The Product-Led Sales Podcast

A pivot after Series B. Sounds crazy right?

When Framer raised its $24M Series B in 2018, it was a design and prototyping tool.

Think Sketch or Figma.

Despite building up a good base of users, the team felt that traction was slowing.

After what must have been many agonizing meetings, the founders and leadership made a bold call. They weren't going to try to iterate the product.

They were pivoting completely.

In SaaS it's not common to see a 4-year company pivot. Especially one that raised $33M in total, with dozens of employees. It's even less common to see one do it successfully.

Yet, today Framer has gone from 0-to-1 once again. They are now a website builder with thousands of customers, including Zapier and Superhuman.

In this interview with Framer's Head of Growth Oscar Carlsson, he broke down the methodical approach the company took to the pivot:

- What they did to acquire the first 100 customers, the next 1000, and the 1000s of customers after that

- How they rebuilt their GTM team into a customer discovery engine

- What channels and growth initiatives worked at different stages

With the recent tech correction, we will probably see more growth stage companies considering a pivot. Framer is an example they should look to.


Check out Framer.com and follow Oscar on Linkedin here. 

There's a Chinese saying - the journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step. For most products, that first step is activation.

Many PLG companies onboard 10s of thousands of users a month, but only activate 10% or fewer of them.

In this economic climate - efficiency is more important than ever.

Failing to activate = wasting money acquiring users.

Priya Bhatia worked on a project that lifted 7shifts' activation significantly.

So how did she do it? It comes down to:

• Getting alignment and clarity on the definition of activation
• Simplifying the onboarding experience by running experiments to remove low-value flows
• Surfacing the value that the user has yet to discover, while not overwhelming them with notifications

Listen to the episode to find out the details of how she did it, as well as pitfalls she faced along the way!

Connect with Priya on Linkedin for more PLG insights!

In 2020, Github ran a simple 2 week experiment.

The result? Dramatically more free AND paid signups.

Sounds too good to be true? Here’s how 👇

Thibault Imbert leads Growth at Github.

When he first took over, he looked for somewhere where his team could get a quick win. Something simple but impactful.

He landed on the pricing page.

Here are the 3 changes the team made to the pricing page that produced MASSIVE results on conversion:

1. Visual contrast between tiers. The old pricing page showed the features offered by free and paid tiers. But the number of features looked similar. The growth team changed it so that visually the higher tiers had many more features displayed than the lower tiers.

2. Emphasizing features that customers cared about. After interviewing customers, the team realized a lot of the features that drove them to upgrade weren’t the emphasized by the pricing page. This was a simple fix.

3. Making the page prettier. “We used different colors to make the page more vibrant. We also removed one of the tiers that we weren’t even trying to sell anymore. It’s much cleaner now.”

Connect with Thibault on Linkedin for more PLG insights!

Ethan Schecter joined Snyk when it was just 20-odd employees.

Today the company employs 1000+ people.

What’s the secret to the growth? ‘Not treating your PLG funnel as just a lead gen’, says Ethan.

It is really important that PLG sales teams know which users want to be engaged by what type of outreach.

Snyk has expertly split its user base into ‘personas’ and each type of user gets a different in-app experience, is shown different types of content, and Sales only touches some of them.

Listen to this episode to find out how Snyk used this approach to grow its user base rapidly.

HashiCorp started as an open-source tool.

It’s now a $6B public company with PLG, enterprise, and open-source products.

Caroline Guo, HashiCorp’s Head of Growth, shared with us how HashiCorp built a cutting-edge internal engine for its PLG motion.

Here are some of the learnings we discussed on the latest episode of the Product Led Sales podcast:

• The data available from open-source products differs from sales-led and product-led products. HashiCorp had to retool it’s approach to data as it moved into PLG.
• Product and GTM teams in PLG should be goaled against a standardized set of metrics. Listen to the episode to hear Caroline deep dive into the exact metrics HashiCorp cares about at each step of the user journey.
• How HashiCorp enriches its Salesforce to arm its sellers with product usage data and PQL scores

…and much much more in the full episode!

When it comes to PLG, Drew and Visakan are pros.

And they work on a product used by 2 million developers. 2 million. 

We spoke to them about Netlify's open source beginnings, how they think about Product Qualified Leads, and more in this episode of the podcast. 

One MUST LISTEN part of the podcast is when Drew and Visakan went really deep into how they kickstarted their system for identifying PQLs.

From building out the initial list of product signals to look out for, to deciding how to work together across growth, sales, marketing, and data teams. 

There are a lot of articles about PQLs out there.

There aren't very many operators going really step by step into how they did it. 

Listen to this episode and you can actually bring Drew and Visakan's learnings to your own product tomorrow.

Evernote has hundreds of millions of users.

So how does this OG PLG juggernaut keep on growing?

1. Data, data, data. At this scale the company is more like a B2C than B2B company. No wonder Rick Sawyer, Evernote's Senior Director of Product, Growth used to work at DraftKings, a sports betting company. From the backend, to the human resources, Evernote has built up a sophisticated set of data operations.
2. Personalization along the funnel. Having been around for 15 years, Evernote has accumulated tons of features. Not every user is interested in all of them, so the Product team works hard to funnel users towards the right set of experiences. No one should feel overwhelmed by the features.
3.  A large analytics function to support GTM and growth teams. Oftentimes, Growth teams notice user needs through the data, not just from talking to customers. When your users number in the millions, sometimes the data tells a more complete story than trying to sample the user base.

Listen to this episode for even more on Evernote's sophisticated PLG data engine!

Connect with Rick on Linkedin for more information.

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

How do you design the perfect SaaS free plan?

CircleCI re-designed it's free plan recently, giving users up to 3x more credits and unlocking features that were previously only for paid users.

While a ceiling on a free plan is better for conversion, sometimes optimizing for that one metric is too short-term.

CircleCI made the decision to enhance their free plan after speaking to users.

They realized that a better experience for these users would:
- increase engagement
- allow users to get a deeper experience of the product
- help with users who are choosing between competing solutions

We spoke to Sammy Shreibati, CircleCI's VP of Product, Growth about this decision. We discussed how to think about structuring your free plan based on your objectives and the nature of your product.

Connect with Sammy on Linkedin for more information.

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin and Twitter. 

It's almost a truism that companies move upmarket as they scale.

Must that always be the case?

In this episode of the podcast, we spoke to Grant Freeman, the Chief Customer Officer of Thryv. Thryv is an end-to-end business management software for small businesses that has scaled to $1b in revenue while staying laser focused on SMBs.

Grant shares with us why Thryv has decided to stay focused, and how it has been able to create a culture of customer-orientation despite Thryv growing into a pretty large company itself. 

He also challenges some myths, such as serving SMBs is not scalable, and SMBs are not 'worth it' because of the low ACVs. 

Most traditional SaaS companies will not successfully pivot to PLG.

They will disrupted by PLG challengers just like on-prem companies vs the cloud.

This was a surprising learning in our latest podcast episode. Mark Roberge runs Stage 2 Capital and was CRO at HubSpot. He's seen how hard it's been for many top-down companies to try to go bottoms-up.  

Listen to the episode to understand:

1. Why it's so hard to pivot into PLG
2. The only way to survive the transition if you are dead set on becoming PLG
3. How to develop your PLG go-to-market tech stack and why growth stage companies are better off buying tech rather building in-house

Follow Mark on Linkedin for more such content. Also check out Stage 2 Capital's Accelerator programme that just launched! 

Visit our Product Led Sales blog for more insights, and follow HeadsUp on Linkedin. If you have questions for me about PLG, growth, or marketing, here's my Linkedin.