw where they got lost. I saw where they had missed expectations, and I saw how that led to not converting. And so I just got really, really close to that problem. And naturally people would say, "Hey, can you tell us more about what you're seeing." And when they would talk about stuff and I wasn't in the room, they'd say, "Hey, I think we really need Andrew here. He's been spending a lot of time looking at this, thinking about it, sharing his learnings." And so, over time I had developed a little bit of a reputation as being someone who understood the problem really well.
Andrew Capland:
And then the other thing that you can do that will accelerate the alignment is sharing what you're learning along the way. Everyone wants to come in and crush it from day one. It'd be nice if that really happened, but usually what happens is you try a bunch of stuff, some of it works, a bunch of it doesn't work, and what most people do is they just keep plowing ahead. And what I think is really powerful is when you say, "Hey, we tried five things this month, four of them didn't work. Let me tell you about them and why I still chose them and I thought they were good ideas. And then let me tell you about what I learned from those failures and how I'm going to iterate and hopefully improve over time." And eventually this builds this real relationship of trust, where they understand that I'm focused on the user, that I'm passionate about the user, and then I'm hell-bent on fixing things for them. And so I think that those things are really helpful, like a combination of those two sides.
Ramli John:
I really love that. You're talking about communicating your learnings already. Do you have any tips around that? I've heard things like Slack channels for people to share their growth learnings, email, like a newsletter list or something like that. But I'm sure you've seen different ideas to document the learnings, and it gets shared across the org, because well, one team might be learning the sale, another team might actually find really valuable and 2X their result just because of that specific thing that you learned from that experiment.
Andrew Capland:
I've done a few things that I think are interesting, especially if folks work at smaller companies, which is my background. Even though I was at HubSpot, it was very, very early in a different stage. But there's a few things. One, when I started at Postscript, I was the 11th employee. And even though they had product market fit and they had a pretty large customer base for having a really small team, we didn't have much company process. And so, I wanted to start to highlight things that I was seeing and things that I was learning, and we didn't have a weekly show and tell or anything like that yet. And so what I did is every Wednesday I would share an interesting takeaway. I would just do it in Slack. I would do it at like four o'clock. I would tag here, and I would call it a data snack. And I'd say, "Hey, here's an interesting data snack." And I would just share like, "Oh, this month we had a 25% increase in our organic traffic. Here's a virtual high five," and people would add thumbs up emojis.
Andrew Capland:
Other times it would be maybe more qualitative, "Here's an interesting thing I tried, and here's an interesting takeaway for the user experience." And then people on the product team would be like, "Oh, that's really cool. How did you come up with that?" And stuff like that. So I think that that's really helpful. Everyone can do that even today in this pandemic, remote environment, easy enough to do.
Andrew Capland:
And then both at Postscript and at Wistia, there was a bi-weekly show and tell where anyone could get up and share things that they were doing. And I tried to share the misses. I just tried to share things that didn't work more than things that did work. And I thought as a person in a leadership position that would create a culture of trying lots of stuff, of feedback, of making it okay to fail, of really just showing that I don't have all the answers, even though I might have a little bit of experience. And I think that created a culture where that was welcomed and then eventually adopted by other teams as well. So, I think that those are some things you can do. And obviously if there's more formal avenues, those are great too.
Ramli John:
Just to the point of the second one about sharing about things that are not working. That's part of... I said this to Wes once, you become what you celebrate and by sharing "failures" or those big... Because failure is the best teacher, it's the greatest teacher, right? That helps build that culture. Would you say that's what you found was people are actually now more open and could be vulnerable in sharing what hasn't worked instead of a ra-ra attitude. I'm only going to share my best side, like what you see on Instagram versus I'm actually going to share things that didn't work out because those are the greatest. Is that what you found in that situation?
Andrew Capland:
What I learned after trying a bunch of experiments was even if I copied what the famous, successful people were doing, like when I went to the keynotes at conferences and stuff, and I hear about what people are doing and I'd copy it, it didn't always mean that it would work. And so I realized that I couldn't always predict the outcome. If we could all be successful all the time, we would. But so what I did is I tried to focus on learning regardless of the outcome and I would make it a core part of my project planning and experiment planning process, where when I would plan out a new project I'd list out why I'm doing it, what success looks like. And then I would list out if this project succeeds here's what I learned from that. If it doesn't go well at all, here's what I can still learn from it.
Andrew Capland:
And I would do it before I started so that I would go into the project, just paying attention to stuff in a different way. And then hopefully it would succeed and I would learn, which would be a double, but regardless I was getting better over time. And I think that's just like a really powerful mechanism is if you can just focus on getting better and learning. It doesn't matter if your project is a win because the next one you'll be closer, and the one after that you'll be closer. And you get better at getting better over time.
Ramli John:
So good. I love that. I think it's part of iteration, right? You're iterating to success instead of a waterfall. We're going to plan this amazing project or this transition from sales-led to ProductLed, one shot to the moon. You're putting all your eggs in one basket, instead of like you're saying here, much better to do small little experiments and iterate up to the success essentially.
Andrew Capland:
I've just never been a visionary. I've just never been someone who just intuitively knew what to... It's not built into me. And so, a mentor early on gave me some advice that was, you don't have to be right, just get good at finding the right answer. And I always thought that was really powerful where that's kind of been my whole career approach is I've tried to surround myself by really smart, creative people. I've welcomed and asked and begged for their best ideas. And I've just gotten a lot of reps at trying a lot of things, at defining what success looks like, at setting up a lot of rigor and guardrails, and pushing to that success, but it only works because the rest of the pieces are in place. It's a process to find the right answer, and that's what I can control.
Ramli John:
I love that. Just so much wisdom in that. Talking about process and things that you can control is data. And one other question we get asked a lot is what does... You want to see the whole customer journey. And unfortunately, there's so many tools, like your email tool, or your website tool, doesn't talk to your product data tool which doesn't talk to your user data tool. So, the question we get asked a lot is Ramli, Wes, what is the data stack for becoming more data-led so that we can be ProductLed? And do you have any tips around here are some things to think about to make sure that you're seeing the whole journey of the customer and actually helping you figure out, based on the data, where the huge gaps are in that journey.
Andrew Capland:
It is hard because there's always more and everyone wants more and it's just a thing. And early on, I had a manager. This was me, early in my career I would just be like, "Oh, we need more data. We need more data. We need a tool to aggregate data. Let's buy Mixpanel, let's buy Looker." I didn't know what I was doing. And he would say, "What would you do differently this week if you had that answer today?" And I'd pause, I'd get stuck, and I'd be like, "Well, we might do this. Or if I knew it was this, I would do that. But I'm trying to learn more so that I can make better decisions." And he would say, "Well, when you find an answer that you feel like you want to do something differently this week, if you had the answer, then let's start tracking that thing and let's see if it's true."
Andrew Capland:
And it was a nice way for me to almost let go. I realized I didn't need to know everything, I just needed to know enough to make the right decision in a given moment. And so, at every company I've been at outside... Well, every company where I've started anyways, had no data infrastructure in place. And what I'd recommend doing for most people is define your funnel at the highest level in Google Sheets is what I've done. You can track it, cohort it, either weekly or monthly, so you can see changes over time, but track the main pillars of the business.
Andrew Capland:
So, for most ProductLed businesses, that'll be like traffic is your top of funnel. You'll have either trials or new free accounts is the next stage in the process. You might want to filter those a little bit for quality or who's going to sales and who's going to not sales, but at a high level, you want to make sure you're tracking installs or trials in some way. Activated accounts is a big one, is usually my north star as somebody who works in growth and Product-Led Growth is of those who are trying the products, how many are receiving value from it? How many made it to a point where you feel pretty comfortable that they did truly get value from the products? And that's an interesting thing to track because it usually predicts conversion, and then revenue. And obviously if you can, it'd be great to break out revenue from new customers versus the general population that's already been a customer for a while that's upgrading or increasing usage.
Andrew Capland:
And so, I think if you can track those things, the raw number in the conversion rates, it's a pretty good starting point. As someone who works in growth, I don't work on every KPI at a time. And I think about myself as just someone who's constantly revisiting the funnel at the highest level, finding where I think either the broken parts or the opportunities are, and then I zoom in from there, and then I figure out what tools I can enhance that data. But I started in Sheets and it's a pretty powerful way to start that I think everyone can at least get that bird's eye view for how the business works and some of those unit economics that you need.
Ramli John:
I love that. Just start with Google Sheets. Just let's go basic first before you automate, because then you might implement this amazing measurement plan that measures too much. And then you take up your engineering resource and find out later like, "Oh, we actually didn't need that data." It becomes more of a distraction, will you say, if you measure too much... I think you had something on LinkedIn where if you measure too many things, it can actually become a distraction rather than becoming focused on just one thing, would you say?
Andrew Capland:
It can be, and it takes six months for a BI department to spin up what you think should be a quick report. Just to set up the BI infrastructure and the backend data warehousing, and then to pipe that information into whatever tool like a Mixpanel or a Looker or a Mode or whatever it is, it takes awhile. And so, I just think the faster actionable thing is do the best that you can do inside of Google Sheets and that's a really good jumping off point. So I don't know, I keep it simple.
Ramli John:
Keep it simple. Keep it simple. [inaudible 00:17:23], KISS, keep it simple stupid.
Andrew Capland:
Yeah.
Ramli John:
So, we're talking about focus. Where's the biggest gap usually? Maybe I'm biased because I wrote a book about onboarding, but if you had to give advice, I'm going to guess it's probably going to depend, if they have to focus on a metric or somewhere in the customer journey, how do you help people focus on where they should focus on? Because there might be multiple fires going on. It might be like everything's on fire, everything's not working. Do you have a system or a process around that, focusing on which part of the journey a growth team or a ProductLed team would focus on?
Andrew Capland:
It's a good analogy. Sometimes I do think about myself like a firefighter running from opportunity or from problem to problem and putting it out. So, I think the answer is obviously it depends, but I think what it depends on is what the first stage of the funnel looks like. There's some benchmarks that you can use if you're working on a ProductLed SaaS business to get a feel for if I'm in the right wheelhouse. Am I in the right ballpark in terms of what we're seeing? Are we seeing a reasonable website visitor to new trial install percentage? If it's within the ballpark, then you feel pretty good about that. If it's lower than that, obviously that's a really high impact place to focus. So I start there. And we can talk about some of the metrics and stuff, but from a framework perspective, I would start by comparing some standards to what your actuals are.
Andrew Capland:
And then when in doubt, you're right, focusing on activated accounts is the most powerful thing I think for a ProductLed team or growth team or whatever to focus on, because it touches everything. There are some ways that you actually can generate less total trials or installs on a monthly basis, but increase the quality of those and you get more activated accounts. And if you get more activated accounts, you'll probably get more customers. And then there's other things that you can do that are inside the product that increase retention and understanding and getting more people to this moment where they can understand the product and get some value from it. And if you do that, in theory you should get more sales from it too. So when in doubt, I think activated accounts is a great metric. And I would start by looking at the existing funnel and doing a little bit of comparison.
Ramli John:
That makes a lot of sense there. I want to shift gears now and bring it back to what you mentioned earlier about when does it make sense to onboard or to direct users to self-serve versus to direct them to the sales or customer success? Because this is also another question we get asked a lot is first of all, they're afraid. They're afraid that if you send the sales team in, they are going to scare users away and they get annoyed. On the other hand, it might be too late that they've already checked out of the door and now you're trying to cheat... Like just an analogy with a store, they're already in the parking lot and you're trying to say, "Everybody try to reach out," but it's already out of your realm there. So where's that balance versus let's just let them do their thing versus, "Oh man, we got to jump in and actually do something."
Andrew Capland:
It's hard. And it changes over time, depending on the category that you're in and if the market understands the product category that you're in, or if it's a new thing and it's about early adopters. The earlier I think your product is in the category, probably the more education you'll need, probably one-to-one education. I think that sales is helpful there, but in general, the name of the game is that you want to drive incremental revenue and the worst thing that you could do is send leads to sales that would have bought anyways and then you just end up increasing the [inaudible 00:21:29] and making it frustrating for users. And then on the flip side, what you also don't want to do is leave really high value customers in the cold. People that would raise their hand and say, "I want to talk to someone. I need their help."
Andrew Capland:
And so my approach is to keep it extremely simple and actionable here. And I think the way to do it is by having some quality score when people come in, looking at if it's likely to be a buyer that's used to or would prefer to buy in a one-to-one way. So, if it's like at Postscript, we sell SMS software to e-commerce brands, and really small businesses just want to buy quickly, they don't have a lot of questions, we just get out of the way and let them do their things. But the large brands, the ones that you're used to seeing on TV commercials and in Instagram and Facebook ads and things like that, they almost won't buy without raising their hand because they have some custom situation that they think is different.
Andrew Capland:
And so, we look at two metrics basically behind the scenes to see where should we route them, to sales or through the self-service funnel and we try to keep it simple and just revisit it on a quarterly basis. I think that's a good place to start is just seeing if you can judge how large of a potential customer it is, and then using that as a good segmentation point.
Ramli John:
That makes a ton of sense. You're looking at are they a good fit, ideal customer profile, and do they have some engagement inside? And that gives you some kind of reference as to where you're going to go particularly.
Andrew Capland:
There's one other thing that you can do that I have been experimenting with.
Ramli John:
Interesting. Okay.
Andrew Capland:
If the folks on the call are familiar with Pendo.
Ramli John:
Yeah, we had [crosstalk 00:23:16]-
Andrew Capland:
Pendo is a [inaudible 00:23:17] onboarding tool.
Ramli John:
Yeah.
Andrew Capland:
It's really good. And what they do exceptionally well is they ask you, so the second you log into their tool for the first time, it's a free trial. They say, "Hey, welcome to Pendo. We're pumped you're here. How do you want to use the product for the first time?" And there's two buttons, I think. It's been a little while since I've gone through it, but one button is, "I just want to explore on my own. Let me do my thing." The other button is, "Hey, I'd like to have a tour guide." And then if you click the tour guide button, it brings you to a demo page and you can book some time with a rep. And I think that that's a really powerful thing where you just let the user decide and you put them in control.
Ramli John:
100%. Something that I've been thinking a lot about as well is even with product tours, they just get in your face. And can you just please ask me if I want a product tour, because imagine just walking into Disneyland and somebody just grabbing your hand and just pointing out stuff, it's annoying. Wouldn't you be annoyed? Would you take that even further and even ask you do you want a product tour? Just asking people if they want to do something in the onboarding experience. Have you seen that done?
Andrew Capland:
Yeah, yeah. I love asking people. And what I like even more about making it such a binary choice like, "Yes, I want a tour," or, "No, I don't want a tour," is, "Would you like a tour right now?" And what we built at Wistia, our growth team built this was a homegrown tool where it was a checklist that lived on the top of the page the first time you logged into the product. If you wanted, you could go through the tour, and if you didn't, you could save it for later and it would pop back up and you could always open it because a lot of people just want to poke around and get lost and see, kick the tires on your product. And then after they have done that, they're ready for a tour. And so, I just think it's just like everything in marketing, right? It's the right information at the right time to the right people. And what better way than to let the user decide?
Ramli John:
I really love it. You've done a lot of experiments around onboarding. Can you share some of the experiments that you've run, whether that's at HubSpot, Wistia or Postscript that one end is the greatest failures, [inaudible 00:25:30] or whatever, things that didn't work on. On the other hand, I'm curious what really worked out? So you got things that didn't work out and things that actually really worked out really well in terms of onboarding activation improvements.
Andrew Capland:
We tried a bunch of stuff at Wistia. I did the most amount of onboarding experimentation. We tried a lot of stuff that was incremental. Our team spent a ton of time looking at the blank states. The first thing that you saw when you logged into the product. When you went to the analytics page and you didn't have any analytics yet, should we show you what a full graph would look like? Or should we just explain what it would look like when your data went in there? Or should we just link you to the help page? We tried all kinds of stuff like that, and it didn't really make a difference. Didn't make it worse. It didn't make it better. It just made no change. So, we tried a lot of that kind of stuff.
Andrew Capland:
And then just like what we were talking about, we tried lots of different tore variations. We tried the Intercom tour where you just go next, next, next. We tried the one where the screen is black in the background with just the pop-up. We tried the pulsating. We tried all that stuff. It's not as impactful as I thought it would be. Moved the needle 2% here, 3% there, the stuff that moved the needle a lot more is when we helped people in the context of the app. We use the app to market itself. The coolest example that we worked on was if you signed up for a tool like Wistia, it's a video marketing platform. So if you signed up for the product and you didn't have a video, you get no value from it. It's like if you signed up for Google Docs, but you don't have a doc, it's just an empty thing.
Andrew Capland:
And so, what we did is we made a loaner video for people that came in that didn't have a video ready. They could borrow one from us. And originally it was just a fun brand video. The office mascot, Lenny, who's a dog running around with a VHS tape in his mouth, kind of like a fun brand moment. But what we realized is that if we made a video that they could borrow and the video itself was someone showing you around the product. So, it was our head of video production saying, "Look over here. And if you click here, this button does that. And up here you'll find your settings. But down here is when you're going to find the good stuff. You can click this to blah, blah, blah." We did that and we watched people use the product and go through this flow and they would follow along with their cursors. And it was almost overnight. I think it was a 30% increase in activations from people that borrow that video and things like that I get really excited about.
Ramli John:
That is so interesting. So it was the mascot, was the dog pointing or was there somebody [crosstalk 00:28:13]?
Andrew Capland:
No, it was a real person.
Ramli John:
Imagine the dog pointing, point here and it's this dog, this acting dog. Anyways, Janel has a question that I'll it herself. So, Janel, if you want to unmute yourself feel free to go shoot.
Janel:
Yeah. Hey, guys. We're such a small group today. I'm curious about this product tour because that's something that we're exploring as well. And I love it and I love how Pendo does it and others. I'm just curious what you think. Does it make more sense to ask if they want a product tour as a CTA on the website before they even log into the app? Or does it make more sense once they log in for the first time saying, "Hey, do you want a tour?" Or both? Maybe it's both, but I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Andrew Capland:
Yeah. I think it's both. I don't think you have to wait for someone to login to the product to begin the onboarding process. I feel like the products that are in the top 1% in terms of product adoption and all that stuff, you basically go to the website, you start using the product without realizing that you're doing it. At some point, they prompt you to like save your progress and then you just continue going from there. And I think any way that you can do that and start the onboarding process before they've filled out the form is a huge win.
Andrew Capland:
Our team tried this. We tried a bunch of stuff where we made a lightweight version of the tool. So you could see it on the website so that the people that would have signed up just to see what it was, they stopped signing up. And we could save those for at a time when it would be more valuable. And those who did sign up for the product already had a little bit of muscle memory and already had a little bit of momentum. And so, when they did make it into the product, it was more just that they were continuing on and not beginning the onboarding process, but continuing it. So, I love the idea of starting it before, if you can.
Janel:
Yeah. Thank you. That's great.
Ramli John:
That's a good question. And to your point, can you give examples of once where they started onboarding before they even sign up? Because that's one of the things that I've written about is onboarding shouldn't start when somebody signs up, but are the ones that pre-signup onboarding experience is great. And ones that you can call or maybe even it could be ones that you've worked out before, feel free to shout out your own work.
Andrew Capland:
I'll shout out my own work and then I'll give you a non... So, we did this at Postscript as well where we wanted to build a try it before you buy it type experience. And so, what we did is we made a whole text message experience where you could interact with the product without ever having created an account. And the interactive experience explained how the product worked along the way. And so, we didn't require a form. We didn't make you fill anything out. We didn't email you about it. You just got to play with the product, basically live, and super powerful. The percentage of people that interacted with that was 15%. We would never... 15% of the people that ended up on the product page interacted with the tour, and you would never have a 15% on the page to sign up for a free trial or something. So, super powerful there.
Andrew Capland:
I mentioned the try it before you buy it, I think, at Wistia as well. I feel like the other companies that did this, I don't know if they still do it, but Duolingo is the really popular one. Everyone want to talk about for a while. It's an app that helps you learn a foreign language. And I think they basically just let you start learning the language. And then after you went through a few flashcards, then they asked you to save your progress. And then Optimizely, they also did this really well in the early days. Optimizely is an AB testing tool that's probably way too expensive for all of us on this call now. It used to be made for SMBs. And what they would do is they would have you... You didn't have to install a script. You don't have to do anything.
Andrew Capland:
It loaded your website page. You just put it in the URL of your website. It loaded your page, no form to fill out, no nothing. You could start to tinker and set up an AB test. Right when you click launch, it would be like, "Oh, well you need an account before you can launch this to save your progress and place to come back and check your data." And then that's how you created your account was at that point. And I just thought it was so smart because you already had all this momentum and it was more a call to save your progress than it was to create your account, which I think is just sneaky positioning.
Ramli John:
Interesting. I like that. Another one that I can think of is this really, just like I've never... Just came across it last fall is if you googled Instagram template design, Canva would pop up and they would let you create an Instagram template and download it. And when you're about to download it is when they ask, do you want to create an account to save this? And I was like, "Boom, you got me to the product's value before I even got the sign up," which is flipping the whole funnel on its head, which is really, really interesting.
Andrew Capland:
So, back when, in my Wistia days, I was new to user onboarding. I'd never worked on it, but I just was fascinated. I just was hooked. I read it everything about it. Every company that had done it, that experimented with it. That was the phase I was in. And one interesting case study that I found was Twitter. So, Twitter super successful product, but they had a real... They were so good at new user acquisition that they got all these people to try Twitter for the very first time, but they didn't explain how it worked. And so, I don't know the percentage, don't quote me on this, but it's extremely high. Something like 80% of the people that tried Twitter never came back because they just didn't get it. They showed up. They were like, "What is this thing? It's only 160 characters. I'm outta here."
Andrew Capland:
Twitter had a real onboarding problem, and they're a case study in just why you need to figure out onboarding before you go too hard on the acquisition side. And so, I just thought that was really interesting. They could have taken an approach like, "Hey, here's just a sample feed for you." There's a million things they could have done to try it before you buy it to increase that activation rate. But they didn't. And who knows, according to the case study I read they should have way, way more active users than they do today.
Ramli John:
Interesting. I feel like I got too far and deep talking about product tours. I want to ask you more of your process. You said you got deep in onboarding. You've read a ton of processes. For a lot of ProductLed companies or transitioning there that's the first top of mind thing is you can't build this ProductLed experience if you can't sell it, you can really onboard and you use a successfully. So, what's your process? Or what kind of steps, or how would you frame getting somebody to improve their onboarding? What's your steps or process or framework that you have that you use now that you've developed as you've grown with and as a growth leader?
Andrew Capland:
I try to keep mine really simple. I think there's four steps. I've never put numbers next to it. So I don't know. We'll figure out if it's four, but I think the first step is to define some activation thing. Some moment that if people do it indicates to you that they're likely to come back and maybe become a paying customer, and if they don't make it to that point, it means they're unlikely to come back. And keeping that dead simple if you can. It's really easy to over-complicate and make it all these, if this and this and this, just keep it real simple. So defining what activation is then removing friction.
Andrew Capland:
Removing any unnecessary steps that are in between a user coming in for the first time and making it to that activation moment. Sometimes it's unnecessary clicks. Sometimes it's changing from two CTAs to one CTA. Other times it's removing, I don't know, just jargon and things. It's just adding clarity. So finding ways to remove friction is a really quick and easy way to make fast improvement on your onboarding and activation rates. And then the other thing that I really like to do is then to find out what's most valuable to users. So once you figure out what's most valuable to you, which is the activation moment, then I think it's really powerful to find out what is the user's goal when they sign up for your product for the very first time.
Andrew Capland:
I like to ask them for a few weeks. I set up an open-ended question in the signup process. What's your main goal for trying this product? And the goal of collecting all that information is to eventually layer on segmentation and help customers get value on their terms. So it's defining activation, removing friction in between the user and that activation moment, it's learning what's most valuable to users, and then the last step is treating users differently based on their goals. Some people call that recipes or frameworks or whatever, but it's basically when somebody comes in, if they look like me, then maybe they go through onboarding flow A, and if they look like someone else then they go through onboarding flow B, and it all comes back to what the user's goal is. And that's usually where I start.
Ramli John:
I love it.
Andrew Capland:
I hope that's aligned with what you write about in your book. You have way more experience than I do. I'm just telling you what I've been working on.
Ramli John:
No, no, it's definitely... I'm all for you. You talked about segmentation and personalization. That's the holy grail. It's like, if you can personalize, if somebody... Wistia does this. I keep shouting [inaudible 00:37:55] just sign up for Wistia, see what they do. I mean, I'm not sure if they've changed it recently, but they ask you what's your goal today? And then they personalize, I'm guessing that's your work, correct?
Andrew Capland:
Yeah. And it still lives there, which is pretty cool. But yeah, that's what it's all about it. The way I think about it is you just want to provide value to the user as quickly as possible and on their terms and values, just different for different people. So, it's just all about figuring out what that is and then figuring out how the experience should be different. And usually if you do those things, the numbers go up, which is great.
Ramli John:
I have the saying, and I might've seen it on Twitter, segmentation is a conversion steroids for onboarding, and it really is. If you can... The analogy I have is when you go to Disneyland, people have different reasons why they go to Disneyland. If you have a kid, you probably want to go to Toontown. If you're on honeymoon, you probably want to go check out the restaurants, and if you're adrenaline junkie you're going to go to Space Mountain. I'm not sure, that's right? When you have a one size fit all, you're missing out that nuances that people are jumping on and signing up for the product, in this case, going to Disneyland, right?
Andrew Capland:
Totally. I feel like there's almost two ways you can think about the segments. One is based on the user and their goals. And then I think the other one is based on their experience in your space. If they're... So, at Postscript, SMS for e-commerce, if they're new to SMS as a marketing channel, we fundamentally need to take them through a different approach than if they're on their third SMS tool, and they're switching from a competitor. If they're switching from a competitor, we show them some of the feature differences, ask about what they want to do, and then get out of their way and let them do it. But if they're brand new to SMS, there's a lot of education around best practices, how the channel works, before we can even get into the products that they just fundamentally need to be successful. So, it's two interesting levers to think about.
Ramli John:
That makes a ton of sense. And if anybody else on this call, if you have any questions, feel free to drop it. But in terms of one question I love asking, and I might've asked this to you already, if you had one or two pieces of advice you'd like to share to ProductLed champions or leaders who are... They're the one championing Product-Led Growth in their organization. Their org is right now most likely very sales-led. What advice or tips would you give to them?
Andrew Capland:
I think the biggest one is that nobody really knows what growth is or Product-Led Growth is. And even the people that hire you, you come in and you start a job as a growth person or Product-Led Growth person. And I just feel like fundamentally people just don't really know what that is and the type of work that you do and the type of problems that you solve and the way that you go about it. And so I think that educating people for alignment and clarity is key to your success. That's a hidden landline that almost every single coaching client that I work with doesn't know about that we work on and usually helps them to be more successful and build their brand within their company and all that stuff.
Andrew Capland:
And so, I would say that, and then I think the other thing is that after chatting with a bunch of people that are way more successful than I am, it seems like a common thread is that they treat their career almost like a growth project where they just try different stuff. They try different ways of communicating. They try different ways of running their team. They try different ways of approaching different work challenges and presentations and all that kind of stuff. And they just take a very similar approach to their career. And when they move on from a company and stuff like that, and that's something that I'm actively working on that I think is really interesting that almost every single really successful person that I've chatted with in this space does. So, just interesting stuff.
Ramli John:
Interesting. I do find the same way. One final question, if nobody else has any question. Where can people find... Let's say if they have followup questions. Well, obviously, you're on the Product-Led Growth channel, so feel free. Is it okay if they DM you there, or it's like, no, go?
Andrew Capland:
No, no, they can do it. I'm hanging out, man. They can DM me.
Ramli John:
Anywhere else where you hang out online so that if they wanted to reach out?
Andrew Capland:
Yeah, I'm most active on LinkedIn. I'll talk about stuff that I've learned, growth problems, challenges, things in the space that I see. And then check out my personal site, deliveringvalue.co. It's where my growth coaching, mentorship, education business, love connecting with folks.
Ramli John:
Awesome. I don't want to keep everybody. I'll give back 15 minutes of everybody's time. Thank you so much.
Andrew Capland:
You got it, man.
