In episode 741, Rob Walling talks to Wes Bush, CEO and Founder of ProductLed, about the nuances and misconceptions of product-led growth. Wes debunks common myths and explains how companies can leverage their product to drive user acquisition, engagement, and growth. They dive into a real-world example and explore how founders can avoid the trap of thinking the product will “sell itself” while contrasting PLG and sales-led strategies.
Episode Sponsor:
Hiring senior developers can really move the needle in your business, but if you bring on the wrong person, you can quickly burn through your runway. If you need help finding a vetted, senior, results-oriented developer, you should reach out to today’s sponsor, Lemon.io.
For years, they’ve been helping our audience find high quality, global talent at competitive rates, and they can help you too.
Longtime listener Chaz Yoon, hired a senior developer from Lemon.io and said his hire ”definitely knew his stuff, provided appropriate feedback and pushback, and had great communication, including very fluent English. He really exceeded my expectations.”
Chaz said he’d definitely use Lemon.io again when he’s looking for a senior level engineer.
To learn more and get a 15% discount on your first four weeks of working with a developer at lemon.io/startups.
Topics we cover:
- (2:01) – Defining product-led growth
- (6:07) – Are users able to get value for free?
- (11:38) – Hybrid: both product-led and sales-led
- (14:52) – Determining the main outcome of your free model
- (19:23) – Misuse of the PLG terminology
- (22:00) – The benefits of PLG over sales-led growth
- (24:08) – Workshopping SavvyCal’s product-led strategy
Links from the Show:
- Mastermind Applications are open until December 4th
- Wes Bush (@wes_bush) | X
- ProductLed (@productled) | X
- ProductLed
- Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself by Wes Bush
- The Product-Led Playbook: How to Unlock Self-Serve Revenue and Dominate Your Market (With a Tiny Team) by Wes Bush
- Free Audiobook of The Product-Led Playbook
- Product-Led Onboarding by Ramli John
- TinySeed
- SparkToro
- SavvyCal
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you!
Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify
Welcome to another episode of Startups For, the Rest, Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode I sit down with Wes Bush. He’s one of the key proponents of the product led growth movement as the author of two books on the subject, product led growth, how to build a product that sells itself and the Product Led playbook, how to unlock Self-serve revenue, and dominate your market with a tiny team. I wanted to have Wes on the show today because I think there are a lot of misconceptions and a lot of myths around what product-led growth actually is, and I wanted to talk with Wes, obviously one of the foremost experts on this topic, to really try to peel away myth from fact and really get to the heart of product-led growth, why you might want to consider it and when it’s a good idea when it’s not.
Before we dive into our conversation, MicroConf Mastermind matching happens three times a year and it’s happening right now, applications close on December 4th, so just a week or two after this episode goes live. Masterminds have been critical to my development and frankly, my longevity as an entrepreneur, and I’ve been a proponent of them for probably 12 or 13 years. You can go to startups For, the Rest Of Us dot com and search for startup mastermind and find the first time that I ever mentioned it on the show. And it’s a long time ago because I became a believer in meeting with like-minded founders over time, a small group of founders who really followed my journey, almost like honorary co-founders. So if you’ve been feeling alone or isolated or lost or you’re just not sure what to do next and you need some accountability and someone else to be in the trenches alongside you, head to microcomp.com/masterminds. You pay a one-time fee, and we will match you up with other like-minded founders. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Wes West Bush. Thanks so much for joining me on the show. Thanks
Wes Bush:
For having me. I’m excited to be
Rob Walling:
Here. I’m excited to talk about product led growth with you for a long time. Listeners of the show, they know I have a love hate relationship with the term product-led growth because I like shorthand terms, even product-market fit, I feel the same way. It’s like, oh, if I say that, and we kind of both know what that means, it can be thousands of words encapsulating that. The problem is when I say product-market fit, if there’s 10 of us in a room, there’s 10 different definitions of it. And I feel like product-led growth is a bit like that and sometimes misused, especially by developers who just want their product to sell itself. Do you find that in your role as, I mean you’re an ambassador, you’ve written three books on product-led growth. Do you find that as well?
Wes Bush:
Oh, totally. And one of the most viral tweets that I got, a ton of retweets and stuff, I was like, product growth, this is just an effing free trial. It was like, oh, okay. There’s a lot of people that
Rob Walling:
Think that.
Wes Bush:
So it was interesting.
Rob Walling:
So I want to start by letting people know, you’ve written three books on product-led growth, so you certainly, of all the guests I’ve had on this podcast, probably the person who knows the most about it and who has thought the most about it. You have the product-led playbook, you have product-led growth, that title and product led onboarding
Wes Bush:
Ley. John did write that one. I just wrote the first chapter, but
Rob Walling:
Oh, okay. Well, thanks for the clarification. Yeah, no worries. I’d love to start by let’s do the best job we can at really defining what product led growth is. So I’ll kick it to you, you say what you think it is, and then I’m going to say like, well, is this product leg growth? Just so we can kind of tease it apart because I have my own internal definition of what is, I’m not even sure it’s right. So talk us through PLG.
Wes Bush:
Yeah, and I think where a lot of people get confused is thinking of one dimension of like, oh yeah, that’s product like growth, whereas it’s a multi-dimensional thing that impacts your entire business. So here’s a fun way of thinking about it, is product-led growth is when you use your product to acquire new customers, engage them, meaning getting them to value and also monetizing. And you could also take that to expanding customers as well, but it’s where you’re using your product throughout your entire go-to market motion. It’s not just the free trial for people to sign up for free, but it helps them get the value. It also upgrades them and you can use it for expansion as well. And so at the surface, that’s what it is in its simplest way, and you’re talking about different examples of it, what it looks like. I’ll use some non-software as a service examples like Cologne, perfume, I think those are great examples of PLG and the real world where it’s like, Hey, I can try it before I buy it. And that’s really, I think a core tenant of it. It’s got to have that experience where, okay, I tried it for free, I like
Rob Walling:
It. Oh, I like that example of cologne. I’d never thought of it. To me, when I hear PLG, I’m just like SaaS, SaaS and software,
Wes Bush:
Right? Yeah,
Rob Walling:
Self-serve freemium. These things all come to mind, but that’s kind of cool to hear an example of a real world product. So now I want to ask you some questions and say, is this product led growth or is it not? So my last SaaS startup was called Drip. It’s still functioning here in town downtown Minneapolis, and we had a self-serve trial credit card upfront, and for now, we had no free plan. Later we did. So we’re going to get a lot of examples out of this, but no free plan. Put a credit card upfront. You get a trial for whatever it was, 14, 21 days inside the app, there was a bunch of onboarding stuff, there were videos and kind of like, Hey, do this next, and you got emails to come and engage and do this next. And then if you got fully set up, then you got to choose if you canceled your trial or if your credit card got charged at the end basically. I always thought of that as just, to me, I just say, well, that’s self-serve SaaS that it existed since Basecamp is self-serve SaaS, and I had hit tail in 20 10, 20 11, that was self-serve SaaS, and it all followed that model. But would you include that under the umbrella of PLG?
Wes Bush:
Well, here’s a qualifying question. First, we’re users that were signing up able to get to value for free. They could, in drips case, send a lot of emails and really feel like, okay, I got the value from the product, could do something interesting in the product that I couldn’t do before.
Rob Walling:
And that was included in the trial itself. It truly was a free trial. And yes, they could do everything in terms of uploading subscribers, sending emails, getting the value that the product offered.
Wes Bush:
So that would be an example where it’s like, yes, I would consider that product led. Now I’m going to try and confuse everybody here for a second and give an example of a company that does have a free trial but is not product led because it’s not always the same case. So this company is called ZoomInfo. A lot of people know about them. You can sign up for the free trial and it’s actually more of a request, a free trial. And then you get to the, okay, you fill out your info and it’s like book a call. You got to go through this whole experience and everything from the second you fill out that form is like convert, let’s convert them and let’s get them on the phone and convert them. So there was no value exchange, there was no kind of try before I buy experience.
So you can actually have a free experience, free trial, but if every bone in that company is soon as you sign up is like convert them, convert them, convert them, no, that’s still just using a different mousetrap At the end of the day, what the biggest changes between what I would classify as more of a sales led company versus a product led one really comes down to, if you think of oversimplify, a go-to market motion, there’s really three things that go on in any business. There’s acquisition, there’s monetization, you got to make customers, and then there’s the overall engagement delivering on the value. Now a traditional sales like company, it’s like you acquire them, then it kicks off the monetization side of things. Then it’s about engagement, delivering on the value. The big change in product-led growth and product-led companies is just that middle piece. It switches. So it goes from acquisition to engagements. You deliver value before you purchase, and then it’s monetization. And so whenever you’re thinking, is this a sales led or a product led company, just refer back to that because that is probably the easiest way to kind of see, oh, okay, is that truly your product led company or not?
Rob Walling:
So it’s engage, monetize or swapped is what you’re saying?
Wes Bush:
Exactly.
Rob Walling:
That’s interesting. Okay, let me ask you this, then there’s a company called Spark Toro. Have you heard of it? Rand Fishkins company?
Wes Bush:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Rob Walling:
And I’m an investor there, friends with Rand, they have a try it free button on their website. When you click it, you do self sign up for an account, your username and password, or I think you can authentic through Google. And then what you do is you get a, it’s a really limited free plan. In essence, you get five searches a month, so very limited and I believe you only get the top three or four results or five results when there might be hundreds. And if you’re a paying customer, you can get all the data. And for folks who don’t know about Spark Toro, the H one is how do you get better ROI from content, SEO, social PR and performance marketing smart to is basically an audience research tool for marketers. So with that stage set of how I just described kind of this free, it’s even a stretch to say it’s a free mean plan, it is quite limited, but what is that? Is that product-led growth? Definitely not. They’re not doing sales. So does that by default mean their product led growth?
Wes Bush:
Yeah, in theory, that’s the free motion they have that. I think that’s definitely in the right direction. The only thing where I would be like, okay, is that the right thing they’re giving away free is could someone sign up for that and feel like they genuinely got some insight that was really meaningful to them? Now, if they can check the box on that, it’s like, Hey, that’s a great free motion. And yeah, I would still classify that as product led, you’re giving away free, but what separates a great free model from one that’s just mediocre and not many people convert at the end of the day is it all comes down to what is the outcome of that free product? Does it have one very similar products that we’re working with? One of our clients, it’s for trade opportunities if for export import businesses, let’s say are trying to find the best baati rice exporter, and it’s like it shows the database, you know what?
They only need to find one. They need to find one deal that’s really incredible. And what we decided to give away for free is like, hey, finding that person finding that is free now if you want to contact them, then you got to upgrade at that specific stage. Now it doesn’t seem like it’s a lot, but it’s enough. It’s enough for them to fill, they walk away from that experience saying, Hey, if I need to find another export import business, I know exactly where I got to go. And same thing with Spark Tora. It’s like as long as they find out of those top four or three options, something’s meaningful, then it’s enough. But that’s the tricky part too, because if you search and you waste those five searches on something, you don’t find anything useful, then people are like, this product sucks.
Rob Walling:
And I kind of asked a question without asking a question with my last prompt, which is sales led is what maybe the Jason Lemkin playbook, I think of it where it’s just a lot of outbound and it’s just this, you build up this big sales force, the boiler room as they say, and you obviously have inbound, you try to do inbound, and anybody who comes inbound, it’s like do a demo, put ’em through the sales funnel versus product led. What you’re saying is, well, that’s more of the product provides the value. I feel like that’s a false dichotomy. I feel like there’s more nuance to this whole story than that. And in fact, coming back to Drip, we did both of those things. Now we did outbound, it was not a huge motion, but we had a ton of inbound. I’m a better marketer than a salesperson, let’s put it that way.
So we had a ton of inbound just from all the stuff we were doing. And what we noticed was on the lower end, if someone’s going to pay us $50 a month or a hundred dollars a month, those our cheapest plans had to be product led. We weren’t going to do a demo, just the A CV. The LTV was not there for it. But we’d see someone come through and it’d be like, oh, this is someone, it’s a website that that if I said the name of you would know. And it’s like, well, I’m sure they have a million subscribers and they’re probably going to pay us $3,000 a month. So then we would reach out to them and we’re like, we need to get on the phone with you. We know that we can help close the deal. So I call that a dual funnel now where there’s lower end and the higher end and you handle ’em differently. So I guess were we sales led? Were we product led, or would you just say, well, you’re both,
Wes Bush:
Yeah, that’s both hybrid and that’s great motion to have if you can do that. If you’re only product let’s say is like $10 per month, something like, it’s like, okay, it probably doesn’t make sense even if that company did sign up because there’s not that expansion opportunity where you can make it work. But no, I love those motions and I think that’s using the best of both worlds where it’s saying, Hey, if you’re a small company here, self-serve, do that. And if you’re a bigger company, hey, there’s a different approach. And we could actually maybe even position that instead of just like, Hey, you want to hop on a call with me? It’s like, Hey, I know you have a big list. How can we create email marketing strategy together that is going to be so much better than what you’re currently doing? And they’re like, man, this drip company’s really looking out for me outside of just looking for another place to send emails. They’re a value added partner here, absolutely like 3000 per month. That seems like a no brainer deal. To get this advice to
Rob Walling:
Hiring senior developers can really move the needle in your business, but if you bring on the wrong person, you can quickly burn through your runway. If you need help finding a vetted senior results oriented developer, you should reach out to today’s sponsor lemon.io. For years, they’ve been helping our audience find high quality global talent at competitive rates. And they can help you too. Don’t just take my word for it listener. Dylan Pierce had this to say about working with lemon.io. The machine learning engineer, they helped me hire was very professional and even learned a new tech stack to set up an environment to train and deploy machine learning models. He documented his work clearly so I could train it in the future with additional data. I’m super happy with the results and longtime listener, Chaz Yu hired a senior developer from lemon.io and said his higher quote, definitely knew his stuff, provided appropriate feedback and pushback and had great communication including very fluent English. He really exceeded my expectations. Chaz said he definitely used Lemon io again when he’s looking for a senior level engineer to learn more and get a 15% discount on your first four weeks of working with a developer head to lemon.io/startups. That’s lemon.io/startups.
So let’s talk a little bit about product-led growth. And I think a lot of people think freemium, you have to have freemium and you’re basically like, no, a free trial, as long as you get value out of the product and that’s engaging in monetizing, that is a qualifier. You can still be included in the PLG Hall of Fame if we’re a paid or a free trial that makes, oh no, it’s the monetization has to be after. So it can’t be a paid trial,
Wes Bush:
It
Rob Walling:
Has to be
Wes Bush:
Free. So the free model you choose actually doesn’t matter. So if you look at billion dollar plus product companies, you’ll find every company with whether it’s a free trial, a Freeman model usage-based trial, they’re all out there. What does matter though is deciding what is the main outcome of your free model. So what could you actually do when you sign up for that free product? And is it actually something that feels like it’s tangible value for that user? A lot of times I’ll send it for a free trial as an example, and you click around and you do a couple things. You’re like, Whoopi, I can’t do anything I couldn’t do before. There is no transformation. And the best product companies, they all have somewhat of a transformation where it’s like, Hey, before chat GBT and after chat GBT, it’s like it is pretty clear there was a difference there in productivity and all those other things. So you got to have that. You got to allow your product to shine in that free experience. And so I could go on a whole big tangent, Rob, go through how do you actually decide what’s to giveaway for free? But I just wanted to point that out that the model doesn’t matter as much as people think it is, it’s what that outcome is. And deciding what that is is really the tricky part.
Rob Walling:
It’s interesting because with Bootstrappers, which the majority of this audience is folks who are bootstrapping are mostly bootstrapping, frankly. I mean there’s 20 or 30% who want to raise funding or have raised some type of funding, but it is just the non venture track. SaaS founders is kind of the listeners of this audience. We’ve just always done product led. That’s just what we did from the start. Because I wasn’t good at sales demos, I wasn’t going to do a bunch of outbound, my SaaS 2009, 2010, 11, it was marketing. And since I was charging early SaaS companies, I had with 10, 20, 40 a month, so really low end and then 50, a hundred, 200 with Drip. I couldn’t afford to do anything but build onboarding into the app because I had to operate at a scale that it just required that and I wasn’t going to be able to manually onboard. So I acquired through SEO content, a bunch of other demand gen, and then I engaged in the product because I was a developer. And that’s the only way to automate it to the point where I could have 500 or a thousand customers in order to get to tens of thousands of dollars a month in MRR and then of course monetization. It was always just a free trial to monetize. So it really sounds like the default for most bootstrappers is probably going to be product led. Is that accurate?
Wes Bush:
So I think the mindset of them wanting to go this direction is, but then there’s very few folks where that is like, Hey, this is what I want to do, and I’m actually seeing really good success with it because I think folks like yourself where you have just naturally done it is actually really rare. There’s like for every one of you, there’s probably 10 others that are like, yeah, I want that too. Yet when I try and do the product led thing, I suck at it or it just doesn’t work out the way I thought it was. The free to paid conversion rates really bad and because users can’t get the value, they just don’t upgrade. So there’s a host of other reasons why it usually doesn’t work. But yeah, I’d say generally speaking, they do want that specific direction because they see that is the most efficient way to scale this business without adding people and more cost to the equation.
Rob Walling:
And I think one of the annoying things for me with PLG is that people have misused it, and I see makers and developers being like, it means I don’t have to market because the product just sells itself. And it’s like, that’s not my, I don’t think any product really sells itself. I mean, again, it sounds like I’ve been running all my SaaS was PLG, and yet it never sold itself. I marketed the shit out of that stuff. I drove a lot of traffic, I did a lot of split testing, a lot of conversion optimization. I optimized the hell out of the funnels, the onboard, all of that was a massive thing before growth hacking was a thing. I was doing all of it. It was like, well, I know I want these numbers to go up. I know I want trial to pay to go up. How do I do that? Well, I got to get more people onboarded. How do I do that? Well, I need more people to install the JavaScript snippet on my thing, so how do I do that? And I, it was just a very logical flow. But do you feel, is it just me or do you feel like some devs, maybe especially builder types, maybe misuse the term?
Wes Bush:
Oh yeah. And I think the biggest reeducation a lot of times do it product-led is just the fact that it’s like, Hey, you still have to market this. You still have to sell it and have really good understanding of what that looks like. There is very few companies I’ve interviewed hundreds of product-led founders where I’m like one out of maybe 300 has a situation where their product does market itself really, really well. But that is because they were super intentional about how that product was going to interact with other people. Mixmax is perfect example. When I was interviewing the CO Olaf, he was like, you know what? We have a $0 cost per acquisition cost. I was like, this is pretty fantastic. But it’s like you send an email powered by mix. I was like, oh, you got this beautiful growth lever, external virality. How many companies have that? Most companies just have internal virality where it’s like, Hey, you share this with your other employees and other users. That’s not going to get you that crazy marketing growth and a user signups that you want. But every once in a while you do find a company where it’s like, that really worked for them and you just hope that that might be your company.
Rob Walling:
But as you’re saying, it’s one out of hundreds. Slack was used often as an early example, PLG. Would you say they’re similar because it did feel like there’s a viral loop in Slack that kind of became associated with product-led growth means that you infiltrate an org and then they invite a bunch of people and there’s virality and it doesn’t sound like that’s what we’re talking about. It sounds like they had that extra bonus of being one out of a few hundred where it could kind of market itself.
Wes Bush:
Yeah. Well, slack had really fantastic internal virality. You just think of the natural side of like, okay, Rob’s not on this installation. Let’s add Rob. And it’s like, sure, he is on our team, so why not? And it just naturally gravitates towards that. But since it was such a good product and did it so much better than email in a lot of ways, then it just naturally grew out from that, from word of mouth. But they did invest. If you still look at their p and l, majority of their expenses are still going towards marketing and sales, which is fascinating to see that. And maybe that shouldn’t be the case right now since their acquisition and now their product has just kind of stayed stagnant. But it’s worth considering, yes, invest in marketing and sales. It does not mean being a product of business. You don’t have to do that.
Rob Walling:
I think the probably the biggest point I want to drive home today for people listening is I think there’s a lot of perhaps misunderstanding or miscommunication around it. So then it begs the question, what are the big benefits of product led growth as opposed to sales led? The big benefits that you see,
Wes Bush:
It really just comes down to do you want to have a leveraged business where it’s the asset you’re building is the product As you scale up, you get more and more efficient, you get more profits, can afford to have a higher revenue per employee, all that fun stuff. Or do you want the people to be the machine in the business? And so many folks, it’s like, actually, I want more leverage in the business. And so that’s the biggest thing. It just comes down to leverage at the end of the day.
Rob Walling:
And you mentioned to me offline before we started that you actually have something you’d like to give to the listeners. What do you have?
Wes Bush:
Yeah, so I just wrote the product-led playbook, which at the very beginning of this book, I’m like, Hey, you know what? This is not the book for you. If you don’t know if product-led growth is right for you. That’s the first one I wrote. Product-led growth. This one is literally just here’s how you actually do it. It goes through nine core pieces that you got to implement inside your business, like onboarding pricing. It just gives you the exact frameworks for how to do it and the templates. So it’s all free for you product led gift.com, and you can just get that for free. And that’s the entire book we held. Nothing back there.
Rob Walling:
Awesome. Well thanks for that. I hope folks check it out. So I have one or two questions for you before we wrap up. And I think I want to frame, because I’m looking at an outline of the book, I have a table of contest and stuff in chapter six, how to decide what to give away for free versus what to monetize. It’s such a good conversation. And frankly, this is a common one I have with my investments. I’m invested in 200 and I think it’s 212 SaaS companies through TinySeed and then individually. And so I see the gamut, freemium or not of free trial, of not of sales led, product led, like the whole deal. And frequently I’m pulled into conversations. A lot of it’s pricing strategy and then it’s currently what we have, what should we, and I’m always like, I have my own kind of mental pattern matching framework, but I’ve never written it. I don’t even know if I could put it into words. So I’m curious. I know you can’t read the whole chapter six, but what’s the base framework there?
Wes Bush:
Yeah, I think this would be more fun too, if you tell me about a company that really well that they were struggling with this, and we can workshop and as people listen, this will be like five minutes and we could go through that framework.
Rob Walling:
Cool. So is this a free trial or is it freemium in this example?
Wes Bush:
No, it could be anything. You pick the company, I’ll use the framework and then people will kind of learn through that.
Rob Walling:
Alright, so let’s talk about frequent podcast guest, Derek Rimer. He runs a company called Savvy Cal. They are a competitor to Calendly and they have a free trial or it’s a 30 day money back guarantee. Let’s pretend they had a 30 day free trial because they’re PLG, but they do have a money back guarantee. So that’s in essence what they’re trying to do. They do not have a freemium, a free forever
Wes Bush:
Plan. So thanks for that. I got their website pulled up and now who is their ideal user? The person they feel like, Hey, we got to just target this person. They’re the best people.
Rob Walling:
So they actually have a couple, my understanding, or there were early adopters that were listeners to this podcast, that type bootstrappers and founders of Bootstrap companies. I think they made a shift as the audience grew or as their customer base grew and they started getting calendar power users, which I think are a lot more salespeople.
Wes Bush:
So first off, this is why it’s so hard, and this is for everybody listening. If you don’t know without a hundred percent confidence who your ideal user is, and I’m on the website too, it’s not just you, Rob, it’s not clear who is this for? I don’t know. Because in the world of calendar booking systems, it’s commoditized right now. There’s tidy Cal if I want to pay 49 bucks once. Sure. And there’s a ton of different options out there and book like a boss, they have a very specific persona on service professionals and stuff. So that would be the first kind of task I’d be like, okay, get really clear. Let’s go with a sales person though, because that’s more fun. And so let’s say it’s salespeople now, what is ultimate success for that sales person? We got to get super clear on that. What would you say that looks like, even if we’re just making it up on the spot a bit
Rob Walling:
Ultimate success, that it’s a complete super seamless booking experience for their prospects.
Wes Bush:
And now if we think about this space, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Calendly. So what is the unique sauce that they might bring to the table that’s like, Hey, this is unique, differentiated for people that are sales reps that are trying to just book easier?
Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s not on the website now, but the early positioning of avial was most booking links. There’s a power differential and it can be offensive to send your booking link because it’s like, oh, now you put a bunch of work on my shoulder,
Wes Bush:
Right?
Rob Walling:
Yep. Oh really? Now I got to click around, blah, blah, blah. And that was Avi Cal’s early positioning was, so I’m going to go with that. But the differentiated between them and Calendly is the booking experience itself is very much does everything you can do with amazing UX to remove that feeling.
Wes Bush:
Okay, so let’s say for the salesperson, we have, I’m pulling up a stat out of thin air here, but it’s 30% more meetings booked with your ideal prospects just because the experience is better and everything else. So that’s success. We’re trying to gear people towards that. Now, if we think about making this a game, this is where we get to the model part. Let’s divide this up into three levels. There’s your beginner level, which is, think about it as the newbie. They sign up, they’re like, oh yeah, let’s go through this, see what it’s all about. Then there’s your intermediate level. This is your first paid pro plan, and there’s the events level, which is your most expensive stuff. So for that initial beginner one, what might that beginner outcome be? Is it enough for it to just be, Hey, book one meeting with the prospect? Is it five meetings, 10 meetings? What do you think that might be for them?
Rob Walling:
Probably one. I think it’s just that initial meeting.
Wes Bush:
So it could literally just be one meeting. Now if they do a test or something like that, that might be a bit tricky where it’s like, okay, they did the test meeting on their own.
Rob Walling:
Oh, I see. Oh, I was thinking one meeting with each prospect. You’re just saying, yeah, the absolute value. At what point would they, huh, that’s interesting. Let’s say they booked five meetings, five prospects book meetings or five book meetings. Overall, you can do that with any, there’s no differentiation. You can do that with any calendar software. So it would almost to me be like, the moment that someone complimented me and said, holy, that was a really great booking. That would be the moment where I’d be like, oh, someone noticed that it was different. I dunno if that can be a qualifying event or not. But
Wes Bush:
Yeah, and this is the tricky part, right? Because it’s the special secret sauce. Whatever makes your product shine needs to come out in that free version. And if it’s just meat game one meeting booked, so what? It doesn’t pass the hurdle. And so this is one of the challenges when you’re thinking about what to give away for free if you’re in a very saturated space with a lot of competitors that already have really good free motions, and so you have to be creative. What is that new experience? And so would, like you said, it has to go back to did they, maybe it’s a customer or somebody that booked that meeting, have that experience where they said, wow, this is fantastic. Could we track it? I would start going down that rabbit hole and say, okay, it’s in this direction. We don’t know what exactly.
We got to validate what that looks like, but it’s something when they have this experience, they book 30% more meetings that they can feel the tangible difference of. When I was using Calendly, I was getting blocked. A lot of times people were in booking meetings, they felt bad about it. Whereas with Savvy Cal, now I have a story, and that story is now actually going to be in their head, the user’s head, and they’re going to tell themselves that story when they’re like, this is why I’m buying Savvy Cal today. Because it makes so much more sense than the other alternatives. They just don’t get me like that. But if you start off with that vague ideal user, it’s so much harder because everything that you give away for free should be tied back to who is that ideal user? What is that ultimate success? And that’s how you build an intentional free model, not just give away random,
Rob Walling:
Right, right. Just pick it off a dartboard. That’s cool. And my apologies to Derek Reimer, who certainly is hearing this and absolutely cringing at all my answers. How when you’re the founder of the company, he knows all the answers to these, and I’m kind of like, I’m going to make this one up. I’m not sure if it’s exactly right. So no, that was super cool, man. Thanks for leaning into the thought experiment there. If folks want to check out the book, obviously product led gift.com, or they can head to product led.com/playbook or frankly on Amazon, though your book is available in all the formats, folks would want to find it. Wes Bush, thanks so much for joining me on the show today.
Wes Bush:
Thanks for having me.
Rob Walling:
If folks want to keep up with you on X, Twitter, u are, Wesco bush and product led.com, if they want to check out all the stuff you’re up to. Thanks again, man.
Wes Bush:
This is fun.
Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Wes for joining me on the show today, and thank you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 741.
Leave a Reply