Product-led growth is the new black. It’s the future. You all must have been hearing this for quite a while now. But what is product-led growth?

VC firm Openview defines product-led growth (PLG) as “a go-to-market strategy that relies on product usage as the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion.” In other words, let customers take your product for a test drive.

Benefits of being Product Led

Rapid Scalability

Hiring and training your sales team is a long, tedious, and expensive process. Scale rapidly by focusing on improvising your product user experience, onboarding flows, and adapting to surging demands quickly.

Improved User Experience

Product-led growth improves the user experience. Since you are providing value to your customers from the time they sign up you work towards making your user experience top-notch.

Lower Cost Per Acquisition

With Product led growth, your product drives marketing and growth by solving customer problems, infiltrating the market, and scaling on its own.

You are effectively avoiding the cost spent on nudging the customers down in the funnel. Hence, lowering the cost per acquisition.

Faster Sales Cycle

Product-led growth makes your sales team efficient. You must be wondering how? Imagine leads who have tried your freemium version of the product, see the value it provides to them, and what pain points it has addressed. These leads are product qualified and hence converting them into paid customers is faster

3 Visionaries Companies

Slack

We all love Slack, don’t we? Slack makes communication so much easier and faster. The secret to Slack’s success is the company’s understanding of its customers. They understand they are selling a way for team members to communicate and collaborate easily. They let you take the product for a test drive and don’t ask you for anything other than your email address. Their onboarding process is simple and you can start testing out the product from the first minute.

Let’s take a look at how Slack gains new customers — Consider Alex who is an early adopter. Alex downloads Slack and starts collaborating with his team on their freemium version. With every successful collaboration, Alex’s team becomes more and more appreciative of Slack. Soon, Slack spreads like wildfire in your entire organization. The product-led model has made Slack a billion-dollar business.

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Slack

Calendly

Calendly is another product that uses a product-led strategy for its growth. Calendly addresses the customer’s pain point of back-and-forth scheduling. But how did it achieve this viral growth?

Calendly’s product is designed with in-built collaboration. Remember Alex who was our early adopter! Alex wants to schedule a call with a customer named Sarah. He sends out his calendly link to Sarah. Sarah schedules a meeting on Alex’s calendar and experiences Calendly’s value. With this Product led approach, the product is demoed in front of the prospects without a sales team. Through this viral loop, Calendy gained customers by putting their product in the center.

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Calendly

Shorter Loop — The Growing Challenger

Product-led growth is achieved when the prospects test out your product before giving you their business.

Shorter Loop is a platform designed to simplify your product management and development processes — gather all your project requirements and collaborate on one platform. Build your target persona, and value proposition, prioritize features, create flexible roadmaps, and run experiments to validate your project requirements.

By deeply understanding and addressing the needs of its users, Shorter Loop effectively drives word-of-mouth throughout the product management community. This is invaluable when it comes to new user acquisition.

Let’s say product manager Alex signs up on the Shorter Loop platform and can quickly plot all the ideas on the impact map to decide which features to prioritize. Alex adds his team to the platform to collaborate on the impact map. With this his team members are exposed to Shorter Loop and how it can help them work effectively. This creates a loop of viral adoption for Shorter Loop.

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Shorter Loop

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