The secrets to mastering product-led growth. | Wes Bush, Author of the #1 Bestselling Book on Product-Led Growth

Wes Bush wrote the original bestseller on Product-Led Growth—and then watched everyone try to copy Dropbox and Slack without truly getting it. Now, he’s here to break down exactly what goes wrong when early-stage founders jump into PLG, how to spot your product’s “million-dollar free problem,” and how to fix the three biggest onboarding gaps that sabotage new users.

He’ll show you why some sales-led companies die when they try freemium, how to carve out a simpler “first strike” moment, and the reason you need bumpers (like an onboarding checklist) to guide people to success. If you’re still using the “Request a Demo” button, this episode could totally transform your approach and give you a self-serve funnel that scales faster than any sales deck ever could.

Why You Should Listen

1. Make Users “Smell the Cologne” – Learn Wes’s approach for letting users experience the core value before they buy.

2. Turning Complex Setups into a No-Brainer – How to map out product, skill, and knowledge gaps so anyone can get started.

3. Bowling Alley Onboarding – A framework to slash unnecessary steps, guide users to that “aha” moment, and cut churn.

4. Freemium vs. Free Trial vs. Reverse Trial – How to pick the perfect model for your startup.

5. Sales-Led to Product-Led – Why some founders fight this shift, and how to pull it off without blowing up your funnel.

Keywords

Product-Led Growth, PLG Strategies, SaaS Onboarding, Freemium Model, Free Trial Optimization, User Adoption, Customer Success, B2B SaaS Growth, Onboarding Framework, Go-to-Market Tactics

Timestamp
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:27) What is Product Led Growth
(00:04:37) When to use PLG
(00:18:20) Why Simplicity is the key
(00:20:15) Wes's Favorite Case Study
(00:25:42) The Bowling Alley Framework for Onboarding
(00:31:02) Free Trials Must Have Progression
(00:36:28) Finding Those Ideal Limits on your Trials

Chapters

• 1:27 What is Product Led Growth
• 4:37 When to use PLG
• 18:20 Why Simplicity is the key
• 20:15 Wes's Favorite Case Study
• 25:42 The Bowling Alley Framework for Onboarding
• 31:02 Free Trials Must Have Progression
• 36:28 Finding Those Ideal Limits on your Trials

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00):

Well Wes, welcome to the show, man.

Wes Bush (00:01):

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Pablo Srugo (00:02):

Dude. So I've read, I think your original book, but you've written two other books since you’ve become kind of the product led growth king. I guess, if I could say that. Certainly an expert kind of went all in on it many years ago and it's got its own hype cycle I think for a bit there with Dropbox and a few of these others, Slack, everybody wanted to do PLG. I think these days there's fortunately a bit more of an understanding of PLG is not for everything. It's not for everyone, but I don't think it's still well understood when PLG makes sense, who it's really for or what part of your product it can make sense with and then how to apply it and these sort of things. So that's really what I want to go into with you today is just understanding PLG and then just using as many examples as possible to really get tactical on, okay, what part of your product or startup could you use PLG for and how to do it?

Previous Guests (00:58):

That's product market fit, product market fit, product market fit, I call it the product market fit question, product market fit, product market fit product market fit product market fit. I mean the name of the show is Product Market Fit.

Pablo Srugo (01:10):

Think back to the last few months, the last few years as you've been running the startup, how many different founders have helped you out? The reality is founders help each other out. That's just who founders are. They pay it forward. So help a founder out, take literally five seconds, take your phone out of your pocket and hit five stars.

Wes Bush (01:27):

Yeah, no, happy to go through it. And I guess for a high level, very quick version of what it is for everybody too. product-led growth is when you use your products to essentially help people understand what the heck you do, what does that look like? Do they like it? and do they want to eventually purchase it? So if you use cologne or perfume at an airport, I love that example because I'm like, you can smell it, give it a snip and I love this. Or like, oh God, I'm so glad I didn't wear that because then I would smell like that for hours. And so the best products create those experiences where you can actually see that value for what it is if you like it or not. And to really get it right, it does have to have that impact moment of there was life before chatGPT as an example, and life after that free motion and it doesn't always have to be that impactful, but you get the point.

Pablo Srugo (02:21):

And because you've been so close to it for so many years now, what do you think happened where everybody, because I just remember this a few years ago, everybody wanted to do PLG, just PLG PLG. How are you going to go to market? PLG, right? what was happening at that point? What were people getting wrong or just not fully understanding?

Wes Bush (02:39):

Yeah, I mean there's so many hype cycles and unfortunately whenever there is a hype cycle that some people get into it for the wrong reasons too. Oh, I'm going to get a higher valuation from a VC because we're product-led now. I have had those conversations. I'm like, okay, how is this impactful for your strategy, how we're going to win as a business? So yeah, there's a lot of companies that get into that, but now it's great to actually see it reset some expectations. People have tried a lot and they've realised, oh, there's actually a lot more to this. For instance, one of the viral-ish tweets that got reposted a bunch was like Product-led growth is just like an effing free trial. That's all it is. It was kind of funny. That's what a lot of people thought it was. It's just a free trial, but in order to do that, oh my goodness, is it ever a lot more than that?

(03:36):

It's like, oh, we got to figure out onboarding, we got to figure out pricing and we got to figure out a great free offer that people want. We got to figure out what do we give away for free? Who is this targeting? So there was just so much more to it that people initially did. It was like that classic iceberg. You just see the free trial at the top and then you hit it head on and a lot of people have done that, but now we're finally realising, okay, there's actually a bit of a science to this and what are the nine key steps and components that you need to get right in order to make product-led work?

Pablo Srugo (04:08):

Yeah, well, let's go through that because I agree. I think what happens is people saw Dropbox or Slack and they're like, you mean I don't have to sell anything? People just use my thing, pay me for it, and share with their friends. That's awesome. Let's do that. 

Wes Bush (4:21) 

You have two employees and 10 mil ARR. sign me up!

Pablo Srugo (4:25)

Exactly. Let's go. Maybe that's the first question. We can go through your nine steps. One of my top questions just like how you use a founder, think about can I use PLG for my business? What do you have to think through?

Wes Bush (04:36):

Yeah. There's so many good potential rabbit holes we could go down here. One is also what kind of market are you in? This is a very important question. So if you're in a very competitive, let's say cutthroat market, let's say we want to introduce a new product in the live chat widget space for your website, like drift or Intercom or something like that. It's very competitive. There's hundreds of solutions that do that. And so what is the best go-to market motion if you want to win in that space, knowing that cost acquisition costs are quite high, it's very competitive. You want the best, most efficient go-to-market motion, I hope. I wish that on you. So it's like what is the most efficient one? Hey, it's product led, what do you know? So don't necessarily go through the sales effort unless you're like, oh, we are just targeting these Fortune 500 companies that have this very intricate need with live chat solutions.

(05:35):

And because of that, our whole go-to-market motion is very different. If that's the case, it's like, hey, you can still make it work. But the second question to ask yourself is who are you targeting? Is it the top dog in the company, the big decision maker, or is it somebody who's just using it and you're trying to go for all, let's say small, medium sized businesses that could potentially use this? If it's the latter with all small  S&P companies, great! Hey, you know what? That could be a great fit. Another example on our product, that podcast I had, David, who's the founder of Hot Chart and what he mentioned, he's like, yeah, you know what? We're trying to democratise what we're doing. That was really important to them. They wanted to give you user recordings for your website to see what people are doing on your website for under 50 bucks per month.

(06:29):

And so that was a key part of their mission. Now, in order to support people to do that, how are you going to make that happen? This is like- I'm not going to hand you every single person to go through for something that's just $50 per month. It's unrealistic. So that's not the extensive list of questions we could go through, but those three, understanding what market you're in, who you're targeting, and also just what makes the most sense for your business are really, really helpful to just break down, is this right for you? But just to kind of wrap it all up, the market wants it. When I wrote the product-led playbook, I did a ton of research to see, okay, 97% people want to try before they buy versus 3% just want to talk to sales. So it's like what do people want?

Pablo Srugo (07:17):

I dunno who that 3% is. That’s crazy. <laughs> 

Wes Bush (07:18):

Give them what they want! give them what they want. It's not rocket science.

Pablo Srugo (07:20):

but I think one of the questions I have is what about when it comes to complexity of use? Because I see a lot of B2B, I'm thinking about my own portfolio of companies I work with and I'm like, one of the challenges when we think about PLG for them is the onboarding piece. It's not, again, Slack or Dropbox being the easy examples. Everybody knows how to message, everybody knows, oh, put a storage here. You save a file effectively very easily, zero learning needed, but when you need some amount of training on how to use the product, how do you get PLG as part of that equation? 

Wes Bush (07:57):

I'll give you a couple of fun examples. So one of them is our client Paubox. So they make it really easy to make your Gmail or your Outlook completely HIPAA compliant and mental health professionals love that because they can just keep using what they're using. However, there's this little caveat, which is that in order to start using it and installing Paubox on your Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, you gotta go to your G Suite admin domain registrar and you gotta change your DKIM. All these other random things that mental health professionals like, oh, kill me. It's really hard to do for some people that are not technical. And so what they did is they had a bit of a hybrid motion, and we kind of did this in their onboarding where as soon as they signed up it's like, hey, listen, do you want us to set this up for you or do you want to do this yourself?

(08:53):

And so if they said, Hey, I would love some help setting this up, Calendly link, here you go, let's get it set up with us. And once they were connected, the churn was fantastic, despite it being a $29 per month plan, the economics still made sense because your email service, how often do you change that unless you go into a business, you're good. So that was fantastic for them. But the other question I would dig into a bit more when you're saying, okay, we have this complex use case versus it's not just a simple Dropbox upload and no learning curve. It's a good question when you're thinking, is PLG right for you or not? And I would reframe it as :are you solving for complexity in what you do as a company or simplicity, and this isn't always the case, but in most generalisations like this, I find a lot of sales-led companies are fantastic at solving for complexity. They can start working with a company and even from the sales process, it can be very custom. It's like, oh, okay, I see you're working at this VC company. You have these specific needs. Okay, well we have this product and we also have these couple of features here. We can connect them and actually do just that exactly what you're trying to solve. And so they're actually doing a ton of value and when I was talking to the folks at VMware, the sales person was describing exactly that he's part of our sales person is just combining these products and creating this intricate custom decision. I was like, fantastic. Don't stop that. For a product-led company, it's actually to your detriment sometimes that you create something that is so complex, does so many things, and then users are like, I don't even know where to start. How do I use this? And that's why we gravitate towards more products like a Notion or Evernote  or something that's super simple to use like a Canva because it does one thing and it solves for simplicity, it makes it easier. 

Pablo Srugo (10:50):

Does that mean though, if you are that VMware, I'm thinking about a company in my portfolio for example, where they're in the, if you think about somebody who manages a property manager who manages a bunch of Airbnbs and they sell software to them to help them manage those Airbnbs, one of the challenges on onboarding is whatever they're using today, they've got the information about the pictures, the rules, wherever all that stuff is stored, and let's say they have 50 of these Airbnbs, they've got to effectively get it into this system and they also create different if this then that workflows, if they book through this thing, send them that, but if they book through that at night, send them this. So there's all these automations they can build in today, it's sales led because it makes it easier to walk them through all that, help them set things up, get'em into a certain level so that then they are happy with and start seeing the value. Does that mean if they wanted to do let's say PLG, do they have to think about a different segment? Do they have to build a simpler version of their product? How would you approach that?

Wes Bush (11:58):

Yeah, so I've reframed the question completely. So it's not even so much like sales-led versus product led, it's just what does it actually take for people to get to success? And the way I always love to break it down is like, okay, whatever user success is, let's say for one of our clients like keap.com, it was to really automate a lot of your core business processes. So let's take that as what success is. Now there's product gaps that we need to solve. Okay, how do you do that within the product? Understanding that side of things, and that should hopefully be easy even with that other Airbnb case should be easy to pull things from one place to the other, maybe import the CSV that you already have, but then there's the skill gap. So are there any skills that are missing from the person signing up that they need to know?

(12:53):

So in Keap’s case, they had a relatively simple product to use, but from the skill standpoint, they had a lot of business owners that were signing up that didn't really know how to automate important processes in their business. And so whenever they paired that with a free audit where somebody from Keap would actually go through, help the business owner understand, okay, what is a core critical process in your business? Let's automate that with Keap. Their retention was through the roof. They saw those people just super sticky. There's product gap, skill gap, and then there's the knowledge gap. That's the third one, which is really thinking about, okay, is there something somebody doesn't know that would be really, really helpful for them to really succeed with this product? If you sign up for an email marketing platform and you have 0-100 subscribers and they're like, oh, okay, you really don't know how to get much subscribers, do you?

(13:46):

And so, okay, here's how to get to your first thousand subscribers. Here's the free course, here's everything you need to do that. We broke it down into a 30 day challenge so you can 10x the number of subscribers so you get more subscribers. Fantastic! Now the reason I wanted to zoom out there and go with that analogy, I call it the cake analogy of the product layer, the skill layer, the knowledge layer is because every product has a different variety of that. The Keap example, it's a little bit more on the skill side. In that Airbnb example, it might actually be the product side. That's quite a big gap for people to go through, set up on their own. Hence they need the human support to actually subset that. Because that's the way I always look at the equation of, okay, what are they missing? Is it the skills? Is it the knowledge? Is it the product piece? And okay, if it's the product piece, let's make that easier. How do we make that easier? Sometimes it's people initially and then it's like, oh, okay, we do that for people all the time and now we use to do like 98% of that. Now we just approve a couple of things at the backend, we're good to go. That's how I’d deconstruct it to think about how we do that.

Pablo Srugo (14:58):

Let's say it's the product piece. Does that mean you just let people start using the product, but then you have ways to identify who's failing and who's not and you kind of jump in versus, I mean today it'd be more like you go classic, you go through the website, boom, book a demo, right? That's the motion today. But would the idea be potentially, and I'm picking on them just because it's top of mind for me, but feel free to use a different example where you just switch that to, hey, start using it today, and then the people that get stuck, you just have a way of monitoring it and jumping in and they can choose to book, let's say an onboarding, but they don't have to.

Wes Bush (15:35):

Yeah, no you can absolutely do that. So one of the companies I was actually signing up for it, is called databox.com, and so they make it easy to visualise your dashboards, graphics, well, not graphics, but scorecards for your business, all that stuff. And I was trying to create this custom metric for product led and I didn't really know how to do that, and it was just about to leave. I was kind of fresh like, oh, I can't really figure that out, build dumb, and then boom, pop up, Hey, would you like us to set up this custom metric with you? It's like, oh, cool, book a meeting done. And because of that it was a much easier site to upgrade because I was like, Hey, it does exactly what I wanted to do. Now it's custom. I made it my own build special. Let's use this scorecard.

(16:22):

And so that's a great thing. But on the backend, what I just learned, we had their head of customer support on one of our webinars recently, and he's like, actually, we have all these BDRs. They're looking at who's using our product and who's struggling, and they're manually reached out to these people. They're doing just that. They're helping people. Some of it's automated based on okay, they have that aggressive clicking and stuff like that, and they just prompt it like, Hey, can we help you here? But that's what it should be at the end of the day is I think the beauty of a product that motion is it's automated everywhere where you need for the majority of users, but wherever they're getting stuck, wherever there's a tonne of friction, you're sub filling in those gaps for the people so that they can overcome the hurdle. Because you think of the bridge, it's like user success is on this side, they're here, and if you only have the road for half of it, it's like of course they're not going to be successful, so let's help them out however we can in that area.

Pablo Srugo (17:24):

Do founders ever worry about how opening up this PLG motion could affect their stats? I think about that from the context of, again, this, one of the things that might happen is typical sales-led, you have effectively you qualify, so you have that call and if they're too small, they have a couple APVs, they might even tell 'em, listen, you can do it, but here's why. Maybe you want to do it your own way. It helps them in a sense because it controls the number of customers they have and makes sure that there's a fit, that the retention's going to be in a certain place, that the expansion opportunities are going to be in a certain place that they're not going to be doing all this work for very small customers. With product led, obviously the gates are kind of open and so now all of a sudden anybody can start using it and maybe is that something you ever see or how do you deal with that, that there's a worry that all of a sudden you're going to get customers that you don't really want, but now they're using a product and they're going to say bad things about your product if you don't find a way to get 'em to success?

Wes Bush (18:20):

That's a common objection for a lot of people that are thinking about going through with the product emotion. Usually they just say, oh, I don't want freeloaders, or, I can't possibly open this up for my competitors to see that they would catch up in a fraction of the time that it took us to develop this unique feature. So yeah, also with churn and everything, oh, it's going to mess up our stats. We're going to have a lot of free users and it's going to be very expensive for us to go through. So it all comes down to what's your strategy? How are you planning on winning in your space? If you're Canva and you're like, I'm kind of worried they're not going to be the right people signing up that it's like maybe that's not the right go to market motion for you because it won't work that way if you're manually approving, okay, you can use the product, you got a Gmail, sorry, you can't and everything else.

(19:11):

But that is part of the culture of a product-led company that is very different than a sales-led company. Transparency has to really be an important value of a product-led founder that is bounding that company because, hey, listen, you're just open-book. We are who we are. This is our product and we're getting better and better, but we might not be perfect. We definitely are not perfect. Simplicity is usually another core value, whereas we don't try to overcomplicate things because if we did this whole business model wouldn't work that well, would it? So those are some things where I would just take with a grain of salt, it depends what you're trying to optimize for, but there is trade off and that is totally one of them. You will have a smaller APV than your typical sales-led counterparts just because actually you do kind of need that when it comes to getting people to sign up for that first plan. Usually that can't be a huge jump to multiple thousands of dollars without having to call, but you can grow them to just as big if not bigger than sales led contracts too.

Pablo Srugo (20:15):

Can you walk me through one of your favourite case studies? Kind of like end-to-end with numbers before and after and how the product-led, adding PLG, to their whatever motion they had changed things for them. 

Wes Bush (20:29):

So do you want a sales-led to product-led one? or just pure product-led play?

Pablo Srugo (20:33):

Let's do a sales to PLG one.

Wes Bush (20:34):

Yeah, those ones are always fun because the transition, it can take a really long time, and I was trying to take a recent one here too. I can't name names, just for confidentiality for this specific client, but it's over a $4 billion company and they're like, okay, we want to go sales-led to product-led, but they had a CEO that was like, Hey, you know what this is going to be, we need to have a $50 per month plan. We need something people can get started with, see what this product is, what it's all about. Then they hired this-

Pablo Srugo (21:09):

 high level, what space are they in? Without getting too specific, but-

Wes Bush (21:12):

oh yeah, it was the IPAAS space. So think of Zapier, but automating really big business processes for your company, more like enterprise focused. So yeah, that was kind of the main focus for them. And they hired this head of PLG, and they were like, okay, we need to figure out how to actually do this. And we started working with them at that stage where they were just going through the very early stage, what is our overall strategy? What does this look like for our business? How's this key to how we're going to win? Because you might have one key C-level leader that's bought into this, but it's really important to get everybody else aligned. That's why we go through your strategy first. How does this connect to how we're going to win? Does this help us with our core modes of: how are we going to be more hard to copy?

(22:02):

Is it because we have a better user experience? Is it because where people can start for free or it's just a low to get started kind of price plan that really positions you as the best company to get started with whatever the goal is, just be intentional of how is this POG motion going to really connect with that? So once you get everybody bought in, that usually unlocks a tonne of resources, the rest of the team, but then you got to get clear on who is the ideal user for this product, and that's different than what they're used to because in a sales company is usually like, yep, our ideal buyer is this decision maker and whatnot, but they're like, oh, ideal user! that's new. Who is the person going to use this product? Huh, that's interesting because this is where they start to realise, oh, the marketing needs to change too.

(22:53):

Who we're targeting also needs to change. So it's a great question for anybody to just go through who’s our ideal user or what success looks like for them? What are their challenges, which can also include getting that decision maker to make a decision about this. But yeah, you map that all out and what that essentially allows you to do is map out what is your free model, what does that look like? Because this ideal user, what their goal is, then he can map out like, Hey, you know what to get to that specific first value, what are all the challenges? What are the things they need to do? And then I just stack up all the four or five core challenges and I'm like, what could we keep away to solve that? What does that look like? And it's really a fun kind of exercise.

(23:39):

It's not really talking at all about, like I said, a free trial. Is it a freemium model? Is it a reverse trial? It's like, listen, we want to get them to this point in their user journey where they feel really good about themselves. What is that going to take? And so you just simply brainstorm, go through that whole process and usually come up with something really, really fun and you're like, how long do they need to do that? Okay, 40 days is unrealistic. Most companies, but they always start with a 14 day free trial. That's the most common one, especially the transition from sales side to product led. So you get the model and then it's all about- 

Pablo Srugo (24:12):

and usually you find, so it's a lot longer. It's usually a lot longer than 14 days that you need people to use something for free to get to value.

Wes Bush (24:19):

Totally. And in a lot of cases for other companies too, there's like, is it in their control a hundred percent of the journey to do that? So for instance, with app queues or user flow or any product adoption tool, you could have a 40 day trial and the product manager signs up who is the user, they got that part right, but then to actually put the code in their application, they got to go through the development and the development has their own little cycles. So yeah, it could take for enterprises a quarter to actually launch that inside the product. And so that's where you run into problems where you're actually a usage based model would be better. You're like, yeah, they would need that. So we explore the full spectrum of what are all the other kind of models? There's a lot more than just the free trial premium. And then once you get that right, this is all about phase two, which is unlocking self-serve customers. So you go through what is your core offer, and that's usually a landing page that talks about, okay, this free model, this is who it's for, and then you guide people to the onboarding. So we have a couple of fun frameworks. I could go through them if you want for onboarding, but that is-

Pablo Srugo (25:33):

Onboarding is huge, I find it's a huge area of friction, honestly for most early stage startups. So yeah, it would be great to dive into that.

Wes Bush (25:42):

Sure. Yeah. So the framework we always go through, it's called the bowling alley framework. If you Google it, you can get the full writeup on that, but that framework, just in bowling, you take it, what's the point of bowling? It's like, oh, it's to knock down as many pins as possible. So I always focus on what is your first strike in your product? Every product, you got to know what that is. And if you're talking to founders, they're like, if you don't know what the first strike is, that's a problem. If you're product-led, because the whole first time user experience, if you don't know what that is, you don't get people towards it. They won't come back a second time most often. So you got to understand what that first point is of value for them. So that's what we, in that case study we go through, we help people understand what that looks like, but then there's three steps to roll out the bowling framework after this. you then, and this is the fun part, I got all the teams, so everybody in the room to basically break up into groups of two and decide, okay, you've got to find the fastest path to get to this strike. And so everybody gets super competitive. They're like, okay, yes, I know the fast path through this first strike, or they know the fast path, and I'm like, and map out everything. So the other person that's watching the other person in that pair of two, they write down everything. First name is a step, last name. It's a step. So you go through all of that, and then we kind of present, okay, how many steps do you got? All that stuff we see, okay, this person's got like 75, this person's 30. Whoa, okay, so let's start with a 31. Go through that example, and then we just triage everything.

(27:19):

So green, it's a must have step. You gotta keep that. It's critical to doing that for a strike. Yellow is, you could totally delay that thing. Red is just axe it, it  won't impact anything. And just from that activity alone, you usually shave off 30 to 50% of steps. So it's a crazy amount of how much faster it is to get to value. And then the bumpers is the next part where it's like, how do we just make this really, really simple? So you're usually left with let's say 20 steps. So 20 steps to the first strike. Ideally we get that down eventually, but that's what it is right now. And now is when we can use product bumpers. Just like in bullying, we can make it really easy to strike out and it's kind of cheating, but for your product, and the only benefit of this kind of cheating is more successful users and more money.

(28:09):

So this is a great kind of cheat. 

Pablo Srugo (28:11) 

What is an example of bumpers?

Wes Bush (28:13) 
Glad you asked. checklists. Onboarding checklists could be onboarding tooltips where if you've ever clicked on something, it's like, Hey, check this out, check this out. And so those are really good examples. I do see a lot of people abusing those tool tips, but if you use it like this, that straight line, you have those 20 steps, you're just guiding people through those 20 steps to get to that first strike. So there's no point in the journey where they're like, huh, I wonder what I should do. It's like, just click the button. You go through the next step,

Pablo Srugo (28:45):

you've got to do it. I mean, you mentioned abusing it, because the flip side is there's not, Hey, more than opening up any product and it's just like, skip, skip, skip, skip. It just suggests, here's this thing, here's that thing. I'm like, I don't care. Just get through it all. And then potentially later I'm like, wow, wait, I don't know how this product works, but it's like, I'm also not going to just take 15 minutes to learn every single button on this interface. Not interesting.

Wes Bush (29:06):

And that's always where I see it's been abused all the time where it's like, Hey, here's this contact details. Here's this thing, here's this thing. You're like, okay, I've explored your entire product and I have not done that first strike. So that's why we want to be very clear even on that offer, the signup page, everything's talked about, this is the first strike you're going to get. This is the first strike, okay, five steps left to the first strike, and it's all guided, no other fluff. So you get the product bumpers. That's important. Then the second step is you should know people are going to drop off at some point throughout this whole process. So we always want to bring them back onto the straight line. And so if people have, let's say they just get stuck on step two or step four, you have emails, texts, anything else, they'll just drive them back, be like, Hey, Pablo, I saw you signed up and you got stuck at the email confirmation step.

(30:01):

Here's the link to reactivate your email. And this will take you right into the onboarding so you can experience that first strike. It's really helpful. And these can be largely automated at scale, but eventually for the first time you roll this out can be completely manual as you understand, okay, what should we write for those emails? What does that look like? What works, what doesn't work? And that's the bowling alley framework. Even if you just did that one thing from this podcast listening to it, that would help you improve your free to paid conversion rate substantially. So yeah. 

Pablo Srugo (30:34):

That goes beyond PLG, because you could do, I mean, onboarding and sales led is still a challenge

Wes Bush (30:39):

For customer onboarding. That is actually one of the best places to start this when it comes to how you roll out PLG, build confidence. It's like, oh, let's just start using the product to onboard people a bit faster. And it works just as well.

Pablo Srugo (30:53):

When you mentioned before, free trials, freemium reverse trial, I think you said, how do you think about what the right model is?

Wes Bush (31:02):

So the first part is it all comes down to how well do you understand your user and how have you understood what does that user journey look like? And so I'll give you an example. When I was at VidYard, since that's a fun product to kinda dissect. They're a video marketing analytics platform at their core when I was there. Now they definitely make it a tonne more easy to do video for sales, but at that time, that's exactly what they were. So when you think about what is user success for them, it's creating videos. So you gotta make it easy to create videos and you want to understand who's watching those videos. And now the final part of that value prop is really making sure you're getting a great return on those videos. So if you send it to prospects, they're converting at higher rates and you can prove that. And so think about those three things. That's what user success is. Now, if we chunk this down into a really oversimplified user journey, there's the beginner problem of you know what? You don't have a video.

(32:09):

Okay, so we should probably make it easy to make a video. Of course, of course. That's your free thing. Now, the intermediate problem once you have the videos is, well, wouldn't it be interesting to know if Pablo watched the full video or they watch a hundred percent of the video? What does that look like? We're getting kind of creepy here, but it would be good to know that, wouldn't it? Especially if it was a prospect. And so that's like, okay, you can upgrade to understand who's watching videos and get some good intelligence on that. And then the advanced problem here is, well, you have a big team and you send a lot of videos out to a ton of people. Wouldn't it be great to see what kind of impact that has on your pipeline if it actually accelerates deal flow and everything else?

(32:57):

And so now we get into the really nerdy stuff of it. This is an advanced problem. This is also the more expensive plan we have, actually the most expensive one we have, but you can see there's a clear progression. It goes from beginner to intermediate to advanced. And every time I work with, especially sales led companies going from sales led or product led, it always is an issue of they just try and slap on the free trial on that intermediate problem, and then they're like, this BLG thing doesn't work. And it's like, wow, okay. It's really hard to go from zero to 10, just take people from zero to one. What is that first thing that people need to go through?

Pablo Srugo (33:39):

Because typically in those cases, they don't even have that super simple product, I imagine if it's sales led.

Wes Bush (33:44):

Yeah, that was exactly the problem at Vidyard, they had that free trial for their advanced marketing analytics products, but they did not have the simple Chrome extension that was like, Hey, just click this couple clicks and create a video. And so that solved that first problem. But if you don't have that, then it's really hard to get started.

Pablo Srugo (34:04):

So the question is almost like, how do I get a lot of my potential ICP, my broader ICP to some value? What's the simplest value I can get? Because if you think about a funnel, not everybody that's advanced, not everybody that's advanced has the intermediate problem, but everybody that is advanced had to create a video. it's like this kind of funnel. So you have to think about what's one level up to almost the space of leads. You don't know which one of those will become intermediate or which ones become advanced, but they all have to create a video in your case. And so you think about my leads, that's a bit higher than let's say my SQL. How do I create some value for them in a really simple way? So it's not just like, here's some email marketing stuff. It's like here's a Chrome extension and create a video, and then all of a sudden they're at least in the product.

Wes Bush (34:54):

I think I frame it as if you understand, okay, everyone has this problem and it's actually very hard to solve, and that's usually your million dollar free problem. Hey, we got to make it easy to do this specific thing, and if we do this, people are going to be flocking to us because it's really hard to do without you. And how else do you create a simple video and send it to somebody else? It's like, it's clunky. I got to record Zoom, I got to export it. I gotta upload it to drive or something, and then they gotta download it. It's like, that sucks. And so if you can say That sucks with how they're currently solving this problem, you probably stumbled upon something. It's very exciting because if you can make that three clicks or less to get to value, you can unlock a huge market. That's exactly what I was interviewing David who founded submagic.co. They went from zero to 1 million to three months, and that was just simply people and all these creators on TikTok and stuff were creating all these subtitles and little animations for your TikTok videos or Instagram reels and stuff like that is really hard. They're like 1, 2, 3 clicks or less, and you just have that done. That's an amazing unlock for a free motion and also just a product in general.

Pablo Srugo (36:11):

Perfect. Well listen, we'll stop it there, maybe I'll ask one more question, which is any other, we talked a lot about moving from sales to PLG, we talked about onboarding. I mean, there's so many other things in PLG we could cover, but any big items that you feel we didn't touch on that are typically top of mind?

Wes Bush (36:28):

I think the one thing that a lot of people don't think about until they're really in the weeds of it that's important to just know: is your free model and your pricing model. Think of them like brother and sister. They're the same thing, essentially. Your model is what you talk about internally. Like, okay, we have this tier that's our free one, this one's our intermediate, this one's advanced. But then you got to, in the pricing component, you got to go through and understand, okay, what is the actual specifics? What are the value metrics we've got to go through for each of these plans? What is the price point that makes the most sense? And you're trying to marry them together in a way that's like, okay, this brings out a great business model. We're not giving everything away for free. We have the right tiers where they get enough of that free value where they feel like, okay, this is a substantial thing.

(37:18):

For instance, one of the clients switching today, they're a no code website builder. And so it's just like, you know what? You have to allow them to do something and have a free plan that's useful. So how many rows do they need to use with an Airtable or something like that to actually build something cool at the end of the day? And so it's deconstructing that, finding those ideal limits because you want people to hit them, but you don't want them to hit them way too early where they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I haven't created anything useful yet. Because when you find that sweet spot, then people are willing to pay way more than you ever thought for that specific product because you showcased, Hey, this is what this product does, it's capable of you do that too early and people are going to be like, yeah, maybe could you have a $10 per month plan? No, no. They could have paid hundreds if you got them to value first.

Pablo Srugo (38:11):

I always go back to, for me, the master was Slack because it was like, how do they find a way to not give messaging kind of basic? Where do they really draw that line? And I always thought them cutting history was genius because it's like, Hey, you can add, I think as many people as you want. I don't remember if it's changing, but back then, from what I remember, you can have a lot of people, you can message however much you want. Not going to stop you from the core value, but we will limit your search. And if you're a serious user and you kind of are like, slack is going to be our thing, you will hit that limit and you'll be like, okay, well, we're already all in. We kind of have to pay or we got to move. In most cases, you tended to pay.

Wes Bush (38:56):

Yeah. And finally those ideal limits too is the finicky part. I was using Evernote for eight years free. I'm the freeloader guy just using Evernote for journaling and stuff over the years. And then they finally changed the pre-plan. It was initially unlimited free notes. They just capped you on the devices you could use, and they gave all the core value away for free, but then they capped it to like 50 free notes. And I was like, oh, okay. I'm upgrading today. Here we are. There you go, Evernote, thanks for all that eight years of free stuff. This is great. Yeah, finding those ideal limits. In that case, 50 notes. It's a great amount of time where I can see, okay, this is what this product does, what it's capable of, but it's not like Google Docs is completely free forever, but I can see what it can do. So finding those limits will help you see that. Okay, PLG will actually work versus having, oh, just tonnes of freeloaders.

Pablo Srugo (39:53):

Awesome. Well, Wes, thanks so much for spending the time on the show, dude. It's been awesome.

Wes Bush (39:57):

Yeah, no, definitely. And I got a free gift for your guests too. If they want the free product-led playbook, I'm happy to give it to them.

Pablo Srugo (40:05)

Yeah, for sure. How can they get it?

Wes Bush (40:07)

Cool. Yeah, they could just check out productledgift.com and if you liked anything we talked about with the product led playbook, you get it all for free, and it's the free audiobook since hopefully you like listening to stuff.

Pablo Srugo (40:18):

Awesome. Perfect. So picture this. It's months from now, years from now, and one of your founder friends, a really close founder, friends of yours, guess what? Their startup went bankrupt. And it turns out, if you had just shared the product market fit show with them, they would've learned everything they needed to find product, market fit, and to create a huge success. But instead, their startup has completely failed. You have blood on your hands. Don't let that happen. You don't want to live like that. It is terrible. So do what you need to do. Tell them about the show, send it to them, put it on WhatsApp, put it on Slack, put it where you need to put it. Just make sure they know about it and they check it out.