Tried and true product-led startup advice
When you are new to startup, advice is gold. While it’s okay to make mistakes along the way, counseling, mentoring, and learning from others who have tread in the steps before you can save you time, heartache, and the dollars entrusted to you.
I was the second hire at my startup and while I had twenty fantastic years of previous SaaS experience, I came green with startup experience. Fortunately, these last two years were spent born into a family of startups in the Midwest where everyone helps everyone. Encouragement and free advice has been plentiful. However, my platform is built on a product-led growth (PLG) model and we quickly learned this is not widely known or understood.
We began to reach out to those who were familiar with PLG to gain a better understanding about the decisions we were faced with from pricing to product priority to product market fit. This wasn’t a meeting in which we walked in with questions and walked out with answers. This has been two years in the making and a daily lesson with twists and turns along the way.
In looking back at our journey so far, here are a few steps we have taken based on advice from the various experts we have worked with and have seen great success as a result.
“Build Something Different”
While you may need to start with a foundational platform or service, try to create something distinctive quickly that fills a unique need.
As we started building our product, we knew we needed to first introduce basic functions but in doing so, we were immediately compared to other well-known companies. “How are you different than [COMPANY]?” We could respond with our vision because we knew we would be different but, other than a roadmap, how could we prove it?
As a person of order and logic, installing the kitchen appliances in a new house that didn’t have doors and windows yet didn’t feel natural. But once we started providing something people needed and [COMPANY] couldn’t provide, we were excellently different!
Remove assumptions about the order of how you build and go straight for projects that offer unique value. While your product will be a work in progress for years to come, you can immediately put this in front of your early cohorts to gain feedback, show early activation, and work towards building retention.
“Let Your Customers Pay ASAP”
You may think your product is early, basic, and hasn’t achieved its purpose, but others may think it is useful and worth paying for.
Almost a year into building our product, we had a faithful following of early adopters. We also had a growing backlog of feature requests and had not started to get to the heart of the work we desired to achieve.
In those days, our main goals were acquisition and activation. While revenue would have been nice, we were testing our product market fit so deviating from our feature backlog to instead build a payment process seemed a heavy burden that would detract our resources from the other projects we wanted to focus on.
But then, a funny thing happened. Our users started asking, “How do I pay for it?” While we thought we had a long way to go, this certainly got our attention.
It felt like a huge mountain to climb, even with out-of-the-box payment portal options, but we shifted our priority to make it happen. There are a few things to keep in mind that we learned along the way:
- Keep it straight forward — we toyed with various payment options, looking at competitor plans and taking our product’s current capability into consideration. While it was tempting to want to show a matrix-style board of features to portray a deeper product, the more comprehensive the options, the easier we knew it would be for a customer to sign up and pay.
- Add pay walls as you grow — by the time we started offering a paid tier, we evaluated our features to decide if they should remain in our free plan or join the new paid tier. At that stage, it was such a hard decision to justify one feature over another as billable. But we quickly added product over time to further enhance and qualify our paid tier.
Keep in mind, not everyone will like your product and not everyone will want to pay for it. There will be naysayers and churn. That is okay! Believe in your product, watch it grow, and keep feeding those who do find it valuable.
“Seek Strategic Partnerships”
Why face the universe alone when you can partner with others and achieve greatness with less energy and cost while delivering more value?
As a young startup, our roadmap and our enthusiasm launched us into early success. We were advised to knock on the door of some big-name companies to try and partner with them. While a few introductions helped us get our foot in the door, we met some VIPs who were willing to listen and others who were not.
Some great advice given to us suggested we seek to partner with others who were successful but were not so far out in the universe that they were not also seeking opportunities.
Here are a few ways we were able to achieve success through partnerships:
- Integrations — Larger companies tend to have a set roadmap and deviating from that to build an integration with you is not typically reality. But what you can walk away with is insight to what their product is lacking and how you might be able to help. If you can find this niche and fill it through an integration, you have something they need. For us, this led to speaking engagements at their audience-filled conventions, free press, a boost as a preferred partner in their marketplaces, and more.
- Reselling— Like our customer’s willingness to pay, we had several companies knock on our door to resell our product. It sounds simple to tell someone they can sell on your behalf but there is much to consider from whether you trust they will represent your brand well to what they get in return. But if you find someone with a solid reputation and a willingness to share your product with others, stepping into these uncharted waters can mean great success for both sides.
While it is possible to reach for the stars on your own, aim to partner with others who are hungry too so you aren’t merely catching a ride but also giving back.
“Dream Big, Release Small”
You will always have more work than you can handle. Keep dreaming your long list but strategically break it up into small pieces of value you can move quickly into your customer’s hands.
In order to tell your story to investors, you need a roadmap that conveys the inventive journey you wish to take so they can envision the potential success of your dream and decide whether they wish to join the expedition with you. This means thinking big, sometimes beyond the expertise or resources you have yet to receive.
Customers, however, cannot wait for you to receive enough funding to make those dreams a reality. They need your product to provide them value quickly or they probably won’t be customers for long. This means identifying minimum viable product (MVP) that you can ship incrementally to keep them hungry for more.
You may have dreams of building a luxury car. But what if you released a standard car with a unique feature and added on to it over time? As long as the car gets them to where they want to go and they see a regular cadence of feature releases as a result, they will continue to remain faithful users and trust you will continue to provide for their needs and will look forward to that luxury car someday.
Share your vision and work towards it every day by shipping incremental value that takes your product step by step up the ladder of success.
Conclusion
Product-led growth is a challenging model to strategically enable users while facilitating your product roadmap. With endless possibilities and choices to make, the advice others have generously shared has helped us define product uniqueness, enable early revenue, open up partnership opportunities, and create a focused MVP plan with much success.
