3 ms·

Product-led Growth

31 points by yakkomajuri 6y ago

mrhektor 6y ago
"The concept is based on the assumption that if you build something that is useful and works well, the users will eventually come to you as result." Sounds a lot like "Build it and they will come", which has been the death of quite a number of startups. Certainly it's important to build something amazing, but I think you ignore marketing and sales at your own peril. You need someone looking at how a product is perceived in the market, not just how amazing it is.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mathattack 6y ago
Seems the article isn’t as black and white as the headline. Is the marginal dollar better spent on engineering or sales and marketing? The answer varies over the course of a product’s lifetime. The higher dollar value the purchase, the more important sales becomes over time.
gizmodo59 6y ago
Selling to any real enterprise that costs north of 100K is almost impossible without a sales team (account executives, sales engineers). A lot of account executives have relationships from their previous work and they get a meeting through that. Look at any successful B2B startup like Okta, Mulesoft, Servicenow and their sec filings. Sales spending is always higher than R&D. It’s also assuming that your software is bug free and software engineers can spend time doing poc, demos etc or they like doing that. As much as we can all hate enterprise sales, just getting a contract from a large fortune company is a big deal.
- kochthesecond 6y ago
  My, albeit limited experience, does tell me it is hard to sell B2B without dedicated sales people of some sort.
flavor8 6y ago
Tempting to believe, but it would be good to see some examples of B2B companies who succeeded via this route. Posthog were founded this year, according to Crunchbase, so this is a very young company to be giving concrete strategy advice.
- Phil-bitplex 6y ago
  Atlassian is one example that grew without a traditional sales team, having a very low touch sales process I think they are definitely the exception than the rule though https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-built-a-20-billion-dollar-company-with-no-sales-team/ https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-b...
raghava 6y ago
- May work for situations where the buyer is the user - Doesn't work for B2B/enterprisey products/SaaS, where often buyers and users are separated by many levels of corporate hierarchies.
polote 6y ago
This article is complete bullshit. It is based on the fact that they have been successful at growing a saas company without sales team Well they sell to SMB [1], of course they don't need sales, no SMB focused company should have sales team. Try to sell SAP without sales people and write an article about it ;) This article is also saying that having a good product will prevent your from needing a sales team, again this is false. The goal of a sales team is not to convince customers that they should by your product. A salesperson is here to listen to your needs and offer you something that match with that If you are trying to start a company, please dont read this article [1] https://posthog.com/pricing?o=cloud https://posthog.com/pricing?o=cloud
notahacker 6y ago
Always good to read marketing pieces about how a company is too focused on their product to do any marketing.
katzgrau 6y ago
Wow, do not take this advice. This must have been written by someone with little to no skin in the game. I'm honestly surprised someone would post this. The idea that a good product will sell itself is a developer's fantasy. Trust me, I've been there and learned the hard way. Once I realized that sales and marketing were the missing pieces, I began to build revenue and I'm well past my first 1M. It only came after I made that change. Every startup should focus on its inbound and outbound strategies. Inbound Marketing: Publish great content (blog posts, white papers, videos, resources, things people will find genuinely useful) on your site and across the web on topics related to your service so that users find you. Put the most compelling resources behind a lead form that helps you qualify them as potential buyers. This gets the user acquainted with you and also gives you their contact info for follow up marketing or sales contacts. Outbound Sales: Reaching out directly to the leads you have acquired (best quality) or off some other list (lower, variable quality). Sometimes the contact will be happy to engage and learn more. Other times not. You can and will win sales from the inbound piece alone, especially if you have a clear and efficient sign up process. But you'll find you can greatly amplify the number of closed sales by reaching out to users and engaging them directly. That human touch adds a whole new element. There are many facets of sales and merketing but I wanted to lay out the most important items, since taking the post's advice will almost definitely point you in the wrong direction.
- nakodari 6y ago
  Absolutely spot on. I made the mistake mentioned in this blog post earlier and I wish I had focused on inbound and outbound marketing earlier.
- bob33212 6y ago
  "Building a Great Product" is the number one reason startups fail. There is nothing wrong with building a great product. However, if no one wants to buy your great product or if it costs a ton of money to get people's attention for long enough for them to understand how great your product is, then you will not be profitable.
  - dnh44 6y ago
sfifs 6y ago
Did this startup founder just seriously make a case for their B2B product's growth model with Facebook's B2C network effects based growth model? Sounds like a company headed for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Jugurtha 6y ago
Sure, but that's like saying you don't need an airplane to go from point A to point B just because you were able to walk anywhere hitherto. It depends. You may not need a sales team for distribution now, but that's due to selection bias, the stage of the growth PostHog is at, and what PostHog does. The product itself can be kept outside of the company's network, with a Javascript snippet sending events to PostHog. Some products make it that some clients, especially in sectors that are heavily regulated or sensitive cannot just start using the software, and even if you don't need to engage them and reach them, somebody at some point must close even if it means greeting them at the door or formalizing a purchase decision. It may not be a sales team/sales rep, but they'll need to sit down with someone and go over a few things, with legal, security, etc in order to green-light the purchase. Some enterprise clients are afraid you might be a company that's really an agent of their competitor, and even if you're not, some clients may be afraid that a competitor might buy you and access sensitive information. How much this is true differs (sector, what the product does, etc.). So, a product lead growth, great. I suppose there is an enterprise offering, with maintenance involved. There is a CIO/CFO somewhere who has the authority and/or purchasing power or who has the ear of someone who has either or both. So, you don't need a sales team or marketing team or PR team right now, but wishing all the best to PostHog and given the product adoption, you might need them very soon. In fact, you probably already have them in the form of one or many of your team-members who are dealing with enterprise clients. Disclaimer: perspective shaped mainly from my context. Custom, turn-key, data products for large organizations. From conversation, problem-statement, to data connectors, learning subject matter, model training & deployment, sometimes making hardware, and web application that goes with that for acceptable figures. The demand is high and we became the bottleneck, so we built a machine learning platform to make shipping these products way faster. We're trying PostHog for usage data, too, so there's that!
jim-jim-jim 6y ago
>posthog.com lol really?
KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
Product is definitely the most important, but somewhere in the piece it talks about how marketing and sales become unnecessary, which is so dumb. Once your funnel is optimized and working well marketing just becomes free money as every cent you spend turns into dollars on the other end. But for most companies where there is a lot of room to improve on the product, spending on product should have more returns than spending on marketing.
gk1 6y ago
You have a "Request Demo" button on your homepage. Who's going to give those demos? Who's going to nurture past demo requesters to make sure their level of interest only goes up after the demo, not down? You mention an "Enterprise" option on your homepage and pricing page. Who's going to do demos for all the stakeholders, uncover the company's pain points and goals, handle dozens of questions and objections, fill out security surveys, follow up to a bunch of times to make sure the deal is signed, and so on? Who's going to ensure you have a pipeline of enterprise deals to hit your revenue goals? When you're brand new, have a small team, and hardly get any enterprise leads, it's easy for the CEO or CTO to do all of that. Don't assume you can continue doing that forever if you have any ambition to grow.
gk1 6y ago
The comments in this thread are a pleasant surprise. Glad to see the deserved pushback to this article from people who've learned from experience that sales and marketing play a crucial role in growing a B2B startup.

31 points by yakkomajuri 6y ago

"The concept is based on the assumption that if you build something that is useful and works well, the users will eventually come to you as result." Sounds a lot like "Build it and they will come", which has been the death of quite a number of startups. Certainly it's important to build something amazing, but I think you ignore marketing and sales at your own peril. You need someone looking at how a product is perceived in the market, not just how amazing it is.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mathattack 6y ago

Seems the article isn’t as black and white as the headline. Is the marginal dollar better spent on engineering or sales and marketing? The answer varies over the course of a product’s lifetime. The higher dollar value the purchase, the more important sales becomes over time.

gizmodo59 6y ago

Selling to any real enterprise that costs north of 100K is almost impossible without a sales team (account executives, sales engineers). A lot of account executives have relationships from their previous work and they get a meeting through that. Look at any successful B2B startup like Okta, Mulesoft, Servicenow and their sec filings. Sales spending is always higher than R&D. It’s also assuming that your software is bug free and software engineers can spend time doing poc, demos etc or they like doing that. As much as we can all hate enterprise sales, just getting a contract from a large fortune company is a big deal.

kochthesecond 6y ago
My, albeit limited experience, does tell me it is hard to sell B2B without dedicated sales people of some sort.

flavor8 6y ago

Tempting to believe, but it would be good to see some examples of B2B companies who succeeded via this route. Posthog were founded this year, according to Crunchbase, so this is a very young company to be giving concrete strategy advice.

Phil-bitplex 6y ago
Atlassian is one example that grew without a traditional sales team, having a very low touch sales process I think they are definitely the exception than the rule though https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-built-a-20-billion-dollar-company-with-no-sales-team/ https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-b...

raghava 6y ago

- May work for situations where the buyer is the user - Doesn't work for B2B/enterprisey products/SaaS, where often buyers and users are separated by many levels of corporate hierarchies.

polote 6y ago

This article is complete bullshit. It is based on the fact that they have been successful at growing a saas company without sales team Well they sell to SMB [1], of course they don't need sales, no SMB focused company should have sales team. Try to sell SAP without sales people and write an article about it ;) This article is also saying that having a good product will prevent your from needing a sales team, again this is false. The goal of a sales team is not to convince customers that they should by your product. A salesperson is here to listen to your needs and offer you something that match with that If you are trying to start a company, please dont read this article [1] https://posthog.com/pricing?o=cloud https://posthog.com/pricing?o=cloud

notahacker 6y ago

Always good to read marketing pieces about how a company is too focused on their product to do any marketing.

katzgrau 6y ago

Wow, do not take this advice. This must have been written by someone with little to no skin in the game. I'm honestly surprised someone would post this. The idea that a good product will sell itself is a developer's fantasy. Trust me, I've been there and learned the hard way. Once I realized that sales and marketing were the missing pieces, I began to build revenue and I'm well past my first 1M. It only came after I made that change. Every startup should focus on its inbound and outbound strategies. Inbound Marketing: Publish great content (blog posts, white papers, videos, resources, things people will find genuinely useful) on your site and across the web on topics related to your service so that users find you. Put the most compelling resources behind a lead form that helps you qualify them as potential buyers. This gets the user acquainted with you and also gives you their contact info for follow up marketing or sales contacts. Outbound Sales: Reaching out directly to the leads you have acquired (best quality) or off some other list (lower, variable quality). Sometimes the contact will be happy to engage and learn more. Other times not. You can and will win sales from the inbound piece alone, especially if you have a clear and efficient sign up process. But you'll find you can greatly amplify the number of closed sales by reaching out to users and engaging them directly. That human touch adds a whole new element. There are many facets of sales and merketing but I wanted to lay out the most important items, since taking the post's advice will almost definitely point you in the wrong direction.

nakodari 6y ago
Absolutely spot on. I made the mistake mentioned in this blog post earlier and I wish I had focused on inbound and outbound marketing earlier.
bob33212 6y ago
"Building a Great Product" is the number one reason startups fail. There is nothing wrong with building a great product. However, if no one wants to buy your great product or if it costs a ton of money to get people's attention for long enough for them to understand how great your product is, then you will not be profitable.
- dnh44 6y ago

sfifs 6y ago

Did this startup founder just seriously make a case for their B2B product's growth model with Facebook's B2C network effects based growth model? Sounds like a company headed for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Jugurtha 6y ago

Sure, but that's like saying you don't need an airplane to go from point A to point B just because you were able to walk anywhere hitherto. It depends. You may not need a sales team for distribution now, but that's due to selection bias, the stage of the growth PostHog is at, and what PostHog does. The product itself can be kept outside of the company's network, with a Javascript snippet sending events to PostHog. Some products make it that some clients, especially in sectors that are heavily regulated or sensitive cannot just start using the software, and even if you don't need to engage them and reach them, somebody at some point must close even if it means greeting them at the door or formalizing a purchase decision. It may not be a sales team/sales rep, but they'll need to sit down with someone and go over a few things, with legal, security, etc in order to green-light the purchase. Some enterprise clients are afraid you might be a company that's really an agent of their competitor, and even if you're not, some clients may be afraid that a competitor might buy you and access sensitive information. How much this is true differs (sector, what the product does, etc.). So, a product lead growth, great. I suppose there is an enterprise offering, with maintenance involved. There is a CIO/CFO somewhere who has the authority and/or purchasing power or who has the ear of someone who has either or both. So, you don't need a sales team or marketing team or PR team right now, but wishing all the best to PostHog and given the product adoption, you might need them very soon. In fact, you probably already have them in the form of one or many of your team-members who are dealing with enterprise clients. Disclaimer: perspective shaped mainly from my context. Custom, turn-key, data products for large organizations. From conversation, problem-statement, to data connectors, learning subject matter, model training & deployment, sometimes making hardware, and web application that goes with that for acceptable figures. The demand is high and we became the bottleneck, so we built a machine learning platform to make shipping these products way faster. We're trying PostHog for usage data, too, so there's that!

jim-jim-jim 6y ago

>posthog.com lol really?

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago

Product is definitely the most important, but somewhere in the piece it talks about how marketing and sales become unnecessary, which is so dumb. Once your funnel is optimized and working well marketing just becomes free money as every cent you spend turns into dollars on the other end. But for most companies where there is a lot of room to improve on the product, spending on product should have more returns than spending on marketing.

gk1 6y ago

You have a "Request Demo" button on your homepage. Who's going to give those demos? Who's going to nurture past demo requesters to make sure their level of interest only goes up after the demo, not down? You mention an "Enterprise" option on your homepage and pricing page. Who's going to do demos for all the stakeholders, uncover the company's pain points and goals, handle dozens of questions and objections, fill out security surveys, follow up to a bunch of times to make sure the deal is signed, and so on? Who's going to ensure you have a pipeline of enterprise deals to hit your revenue goals? When you're brand new, have a small team, and hardly get any enterprise leads, it's easy for the CEO or CTO to do all of that. Don't assume you can continue doing that forever if you have any ambition to grow.

gk1 6y ago

The comments in this thread are a pleasant surprise. Glad to see the deserved pushback to this article from people who've learned from experience that sales and marketing play a crucial role in growing a B2B startup.