Implementing Product-Led-Growth (PLG)
I think I’ve said it before. Every SaaS founder's dream is to create a fast-growing company with only two teams: Growth (marketing) and Product (development).
It was mine, too. But about four weeks in, reality hit: You need sales!
I’ve written some posts about how we got the first 100 paying customers and how I pretty much talked to and manually onboarded all of them. And now we’ve got Sara onboard, an excellent customer success manager who’ll do sales calls, demo presentations and customer onboarding.
So, while you have the two opposite growth strategies, sales-led and product-led growth, I think our future lies somewhere in between.
Over the past 15 months, I’ve learned that there’s a huge target market that either doesn’t want to or doesn’t know how to get started with a tool like ours on their own. And there are no other companies that are willing to help them! So we’re gonna continue down the road we’re on and give all the help and support we can to the customers who need it.
But at the same time, I want to make it easy for those who can and will. That’s why we’re now implementing a reverse free trial.
Up until now, when you signed up at Herodesk, you were onboarded on our free plan and sent a series of emails to guide you through how it works and try to convince you to upgrade to a paid plan.
With the new onboarding flow, new users who sign up are onboarded on our Herodesk Plus plan on a 14-day free trial, during which they get full access to all features. After two weeks, they have to decide: Do you want to continue on a paid plan and keep all the features, or do you want to downgrade to our Free plan (or churn altogether)?
Data shows that customers are more likely to upgrade to a paid plan at the end of a reverse free trial than if they were onboarded directly on a free plan or using a regular free trial. That’s, of course, because they get to experience the product's full value faster.
During those two weeks of the trial, it’s our job to bring the new user to the “Aha-moment”, where they see the true value of Herodesk and why they should keep using it.
I believe that our “Aha-moment” is when a new user sees a message coming into their Herodesk account and gets to reply to it (that’s a thesis that’ll have to be tested, through).
To do that, we’ve carefully crafted a series of onboarding emails that are sent at specific times based on how far the users are on the onboarding journey.
The goal is to ensure that users have the resources they need to reach the “Aha-moment” or to make it easy for them to contact us if they need help.
That’s the onboarding strategy we’ll be testing in 2025.
A reverse free trial that quickly gets new users to the “Aha-moment”, making it possible for those who can and want to self-onboard. But at the same time, we will be super available and proactive in our outreach to assist those who need or want our help.
There’s still some way to go before we’re fully “product-led,” but these changes to our onboarding are a good step forward.
Two final tips:
- Check out ProductLed if you want to know more about it
- When I implemented this, I was looking for a system that would make sending those emails easy. I found Loops – a super simple email platform built for software companies.
Have a great weekend! ☀️
