Red-ocean companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market gets crowded, growth reduces, products become commodities, & cut-throat competition turns the bloody ocean red. Blue-ocean companies access untapped market space & create demand, so they have the opportunity for highly profitable growth. In Blue Oceans, competition is irrelevant.If you’re in a blue ocean & have a quick time-to-value in your product, use a product-led model. However, if your product is complex, start with a sales to educate your audience & create demand.

Red & Blue Oceans

Traditionally, SaaS products sold to executives at the top. Nowadays, the tables have turned. Products are now cheaper & can be adopted without talking to sales: Slack is a perfect example, spreading organically, starting with one user who invites a colleague, then an entire team.How Product-Led Growth models fit with selling: <ul><li>Freemium & top-down selling. Rarely works, most decision-makers won’t be everyday users of the product </li><li>Freemium/free trial & bottom-up selling. Works if you help your potential buyers use the product </li><li>Free trial & top-down selling. It's a coin toss.</li></ul>

Audience: Top-Down or Bottom-Up Selling Strategy

It helps you pick the right go-to-market strategy for your business: <ul><li>Market Strategy: Is your go-to-market strategy dominant, disruptive, or differentiated? </li><li>Ocean Conditions: Are you in a red- or blue-ocean business? </li><li>Audience: Do you have a top-down or bottom-up marketing strategy? </li><li>Time-to-value: How fast can you showcase value?</li></ul>

MOAT Framework to analyse market conditions 

To create a successful product-led business, you need a quick time-to-value. New users need to have a good experience quickly. There are the 4 types of users: <ul><li>Mission Impossible Users. Your user has low motivation & finds it hard to use your product. </li><li>Rookie Users. Your user has high motivation but finds it incredibly difficult to use your product. Maybe they are forced to do it.</li><li>Veteran Users. Your user has low motivation but finds it easy to use your product. </li><li>Spoiled Users. This is the outcome to optimize for. Your user has high motivation and finds it straightforward to use your product.</li></ul>

Time to Value

Product-Led Growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on using your product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers. This is in opposition to the traditional sales model. Instead of helping buyers go through a long, drawn-out sales cycle, they give the buyer the “keys” to their product. The company, in turn, focuses on helping the buyer improve their life. Upgrading to a paid plan becomes a no-brainer.Companies like Dropbox or Hubspot are some of the companies succeeding with this approach.

What is a Product-Led Company?

As in bowling, we need two bumpers to keep our ball out of the gutter. We can use product and conversational bumpers to guide users to a key outcome.<ul><li>Product bumpers are mission critical. They help users adopt the product within the application itself. </li><li>Conversational bumpers work to educate users, bring them back into the application, and eventually upgrade their account.</li></ul>

The Two Bumpers Product Analogy

Product tours are one of the most effective ways to bump users toward experiencing meaningful value in the product:<ul><li>Product tours should ask users what they’re trying to accomplish in the product. </li><li>Product tours should cover important step(s) that set users up for success with the product. </li><li>High-performing product tours often use a “focus mode” that strips away unnecessary elements, like the navigation bar, until the user completes the product tour. </li><li>Product tours are typically between three and five steps. </li></ul>

Product Tours

Product-Led Growth means that every team in your business influences the product. <ul><li class="ql-align-center">Your marketing team will ask, how can our product generate a demand flywheel. </li><li class="ql-align-center">Your sales team will ask, how can we use the product to qualify our prospects for us? </li><li class="ql-align-center">Your customer success team asks, how can we create a product that helps customers become successful beyond our dreams? </li></ul>By having every team focused on the product, you create a culture that is built around enduring customer value.

Depending on your strategy you can find yourself in one of the 4 categories, which impact your go-to market:<ul><li>Dominant strategy: the best solution for the lowest price? Freemium works amazingly well here, but the size of the market needs to be really BIG. </li><li>Differentiated strategy: the best-customized solution for the highest price to underserved customers. Trials or demo s work best. </li><li>Disruptive strategy: Do you want to offer the simplest product for the lowest price to over-served customers? Freemium works great. </li><li>Hybrid strategy</li></ul>

Market Strategy: Freemium, Trial or Demo

Common product bumpers:<ul><li>Welcome Messages</li><li>Product Tours</li><li>Progress Bars</li><li>Checklists</li><li>Onboarding</li><li>Tooltips</li><li>Empty States</li></ul>Common conversational bumpers:<ul><li>User Onboarding</li><li>Emails</li><li>Push Notifications</li><li>Explainer Videos</li><li>Direct Mail </li></ul>

Common Product Bumpers

A decent introduction to the strategy of product-led growth.

"Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides. It is a critical step in successful product design and this book shows you how it's done." - Nir Eyal, Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of "Hooked"

books

Books

product

Product & Design

"Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides...and this book shows you how it's done." - Nir Eyal, Author of "Hooked" and "Indistractible""As captivating as a good novel, Product-Led Growth is an absolute must-read for SaaS business owners." - Omar Zenhom, CEO, WebinarNinja"Why did I just blow $300K promoting a whitepaper?"That's the hard question I asked myself but couldn't answer--after all, we were just following the same old SaaS playbook. Sure, sales cycles were long and acquisition was expensive, but that's how everybody grew their companies.But after I helped launch a freemium product that went from 0-100K users in less than 12 months, I realized the traditional way of selling software was deeply flawed.Hi, I'm Wes Bush, founder of the Product-Led Institute. And in Product-Led Growth, I show you how you can cut your acquisition costs and scale further than you ever thought possible...by making your product the tool that helps you acquire, convert, and retain customers.But what does it mean to be "product-led"? How do you know if a product-led growth strategy makes sense for your business? And most importantly, how do you execute it?You'll find answers to all of these questions inside this book. In addition, I'll also show you: <ul> <li>How to save 3-6 months of development and hundreds of thousands of dollars by launching a free trial in 24 hours--and why you should do it (Ch. 10)</li> <li>Which HUGE mistake ProfitWell's Patrick Campbell says can "kill your growth and set you up for long-term failure"...and how to avoid making it (Ch. 8)</li> <li>Which of the 4 most common SaaS pricing strategies is the ONLY one with long-term viability (Ch. 9)</li> <li>What the "Triple-A" sprint cycle is and how to use it to build a sustainable growth process--in just 1 month (Ch. 12)</li> <li>How to stop paying customers from slipping away (Ch. 15)</li> <li>The 3 apocalyptic "tidal waves" that are coming for SaaS companies--and what you MUST do to survive them (Ch. 1)</li> <li>How to make free trial and freemium users hunger to upgrade to paid (Ch. 9)</li> <li>The single biggest cause of leaky funnels and how to fix it, fast (Ch. 10)</li> <li>Which 7 people you need in your "tiger team" to run a successful product-led growth team (Ch. 11)</li> <li>The #1 thing to improve right now to maximize your customer lifetime value (Ch. 14)</li> </ul> Product-Led Growth also comes packed with "do this, not that" real-life examples from the industry's biggest brands--as well as a collection of high-converting email scripts you can customize and send out immediately to turn more users into customers. So if you are a SaaS founder, key decision-maker, or marketer wondering what your next strategic step should be, order your copy of Product-Led Growth today. "This is one of my favorite books of 2019." - Zeno Roch, Chief Product Office, Liferay Cloud "A must-read book for SaaS founders, especially if you have a self-serve SaaS." - Kaloyan Yankulov, Encharge "This book is epic. If you want to know more about how to build a product-led business, you need to read this. Go. Buy. It. Now." - James Gill, CEO, GoSquared