S3E1 – How to achieve Product Led Growth for your SaaS With Wes Bush

How can you achieve successful product-led growth for your SaaS? We dive into this topic with the author of the bestselling book “Product-Led Growth”; Wes Bush. We will discuss everything from the core principles and significance of product-led growth (PLG) to how to implement PLG and overcome the most common challenges. 

Wes dispels the common misconception that PLG is solely about free trials or freemium models, breaking it down into three essential components: acquisition, product experience, and monetization. 

What is Product-Led Growth & why does it matter? 

Subject matter guest expert Wes goes beyond the misconception that it’s solely about free trials or freemium models. Instead, he breaks down the essence of product-led growth into three key components: acquisition, product experience, and monetization. It’s about seamlessly guiding users from discovery to value realization and ultimately converting them into paying customers without direct sales intervention.

Check out Wes’s training on his site to learn more about the basics of product-led. Or check out his book here (for free). 

The conversation is practical as Joran asks Wes why businesses should care about product-led growth. Wes’s response emphasizes efficiency and scalability. Product-led growth offers a compelling solution in a market where doing more with less is crucial. 

Wes highlights how product-led businesses can scale faster and more efficiently, contrasting them with sales-led counterparts that require substantial capital investment in expanding sales teams.

Common Challenges and Pitfalls in Achieving Product-Led Growth

To shed light on the challenges, Joran prompts Wes to share common mistakes companies make when attempting to achieve successful product-led growth. Wes draws from his personal experiences, recounting a pivotal moment at Vidyard, where they transitioned to a 14-day free trial model without aligning it with their vision and user understanding. He emphasizes the importance of strategic alignment, user clarity, and a seamless onboarding experience to avoid common pitfalls.

Strategies for Successful Implementation of Product-Led Growth

Wes introduces his Product-Led Go-to-Market System, outlining three phases: foundation-building, offer creation and experience optimization, and scaling. The foundation phase involves clarifying the business’s vision and strategy, understanding the ideal user, and mapping out their journey and challenges. The subsequent steps focus on crafting an irresistible offer, optimizing the user experience, and, finally, scaling through data-driven insights, experimentation, and team empowerment.

Wes encourages founders to prioritize building a solid foundation before scaling, citing the significance of having the right vision, user understanding, and a compelling offer. The Product-Led Go-to-Market System emerges as a roadmap for companies looking to leverage the power of product-led growth, offering a structured approach to navigate the complexities of this transformative strategy.

Sales-Led vs. Product-Led

Sales lead allows for choosing the target audience and accounts, while product lead involves opening up for sign-ups. Wes discusses the key difference between sales-led and product-led companies regarding the go-to-market motion.

Wes elaborates on the significant changes in the go-to-market motion between sales-led and product-led companies. He highlights the importance of aligning strategy with capabilities for successful execution.

Key Timecodes

• (0:42) Show and guest intro
• (1:19) Why you should listen to Wes Bush
• (2:00) What is product-led growth?
• (3:40) Why should people care about product-led growth?
• (5:26) The common mistakes companies make while trying to achieve product-led growth
• (9:14)  The strategies and processes to implement product-led growth
• (19:08) How to deal with people signing up who are not within your ICP
• (23:28) The best practices for doing product-led growth well.
• (25:19) Challenges and obstacles faced while doing product-led growth
• (27:28) The future of product-led growth
• (30:17) How to grow towards 10K MRR
• (31:48) How to grow towards 10 million ARR
• (33:03) Wes’ crucial advice to SaaS founders
• (23:14) What Wes wishes he knew 10 years ago

Transcription

[00:00:01.760] – Wes Bush

Welcome to season three of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. In this podcast, we cover all topics related to how to grow your B2B SaaS, no matter in which stage you’re in. I’m Joran Hofmann, the host of the show and the founder of Reditus. Us, which is a B2B SaaS that helps other B2B SaaS companies to set up, manage, and grow an affiliate program. This basically means I’m going through the exact same journey as you are, experiencing the same issues, having the same questions. And this is the reason why I started the podcast in the first place, getting advice from industry experts on a specific topic. So if you like this content, make sure to follow, subscribe, review the show so we can help as much founders as possible. Let’s dive in. In this episode, so the first of season Today, we’re going to talk about product-led growth. My guest is Wes Bush. Wes is the CEO of the company called Product-led. He helped product-led growth companies beat sales-led companies. So I’m really excited for this one. He also written a book, which I’m holding right now for people are looking at it, called Product-led Growth.

[00:01:02.940] – Wes Bush

He runs a podcast which is called Product-led Podcast, and he has trademarked his system called Product-led Go-to-Market System. I can’t think of a better person to talk about Productlet Growth. Welcome to the show, Wes.

[00:01:18.080] – Wes Bush

Wow. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:19.650] – Wes Bush

I’m going to always start with a really Dutch blunt question. If people are not convinced after listening to that intro, why should people listen to you today?

[00:01:27.360] – Wes Bush

I live and breathe everything product-led. You can tell that from the intro, whether it’s writing multiple books on the topic, whether it’s building a system, implementing it with hundreds of companies. What’s so cool is we’ve helped over 700 plus companies implement the product-led go-to-market system now, and it’s generating over a billion dollars of revenue. It works. It’s really cool. I don’t know if you can tell the tone of my voice, but I get excited about this shit. You’re not listening to somebody boring when it comes to this topic. There you go. Hopefully, that’s enough forism.

[00:01:59.220] – Wes Bush

In your own words, how would you explain product-led growth?

[00:02:03.120] – Wes Bush

A lot of people think it’s this free trial, it’s this premium model, and that’s all there is to it. I get it because I was thinking about that seven years ago. I was like, Oh, yeah, that’s all there is to this thing. But then when I started digging into it and looking at what are the most successful product-led companies doing really well that really symbolize product-led growth, it’s like, Well, they’re using the product in some pretty cool ways. When it comes down to it, it’s really three main ways. It’s how do you acquire people to find out about what you do, what’s the first offer? When you go on to a product-led website, it’s usually that free offer or something like that, or sign up for free. Product-led growth is starting with that, but then it doesn’t end there. When it goes into the product experience, it really leans into how do you use the product to engage people. So instead of manually guiding people through step by step how to use your product, you just make it really easy. You cut out all the steps, you make it simple, you get fields of value with the product leading majority of that onboarding experience.

[00:03:04.380] – Wes Bush

Then the last piece is really the monetization. So can your product actually sell itself? Can people pick a plan, understand what is the right plan for them and upgrade, pull out their credit card, sign up, become a paying customer without ever talking to you? That, to me, is what product that growth is about. It’s when you can actually build a product that can sell itself.

[00:03:26.740] – Wes Bush

Yeah. Then from the beginning part, so from acquiring people to actually engage it with the product and to actually selling or buying it in that sense. It already maybe explains a little bit my next question, but I am going to still ask it. Why should people care about product that growth?

[00:03:42.820] – Wes Bush

I think if you don’t care about product that growth, I’d be worried, especially with the current market environment. If you think about doing more with less, how do you do that? If you want to double the number of customers you have, let’s say if you’re a sales of business, you’re probably looking at doubling the number of sales people you have, which is a big capital to get them up and running. Then you got to wait maybe 6, 12 months to get the payment back on them. You usually have to raise a lot of money to make that work. If you’re to double your business with a product-led business, you actually hire as a last resort. We’ll get into that when we go to the product-led go-to-market system in a second. But that’s the cool thing is your product can actually take a lot of that manual labor out of the equation. You’re building a machine, which is your product, and that actually gives your business the Holy Grail word of leverage. You can scale faster, easier, and especially when it comes out to testing different markets and everything else, it’s way easier with a product-led business.

[00:04:41.560] – Wes Bush

Those are some of the main reasons why you want to care about it. It’s more efficient, you can do more with less. If you’re a founder listening to this, it’s a hell of a lot easier in a lot of ways to scale a product-led business. That’s the big distinction between a sales lead versus a product-led business is sales lead businesses, to be when it comes to getting started, they’re easier to get started. When it comes to scaling, they’re way harder, way more people involved. Yet a product-led company is like, It’s a lot harder to get started and get right. We’ll go through how you can do that. But scaling it is actually a lot simpler. That’s the big reasons why you should care about this.

[00:05:19.420] – Wes Bush

Yeah, and as you mentioned, it’s hard to get right at the beginning. Maybe that flows really well into the next question. What are the most common mistakes companies make while trying to achieve product-led growth?

[00:05:30.180] – Wes Bush

Yeah. How would I start with my own mistakes since I made so many, man? All right, so eight years ago, as we’re going to the company called Vidyard, they were a simple B2B video analytics software. I could know if you watched my video if you were on our website, which is really cool, especially eight years ago. Video wasn’t even that popular. So one of the most common mistakes we had is, okay, we saw some of the competition. They had a free trial and we’re like, Oh, that seems like a great idea. Right now, we just have this demo model. It’s working. Let’s try something else. So when it came to deciding what you would give away for free, we just looked at what everybody else was doing. We’re like, okay, seven, 14-day, 30-day free trials are pretty common. Let’s just aim in the middle. Let’s do 14-day free trial. Let’s launch it within a very short period of time. Then when we started looking at the results, we were like, Something’s not working. None of these people are actually converting to customers. The The only thing that the folks were talking about, especially in sales, in relation to this free trial, was cannibalization.

[00:06:37.510] – Wes Bush

It just wasn’t converting. When we looked at that and we dissected, why is it not working? It was because we didn’t approach things in the right order. We didn’t understand, how did this connect with our strategy? We didn’t really get clear on who is this ideal user, who’s going to actually use this thing. A lot of times, sales of companies are really clear on your buyer persona or ICP. Yet it’s, who’s your ideal user? They’re like, Crickets. You didn’t think about that. Then when it comes to the model, it’s, oh, yeah, we totally guess that. The 14-day free trial was just like, it’s a little cover of, okay, Yeah, boom, slap on the model and think it would be helpful. But it didn’t actually tie to what could somebody do in this trial in a meaningful way without even giving them enough time to see value. In our case, it didn’t. Fun fact there, it didn’t work. But then when it came to the offer, we didn’t actually lean into it. We weren’t actually super specific regarding that. In the last piece, actually, there’s two more, there was the overall onboard experience was nonexistent. We didn’t actually help people get the value.

[00:07:44.740] – Wes Bush

Then the last piece is they couldn’t even purchase on their own, so they had to talk to sales. There was a ton of friction. Those are the big six things that really made a big difference when it came to why it didn’t work. That’s It’s my personal example there. But I’ve seen it so many times in other companies where it’s one of those six. It’s you didn’t tie it to your vision or your strategy. It didn’t tie it to understand your user, your model, your offer, your overall experience was off or your pricing.

[00:08:13.900] – Wes Bush

I think the two things you also mentioned a lot is value. You need to guide your users to the value they’re trying to achieve with your tool. I think that’s a really big one.

[00:08:25.400] – Wes Bush

I think at the talk when we were chatting in the SaaS talk, too, there There’s that big difference of, I think, the mindset you also have to adopt. If you don’t adopt this, it’s a big mistake, which is how you sell is just as important as what you sell. When you look at a standard sales of business, you got to acquire people, get them through your website, that’s fine. But then you typically monetize them and they go through the demo process and then it’s boom, okay, great. Now we engage them, we provide value. In a product of business, the one thing that switches is we still acquire people, but the next step is we got to engage them and provide a ton of value, and then we can monetize them. What happens is if you don’t build that engagement as a core strength or capability in your business, it just won’t work.

[00:09:10.600] – Wes Bush

We’re going to dive in the juicy things, I guess, now. Regarding product-led growth, can you share any strategies, processes you would use to implement product-led growth the right way?

[00:09:21.020] – Wes Bush

The product-led go-to-market system I’ve been working on for the last few years is one of the fastest ways you could ever consider rolling this out, building it all out. Everything starts with building a strong foundation, just like you build a house, it’s like the first three months, it doesn’t look like you’re doing anything. Just building a hole, pouring in concrete. But why do you do that? It’s so you can scale higher. You can actually have more than one level to your house. So the same thing happens when it comes to your business. You got to start with the right foundation. Now, there’s three components of this. The very first piece is you got to figure out what is your overall vision strategy for the business. So you got to get super clear on that because if you’re not, you’re going to wander different areas. And so a lot of times, actually, when I talk to founders and they’re like, I’m not sure if I should be product lead or not, it’s really hard a lot of times because they’re not clear on the vision. What is your vision again? What does it look like? For instance, really fun, easy, simple vision is like, Cambos.

[00:10:22.520] – Wes Bush

I love it because it’s like, oh, yeah, we want to enable anyone to design anything. It’s really empowering. And yet, how would you do that? Would a product-led model do that better than a sales-led model? Hell, yeah. Absolutely. There’s no question. Now, when it comes to your strategy, how are you going to win? Are you really clear about that? Do you have a very compelling way of how you’re going to win as a business in your market? Do you have two or three big motes you’re going to build as a business? For a lot of product, that company says, Oh, yeah, we want to win because we have the best user and customer experience. And at What’s the SaaS Talk event, actually, I was laughing at this because I love it. When I see it, there were so many people that had the tagline like, We do XYZ made easy. We make all this easy. And it’s like, Oh, yeah, this is the next edition of SaaS, which gets to one of your other questions. What do you see as the future of SaaS? Okay, we’ve enabled a lot of things in SaaS, but making things easy, not quite there yet.

[00:11:22.320] – Wes Bush

We got a lot of room to grow. So that’s the first component, get clear on your vision and strategy. The second piece is really getting super duper dialed in on who is your ideal user? Who is that person who’s going to get the most value from your product? Who is that person where they’re the most motivated actually to use this product? They get excited about it. They don’t churn out to that often. They get a ton of value out of it. Who is that person? And then what we basically end up doing at that stage is we map out, where do they start in their journey? Where is the end game for them? What does success look like? And then this is the fun part. We map out all of the challenges in between the starting point, the end point. Then when we get to the model component of like, Hey, what do we give away for free? There’s no guessing. We’re just like, Okay, we have all these challenges. There’s these milestones along the chart, along this journey. We basically decide what would feel meaningful for this user to accomplish something in the product for free.

[00:12:24.060] – Wes Bush

What would that look like? What would we have to do for that person? And so once you pick the milestone of, Okay, we want somebody to achieve this in our free experience. Then the fun question is, let’s reverse engineer this. What do we need to give away for free? And how do we just do that? And so it’s not so much about debating over, is this free trial or is this free model? Or Oh, better yet, one of my favorite ones to bash on. Is it a reverse trial? Should we do that? And it doesn’t matter what the model is. It matters what are you actually helping people do and accomplish. Those first three things, that is the highest leverage stuff you could ever possibly do when it comes to building a solid product-led foundation. So I call that phase one of the product-led go-to-market system. Now, phase two is really where founders mostly start, but they skip the first three steps. So step one of building a product to sell stuff is all about you got to start with a great offer. So what does that look like? When it comes to an offer for product-led businesses, the reason the offers are way more irresistible is because if you’ve done the model part right, you actually have something that you can say, Hey, we’re going to help you get the XYZ outcome, and we’re going to do that, enable it for free.

[00:13:38.820] – Wes Bush

Would you like that? Because we know where you are on the journey. We know most beginners start here, and then you got to accomplish this outcome, and we just make that a hell of lot easier. Would you like to sign up for free? Of course. Okay, great. So you set the promise, you know what the offer is. Next step, the experience. How do we actually get people to experience this? And the way I look at experience, I was initially going to call this component onboarding. That’s a part of it, but it’s much more than that because it’s like, how do we make this effortless to sign up, effortless to actually experience the value of the product, effortless to upgrade? So this is looking at the holistic picture of you. Every everything across your experience. And then the last piece is, okay, if we do the first two things, people are going to be primed, they’re going to get the value. Now we got to make it easier for them to actually upgrade, and we got to have a simple pricing. And so a lot of times I find founders where it’s, okay, zero, and then it’s $2,000 per month.

[00:14:35.320] – Wes Bush

It’s this huge pricing gap. So you got to make it easy to get started to that first plan, and then it can scale as you grow and get more value out of this product. That’s the last one of this phase. But if you do those three things really well, that is like your 80/20 of how do you build a product that sells itself. Once you get to that stage and complete phase two, that’s actually when you start to Okay, great. We have some users that are converting into paying customers. We have a pretty solid free-to-pay to commerce, right? But it’s not over yet. It’s actually just the beginning. That’s phase three now begins where it’s like, how do we actually scale this up? The three components there that you got to really dial in is now the data side of things. Now that you have this working, how do you actually know what is the biggest bottleneck in your business? Do you always know what is that big bottleneck, the biggest opportunity in your business for you focus in on? When you know that, you can start building more of a scorecard for the rest of your team, reviewing it daily and weekly, building accountability around some of those core metrics.

[00:15:41.190] – Wes Bush

For instance, who is in charge of that from sign up to getting the value conversion rate? Who is in charge of from value to upgrade? Really making sure that you have the right accountability in place, being scaleless. Then the next component is all about the process. How you get high impact experiments and accelerate that across the rest of the team. Now, if you got the right accountability in place with the right data, then it’s like you pour gasoline on the fire as, Oh, we have this low onboarding rate. What do we do? It’s, of course, we run experiments, we try and fix it. But then now it’s not just any other problem is we know where to apply the most leverage and we’re not just like, willy-nilly, Yeah, we launched 10 experiments this week, but we didn’t move the needle. The best, truest way of knowing you’re actually doing a great part in the process component is you’re growing month over month, consistently. Then the last component of all this is the team component. And the reason this is last, even though this is a go-to-market system, is because in a product like a company, you can afford to hire as a last resort.

[00:16:44.560] – Wes Bush

A lot of those challenges and problems that you just encountered in the process component, let’s say a low free-to-pay conversion rate, you can probably solve it with the product. You can probably have the right people on your team who can figure out what is the right thing to do. Usually at this stage, though, once you have the product that sells itself and you’re trying to look to scale it up, it becomes time for you to look at, actually, this is working well. Maybe we need more marketing, maybe we need more channels. You can hire a channel specialist to maximize that out and build out and get more people to find out about what you do. That’s a lot of me talking, but that’s the overview of the product-based go-to-market system that I’m so pumped about because the strategic order of everything, it matters. One thing builds off of each I was just talking to this other founder yesterday, and he was like, Man, I wish I found out about this earlier because he had hired a consultant for the experience component. He had hired a consultant for the offer or product marketer for that person.

[00:17:45.620] – Wes Bush

He had hired another consultant for the data side. I’m piecing together all of this, and it’s messy. I was like, But you didn’t do the first three, did you? He was like, Oh, man, I didn’t.

[00:17:57.110] – Wes Bush

So yes, there’s the overview. Yeah, and I think the first three We need to dive into that, I guess getting the foundation, it’s really important. Like your ideal user, the ICP, if you don’t know their challenges, if you don’t know their pains, then product lead is going to be really difficult indeed if you’re going to not have that in place. It’s There we go. We’ll see you next week. We’ll see you next week. Thank you for listening to the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. This podcast episode is sponsored by Reditusus. Reditusus helps B2B SaaS companies to set up, manage, and grow an affiliate program. In short, an affiliate program means that you’re going to ask other people to to promote your SaaS, and you would only pay them if they deliver you a paid client, making it a very cost-effective and scalable way to grow your monthly return revenue. See more at getReditusus. Com. Maybe one question regarding that, because in my opinion, it might be completely wrong, but the difference between sales lead and product lead is with sales lead, you can choose who you’re going to sell towards. You have your accounts, you’re going to target them, and then you’re going to try to get them in.

[00:18:55.800] – Wes Bush

With product lead, you’re going to open up things. Basically, people are going to sign up, it doesn’t always mean that they’re going to match your ICP. Because how do you make sure that… I guess it’s also messaging on the site, but how do you deal with people signing up who are not within your ICP? Because they’re going to probably clog up support. They’re probably going to ask for different features you don’t want to support. Any advice here?

[00:19:18.320] – Wes Bush

There’s two questions here. There’s the first one is the biggest difference is between sales lead and product company. I’ll go through that one first. But yeah, when you look at some of the big changes between the two companies, I was mentioning the difference at the beginning where it was like how you sell is just more as what you sell, like that piece, or it was like acquisition, engagement, and then monetization is like the standard go-to-market motion for product lead companies. But then sales lead companies, it’s like really acquisition, monetization, and then engagement. It’s one small change, really. That’s the biggest difference between the two. Yet it changes everything. I have also seen a lot of sales-like companies try, and VidArt was this when we first our free trial. We had a free trial. We were absolutely sales-led. There was not one, maybe there was two bones in the whole business, which were like, Oh, yeah, let’s engage people in this experience. There was not much thought about that in terms of how can we get people to value in this experience. That was something that you got to develop. That’s why when it comes to the strategy, that’s really important.

[00:20:24.510] – Wes Bush

As an example, one of the things we do or the questions we ask is, How are you going win as a business. And so let’s say, even if you’re a sales of business, it’s like, oh, yeah, we’re going to win with user and customer experience. We’re going to make it the easiest thing ever. Yet the next question is, what are the capabilities you must have to win? So if you say, okay, yeah, we’re having user and customer experiences, how are we going to win? But you don’t look at your team, there’s nobody who does UX, nobody who does product design, nobody who does research and finding out a more about the user and everything. It’s probably not going to work. It’s just like somebody who says, I’m going to become an Olympic marathon runner, and yet I don’t like running and I don’t run. Good luck. We all like to dream, right? So yeah, it comes down to just the go-to-market motion and then also the strategy and how you follow up with it because strategy means nothing unless you actually develop the capabilities behind it to actually execute on it. So yeah, that’s That’s the big difference.

[00:21:30.920] – Wes Bush

The second part you mentioned is, what do you do when it comes to non-ICP, non-ideal users signing up for your product? That’s always going to happen. Even as a sales like companies, when it comes down to, Yeah, why did this person sign up for a demo? What are they thinking? Yeah, so you’re never going to avoid this, but there is ways to navigate it. One of the things that I always coach our students on is the The first 3-5 questions you ask when people sign up for your product are really vital. What I try and do in those is structure those questions in a way where, one, I can identify if this is our ICP, and two, really look through, you can extend it to the experience component of how can we personalize that experience for that ICP. Why we do that is because we want to understand what marketing channels actually brought that particular user? What campaigns brought that particular ICP? And we just focus on those ones because a lot of times it’s like you might look at your overall visitor to sign up, conversion, and you’d be like, It’s really good, or maybe it’s really bad.

[00:22:44.800] – Wes Bush

But it might actually be great if you just look through the lens of your ICP and you said, Actually, wait, this LinkedIn ad is fire. Let’s 10X this budget. But we got to kill that other thing because Google Ads, what the heck are they doing? They’re sending us all this trash. That’s the level of granularity there. It comes to, Yeah, we’re not getting the right ICP. It always comes back to, What channels are you doing or using? And what campaigns are actually driving the right ones? It seems simple when I’m going through it, but obviously, attribution and going through this is hard. That’s why those 3-5 questions when you first get somebody to sign up are actually really important.

[00:23:22.440] – Wes Bush

Yeah, really nice. Thank you. We dived in mistakes, right? We dived, I guess, on the bad side. We look at best practices. Any best practices you can share regarding companies who do product-led growth really well?

[00:23:34.860] – Wes Bush

I think the biggest best practice is a little bit of a cop-out, but whenever you implement the product-led growth market system, that’s the best practice order. As as far as how you implement things, a lot of times where companies get in trouble is they don’t know that order. An example with another founder I was working with, it was like, I have this low free-to-paid conversion rate, so I’m going to be spending in the next three months focusing on our onboarding. And so I was like, Okay, interesting. Let me just go to your website and do some digging. And I was on his homepage and I was like, So tell me again, what do you do? I don’t quite get what your product is all about. I wasn’t trying to be rude or anything, but I was like, It’s vague. And I know there’s other tools that do this thing, yet I’m not sure why should I choose you? What’s different about that? So it wasn’t even a messaging thing. That’s it. It’s all the way back to the vision strategy part. Another client we had as well, he went through the vision and strategy component.

[00:24:36.580] – Wes Bush

They nailed down why they were going to win as a business. They were up against some really big event companies like Eventbrite. But then they were just the lowest cost, and they provided and made it easier for you to sell more tickets for your events. They leaned into just those two things, just two things. Their offer and sign-up rate, it It’s increased by 47% just because of that. They’re not copywriters or anything. I was just like, This is so cool. When you get those components in order, good things happen.

[00:25:08.600] – Wes Bush

I think you mentioned already, you make it sound easy implementing product lead into a company, but I think any company is going to face challenges when you’re trying to implement product let growth within. Are there any common challenges and also maybe some ideas to overcome those?

[00:25:23.980] – Wes Bush

I think the biggest common mistakes or challenges I see companies go through is the commitment and conviction regarding, Hey, this is going to be the right approach. Being willing to… That first time you launch it, it might not be that successful. Even if you’ve gone through the first few steps, for instance, when it comes down to, Okay, let’s see, you get a great model, you improve the offer. But improving your onboarding, getting people to value, that whole engagement piece, it’s really hard. It does take a lot of time, sometimes to make it really work well. It isn’t just as simple as, Oh, yeah, let’s just do this the first time and set it, forget it onto my next SaaS business. I wish, but you do have to learn a lot. When it comes down to this system I’m going through and walking you through, sometimes you might get to, we figured out our vision or strategy, our user, our model. We get to the offer stage and we start to realize, Oh, that’s not resonating at all. Maybe it’s just we have to go through, redo our offer Or you might realize if your earlier stage comes, you’re like, Actually, we weren’t actually focusing on the right user.

[00:26:36.000] – Wes Bush

When you start to launch some of these things, you should be able to see, Okay, great. We launched that offer and we focused on our ideal user and we promoted the model. Wow, boom. It’s serious. That 47% difference, it’s not always that high, but it should feel like, wow, okay, we’re on to something here. We have synergy. That’s the key of this. Everything here that we’re talking about is if you If you go through these components, you’ll get that synergies. Yeah, that’s the biggest challenge is just knowing where you are in the system and then being okay where it’s okay if we’re going to really make this work, we got to have that long term commitment, conviction that this is going to work, and then you got to have and build up that engagement capability.

[00:27:17.100] – Wes Bush

Yeah, because I think you also mentioned at the beginning, it is going to take time. Product-led growth is going to take a lot longer than the sales-led approach, but in the end, it’s going to be a lot more scalable. Nice. When we look a bit further ahead, a lot of I think these are now switching to product-led growth. I think that’s nice for you. Any other things you see maybe in the future happening within product-led growth?

[00:27:38.080] – Wes Bush

I think over the last three, four years, I call it act one of product-led growth. People learn about it, people are excited about it. A lot of people try it and then they fail. It’s hard. Some companies naturally get it. Maybe they’re more product-oriented. They’re like, Okay, yeah, I get this, and naturally intuitive. That’s not the majority of people. The majority of people struggle with this a lot. I think act two in the future for the next 5, 10 years is a lot more people leaning into thinking about product-led as a complete go-to-market strategy, not just, Oh, yeah, it’s this little product thing, this little tool, this little tweak we did, this hack, we launched free trial. No, actually, this is the entire go-to-market motion, and this is what we’re going to build off of. What I’m so excited for, and I truly do see this, is there’s going to be a future where product-led That is the default way of how you’re going to build a SaaS business, specifically B2B SaaS business in the future. Then there’s going to be a lot of cool combinations coming out of that. Okay, yeah, we just bolt on product-led sales as we go up past 10 mil.

[00:28:44.100] – Wes Bush

We’re going to see a lot of these successful motions, but it all starts with how do we master the product-led go-to-market motion first, build that strong foundation, and then we become unstable when we layer on these other hybrid motions as we scale up.

[00:28:58.740] – Wes Bush

Yeah, nice. I think, as you mentioned, if you do it from the core, then it’s going to be a lot easier to scale just because the foundation.

[00:29:06.260] – Wes Bush

I’ve worked with billion dollar companies, helping them go from the sales to product lead. And I can tell you, it’s not that fun. It’s a lot of firing. It’s a lot of change management, realignments. It’s tough for any business because you change the capabilities of a business, which that’s always hard.

[00:29:25.660] – Wes Bush

I think the things you mentioned as well, like the future, as in a lot more companies are doing product-led growth. I think now what market is a lot of companies focus more on profitability, which means you probably need to have less cost. As you mentioned, hiring as a large resort where you see a lot of the LinkedIn posts I see nowadays is what is the MRR, ARR per employee, basically. That’s also a lot better when you go to product that growth motion.

[00:29:49.420] – Wes Bush

Yeah, totally. There’s so many… I was talking about two different founders. One was like 4 million in recurring revenue, three employees versus another one where I’m like, Oh, wow, you have 40 employees. I’m I’m expecting a big company and it’s 2 mil. I was like, What? Big difference between that, both companies and the amount of leverage that they do have.

[00:30:09.920] – Wes Bush

Yeah, interesting. We’re going to close off with the final four questions. When we talk about product-led growth, what advice would you give somebody who’s just starting out and growing to 10K monthly recurring revenue?

[00:30:22.360] – Wes Bush

I was just actually helping a company do this recently, which is fun. When I was helping them, basically what we ended up doing is going through that go-to-market motion. But you go through the iterations way faster. You initially start with, Okay, what’s our vision strategy hypothesis? Here, who’s our ideal user and buyer? Let’s get clear on that. Then we go through, Okay, what could be a compelling offer that we would go through this part? Then what is the experience? How do we get people to deliver that value as soon as possible? At any stage, if you start feeling like, Oh, we’re not getting that much synergy or traction, you just go right back to the vision strategy. Then you go to the user and everything else. When we did that a few iterations, what’s cool about this I didn’t mention at the beginning of this podcast, but there’s really three things you need to find, like PMF or product market fit. There’s your company, which is like, What are you really good at? More specifically, very early stage, which is 10K for sure, it’s what are you good at as a founder? And then you also got to align, who do you serve best?

[00:31:20.060] – Wes Bush

Who do you love serving? Who are you passionate about serving? What problems do you love helping people with? So that’s like a second piece. The last thing you got to figure out, which is your product and which will get you out of that 10K range, which is like, how do you create the most value? So you have those three things, Venn diagram, and the middle is like that synergy. You’re really trying to define and identify those three things, and you’ll create that synergy that will help you scale out of that area.

[00:31:48.200] – Wes Bush

Let’s assume then we’re past that 10K MRR, and then we are going to make a big jump. What advice would you give founders growing from 10K to 10 million ARR? So 10K MRR to 10 million When you’re trying to go from that, it depends obviously how big your team is, but when you’re trying to make that big of a jump, there’s a lot more alignments that you need to do.

[00:32:09.420] – Wes Bush

One of the reasons why in our product-like go-to-market training, when we teach it and implement in businesses, it’s actually a weekly coaching call with the entire leadership team because when we go through these same components in the product that go to market motion, what’s really cool is that when you create that buy-in and alignments at each stage, They implement it because it’s their idea. There’s less resistance. Whereas if it’s, Oh, here’s how we’re going to scale it to 10 mil, and this is the product in motion, and this fancy consultant comes in and shares it all, it almost never gets implemented. So it has to come from the people, and then You have to build being product-led as a capability in the rest of the company. If you go through that product-led go-to-market system a few times, you will definitely build that long-term capability.

[00:32:57.200] – Wes Bush

A bit zooming out, and this could be also not It’s product-led related, but knowing you, it probably will be. Do you have any general advice towards other SaaS founders who are now on their journey growing their SaaS? Anything you could give them as an advice?

[00:33:10.640] – Wes Bush

There’s this common adage of who not how. It seems great. It’s okay. I have a problem as a business owner, and who not how, right? I should hire somebody for this. Let’s walk through an example. You have a lot of support requests because you just launched a free motion. Should you who not as an example? Let’s hire two more customer support reps to scale this business up because, well, we got a lot of tickets. Who not how actually makes your business less profitable? Who not how actually slows your business down is to get more and more people. It’s actually wrong in that context. What you should be doing is thinking, Okay, what are all those tickets coming from? What’s confusing about our software? Why are people reaching out, treating that as a bug? And then realizing, actually, how do we automate this and create this product experience that is It’s truly easy to use, that we can support 10X the amount of customers with the same people. That’s why I’m pro product led, because it actually gives you that leverage if you do it right. So who not how does not always work. Some cases, It’s great advice.

[00:34:15.930] – Wes Bush

Other cases, it actually just leads to a very unprofitable business.

[00:34:19.140] – Wes Bush

Yeah, nice. I like how you have the product led group mindset just baked in. I love it. Maybe one personal question. What is one thing you wish you knew 10 years ago?

[00:34:30.200] – Wes Bush

Yes. I recently picked this skill up about six months ago, and it’s been a game changer. I wish I knew about it 10 years ago. How it works is when it comes to your goals and your vision, obviously, you review it Every single day. It’s not that part. But the big piece is basically pick what is the result you want in any part of your life. Let’s say as an example, it’s, okay, I want a six-pack or whatever, something vain. Now, what is the standard you have to do in order to make that result inevitable. So as an example, I’m writing a book right now, my next one, and I’m going to write it. It’s going to launch in August next year. But I’m writing for two hours every day, and that’s going to make that goal inevitable. I’m going to hit it regardless, just because I’m putting in the right amount of time and effort to make it happen. So even if you have a sales goal, it’s like, how many people do you need to reach out to every single day? Make that inevitable. I love deconstructing goals like that and setting up the right daily standard to actually make that happen, because a lot of times I was always just goal setting, and I was like, Oh, yeah, that sounds great.

[00:35:47.440] – Wes Bush

I’m excited about that, but then I don’t hit it. I’m like, What went wrong? And it’s, You know what? You will not hit your goals if your standards are low. You got to have the right standards for the right goals. And so deconstructing it has been so helpful.

[00:36:03.060] – Wes Bush

Yeah, I think that’s really good advice. Just making it really small. Daily jobs you have to do to get to the end goal and not just having that end goal in mind. I need to get my book done in August. It probably means that you’re going to write it in July if you don’t have chopped it up into what you’re currently doing. Totally. If people want to get in contact with you, Wes, what is the best way?

[00:36:22.210] – Wes Bush

If you want more daily tips on product-led growth, you can check me out at westbush on LinkedIn. And then if you want learn more about the free product-led go-to-market system that we went through, that’s our free model. You can go through it, you can implement it on your own, and check it out at productled. Com.

[00:36:39.610] – Wes Bush

Nice. We’re definitely going to add the link to it for people watching the video. Yes. Go get this book as well, Product-led Growth. You’ll find it probably on all the bigger online bookstores.

[00:36:48.380] – Wes Bush

And it’s free, too.

[00:36:49.700] – Wes Bush

Yes. Is it free, really? Yeah. Then you have a free e-book? Yes. Nice. We’re definitely going to add a link to that as well. Probably somewhere really high so people can get it. Love it. Thank you for coming on to the show, Wes.

[00:37:05.580] – Wes Bush

Thanks so much for having me. This is a blast.

[00:37:07.800] – Wes Bush

Nice. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. If you found value in today’s episode, please leave us a review, follow us, thumbs up. You know what to do. If you want to sponsor this show to reach SaaS founders, just ping us on LinkedIn. And if you’re experiencing any specific challenges right now, let us know as well. Always looking for topics to cover in our show. For now, have a great day and keep growing your B2B SaaS.