Learn the fundamentals of Product-Led Growth from the bestselling author of Product-Led Growth in this practical, no-fluff course.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
✅ What it truly means to be product-led
✅ Why product-led growth is becoming of rising importance
✅ What the main benefits of product-led growth are
✅ How you can become product-led
✅ The role every team plays in creating a successful product-led business
And more!
Best of all, if you pass the exam at the end, you’ll get a PLG Fundamentals Certificate that you can show off to your colleagues. ????
Wes Bush:
How do you build a successful, product-led business? Think about the last time you signed up for a software product. What did you hope to achieve before signing up? And were you able to accomplish that easily within the product? Now if so, you probably gave that product a second chance. Now a big part of this is because your perceived value of the product lined up with your experienced value. In short, the product delivered on its promise. And because of that, you have a damn good reason to come back a second time.
Wes Bush:
And on the flip side, if the product didn't deliver on its promise, you probably didn't bother logging in again. Because here's the cold, hard stats. According to Intercom, 40 to 60% of first-time users sign up and never log in a second time. Why is that? 40 to 60% of your users signing up and never coming back is a lot of people when you think about it. So why is that? Now one of the main problems behind this is we have this nasty thing in the middle. But behind, between our perceived and experienced value. I'm going to refer to this as time-to-value. And most product experiences, maybe even yours, probably resemble something like this.
Wes Bush:
And your time-to-value really just gets in the way of helping your users experience the value of your product. And although it might not feel like it's a big deal, even the smallest things can prevent thousands of people from experiencing the value of your product. Take Snappa.com for instance. They have thousands of sign-ups every single week. Yet they used to require everyone to validate their email address. Now sounds pretty simple, right? You sign up for the product and then you have to go to your email, click, yes, I'm not a robot, confirming my email, and then it can go in to the product.
Wes Bush:
So that one step. It didn't seem like a big deal for Chris, who is the CEO of Snappa.com. But I asked him, "Chris, how many sign-ups, when they go on your website, and they sign up, those thousands of people every single week, how many of them actually go in to their email, click and go in to your product?" So Chris didn't know right away, so he got back to me. About an hour and a half later, he said, "Wes, oh my goodness. There's actually a lot of people here who don't go in to the product at all, yet they still sign up." In fact, there was 27% of users would sign up and never go in to the product.
Wes Bush:
So why was that? Well, a lot of it just comes back to the same fact that their time-to-value was too long. They said to themselves, "Hey. I just signed up for the product, I'm motivated to sign up for the product, but because there's all these extra steps in the way, I'm not as motivated as I once was." So we decided, what could we do about this? We were going to delay this step. So the first-time user could sign up and immediately go in to the product and experience the value of the product and truly experience the value. So what happened? Well, it was quite, almost, scary. About a week later, once it was implemented, Chris started sending me screenshots and updates of his monthly recurring revenue.
Wes Bush:
And I kid you not, over the next month, Chris' monthly recurring revenue went up 20%. And why do you think so many users started upgrading? Well, part of that 27% of users who, initially Chris just wrote off as, you know what, they're not that interested to go in to the product, they don't care about the product as much as the other people. No. You see, once they actually experienced the value of the product and solved their pain, they were saying to themselves, "I love this product. Snappa.com is awesome. I can create graphics truly in a snap. I want continued access to this product. I'm just going to hit here and upgrade and become a paying customer." So that is something I want you to think about.
Wes Bush:
Whenever you think about how we need to prioritize destroying our time-to-value within the product. Because what you'll notice is when you do that, people will reward you with becoming paying customers. And this is because this is the whole secret behind product-led growth, is that your user success will eventually become your success. Put another way, to build a successful product-led business, you need to serve before you sell. And in the next lesson, I'm going to cover what you need to know around all things product-led growth and recap everything.
