Product-led growth is a shift from the traditional tactic of pouring piles of money into advertising and having a fully staffed sales department calling leads all day. Instead, you build a product that's focused on the customer experience from the ground up. Your happiest customers become your own personal sales army, spreading the word about your product without even being prompted (or with little nudges).
We fully embrace a product-led growth strategy with all of the products we make. Today, we'll dive into how we implement product-led growth principles into every product we make.
#We Build Products with Growth Loops
From the first day, we get our hands on a project, we take it apart and examine how we can turn it into a growth loop. A growth loop is a vital element of a product-led growth strategy. Growth loops work by having a user experience your project for free or with a low entry barrier and then encourages them to spread the word to another user.
Survey Monkey is an excellent example of a growth loop. User 1 creates a survey to get feedback about their latest album cover design and sends it out to their network of designers. User 2 is one of those designers. After User 2 completes the survey, they see a screen that says "Want to create your own survey?" User 2 just finished a project they'd like feedback on, so they sign up to create their own survey.
This example highlights growth loops beautifully. Survey Monkey isn't pouring money into marketing funnels that User 2 became a part of. Nope, User 2 found out about Survey Monkey from User 1.
Another example of a growth loop is adding a 'refer a friend' screen at the end of successfully performing your product's key activity. For example, if you're Uber, you would ask the user to refer a friend after completing a ride and leaving a five-star rating.
#Product-Led Growth Means Making Your Product Habit Forming, Ethically
A vital element of our product-led growth strategy is having a product that quickly becomes a part of the user's daily routine.
We craft habit-forming products by conducting thorough research on your current or future user base. We engage in the community, pour through research, and figure out what causes people to take action.
What we're looking for throughout all this is to understand the pain points that your product solves, and then we want to know what causes those pains to emerge. For example, people head to Google when they want an answer to a question. That starts with wondering something or seeing something they don't fully understand. We strive to figure out what that "answer a question" is for your product.
Once we know this, we'll know how to integrate your product into your users' daily routine by ensuring that it solves the problem that led to them taking action.
This doesn't mean it's ok to design products unethically. Actually, it's the opposite. It means that to design good products, you have to really understand where, when and how users will use your product. And ensure that the product fits into their routines and most importantly, helps them solve a problem that they have when trying to get something done.
#We Take Onboarding Very Seriously
Onboarding is a core aspect of a product-led growth strategy, and we don't take it lightly. After designing the growth loop and determining how to make your product habit-forming, we take a look at the onboarding process.
If we jumped into a time capsule and went back a decade or two, we would see onboarding processes led by an actual salesperson, or they just gave you the product and let you figure it out. For companies that have embraced product-led growth, those days are long gone.
Since your product is the driving force, you need to make getting value from the product as easy as possible. A smooth onboarding process gives the user all the information they need to use your product.
One tried and tested method of onboarding new users is with a product tour. These tours are little pop-ups that highlight key points of the product. They don't need to educate the user about every little aspect of the product, but just enough so that they start getting value from it.
Another method uses select prompts, starting with a prompt the first time the user opens the product and then adding in new prompts as they poke around. The issue with this method is that you risk prompting at the wrong time, so we take extra care in testing our prompts before deploying any changes.
#Our Product-Led Growth Strategies Equal Success
The secret is out – product-led growth is the way of the future. That's why we make it the primary focus of every product that we make. Here at With Pulp, we have worked with our clients to transform their products and services using product-led growth principles. Contact us for a free consultation on your product-led growth strategy. We can't wait to hear from you.