Deciding whether a free trial, freemium, or hybrid model will work best for your business is challenging — especially as choosing the wrong one could potentially dent your business’ performance.
In this course, you’ll learn:
Wes Bush:
First part of this is going to cover if now is the right time for your business to be product-led. I want to kick this off with a quote. And this is from the director of product management at Salesforce. It really goes to say that, "Product-led growth is the only distribution model worth undertaking once the market is mature." I want you to think on that. Do you disagree? Agree? When we had the first live course around this, some students thought the word only, there's never only one way to do something. So there was some people who disagreed on that notion, but the grand majority of people definitely agreed that well, when we think about it in a very competitive, mature market, if you're not being product-led, there are some serious risks, which I want you to start thinking about those risks.
Wes Bush:
What's the risk of not making this transition to being product-led in a mature market? Think about it. What are those risks of not making the transition to being product-led in a mature market? Competition's heating up, more competitors are added to your market every single month. What's the risk of not being product-led? There could be losing out on market share. That's one piece. If you can't compete in some markets, because well, it's just too expensive for you to sell into those markets, you're definitely going to lose those markets. I hate to break it to you. That's going to happen. There's also the fact that well, competitors can offer potentially a better price while generating more profit. And that is because one of the MOATs of a product-led business is capital efficiency. They can operate more efficient than your sales-led business. And so that's something you have to think about.
Wes Bush:
Well, am I okay with that? Am I okay with a competitor potentially undercutting me with a better product while they're still generating more profit? That's a competitive advantage for that business, but wouldn't you want it to be yours? So, how do you know when it's the right time to make the jump to product-led growth? If you make it too early, it might hurt your business. If you make it too late, once again, it'll hurt your business for sure. So I want you to meet the MOAT framework. And so I created this framework to really help folks identify when is the right time to be product-led. And so as we go through it, there's going to be a lot of questions, and I want you to start thinking about what does your long-term strategy look like? That's the whole purpose of this framework is really to help you determine your longterm strategy and what will perform best for your business.
Wes Bush:
So this is a quick overview of the framework. We're going to start looking at, what's your market strategy? How do you want to tackle your market and help your customers? Then we're going to look at what does your market currently look like? Is it super competitive? Is it a very new market altogether? And based on that, there's different choices we have to make around how we market. And the other piece around audience is really interesting because, let's say if you're focusing on a market that is not tech savvy one bit, they see tech, they run away, they're scared of tech. It's going to potentially be very hard for you to make that product-led model work right now.
Wes Bush:
And I'll also give you a bunch of examples in that instance where you'll see people doing it still and what are some of the repercussions there? And when it comes to time-to-value, what we're really trying to get here is how long does it take for people to get value out of your product? If it's a really long time, it might not be the best time for you to be product-led, at least right now. So let's kick off with your market strategy.
