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

“Think about your PQL, PQA motion, which is the other conversion path, which is if you also want to have sales blended into this, right, product-led sales motion, how do you set up the structure, the foundation, so that you can know what are some data signal to tell you those are better leads and what are some customer criteria in terms of size segment you should set up. How do you get those data? And then how do you handle hand this to your sales team? How they can close using those data use this knowledge? That's another very big opportunity area. That's a bigger kind of effort compared to those two low-hanging fruits. And the last thing I would say, product-led acquisition is a great place to start if your product is a collaboration software. Think about Airtable and Figma.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very hard to find where do I click to start this checkout process or they may have some frictions in the checkout flow where it's not localized. One company, when I look at their data, they find that India has very low success rate, which is expected, but we begin to say it's because the payment solution they choose actually doesn't support that market well. And they added another payment solution immediately. They are seeing much better success rate. And if they're already in the checkout, you don't want to lose any of them. Just do 100 experiments to get to as much as much higher kind of commercial because you don't want to lose any of them. So activation conversion usually are two great places to start. And then from there, I would say”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you need to think about find the right aha moment metric as the first step, as we just talked about, because that's the success. That's the goalpost. And then design a product experience to help more people together. And I usually think about do is better than show, is better than tell. Meaning you want to remove all the frictions and somehow give them a warm start, give them some sample template, give them some thing they can play with initially in that very moment already. And you can supplement that with your email to bring them to the product if they don't do that. So that's activation. If activation is okay, but your conversion, your self-checkout flow usually, there are also room for improvement. Many companies I work with, when I try to buy, I can Not even find a word to buy”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can do audit like this yourself, right? Just imagine if you are a B2C user trying to buy a product, you want it to be easy. Ideally, PLG for B2B can be that easy as well. So go through that process and identify where is confusing, where do you get stuck. If you find that you have a problem with activation, meaning if you enter into the product, you're like, what do I do? I don't know what should I do. And maybe I just left. And if that's the biggest opportunity activation.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also look at the email, the first initial emails. And then when I map this out, I asked the company to give me the data at very high level for each of the steps, how many people are on your website, how many people go through sign up, how many people hit this aha moment. We need to define that. We need to usually a lot of discussion, like how many people get to the aha moment, how many people started self-checkout and being successful. And then that between my experience from a user perspective and the data, we usually immediately begin to see, oh, this is the biggest opportunity, usually activation conversion are two of the common starting places.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I also look at their initial first few emails they sent to me. Because sometimes the email magically can help a lot. If I'm frustrated the first time the other day, I'm trying your product, I'm frustrated, I'm like, I will give up. And then in the night, and I saw an email, I'm like, oh, maybe I just click the CTA and gave it one more twice. And that time, actually, I figured out I get to the aha moment.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you then see, do I see higher conversion? Do I see higher retention? Because in data, you are only isolating correlation. You are not proving causation. You just saw people who are doing this are more likely to convert. But it doesn't mean if you get people to do this, they will convert. So experimentation is the step you will finally kind of validate 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 don't know for Airbnb, your day is probably you book a hotel, you go to there, you are so happy, right? You leave a high star review. That's the key action for this platform. For GitLab, we have so many different workflow components. Teams are here for different reasons. Some are here for security. Some are here for CICD. So that's why we ended up combining like two actions. It can be any of the two high value features. The next step is actually you need to launch some experiments to try to get more people to do those high value action.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the 30 day retention rate? Because we look at both. Sometimes you only look at retention or you only look at conversion. It doesn't give you the full picture. So we look at if you did this action, let's say if Lenny, you are trying our product, you are able to successfully merge the PR in your first 30 days. Does that improve your likelihood to convert? Does that improve your likelihood to retain? And we compare across those 10 high value actions compared with the average. And we begin to see, oh, some actions, actually, if you do that, it lifts your conversion, lift your attention much bigger. And those are the candidates for potential aha moments. And from there, the reason why we ended up not picking one single action for some products actually, you can pick a single action if one action really”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. So there are how you can get to that, right? First of all, we, the internal team, our growth team, actually, we did some brainstorming. We think about what are the potential action or behavior that indicate they're getting value. We ideally want to do something like they may be successfully merge their first PR or they successfully run their first pipeline, all of that. There are some potential high value actions we can think of. We just list all of them. And then the next step is we did a coronation analysis to understand, hey, those are the 10 high value actions we believe. We want to look at if a new user did this action. What's the maybe 30-day conversion rate and not 30 day, 90-day conversion rate?”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are a team product. Two users is talking about the team components. Whatever the first user is trying and using that is so valuable, he or she is confident to invite another coworker to come in, that itself is a very, very valuable action and indicates this first user is seeing value. And if together they use two or more features, that means they are seeing the collaboration, the platform components of the product. And within the first 14 days, because it has to be reasonably quick, but not unrealistic because we are complicated product, we are not Facebook, we're not Zynga or Game app. It's hard for you to figure it out in the first day. So, yeah, I think it's a very important concept. For any PRG company to figure out, because that's often the biggest opportunity area I see.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think for a lot of, especially we're talking about many SaaS products, B2B software, right? The value of such a product is usually either you see a workflow can be supported by this, it can save your time, it can save your money, it can help you make more money, or it can just solve this pain point that you never get to solve on your own without a software product. So at GitLab, we actually did a bunch of analysis. We're trying to understand what is that moment for our new users. We ended up having something along the line of two users, two features used in the first 14 days. So kind of, it's very similar to Facebook's kind of the format, but deep down, because we are a platform.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think as a moment, as a first time a user experience value of your product. So it is kind of, it gets popular because Facebook has this like example from the early growth days, like you add, I think you add 10 friends in seven days, you hit your aha moment. But there are many layers under that. The reason why Facebook used that to define aha moment is because in early days, if you add these friends, right, you begin to form some connection, you can see interesting feats, you can interact with your friends, and that social interaction, it's the core value of Facebook. And Facebook leaves by looking at a lot of data, if you meet that data metric criteria, it's kind of very likely you will hit that.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For example, one client, when I go to the checkout flow, the kind of checkout form is so confusing. They ask a bunch of questions that only, let's say, UK customers need every word, every other places they don't need to answer, but they ask the question anyway. And as a US kind of based person is very confused and I drop off at that point. And then there are other things, for example, the aha moments, like I talked about. I don't know what to do when. But I don't know what to do. I'm so lost and confused. That's usually a pretty big focus area and opportunity area, like just getting your users to aha moments. They are already over so many hurdles here, but don't just like turn down them and they leave because it's so confusing.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I actually do with a lot of my advisory clients as a first step is we do a full funnel audit. For PLG final audit, think about we go through me as a kind of end user, go through the entire journey, pretend I'm interested, semi-interested, I want to buy from the website. Does that kind of attract me? Is it super clear the value proposition? And then from there, going through the signup of the free account or free trial, is that smooth? When I begin to use the product, do I get to my aha moment fast? Or I'm very confused and frustrated, abandoned at that moment. And from there, if I'm like, think this is good, right? I hit my aha moment, I want to buy, can I even buy? Like you will never believe, like when I do this audit, there are so many low-hanging fruits usually in this process.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you don't have the foundational components, you need to build all of that. But if you kind of have something, if you already have this funnel exist, right? It's just not working perfectly, but it's working. It's there. I think the next step is you need to pick a starting point. Where do you want to focus first to drive the maximum impact? Personally, I'm a big fan of finding leverage. Like I think doing growth is always about finding leverage. If you can always find the area that with relatively small investment can give you the biggest results, that can be such a kind of momentum can power you through future experiments and more work and just like finding leverage is a beautiful thing in my mind. So I always want to do that. So when I think about PICA starting point”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. And I think it's not that like the devil is in the details. Just mapping all the big steps is not that hard, right? You think about, I have a marketing side already. I can build a free version and then they use the free version and I build a checkout flow. And that's it. That's the story, right? But that's the first step. If you don't even have those components, right? Building, like mapping out the funnel will allow you to see amazing checkouts flow, I'm missing free version. Like you already identified that. the devil is in the detail one layer down how do you design the experience for each of the steps what do you say on your marketing side right to drive free signup in the free signup what how do you guide them to use the three most important features uh and in the checkout flow which payment option do you offer so that customers from everywhere can buy very smoothly so that's that's the next layer”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I only need five seats. It's cheap. I would just go to the pricing page and check out the pricing and buy from there. Or in some cases, this is a big company and we see this big company is using our product, our sales team get that data signal, they may send an email and reach out and say, hey, I saw you are checking out. How can I help? And that may start a sales conversation, eventually become a contract 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
“Time. And I really liked it. I think we should check them out. And then this team, maybe this engineer manager or CTO, depending on the size of company, they're like, okay, he went to their website and he kind of signed up for a free trial because that allowed him to test some more advanced features in 30 days, but he already has this person, knows how to use it, right? This person already set up the foundation with the free version and they started the free trial. They used it 30 day to do a proof of concept. The entire company already using it, part of their process. And they're like, oh, awesome. I tried this feature, that feature, that feature. It's a really great tool. It can support our workflow. I'm pretty sure we should be able to kind of get our eye from this product. And then in this case,”
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 how the product last funnel work for us is someone maybe as a developer, I heard about GitLab. I go to website, I see, oh, I can actually sign up for a free account. I may use it for my personal project. My company may be using another solution, but I have some site project I'm doing as a developer. I want to use GitLab to host that. And I did that, right? And so you begin to see this individual user is having some usage, but nothing to do with his company. And then one day, maybe this person's employer, they're like, we want to look into some other solutions. We have way too many point solutions for each step of DevOps. Now we want to potentially consolidate them. So what are the options? And this engineer raised his hands. Hey, I have been using GLALAB for a very long time.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Gilab, we are a developer platform DevOps platform basically engineer teams, developer teams, they use this product to manage their entire DevOps process from storing their code, kind of managing the version control, releasing CICD, like security scan, all of that. It's an all-in-one platform for that team. So for the cells of that motion, right? Like I mentioned, the teams, our marketing team, we're working in bringing a lot of visitors to our website and they sign up for free trial for free accounts. And then we have this lead nurturing and lead scoring process to surface, which are the good ones for our sales team. And our sales team, we have S&B, we have the mid-market, we have enterprise, and they each kind of took their”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I can give an example first, then we can talk about the other question. So, I think use DLab as an example since that's where I'm most familiar. Very strong sales team from the very beginning. But the company also, we started from an open source product.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first step is for you to understand those two funnels and then think about if you want to add PLG, right? What is this journey? What are the steps along that funnel you need to establish for your product in order for your user to be able to convert in that funnel?”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideal customer profile, right? It's from a Fortune 500 company, or it's from a target industry that you know they need your solution. Then this customer worth more of your time. And you should actually not even if they may want to buy on their own, you may want to still have your sales team or have your customer success team to reach out to them to understand a little bit more the situation and give them some white global service. Hopefully you can even close a bigger deal than if they would have buy on their own, right? So that's another path. I call that PQL, P2A, like Sales Pass.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So usage becomes so important, and that's the biggest difference from the usage that you have two potential conversion paths. One is that if this product is not that expensive, the price point fits in most companies' budget. Some companies may just use their credit card and they buy online, right? That's also, you then don't even need sales team to be involved. And it's very similar to the B2C product e-commerce product buying process. And it's awesome, right? Like, because it's automated, you don't need to have more sales team involved. It's low cost, it's efficient. It can happen on its own every day. It will just add up to your revenue. And then the other potential conversion path is where the product usage is high. But also this customer, this potential prospect fits into your”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have people visit your website and they sign up for a free version or free account or free trial, the most important thing, the biggest difference is now you want them to use the product. You can still send all the marketing emails, all of that, but those are supplemental. Those are kind of trying to get them to the product to use to try. The usage, product usage is the almost like the leading indicator for success for PLG versus in the sales funnel, it's like almost like how many do you get and do they interact with the marketing campaigns, right? Which in the old days, what you have because nobody can access your product unless the contract is signed. But nowadays, that's almost like an artificial barrier. It's not there, right? You can totally build a product in a free version to allow people to use.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's basically very, very popular and widely used in the B2B business. And you go through some qualification process and leads needs to be from your Target kind of customer target industry company need to meet certain size, but they also need to show interest in how marketing team historically gained interest is how much they interact with your marketing campaigns. Do they open an email? Do they read three white papers? Do they go to this webinar? That's how they gauge interest. And for each positive action you did as a buyer, they add some points to you. And once you reach certain points, you become this marketing qualified lead. Basically, those are the better ones we filtered through that process. And we gave that to the sales team. And sales team has more process, but then they choose some of them, work on them, and they close some of them. So that's kind of traditionally B2B sales that motion works. And then product land funnel is different. It's much more similar to B2C. Basically, you can still”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the first step actually I would recommend founders and leaders to just understand what's PLG funnel, what's sales-led funnel with SLG funnel. Because when I remember when I begin to work on PLG at GitLab, it was not that clear to me, right? There's a lot of things you can read, but they're not all super clear what is PLG, like how is that different? And through working on that myself, I begin to develop this conviction and kind of this clear picture. The biggest difference from SLG and PLG is that the sales funnel traditionally work like something. You have marketing team working on the top of funnel, brain visitor, and then they need to have a process to turn the visitors into lead and lead is something”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just imagine you are building, you're selling kind of something on e-commerce side. You need all of this, right? Just in order for the B2V buyer to buy your software in PLG motion, you need to make all those available to him. It doesn't mean if you build this, it will happen again, right? That's the data experimentation. A lot of that needs to be there to support a lot of iteration and make 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
“To guide user to the next step. So have a very strong data foundation there. I would say, I think those are the main things. And there are other things like your pricing need to be relatively simple. If your pricing is super complicated, they need to, whenever they prick, for example, they try the product, they love it, they have a self-checkout flow. But in order to decide how much they need to pay, they need to send your sales kind of some information. You need to do a quote, then that's broken, right? Or they're already confused about this process. So that is another kind of important thing 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
“About all the ways you can reduce time to value. It doesn't need to be this big aha moment in the first five minutes, but at least give them some mini aha moments, right? So that's the second thing. Third thing is think about from there, if they get aha moment, if they want to buy, you need to have this self-checkout flow ready, self-service flow. It's the foundation. You have it. It doesn't mean they will buy immediately, but at least it gave them this option to do that themselves. And the fourth thing I would say between this kind of activation usage aha moment to this conversion moment, actually there is a big gap. And what is the gap? How you can understand the gap, how you can guide people along that journey is...”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Value and play with it yourself. So that's the first step have a vehicle. The second step is time to value. Basically, just because you have this vehicle, it doesn't mean people will come and use it and see the value. So you need to figure out how do you give your users a warm start and help them get started. I was talking with a kind of company today, they just realized like we have this tool when people come in into the free trial they are asked to do some action, but nobody know how to do that. Like they may not have everything ready to take that action. So we're like, what about we gave them some sample video or sample action they can try, right? It's not the same as they do it themselves, but it's better. It's getting closer. And after that, you can ask them to try this thing on their own and they need to do more work. So kind of”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing is that Annie mentioned you are able to build a vehicle, have a free version, have a free trial. Sometimes it's an open source product. A lot of developer products start as an open source product. It has its constraints, but it's also a great kind of vehicle for PLG. Or you can build, if none of those are options, you can build a really realistic kind of experience. For example, I remember Amplitude, they are pursuing PLG now, but they used to have a lot of barriers. Like as an end user, it's hard for me to put that code into my product and see my data. But they build a really realistic, interactive demo that's getting closer to PLG. So it's not PLG, but it's getting closer and you can already see.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a spectrum, right? I would say the defense company, defense software company is a pretty extreme. And of course, in those cases, I don't think it makes sense. But I think majority of B2B software I've seen, you've seen, we've used even some more complicated ones. Like Salesforce used to be this example of Sales Motion, right? They are the pioneer of SaaS and they do this so well, but they begin to add, look into kind of self-service portal and all of that. And even a lot of the bigger players are looking into that. So I think majority of the B2B software probably they are in the middle of the spectrum rather than the defense company.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Low complexity doesn't require a lot of customization for the customer to see value, like time to value need to be relatively short, or you can figure out a way to make it short. And then do you have a lot of potentially end user S&B business they are interested in the solution? They want to try it out. If you do not have both, if you, for example, develop a software for the airfly companies like Boring or Defense Companies, like only three target customers exist. In the entire world, you don't want to do PLG, right? So think deeper about the fit and then commit. And I would say those are the red flags.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How those teams, like those new Gross teams work with other sales and marketing teams, all of that. So that's one. The other one is they don't have a dedicated team. They just basically assign one person to this thing, right? They are imagine, hey, you already have this. It's not that big of a deal. You can just figure this out by borrowing resources from everywhere and try to coordinate all the stakeholders from sales marketing product. Like that person need to be a magician in order to be successful in that, basically. And I think the third thing is basically they are really doing this because it's trendy. They didn't think about the deeper strategic reason why this is a good fit for their business, right? Do you have a product that's relatively”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The red flags I've seen basically sometimes, first of all, they think about PLG equals launch of reversion or launch of free trial. They made this assumption in their head, oh, I already have a product. I already have a software that's working customers are using. Now if I add a free version, if I open a free trial, that's it. Like that's basically PLG. And I will have conversions. I will have people becoming a product qualified leads just because I have it. Hey, I opened this for you. Just come and use it and convert. I think that's one red flag basically. They are not thinking about the entire thing through understanding the implication, not only the free product. It's really just a start. You need to think about how to activate, how to design the upgrade path.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in those cases, I think it's super helpful to maybe either find someone who have done this as an advisor or hire someone. Like you need to have that expertise in-house or through advisor to support your POG motion.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you gave away your free product, what you want to get in exchange are two things. One is the broader reach because free product spread itself is lower barrier to entry. Two, you want to understand usage behavior of those free users. Which features do they use? And which features kind of correlates with a higher conversion rate, retention rate, all of that. If you don't have a foundation of data and understanding of how to analyze those data, you're giving away a free product for nothing. Like you are really not being able to utilize all of that to build your PLG motion. So I think data foundation and expertise in terms of how do I design that user journey, that journey is very different from the sales user journey. Like those are sometimes missing in company when they just begin to doing this.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really good at sales or maybe really good as the traditional motion, but they don't have this part of expertise and foundation. A common thing I see is that companies want to do PLG and they have no usage data at all. And they're like, I was just doing PLG. But PLG, I always say it's actually fundamentally DLG, data led growth.”
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 they maybe spend three months build kind of some sort of very basic free trial. And then they think that's it. They think the leads will come, conversion will come, self-service revenue will come. It's not that easy. It's not that simple. It is definitely an entire motion. So I would say you need to commit to it. Maybe you can do some thinking, collecting some data, build your conviction, but to a certain point, you need to commit to at least a year or even two years kind of roadmap to build this entire thing out and change the process internally sometimes as well to support that. The last one I would say a lot of times the company is committed. They want to do this, but they don't know the right way or they don't have the foundation. They don't have the expertise of PLG. Their internal team, they're”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You also need to convince your sales team, your existing product team, your marketing team, hey, let's try this out because before this process is super clean, like everyone only get only selected future leads, right? And sales work on those. But now you need to allow more people in and there need to be more understanding of their behavior, data. The process needs to change. It's actually a whole process. So I would say that's first one. And along with that is some companies didn't think it thoroughly and they are just kind of saying, oh, POG is cool. Let's do PLG.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, they don't have anything else. The first step for you to do is submit a form and kind of basically explain yourself to this company. I'm from who and who company. And I want to use the tool. Can you come back to me and allow me to see a demo of your product? That means the entry point to PLG is cut off. Instead, the first step is you need to either have a free product, free trial, some sort of low barrier entry for anyone who stumbled upon this product to give it a try. A lot of companies don't have that. That's the first, I would say, hurdle or peaceful. And especially if you're a sales led and you already have all those things figured out, you try to go to adpl it. It's not as easy as just say add a kind of free trial CTA on your website. You need to build this free experience.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first of all, as I mentioned, you need to have some sort of vehicle, right? A lot of the companies, if you go to their website, especially B2B companies, you will see the biggest CTA is called Book Demo.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Key properties, also a PRG product, think about it should have a very low barrier to entry. Usually it has a free version, free trial. You don't need approval from your boss to use it. You can use it today. And then it has some sort of a self-service checkout flow. If you need a better version, you can buy yourself as well. And this product basically, the free product will spread on its own in some way or another.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. I think maybe we can use a product as an example, right? Like, think about Zoom. How me or you maybe everyday users, how we get to know Zoom is not necessarily through a sales team call me code or email me code and introducing me this, showing a demo of Zoom and I get to know Zoom, right? It's because maybe Lenny, you hosted a webinar. I joined and I get to just use this software already without even knowing it's Zoom. And then afterwards I may one day think about I want to do this myself and I just do that and sign up and I already create a host of webinar and I can pay if I need a paid plan or I can use a lot of more advanced features when I let's say hit the 40 minutes limit. I can already click that and pay and become a paid customer already. So I think the”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The user of B2B softwares are also human. It's the same human using B2C softwares. And we're already trained to use product try and before we make any decision. And we demand that in B2B as well. So it needs to happen. And more and more companies are capturing that trend, basically. And they're trying to utilizing that as a entry point to either disrupt existing B2B players or build something really awesome for any users. So that's why it's becoming more and more popular.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just use a simple example in B2C product when you think about Facebook, when you think about a lot of the products you use every day as an end consumer, it's always by default product-led growth because there's no sales team email. The LTV of the product doesn't support that. I think PLG, the term become popular because traditionally in B2B world, sales is the main motion. You need a sales team to close the deal after the contract is signed, the end users can now finally use it, right? But nowadays, it's not necessarily the case. You can have your B2B SaaS product developed in a way to allow end users to try before you buy. So that's the reason I think this has become being more popular. And the fundamental driver behind this is”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. But I would say it is easier if you have PLG from early on. If you're pure sales led, you try to add PLG, that's the harder thing to change, basically.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would think so because if you are like, let's say if you're in the sales motion dominant kind of traditional B2B software industry, your competitors will be adding PLG, right? As soon as they added, they will have a benefit of attracting more end users and the end users become advocates to the employer, to the clients, and you lose that. And if you're only in PLG, somewhere else may go after the big customers, it takes time for PLG to go to the big customer and close them, right? So you lose a little bit time there as well. I think eventually you need both.”
2023-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source