In this bonus section, you'll get access to previously recorded live expert workshops and Q&A from PLG experts such as Todd Olson (CEO of Pendo), Tara Robertson (CMO at Teamwork), Nelson Joyce (Co-founder of Tettra), and more.
Wes:
Hello, everyone. Awesome. So while we're waiting for everyone to jump in and join, Gui is going to tell us a little bit about the current place he is right now. And this is called Florianópolis, Brazil and I have the opportunity to be there actually, last year not too long ago. It was almost a year, exactly. I used to get in the Google [inaudible 00:00:27] notifications. Now I'm like, "Oh, my goodness, I love that beach. I like this air." So many good memories of Florianópolis. But why don't you just tell us a little bit about where you're from.
Gui:
Right. So I'm Gui. I'm from South of Brazil. Florianópolis is an island is a city, which is an island in southern Brazil. It's actually the smallest state capitol in Brazil, which is the state capitol in the South of Brazil. So we have 42 different beaches. It's hot in here, probably 80 or even more. And I'm in the office and in my house. The office is in my house. But maybe tomorrow I'll be at the beach, one of the 42 that we have.
Wes:
Yeah, awesome. And I really... The island itself it's actually pretty big when you compare it to some other ones, so I loved visiting there. And they're also...
Gui:
It's developed a very large tech ecosystem here in the South of Brazil, in Florianópolis. So we've got about half million people living here. And tech is the biggest industry in town.
Wes:
Yeah. And how's that been growing over the years too from the tech? What started that big growth for the tech seen in Florianópolis?
Gui:
So we have a very strong college university here that I think that ignited some of the things. Because of the environment, we have environmental laws that... So they prohibit factories and stuff. So the entrepreneurs and people that were graduating on this university were trying building something and they found tech not to be a factory and they could build it here in the city. So this is one of the factors, but of course that once you get once you big entrepreneurs with a success story, and things start like a flywheel and [inaudible 00:02:49] itself and it attracts more money, more people and have now a good existence here in the South of Brazil.
Wes:
Yeah, absolutely. It was really cool to see it last year. And I was pretty amazed, just how many tech companies were in Florianópolis and the weather. That'll always bring me back. It's fantastic. Awesome. So now that we've heard a little bit more about Florianópolis, I want to hear just a bit more about your background Gui, and how you came to find RD station and all the amazing things that you've been up to since then.
Gui:
Great. So I was born here. So I am an engineer. I graduated on robotics and automation. And since the college I started coding, and I was a developer, and I work for different startups at the time here, like building apps before the iPhone, not the right timing, failed on that. But we managed to attract a lot of attention from other states and other series in Brazil. And we thought, well, this marketing thing we are doing here is doing well. And we were working with content and email leads and lead management and sales funnel and all that stuff. And people were just thinking about social media and virals, and not really transforming the digital assets into a sales machine. And so we decided to create a company focused in that. We always got some inspiration from HubSpot and or even [inaudible 00:04:32] or other companies that are similar to us. But we created something really specific for SMBs in emerging markets in Brazil, so where we have 70% of market share here.
Gui:
Currently, our decision has 25,000 paying customers and we have a very large audience here, for instance our website perhaps more than the middle of visitors a month. We hold an event was last year for 15,000 people here in the Southern Brazil.
Wes:
It was amazing.
Gui:
Yeah, it's such a great event. We have a lot od speakers from the US and from Canada as well. And of course this year, it's everything online. Unfortunately. But we are doing really well and about $40 to $50 million revenue on our path to an IPO hopefully.
Wes:
Awesome. So this is the perfect moment to ask the question, Gui. Okay, you're doing all these amazing things, you're seeing a ton of growth and things are going well for RD station, why rock the boat? What was the main impetus behind going product led for your business?
Gui:
Great. So we've always managed to grow with a sales led approach. And actually, we became much more sales lead in terms of, we always wanted to increase the lifetime value, reduce churn, so work with the ideal customer profile and all that stuff. And we started creating some barriers for those customers to come in, like lead qualification, and one year or multi year contracts implementation package, and all that stuff related to a more sales lead b2b sales process. And that helped us more due to increase the lifetime value, the average ticket and all that. But it is [inaudible 00:06:44] as down in terms of growth, we used to grow more than 100% and then it was about 60, 50. And we decided that we could add another layer of growth to all of that if we started or try to change gears to product led approach.
Gui:
Because all of those barriers that we were creating, to try to prevent the bad feet customers to come in, we could actually try something different and offer them an entry level version of our software where those guys would come in and come out easy, easy out. And this is a different business unit. And from that we would get only the best one to upgrade to upsell to our premium solutions. And we would create a large pool of users, that would be a new sales channel for the premium solutions. And of course, not only that, because we had some pressure from our competitors, that we're already shifting to more product led approach. And even smaller competitors trying to sell cheaper products similar and cheaper. And then we thought we have to launch lite version, or super cheap or free version of our software to prevent those small competitors to get those customers, those leads that we're blocking, and try to sell them after they have proved some ROI with using the live version for software.
Gui:
And with that creating a new wave of growth for our company. So that was the rationale about the decision, like two years ago.
Wes:
Okay. And help me write down here, is just like the whole decision framework you had around making this decision. So can you outline some of the pros and cons of what you see around the sales led approach or just staying in the current way? Because you mentioned one good pro here already, which is a lot of people think as it relates to being sales lead, they're like, "Hey, we can just work with the best fit customers." And I think that's really convincing. We just want to create a product for the best fit customers. And that's why we would want to have friction. So can you just go through just what you believe, even still now, what are some of the pros of sales [inaudible 00:09:14] in the cons, and then we can see the next step? So it's like, do the same thing for product led and see what was the tipping point for you?
Gui:
Yeah, I think that this is exactly what we are trying to make. We are trying to maintain the two different systems working at the same time. So it's not that we don't have the sales led anymore. We do have the sales led approach for the premium version, and the product led approach for the entry level version of a software. And what are the pros on the sales led approach? Well, when you were talking, we're trying to sell to a medium to large company with a complex structure and they have to commit to a project actually, to some change management in order to implement to adapt your system, your software. It's better to talk to the decision makers to make sure that they will turn that in not only in a software purchase, but also in a project, they will change process, they will make it happen.
Gui:
And on those cases it's good for them to sign a contract to show their commitment to buy some professional service package to help them with that, and all that stuff. So that's why we divide and there are two different business units. So the unit economics of this premium versions that we use the sales led approach of super tied. We have super high expectations with retention rates, and lifetime value and increase in the contract size and stuff. While on the other side on a product led, easy in, easy out. We don't even look at the churn rate anymore. It's more like a marketing approach come in, use it, if it's good, I'll try to upsell you to the premium version. But it's not if you want to go away and come back later, that's fine, too.
Gui:
So it's getting all this weight out of your backpack when you are trying to move forward and to grow your enterprise and while maintaining the margins in the unit economics. Because it's the right approach that worked right. Sales process to the right kind of customers at the right time.
Wes:
And it's another really good question just around like, how do you deal with users moving from one side to the other? So going from that free version to more of the premium version? And how do you make that transition as frictionless as possible?
Gui:
Before we did the lite version of our software, we didn't have customers, didn't have the possibility to sign it online through a self service buying process. And we still haven't implemented that for the premium version. So they still have to talk to the sales rep, to sign a contract and stuff because as I said, we want the commitment with the project, not only the tool. But usually it's fairly smooth, actually is much, much easier to sell to a customer that is already using the lite version of our software and got interested in the premium version, than trying to sell the premium version at firsthand for someone that sometimes even doesn't know what the tool is about.
Gui:
So it's the conversion rate... To give you some numbers. The lead to close rate when they're not like free version or lite version users is about 20% from an open opportunity to close. When they are a lite user, it's 45%. So the sales team is twice as productive, the implementation projects are shorter. And the implementation specialist and the customer success managers love the kind of customers. Because they've already set up most of those... The things they needed to set up. They are tech savvy, they know how to use the tool, while when they were selling the premium versions directly. As I said, sometimes they didn't even know what they were buying and what configurations would need to put it in place and to run.
Gui:
So it's much much smoother, the conversion rate are much better, the engagement and the implementation goes faster. It's been really great, this transition from one product to the other.
Wes:
Awesome. And I want to hear just a bit more about the journey from sales that are product led as well. And really just, if you could walk us through, what did that journey look like from that first moment where you decided, hey, we're going to go down this path and really do whatever it takes to make it work? And I know just from seeing you and connecting with you over the years too, this has taken a while and I think it was agenda [inaudible 00:14:50] like yesterday I asked everyone, what were your biggest takeaways and it was like, "I just realized it's going to take a really long time to make this transition." So I think for others here too, you can map it out just like, here's the journey, what it took, and how we were able to get some of those wins. So, in particular order, if you just want to walk us through how you made this transition, and what were some of the biggest hurdles you had to go through?
Gui:
Great. So it all started 2018, I think so about two and a half years ago. And we started with a prototype of this slight version of our software. And we didn't launch it at first, we actually were experimenting, and trying to prove a hypothesis. And the hypothesis was that somebody would buy it, somebody would use it, and some user would upsell to the premium version. So we started in this stealth mode with this lite version. And we used to offer it to those customers that were blocked in the first place. So they weren't able to buy because they didn't have the commitment, they didn't want to sign a multi year contract or anything like that. So why don't you try this instead? And that was the first step. And of course we wanted to know from that user pool, we would manage to upsell part of that. And we proved that. We were upselling about 5% to 10% of them.
Gui:
And once we proved it, we decided to really launch it, to unveil this strategy that was in stealth mode before and to launch it publicly and place the lite version of our software, on the pricing page and all that stuff. And that was when the things got a little bit more difficult because everyone got nuts. They were mad at me, because CEO thought that it would prevent them to sell because everyone would only want the lite version, the CS team thought that everybody would down sell to this lite version, and it was a hell.
Gui:
But it was really important that we have strong support from our CEO, we had this early indications, this experimentation period that we run. And so we could mobilize the whole company around it. And it was a heavy project. Not only because of the resistance, because it was a lot of work like training the sales team so they could understand the different layers, like revisiting the whole packaging strategy, pricing strategy, training the customer success team, changing the website, and working with the engineering team to make sure that things will scale and all of that. Once it was done we launched it. And it was a tremendous success. We went from zero to 12,000 customers in one year. That was the result in customers. And for the sake of comparison, the premium version of the software we have also 12,000 customers but it took us 10 years to get to 12,000 customers. And the lite version got to 12,000 customers in just one year.
Gui:
And also after that we had and still have a lot of resistance because it was not only about launching, we needed the marketing support so we could generate the number of signups that we needed. And we needed the sales team support so they could sell to those PQLs, those upsell that we are trying to give to them. In the beginning we had resistance, they didn't want to deal with this PQL thing. Marketing didn't want to spare some resource to help us increasing the signups number. But we've managed to convince them with results. We managed to get just a few resources from them in the beginning like little of their commitment with project, although they suddenly started to realize that [inaudible 00:19:59] were flowing in lots of signups and sales started to realize that those PQLs were actually really good quality leads. And they started telling me, "Well give me more of that. Do you have more of it?"
Gui:
They got addicted. They have more of it. So that's the stage we are at right now and still some challenge. Currently, the PLG already represents 15% of the total sales from the premium version. And I think that's a new layer, is not something that we redirected the leads that they would already have, it's 15% more. And my goal is to flip and make the majority of the leads that we close in the premium versions through the PLG. So at least to reach 50%, or 60%. And I think we might reach that in one or two years more, where of course, there are some challenges, especially with the marketing team, that we need to at least grow the signups three times, four times, I think, to really consider ourselves or product led growth company, we need large user base.
Wes:
Yeah. And can you touch a bit on just the teams and how you've been working through this? Because I remember initially, you were the head of customer success. And then you decided, let's go and focus full tilt on this new product led on the business. And you had PLG team initially, and I want to just walk us through what that first team will look like, and how its transformed since then.
Gui:
Actually it haven't. I lost a lot of developers and my team is really small, but we can accomplish a lot with a small square.
Wes:
Yeah.
Gui:
Well, so before that, I was leading the customer success team. So a much, much bigger team. And we have 150 people, 160 people working with customer success, support and [inaudible 00:22:26], then I moved to the product organization to lead this PLG initiative, which is more squared with three developers, one designer, one PM, two more hours. And that's what we have so far and till now. Because what we do is to run lots of experiments. And I think it's good to be as bold and very predictive. Everyone in the team is super senior, they understand the shortcuts inside the company, they are here for a long time. And they are the best. I created a [inaudible 00:23:09]. The best thing that I could from the employees we had inside the company. So we can run lots and lots of experiments really fast. At least one or two every week. And we move things faster. But it's not only about us, of course, we have to mobilize marketing team, the sales team, the CS team and everyone else.
Gui:
That's why I decided to lead this initiative because although it was a small team, it was really intensive in terms of negotiation and influentiating our other directors, other executives. And as a founder of the company and actually a board member, I could use that to influence him to make the company move forward toward disposition.
Wes:
And I know a lot of folks here have been asked me around, just like how do you get this buy in? And how do you get more people on this PLG boat, train for the whole company? So why don't you share some of the ways you were building influence to get more people thinking around how to think product led and move in this direction?
Gui:
Great. So first, I'm a big believer of having strong storytelling behind the boat moves, the important projects. So we created the narrative, very strong, and we teach and preached how the company could grow, how this was the trend. And there was one thing... The other one was having the CEO support, which is my part and we couldn't get any without his help. At some point, you have to have someone telling people that they must do it, that's their job and their goal.
Gui:
Otherwise they will only get resistant and back off and try to postpone it. So CEO support and really vocal support was super important. And after that, I was using my influence on the different departments and different executives, since I'm founder I'm here since day one, and I know every corner and every shortcut that I could take, and I mobilize the whole team and I got a really strong person with project management skills to help me to organize those different working streams. And after that, that was the initial kick, let's say. And I got to get the ball rolling after that. Otherwise I wouldn't get the initial kick, the CEO was really important, the storytelling, good project management skills. But if it weren't for results, we wouldn't move more forward.
Gui:
So later on, we started delivering the PQLs for the sales team. The signups which increased by three times or four times in one year, helped not only on selling the lite version. But some of the signups, they tried the lite version for just a few days and they decided to buy the premium version directly. So the marketing team, the sales team allowed it. So I think it's like storytelling, CEO support, product management and results.
Wes:
Awesome. And one of the underlying themes that I know we were discussing before the call too, is just around the theme of resistance, and identifying resistance, and also knowing how to combat that resistance. And you mentioned a couple of teams. There was your CS team, they were really worried, if we have this free version, people are just going to downgrade and we're going to lose out on all that potential revenue. As sales team is thinking, hey, this product is going to outsell and everyone's going to go on the lite version, there's not going to be much premium options here. So that's a risk here. There's also cannibalizing sales, which you mentioned like, hey, the product right now, the lite version represents 50% of total sales, but that's probably more of an additional 15% than just coming from whatever you are going to make in the premium version anyways. And so why don't you just take us through some other areas of resistance that you encountered, and how you really approached it?
Gui:
Well, almost every area [inaudible 00:28:22] company. The billing system... I don't know, your [inaudible 00:28:29], everything, it has some resistant because it was extra work for everyone. But I think that the main block is where the business teams, the revenue teams, so the sales and customer success, and I worked in partnership with a strong partner from the product marketing team product, I don't know if you guys have product marketing inside the marketing organization, but we have a really good product marketing director and we work with him with total review of our pricing and packaging strategy. Which by the way is the key component for our PLG strategy to work or to fail.
Gui:
And we talked to them, we talked to the salespeople, what were their concerns and with the customer success team. And we addressed that on this project. We divided the different features, different limits, what they thought about it. We ran some surveys with the actual customers, asking them if they would downgrade for version, if that version had this, this and that, what would make them stay? We asked some deals in the pipeline, if they would not willing would close the deal if we're a different package like that. So we show them some leading indicators, that their concerns, what they were afraid about wasn't happening. So that was one part, of course. Working with this project with a strong support from the product marketing team. So, when we launched we also change the whole packaging pricing structure. And of course after that we needed to show the numbers, and between one and three months to show them that we had zero extra churn. And the sales team were hitting the report anyway. So I think we were fine. So it worked.
Wes:
What was the biggest worries around that? Because I know, one of the modules for the program is all our monetization strategy, because I see it again and again, I'm like, it's always a problem when going from sales at a product led. So how did you go through and structure your pricing in a way that people could easily understand what plan would work best for them? How is that process?
Gui:
Well, let me try to explain a bit more about our software so you can understand. So we have a marketing automation software. So there are different features like lead generation, landing page builder, pop ups and stuff, we have email marketing campaigns, we have workflow automation, a lot of analytics, the SEO tools and stuff. So we realize that the first thing they are looking at, at least the first thing that connects them with the premium version is the lead management. So to start to actually converting visitors into lead, and using your RD Station as this contact base.
Gui:
So this was the core feature that we would launch on this lite version. And we also realized that the good customers were the one that had lots of leads, lots of contacts, they would be willing to pay more. So what we did was we decided to put automation, for instance, automation only on in the pro versions, in the premium versions. And of course as I said, we ran some surveys to ask them about it, because we knew that if they had just a few leads, they won't need the premium versions anyway, so why try to sell the premium version to someone that only have... I don't know, a couple of leads, they don't need all those features like lead scoring, automation, integration with different systems.
Gui:
So we got all of that on the premium version only. And we also worked on the product Lehman's. So, we limited the number of users trying to make customers in small companies to be comfortable with the lite version, but not medium and large companies, it wouldn't be comfortable because they would need more seeds, more of the contact base, or do those different features. But I think it's an ongoing process. We managed to make it right from the beginning it work. But I do understand that it could go wrong. And I think that lots of companies, they are trying to make similar transition might make something that don't work at first. And we need to look at the monetization strategy. The pricing packaging as also one source of experimentation.
Gui:
I think it would be awesome to run like AB tests with the pricing strategy. So don't think as something that you decide once and you engrave it on a stone and it's it will keep like that. I think we should revisit it at least that every six months.
Wes:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think just the whole product that [inaudible 00:34:41] in general and [inaudible 00:34:43] not just specifically product led. It's just an ongoing process. Always be innovating and improving and then that's how it'll work. So Gareth has shared a great question about beyond your influence, have you now been able to turn the PLG functions in business as usual across all other functions [inaudible 00:35:03] needed support? So for instance, how is marketing now prioritizing, promoting the lite version? And I would imagine how is sales now prioritizing PQLs and all those other pieces. So how did you operationalize and get more teams bought into, and thinking product led and supporting these bigger initiatives?
Gui:
Well, usually, it goes down to the budgeting process, when I really went to make sure that it will commit a certain amount of resources on the initiative. And we did that last year. And we are currently discussing the budget for 2021. And as I said, as we managed to show some initial results, and they are outside of all that, I'm really excited about next year, because this year we worked with the marketing team, with a small team from them, working with us three or four people that we're working alongside with our team, like part time job only. And they didn't see the signup metric as a key metric on their goal. It wasn't even tied to their bonuses or things like that. And I'm really excited about next year because it didn't came from me, the marketing director, the VP of marketing decided that there are no star metric for their whole department, which is 100 people department, should be sign ups. That's really good.
Gui:
So now I have virtually all of their resources work to create sign ups. But of course, we had to show them that it was a really good source of leads and they have a better conversion rate to sales if not only to the live version, but to the premium version also. But it was a small step. So the first step was to creating this small experimentation team, this is most [inaudible 00:37:21] working with my team. And then we started to build them from that. And while from the sales side, actually, I don't need to negotiate resources from them. Once they understood that they needed to work with the PQLs, and they created a process to work with that. It's actually the opposite. The more PQLs are delivered the less resource they need. Because they get more productive. And so they struggle and where it really need resources is in on the marketing team. The more resource and marketing team put them to work on the PLG strategy, and the more results we deliver, the less resource we need on the sales team.
Gui:
So it's not really negotiation about resource with the sales team anymore. It used to be in the beginning. But once they created the resource playbook, the training, it was all set up and it was fine.
Wes:
And how has that sales approach changed? Because I know last year, when I was at the company, you had broken it down into low touch, and then high touch sales teams, and that was something relatively new that you were introducing at that point. So why don't you walk us through just how you approach that initially, and what was the main reasons behind having a low touch and high touch sales teams?
Gui:
Well, actually, it's not really a low touch and high touch, but we decided that we wouldn't have SDRs like pre-sales or the PQLs, because we decided the conversion rate was a strong enough for not having this step. And also that the sales team we work with many more open opportunities when working with PQLs. Actually they would need to close the deal in a shorter amount of time. So that's not necessary, low touch by intention, but because of the productivity. And we started with only one rep. We got the best. I said we just need one sales rep but give me the best one. And it was a fight to struggle because of course no one wants to spare the best sales rep you have. But we managed to solve that and quickly that sales rep was selling to tons of PQLs, and that sales rep helped to train the other ones.
Gui:
Of course, we documented everything and created a process and upload it and set it up on the salesforce. And then we have the enablement team that keeps constant training for the sales team. And now we have all of that, but we started with only one and a half, then two, then three, then the enablement team, then the process, then the salesforce. And now we have the whole thing.
Wes:
Awesome. I love the structure of that too, just writing it down. Really getting the best sales rep. Have them figure out how to sell the PQLs, as soon as they've already shown really good progress towards selling into other existing counts, and then have them train everyone else. And build that playbook as you go. And that's quite literally just the same approach of building the airplane as you're flying. Figure it out as you go. And that playbook should always be evolving and changing as you go forward with it. But now that's super fascinating. And was there any other stories around that process as it relates to support or marketing or any other teams where you just went into those teams, try to find some people to really test this out, whether it's a PQL or something new, to get their buy in and prove out their approach to see those results very quickly?
Gui:
Yeah, from the marketing side, as I said, this squared, they started working with less was similar. Actually, the marketing team always wanted to have a growth hacking squared. In the hack they named it growth hacking, but it wasn't really growth hacking. And what I told the VP of marketing is, I'm going to turn this into real growth hacking. So just make them work with me and I'll give them the framework, and I'll give them developers and designers, and they will have the methodology. And of course, the square itself, the people working on from the square, were really excited because they were call growth hacking, but we're really working relentless and trying to reach the leads goal on a short cycles of releasing more content and stuff, just [inaudible 00:43:04] the leads quarter.
Gui:
And we actually did that. We delivered a lot of good tools and methodology from the product team. They didn't work with AV tests properly, or statistical approach for the experimentation to the cycle where we could deliver one new experiment every week. With experiments that we were really interested in reading and hitting the month goal we were interested in and proving something from the final. And so that was the first thing, the first way we could turn them to our side. And we actually give them lots of tools and methodology and guidance and leadership to turn what they had and what they called the growth hacking team into a real growth hacking team.
Gui:
And those were the guys that helped us to deliver the very first results. And then we went for demand generation team, the content, SEO, ads, all other channels. Because once we prove that the sign up, we're not only about selling the lite version, but sometimes we would sell the premium version directly and sometimes we will turn the lite version to a PQL very quickly. Then we started getting attention from all other teams, especially the demand generation team. And so that was the first part. From the customer success team, we happened to ship some resources because we actually don't have... We don't offer a customer success managers to the lite customers. But we do have to work with the support team.
Gui:
And it was basically a math like, "Okay, I need budget, I need more agents to support, the extra support that they'll have with those and for local customers." And we did the math. And the person running the support can hire a new agent every X new users we put in. So it was basically that... They were already training, it was the same software, it was actually a simpler version of our software, they knew how to answer the questions. It was actually the lite version, a user is quite... They have more simple questions. It's easier to work with than on the support. And if they weren't coming in, we were giving them the budget to hire new agents.
Wes:
okay. And did anything else change for support, in terms of how they're servicing people or anything? Or was it pretty much the same support team, they just use their same approach to how they're helping them initially? Or was there anything scaled down because they were for users?
Gui:
We had to scale down. At the beginning, it was all the same. So we had all the channels like mail, tickets, chat, and phone. And we have to turn off phone and chat for delight customers.
Wes:
Okay.
Gui:
Right now we have only the support through email, but we do you want to reopen the chat channel for the lite customers, at least in their first month. Because in their first month, is where they have most questions and is where they decided to stay or not. So it would be really good if we could help a little bit more, at least in the first month. So we are praying that for next year. But we had to scale that, we had to shut off those two channels because it was getting too expensive to support those customers. So we still offer some levels... Sorry.
Wes:
Sorry. I was just saying you went from zero to 12,000 in one year like that.
Gui:
Exactly.
Wes:
[inaudible 00:47:38] support [inaudible 00:47:38].
Gui:
A lot of fine costs.
Wes:
Yeah, it's a [inaudible 00:47:45]. Interesting. And so I have another good question around, is the upgrade from basic to premium, or I guess lite to premium, in your case, all product lead, or is there some manual onboarding where people have to talk to sales to do the upgrade?
Gui:
They have to talk to sales to upgrade to the premium version. As I said, we still want the customer really, really committed to the project when they go to the premium version, not to try to and see if it works. We want the committed to creating the lead scoring criteria, to setting up the workflows. And sometimes it's a lot of work to set up the whole workflow they need and to connect to different apps, and to integrate, that can't be a test. So that's why they have to talk to sales, they have to sign an year contract, and they have to pay for implementation. So we know they're real, they're tight and they're really committed to the plan.
Wes:
Yeah.
Gui:
We do want to run some tests to buy it online, self service are great online. But we will run it as a test because in the past, we had lots of trouble with customers not really committing to the project and just checking it out and we don't want that on the premium version.
Wes:
Interesting and I forget if it was in Brazil, or if it was another country or [inaudible 00:49:32] that's talking to you for this part. But is it a problem you've noticed in Brazil where people aren't necessarily as comfortable as some other countries paying with a credit card online? Is that also part of it?
Gui:
Yes, it is. So do we decided to only give them the credit card option for the lite version. We have the payment method here in Brazil called Boleto, which is a wiring transfer. But they can do that monthly. So they receive a QR code to pay for the bill. And the problem is, when you set it up in the credit card is much easier, but when you have to every month to take a photo of your code and decide, do I really want to pay this? So at first, we decided not to offer this payment method to the lite version. So they only have a credit card, which is a problem, because sometimes the really small companies don't have credit card. It's also more related to the customers that weren't going anywhere, weren't growing the software in any way. So we decided to only offer credit card to make things simpler [inaudible 00:51:05].
Wes:
Got it. Awesome, and really I was just wondering, how did you go driving that 12,000 accounts to the platform? That's massive for one year, I love to hear just what went into that, what did you notice there was any virality that helped out with that? Or was it just pure word of mouth, or it was like driving majority love?
Gui:
Yeah, I think we already have a large audience on our websites. So as they said, We attract more than a million visitors a month. And lots of those were maybe interested in trying out our software, or trying out what we had to sell. But they were not really interested in talking to sales rep and signing a contract and implementation project and all that. And so you're just trying out and guess what, once they try it out, they decided to buy the premium version as well. So it's not that we created the audience, we already had it, but we weren't making the best use of it. And now we have an offer to those that are not ready to sign a multi year contract. But they are ready to pay 10 bucks to use our software in the beginning.
Gui:
So that's it. I know that it's not that all other companies that are trying to make that transition have this big audience, but in our case we had. We are a marketing company after all, and we do a lot of education and create content. I have this massive event here in the South of Brazil and although that audience, we weren't really extracting the best [inaudible 00:52:59].
Wes:
Awesome. And I guess for anyone else, if you have any other questions about [inaudible 00:53:06] went from sales led, product led, feel free to add it to the chat. But the last question I had on my list was really just, if you were to go and go back in time, two and a half years later, what would you do differently as it relates to this whole transition?
Gui:
I will make it faster. Yeah, definitely, I'm not kidding, I would make it faster. A lot of people were afraid of a lot of things that didn't make sense. And it took us time to prove, to be cautious with every different executive concern. So I would make it faster.
Wes:
Okay. And how would you approach that to make it actually faster?
Gui:
Easier said than done, but I wouldn't make so many tests to prove that every little concern from every different director would be addressed. I would use the Facebook motto in the early days. And if you know there's the story that the Facebook motto was move fast and break things.
Wes:
Yeah.
Gui:
And then once at a time, Facebook was really unstable and Zack changed it to move fast with scalable infrastructure. But nobody even remember that anymore because it didn't catch. So I would move fast and break things.
Wes:
Yeah. I think we've had some great things and when things get unstable. That's a good motto.
Gui:
That's a good motto. Move fast with scalable infrastructure is not a good thing.
Wes:
Yeah, it doesn't quite stick. Awesome. I guess out of your question around, what was the biggest difficulty in getting the lite version to launch with confidence? And how did you address it?
Gui:
Sorry, what was the question?
Wes:
Maybe just like, what was the biggest difficulty in getting the lite version to launch?
Gui:
The biggest difficult... It was making all the different work streams to move together and aligned. Because as I said, for the launch date, we needed the sales team train, the CS team train, pricing page ready to go on our... The billing system ready to charge the customers. And the most difficult part was this... It's a project management of working together with several at the time, we had nine different work streams with different teams. And I was trying to juggle with all that and making everyone to move at the same pace. So I can't say that one workstream was harder than the other or more difficult. But I can say that making those nine workstream to move together was most difficult task.
Wes:
Awesome. And I guess where can more people learn about you and what you're up to?
Gui:
Yeah, my LinkedIn. So just look at... I have to say that I'm a big fan of not having social media. So I'm not really active in social media. And I read that book about... I forgot the name. If someone that tells you shouldn't have social media, but I do have LinkedIn and I look at it once in a week. And of course, my company, rdstation.com we have lots of content. And if you want to email me, is dlopez@rdstation.com. Or just send me a message on LinkedIn.
Wes:
Awesome. I've shared your LinkedIn in the chat below. But just wanted to really say thank you so much for going through this and sharing how you're going through this transition. Because it's so interesting to seeing two and a half years later, who would have thought you would have got here and just the big thing that stuck out to me is that 12,000 number, it took 10 years to get there as a sales led company. But long and behold one year later, you're able to do the same thing on the product led side of things. And that's just mind boggling to think about the scale of that too. And what the next couple years will look like as you really build that up. So I'm rooting for you. And I really hope to see this as it get to 24,000 and 100,000 one day as you do transition.
Gui:
You too, the same here. I hope I have news and new challenge to talk about next year.
Wes:
Awesome. Well, thank you everyone for joining. This has been an absolute pleasure. And you know where to connect to Gui and hope everyone has an amazing day. Cheers.
Gui:
Cheers.
Wes:
Bye.
