Bits about Books

Bizcast: Bits about books -: Wes Bush on his book, “The Product-Led Playbook”, in conversation with Subhanjan Sarkar

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Wes Bush is a prominent Canadian entrepreneur and author.

He started his journey working at VC-backed, hypergrowth startups in demand generation, where he thrived by generating a high volume of leads for their sales teams. However, everything changed in 2016 during his tenure at Vidyard, when Wes launched a free product. Instead of paying hundreds of dollars to capture someone’s lead info, he could give users a great free product, and users would do the marketing themselves by sharing it with others. Millions of people have since used Vidyard’s free product.

Over the next three years, Wes wanted to see if he could replicate these results, so he started consulting hypergrowth and Fortune 500 software companies on how to grow faster by leveraging free products. His guidance was instrumental in helping these organizations accelerate their growth trajectories using a product-led growth strategy.

In 2019, Wes released the bestselling book Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself. This book popularized this new approach to doing business and sold more than 100,000 copies internationally from word-of-mouth alone.

The monumental success of the book led to the rebranding of his consultancy in 2020, which emerged as ProductLed.com, now recognized as the leading education company dedicated to advancing product-led growth. Their relentless focus on empowering software companies to become product-led has yielded remarkable results. By 2023, 700+ companies have collectively sold more than $1,000,000,000 in product-led revenue.

Wes’ mission is to make it easy for anyone to build a successful product-led business and change the way an industry sells for the better. He fulfils this by publishing free books and advising entrepreneurs on how to break through their product-led bottlenecks. When not helping his clients win, Wes enjoys travelling to exotic locations, playing pickleball, and reading a good history book.

Wes Bush
The Product-Led Playbook
  • Product-led Growth strategies focus squarely on the product. In other scenarios there are Sales and Marketing, there is Fulfillment, Delivery and all these verticals, but those miss the centrality of the product itself. In these scenarios, the business operates in silos with each team communicating with the other. Whereas in Product Led, the product is baked into the strategy.
  • How do you scale to say $1 million per employee? You usually can’t with most strategies. Normally such scaling demands hiring more salespersons and marketers, allotting a certain quota for each employee, and so on and so forth. But with product-led strategies organizations can scale really well because the one employee who/which ensures that is the product itself.
  • This strategy needs to map out the user journey to better understand users’ challenges. In the book, this is mapped into five main stages, and each stage is further broken down into two steps.  

    • Run time – 47:57 mins.

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    Bits about BooksBy Subhanjan Sarkar
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