YouSaid · the spoken record

Hila Qu

lines on the record: 104
first: 2023-04-02
most recent: 2023-04-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn. Just search Hila Chu H-I-L-A-Q-U-U. You can find me. I have a personal website that's under development, but I contracted to my kid, to my 12-year-old. So he needs to wait until summer. And hopefully this summer he can finish it. Yeah, like if you are a founder, you are looking for a growth advisor, feel free to hit me up. I'm always happy to just have a free, have a call with founders and leaders, get to know more people. And I'm a gross nerd. So I always want to nerd about growth anyway.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in North Star metric because I find it's not only valuable to growth, it's valuable to just everything, right? When I think about what do I want to do with my career, does that fit my own personal North Star metric? When I think about how I want to raise my kids, I think about what's the North Star metric for successful education or for my kid, because it forced me to think, Long term, it was forced me to think about what value both to me, to them, not only by the society standards, ARR revenue like salary, right? And also, what's my vision for myself and for my kids?”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My fear of children's book is called Someday, and I recommend everyone to check it out and I basically is talking about how our children used to be our baby, become our kids. And one day they are taller and more stronger than us, and they will remember us.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I forced, I added basically a section in the doc, in the ticket spec as the PMs to write the success metric ahead of time, as well as adding which of the growth lever this is helping? Is this contributing to acquisition, activation, retention, monetization? And it forced them to sometimes think through deeply why are we even doing this? Sometimes they ended up not doing that by just”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, they have to be launching a lot of experiments to get very unexpected answers. If you are only, many people remember their success for the interview, right? They prepared that very well. I don't want to ask, what's your successful experiment? Secondly, I want to know just why it's unexpected that reveals the deep, deep level of their thinking, how deep they are thinking. If they should expect that based on what they describe, then they are not thinking deep enough. They're not understanding customer enough. And what they do afterwards is also awesome, like how do you face a failure or unexpected result? What are the clues you can pursue? What are the actions you can take? How do you learn something out of it?”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I interview a gross PMs or analysts, I will always ask, what is the experiment? You launch that has a very unexpected result. And what did you do after that”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I watched a movie, it's a sci fi movie from China, it's called The Wandering Earth 2. It's by the famous author the Xin Liu. He's the author of three bodies. I don't know whether you heard of him.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think Chinese, if you don't read Chinese, you cannot read it. But I heard my friends told me, if you are launching an email campaign, if you are doing experiments, have this book by the side will help with conversion rate just by some parents.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned finding leverage from him. How about there are four types of leverage? It can be your writing. It can be code. It can be capital. It can be team. So the reason why I invest a lot in writing is like I felt like that's my leverage. And I love that. The second book is called How Women Writes. Really loved as well. I gifted this to a lot of my female team member and I really learned a lot from them. And the third one is my book. It's called”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First one is called the almanac of novel. Yeah, I don't know whether we read that one. I really love that one. That's kind of a life changing book for me. You have a favorite?”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have anyone internally with that knowledge or with that interest, you can look outside. I would say map the initial gross PM higher to your starting point. If we already decided activation, right, he's the biggest focus area. Try to find some PM, gross PM with that experience. And if the conversion is focus or acquisition is the focus area, try to find someone with that experience.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an excellent question. I have seen both. I actually recommend if you can find someone internally, maybe he's a PM, he want to do growth, or he is an analyst who want to become more like a product role. I even have one client, the head of growth I work with, used to be an investor relationship, like head of investor relationship. reports to the CEO and founder He's very analytical. He hasn't been a PM before, but he can socialize the resource within the company to launch experiments in product, in marketing, in all of that. And I, as an advisor, come in, guide him in the area he's not familiar with. And we actually drive pretty good results together. So I think prefer higher internally, if possible. If not, if you really don't.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because without insight, without a lot of foundation, there is like your experimentation, your effort is really directional in a sense. So growth PM analysts and from there, definitely you need some dedicated engineer, you need a designer. Designer can be somewhat not dedicated in early days, but engineer needs to be some sort of user research support as well. It doesn't need to be dedicated, but those are the core growth squad.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The conversion rate, the journey, the funnel versus feature specifically itself. And then the other functions you need to have so sure, I would often say actually a data analyst needs to be the very first hire. Sometimes even try to find a growth PN who can do end analysis if you're really small, right? You can find that type of unicorn person. Or even before Harring wrote PM Harry analysts, I would actually go as far as that.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important while is have a gross PM to be the lead, right? Head of growth, director of growth, lead growth PM. And then the growth PM, as you know probably very well, growth PM is a PM but has a much Skill setting, analytics, experimentation, very data driven, think about metrics. The growth PM's way of working is similar to other product manager, but his KPIs is actually more similar to the sales and marketing org. He's very focused on”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you have those counterparts in product, in sales, in marketing, the next step is think about what are the metrics they own. To make sure you can manage this funnel, this motion. In a data driven way because the PLG metrics are very different from SLG. The top of funnel is more about high quality signups. You don't want a lot of traffic. You want free signup free trials, but you need to meet certain quality bar. It's not just like anyone, right? And then the head of gross product, he or her top KPI is about usage, activation. activated teams is a very common metric and then maybe number of pqls if that's another like you want to get those teams to certain usage threshold basically and then the head of product led sales he will be focused on converting those pquls into revenue so he will focus a lot on conversion rate efficiency”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because PLG is a motion, it's cross-functional by nature. It's not just a product team or growth team. Eventually, you need to get to the place. Basically, there is a head of growth product. That's the center of the PLG org. But there also needs to be a head of growth marketing. That's his or her counterpart in marketing organization. And then head of product-led sales. That's the counterpart in the sales organization. Exactly where they sit, how they sit is different company by company. The most common one is head of growth product report to product or head of growth marketing report to marketing, head of product that sales report to sales, but they have some sort of a very strong collaboration because they are working in the same motion and same funnel. But that's, I think that's next step. Think about this work.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you have this initial team, it's important to give them the resources they need and give them initial focus area, gave them support and a little bit time, allow them to try things out and get some early wins. And early win is the biggest thing, I would say, and whenever you start a new growth team, try to look for some opportunity, try to get some early wins in whichever focus area you choose. And from there, if you get some of the wins, the team has some momentum. There are more confidence from the organization in PLG, right? It's time to potentially expand and formalize. So fundamentally, I think you should not only think about the PLG team, you should think about the PLG org.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But activation and conversion are relatively confined. The gross PM and engineer design data they can work on. If your initial focus area, you felt like my biggest band is actually do this PQL thing. It is a little bit harder for the growth PM to socialize all those cross-functional resources because you need to get pretty deep into data. He needs to have a counterpart in sales, even in marketing. So in that case, I think it's possible that maybe you start a typewriter team. You can combine both, right? You can have a growth PN dedicated, but have some tighter team. Be working with him or her on this PQL project as well”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One situation I would recommend is that if the initial focus area is, like I said, product qualified leads, the sales conversion path. Because if you think about you have a head of growth or core growth PM, That person usually has a gross PM background and is in the product organization. And they are awesome if the initial focus areas are activation, conversion, those kind of involve a lot of experimentation.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a little bit for a period of time. So it's temporary, right? It's kind of they almost need to, they want to get Into, I would say, like usually the cross functional team, the tiger team, is a little bit prayer prior to full commitment. They are pretty much committed, but they still want to try this out and get a final conviction. And then they begin to dedicate resources. And you ask about how do they evolve from there?”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the initial focus area is, like, say they want to do product qualified lead or basically add that funnel, that involves not only product team that will involve data team because you want to know what are the usage patterns that indicate this is better leads. You also need to bring sales team in because they need to work on those leads to close them. So if that's the initial starting area across functional haggard team is also possible option. But the most common way is hire ahead of growth, usually a gross PM, and then start a team with engineering design data to support that core growth squad.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High scene, most companies started is the founder or the leadership team realized that they need to do PRT. They build They want to, maybe initially there isn't even a dedicated team, but they did something here and there. They decided to invest in this. And a common place to start is to hire a head of growth. It can be a lead growth PN. But someone who is relatively has a little bit experience in this area. And then they begin to build this core growth squad as the first growth team. And I think that's a very common place to start. The other place to start that's less common, but I also see it happening in reality is maybe they will start a cross-functional, almost like a tiger team because”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the early stage companies I work with when they just get started in the very beginning, they don't have data warehouse. They just basically have their product and they have some sort of a Google Analytics or amplitude. And that's it. It's pretty wild, but it's working and they can get to someplace from there. But as soon as you begin to have data user, it's time to get serious to establish a data warehouse, have some ETL solution. There are like, I think there are the most common best practice ones like AWS and things like that. There are also some startups that are doing this and you can utilize as well. But again, as soon as you become a serious business, you should invest in that. Otherwise, like it's pretty wild and it's pretty fragile as well.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you can just go through basically the key idea is go through your product experience, identify the key actions, and go through your data instrumentation and see, do they match? And the success of this is you identify the gaps and eventually you want to establish something called the data dictionary. Like I basically do that for a lot of my clients. And the data dictionary will include here are all the key actions. What's the event name for each of those and what are the property and things like that? But you now know, hey, I have this action track. This is the name. If I have a new product manager analyst, he can all refer to this and everyone know the same means the same definition rather than people are interpreting differently. So that's a very important part to success even before the tooling.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you can brain me, but you don't have to brain me. I think there are, if you search on Google, like just a data dictionary or data product usage data audit, a lot of companies published template and spreadsheet. I can even send you a few after.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your analyst will be just even more confusing, right? It's like he doesn't know whether to trust the data, what to use. So a lot of company I work with, the first step is maybe not looking into two, but do an audit of your data instrumentation situation to understand how many of the key actions are in track, Is the format correct? Is the data right? What are the gaps? And you may need to do some reinstrumentation reformatting and things like that before you even plug into a product analytics to make it useful.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get started, I would say probably a product analytics tool is the first step. And maybe like the data hub such a segment. So if you have a segment and particle tools like that, it allows you to plug into so many different tools. You can basically try all the different tools. And if it doesn't work, you just flip a switch. You can try another tool. So there's a benefit there. But it is expensive. I know companies may just go right into the product analytics to, I would say it's hard to get it wrong completely, right? In order for product analytics to be meaningful, the first step is you need to collect the data. You need to do some instrumentation. You need to have the foundation. And then because it's Gabit in Gabit out, if you send a bunch of gabbed data into your product analytics to”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ask for, but also whatever one is using, right? Like your customer success team can take a much deeper view in understanding what the clients are using rather than just talk with the executives from the client and get a rough kind of couge of the situation. So it is, I think it is an area worth investing and every B2B company should be investing in.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just want to go back to the point, as I mentioned, product led growth is data-led growth deep down. So in most of the situation, when I see a company want to get started where they are really missing or they need to invest more is data. So if you identify, you have a gap in this area, don't feel bad as well. Like a lot of Wikipedia companies are in the same shoes. And if you can invest the time, money, the team, the tool to figure this out, the benefit of this, right? The data collection usage, understanding usage data can not only power your PLG motion, it can really power your entire product team, even your customer success team. Now you gave them the ingredients they need to develop the next feature based on not only what your top customer”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of my clients are finding a lot of value in those tools like AppQs, user The tools that allow you to build onboarding flow quickly in a product without engineer kind of resource. So you need to do some initial integration. But as soon as you did that, a marketing manager PM or someone can just build some customized onboarding step-by-step flows himself. I think that's quite neat because you need to test the tongue in that area. And in terms of conversion, I would say there are many product-led growth product-led sales tools. I think those are great if you want to build out your PQL PQA kind of conversion paths. Think about endgame, POCOs, top playing pace like there are a couple of them.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 points to their lead score and their next step further in their lease funnel. So data to experimentation to lifecycle marketing, those are the infra. And then from there, there are a lot of PLG tools you can add on top to make your day-to-day much easier just to start. I feel like that are most essential for acquisition. you need to have some sort of lead like a data enrichment tool think about zoom info clear bid because the biggest difference between b2b and b2c is that you still need to know about their company like you want you want to know this person but you also want to know this person's company right that's a very important thing and you can get a lot out of those data enrichment tool and then you can design your journey differently based on that for activation”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experimentation components. Apple is a new and upcoming one. Like you need some tool to allow you to do experimentation. The third piece, I think that's pretty essential. I counted in the infra is some sort of a life cycle marketing tool. I know many BHE companies, they use HubSpot or they use something like for their email marketing, but those are usually least nurturing. And it's very different from lifecycle marketing tool, meaning you need to connect with segment amplitude. You know what customers are doing your product, your design, your email, your in-nap, your push notification based on their behavior at the right moment to the right person. And you measure success by do they take the right action in a product versus the lead nurture email marketing to his, do I get them to read the article, open the email I have?”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I say there are two pieces one is infra, the other piece are some tools that are kind of secondary. So from infrastructure perspective on data to my first two usually one is some sort of data hub segment, right? This next one is some sort of product analytics tool. Think about amplitude. I know post hog is actually a pretty popular one. It's an open source product analytics tool. There are mixed panel panel, all of that. So have some sort of data hub data collection tool and have some sort of product analytics tool. That's the data infrastructure. And then you need to have an experimentation tool because like I said, you can now just imagine you build everything and everything works perfectly. So you need either like optimizely. I know amplitude has some”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do I know? There are users from Airbnb that are using my product, which features are they using? And do I send any marketing campaigns to each of them? Do they respond? All of that, all of those ideally need to be connected. But the reality is all over the place. It's all its own tools in most of the B2B companies.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there are two big buckets. The first bucket is product usage data. As I mentioned, a lot of B2B software, they're really lacking in that because when you sell via sales team, you don't need to know so many details. So granular usage data, all of that. The second bucket is, I call this customer 360 database because product usage data is one component, is the most essential. In order for your product-led growth motion to be successful, you also need to connect that with your marketing team's marketing campaigns. Your CRM, your Salesforce, like who are the customers' prospects, what their stage. So those ideally need to be connected so that you have a 360 picture of your customer if I have an Airbnb as a potential target account.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To check our investment, it's very hard to retain you. We don't have any lever to engage with you as well if you are not in the product. So we ended up adding IRA account retirement account. We ended up adding spending account like a debit card, like more high frequency use cases. Those use cases come with higher frequency and better attention by nature. So now you change the problem from how do I improve retention to how do I drive adoption of higher frequency use cases. So I did, again, a bunch of experiments how to drive more adoption of retirement account. Once you have a retirement account IRA, there's tax consequences, all of that, there's very hard for you to leave. So you flip the question into, again, adoption activation problem in that case as well.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Identified what are the features for users to take experience value quickly so that they are more likely to retain for us. It's a feature called recurring investment, which makes sense in hindsight. But at that time, nobody's caring about that. We have some other very cool investment features called Roundup Investment. So nobody is really paying a lot of attention on this. But what I look at data, I saw recurring investment has a high correlation with retention. So I did a lot of work trying to get more people to set this up, which has been a great success actually in the very short period of time. And then from there, I would say we begin to add more use cases that has a higher frequency. Like I mentioned, right? If you only come here once per month,”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can share some of my example at a course I think there are two things. One thing is actually very similar to what you just said. When I was asked to work on retention, I did a bunch of analysis. The biggest leverage for me is actually activation. So I ended up doing tons of experiments in activation.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For GitLab, you can go from Bronze tier to a silver tier, you can go to a higher tier, and then you can buy more seeds. And you can also buy more CICD minutes to consume. Those are all the different moments how you can do that is really understand data, understand usage, and trigger a lot of the right conversation at the right moment to the right person. And you can, again, a lot of similar tactics using activation and conversion actually can be beautifully applied in expansion because it's almost a combination of getting people to the aha.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around retention is, I think, I actually think extension is part of retention. Basically, you already have a steady usage flow. You are using this habitually like every week, every day. What are the right moment to prompt you to think about maybe buying more? And there are three buckets of product-led extension. The first one is upgrade to a higher tier. The second one is buying more seeds, buying more license. The third one is if you have some sort of consumption add-on component just consuming more.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that make it very hard as a head of roads to drive engagement, drive retention. I don't even know whether they're retained or not if they're not coming back, right? I can only gauge from other indicators. So I think one thing I would say about building habit is think about how to build those habit feature or collaboration feature into your workflow already, into the product already. That is the reason they can retain fundamentally if it's high frequency, if it involves collaboration with other people, if it's part of their workflow. So that's the first step. You can obviously use a lot of the loops to reinforce that. You can send them an email if they take certain action and get them back and to repeat that action. But fundamentally, you need to build that into your product. And then the next part.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is first off all your product needs to have a high enough frequency. Like if you're using this once per month, it's not likely you can build this into a habit. Like when I before GitLab, I worked at Acorns. We started as an investment app. And the whole thing is kind of passive investment, passive investing. You bought some ETFs and then you basically don't even need to check. and you just keep adding money and it will grow. And after 10 years is awesome. It's actually the right investment philosophy. But when I work as a head of growth, it make a big challenge for me because like think about set it, forget it. They don't even need to go to go back to a product to be successful.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Activation, conversion, those are fast. Those are almost like almost sometimes shorter time span, right? You have a lot of lever and you can test very quickly. And then acquisition is a very big leverage. You need to get more users always. Retention is super important, but it's a little bit messy. It's over a very long period of time. And your customers can be at any given moment. They can be retained or not. They just cancel or they just decided not to use anymore. You already lost them. So it's a very messy part. But how I think about retention, there are two steps. One is how to build a habit in their usage pattern so that they are using this maybe every week, every day, like the key to do that.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know I didn't talk about that in the post. And there are people asking, hey, do you plan to write another post on this specific topic? So the reason why I didn't cover too much retention expansion is, as you mentioned, it's not usually a first place to start. I call retention the messy middle. It's actually a messy part of the entire funnel.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The consumers shouldn't be confused about complicated pricing where to find all of that. So that's a place always worth investing, testing more because that's revenue so close to be kind of added into your book. And then the PQL PQA part, the other more complicated path, I would say that's something you want to figure out activation and self-checkout a little bit and you want to have some reasonable user number and then invest there. Otherwise, it can be a little bit kind of jumping too fast and jumping too ahead. And then a position product acquisition is a great place to invest if you have a collaboration workflow, you have some internal viral components in your product, think about Figma, think about Like candidly, even writing, it can spread. This product is so easy. You can build something to allow it to spread on its own.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say is a place, again, worth investing, but there are two layers. One is the self-tech optional. Just do some experiments there. You can actually go to any e-commerce website, like, I don't know, go to lululemon, go to Amazon. Make your conversion process as easy as theirs. That should be your goal.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About Miro as an example if you go through their activation experience and sign up to usage, they ask very limited questions, very targeted. They drop you kind of, they ask you about your use case. What are you here for? Are you here to do a brainstorm session? Are you here to develop a roadmap? And they quickly gave you templates to get started. Just like in maybe five minutes, you finish the entire journey from go to the website and sign up, answer a few questions and you are already using the template the product they provided to do the thing you want to do. That's time to value. That's a success. I think that's a really great standard for all the PLG like a B2B product try to follow. So that's activation is usually a good place if you don't know where to start. Like do that. And then”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should probably start away with activation. Activation is actually a common good starting place for most. Because usually B2B self-wares are not designed to really Get you to use quickly, historically. A good example, there are, I think all the best PLG companies, they do an awesome job. That's almost like my criteria to say whether this is a great PLG product or not.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As part of my workflow, I invite my team to join. I spread this out. If you have that use case, you can build that into a product. That's awesome. That's kind of very powerful.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source