How your PLG company can go viral.
This week: Viral growth loops, pro marketing tips, the evolution of GTM in B2B SaaS, Notion's org chart, and more.
Welcome back to The HeadsUpdate! Help us grow by sharing this edition and leaving your feedback at the bottom of this email.
Let’s dive in.
📊 Going viral
Rosie and Antoine over at Prosumerized SaaS share some early growth tactics from Loom and Dropbox. Here are our biggest takeaways:
Optimize for user activation in the early stages.
Defining activation can be difficult and often requires quite a bit of tweaking. For instance, at Loom, Shahed Khan explains that one of these user journeys was more representative of activation than the other:
User signing up → user recording a video
User recording a video → user sharing it → receiving notification that someone watched it
The second one – which validates that a user received value from someone watching their video – was the whole purpose of Loom and is thus a great indicator of user activation.
Make onboarding seamless.
You’ve heard this from us again and again. GC Lionetti at Dropbox explains that “you never completely nail onboarding - you’re iterating, tweaking and experimenting with it.”
In its early years, Dropbox defined seven key actions in its onboarding checklist. That was far too much, and it turns out that only two actions were needed to successfully onboard a new user: put a file in a folder, and share the file. That’s it.
Lesson learned: help the customer reach value quickly and easily.
Figure out what sharing methods work best for your company.
Both Loom and Dropbox do all four of these extremely well:
Word of mouth, e.g. users championing your product
Collaboration, e.g. sharing Loom videos with your team
Implicit sharing, e.g. the Mailchimp monkey branding from last week
Incentivized sharing, e.g. Dropbox granting more storage upon sharing files
All four of these methods will help to grow your user base!
We highly recommend reading the full article below:
💭 Marketing in the product-led era
Shawn Herring from PandaDoc lays down some of his most important tips for all you product-led marketers out there:
Re-forecast
You can have an annual plan, but you should re-forecast every quarter. You will see certain areas under- or overperforming that are leading indicators for revenue.
Waiting a year to re-forecast can be costly – reassessing quarterly helps you better understand your sales cycles and what to expect from the self-service experience.
Outline your customer journey
Understanding your customer journey — where things go right and where things go wrong — will help you identify areas to optimize before doing anything new for the rest of your campaign.
We’ve repeated this time and time again in the HeadsUpdate: get as close as possible to the end-user. Gain a better understanding of how the product helps users solve problems, and where they encounter roadblocks.
Switch from lead-centric to account-centric marketing
You should no longer exclusively treat entities as leads. Even if you’re an inbound organization, you should use an account-based approach. Once you know who your ideal customer is and have outlined their journey, you can concentrate your resources on targeted accounts and personalize campaigns to their needs.
This one’s crucial for creating relationships within large entities and companies – you’ll want to hear from the many end-users within an organization and understand how your product can address their needs.
Rethink your budget
Understand that a dollar spent here will represent a return over there and that the problem may not be linear anymore. You may find your returns in places you weren’t expecting. This means that you should align your reporting with the revenue ops team so you can actually see the results of your efforts instead of having to infer them.
There are a lot of ways to market. At HeadsUp, we release blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, org charts, and so on – sometimes certain forms of marketing and certain campaigns will stick better than others. We’re always adjusting our strategy to strike the right balance; it’s important to be quick on your feet.
🐵 The evolution of go to market strategies of B2B SaaS in 3 charts
Lenny’s Newsletter published an excellent survey of how the go-to-market strategy of B2B SaaS companies evolved over time. By speaking to operators at companies ranging from upstarts like Notion and Retool, to giants like Stripe and Salesforce, we got a glimpse into how the go-to-market strategy changed as the companies grew.
In this article, we present a data-driven analysis of the results from Lenny’s survey, with our takeaways.
You have to layer on sales, even though being product-led early on might help you grow quickly. You might even want to transition from product-led to predominantly sales-led.
You have to start off targeting startups, but you also must move upmarket to grow.
You should focus on selling to a few personas when you are early-stage.
🚀 Notion’s org chart: a closer look at a product-led rocketship
At HeadsUp, we took a look at Notion’s org chart and team composition, which helps us understand what best-in-class looks like for a product-led growth company, especially one that’s in hypergrowth.
Here are our biggest takeaways:
Growing your revenue teams is important in the current stage. Most of the growth in headcount over the last year has been in Notion’s revenue teams. From having almost no sales and marketing, Notion has quickly transformed into a company where almost half the people are working in revenue teams!
Community remains a key pillar of growth. Having 10 people work on community reflects how much of a priority community-led growth has been for Notion.
Having a strong people team sets your growth up for success. At 18 strong, the People team makes up more than 10% of the company. This helps Notion grow sustainably, maintain the talent bar, and also ensure culture does not become distorted as the company triples in size.
💸 Amplitude taking off
Amplitude just IPO’d, with shares opening at $50, 43% above the $35 reference price set by the Nasdaq.
That’s a PLG success story if we’ve ever seen one – Amplitude is a product analytics platform for businesses to analyze customer behavior data and improve their products using that data and intuitive visualization tools.
Check out their S-1 and IPO teardown over at Public Comps:
💰Atlassian hits $100 billion milestone
That’s a lot of dough.
Check out Jesse Pujji’s Twitter thread on the truly ~wild story~ of how they got there:
📌 PLG jobs everywhere
You’re hiring? Us too!
Here are two of our favorite spots to find and advertise your PLG jobs:
productled.com/community - A huge Slack community for all things PLG, including a #jobs-board and weekly jobs roundup
productled.marketing/c/jobs - Forum for PLG marketing including jobs boards.
And check out our most recent LinkedIn shoutout for a list of PLG jobs at the biggest companies. Stay tuned, as we’ll be releasing a jobs board soon!