 Hello everyone. I'm Anshul and today we'll take some time to talk about what product-led growth means in SaaS context, SaaS meaning software as a service where you make a business out of selling subscriptions for a software. What are the principles that can be applied for making a great product-led growth program and also setting up a good culture irrespective of what kind of business there is and how do we fine-tune those to apply across different contexts? This is how we are going to break down the discussion today. We'll start about talking for what growth means and how do we go about defining growth for your company? What are the nuances that need to be covered? We'll then move on to deep dive into different components that can help drive growth and talk about a few principles that you need to keep in mind, plus some tactics which we'll touch upon to understand how you can go about efficiently driving growth for each pillar for your business. Last, we'll take a look at the different context in which product-led growth is applied and specifically zoom in on B2B versus B2C setups to see how we need to fine-tune that approach. A quick snapshot about me. I've had multiple stints in the past, but most interestingly, I've worked across B2B SaaS company which was a browser stack and currently I lead user growth for Canva which is, we all know, a very large design tools company and I've also been a SaaS VC investor for a brief part of my career early in the journey. Let's start at the beginning and talk about what is growth and growth in itself is a very lumpy concept which is open to interpretation. So we'll break it down into actionable pillars and we'll go about unpacking it. If I was the CEO of a company or the chairman of a board and if you would ask me about what's the growth that matters, I would answer that the number that we should be looking as the ultimate driver of growth is business valuation. We talk about market capitalization, business valuation and these are the kind of metrics that drive decision making at the board level, but they are not very actionable at a short-term basis. So we take drivers of that which is usually profit and cash flow basis which the companies get valued. In companies where profit or cash flow does not exist, users or investors look at other indicators which indicate future probability of profit or cash flow. Again that's something that can be influenced at a quarterly or an annual basis but what should the teams be driving at? Businesses usually look at engaged user base size and revenue to drive growth operationally and that's mostly what product teams and marketing teams and sales teams get together to go after. For the context of our discussion, we'll use growth in context of these metrics and we'll talk about how it can be applied in different contexts. That brings me to unpacking it. So growth if you talk about revenue or engaged user base is some of three broad categories of metrics. Acquisition which is the measure of new inflow of user business. Think about how many new users are trying out your product for the first time and what are the indicators that can help you do a health check of whether that process is going on well. Retention which is arguably the most important metric in my point of view because that gives you a sense of how many users come back. Most companies that scale to hundreds of millions or billions of users do this part really well. Acquisition can help you build momentum but retention will make sure that your company scales and the leaky bucket of your users does not leak fast enough. Monetization decides whether users can become revenue or not and it is the factor that will decide whether the business is viable or not. We've had lots of examples where there have been tons of engaged users acquisition and retention are on point but the value proposition is just not strong enough for the user to pay for the services and the company has not really nailed the monetization model leading to stagnation or even death of businesses in some cases. Product lead growth also needs to think we thought about in terms of these pillars and we'll talk about some guiding principles that can help you set up programs that will drive growth across each of these three pillars. If we do all three of these well together we've achieved sustainable long-term growth. In addition to having broken down the growth problem into the actionable pillars we also need to make sure that there is a strong method in which growth is measured. Metrics and data come to your rescue when we are struggling with figuring out how do we measure the growth metrics in the right way. Some principles that have helped me in good stead while trying to solve the growth problem is to have a not star metric which the whole company is rallying beyond. This helps make sure everybody is on the same page when we are trying to prioritize initiatives and absence of a clear not stack metric driven top down right up from the company leadership could mean different companies, different teams running in different directions and those energies cancelling out each other. Usually companies choose between a revenue metric and or a user-based metric like monthly active users, daily active users or weekly active users any of those active user metrics to be picked as not star for their business growth. The not star metric might be a good guiding indicator and could be a good alignment metric but not super actionable and this is where a lot of product growth teams do the job of identifying inputs to those metrics well. Now inputs solve two problems one not star metrics are usually lagging indicators which means by the time the metric moves it's already too late and you need to identify leading indicators which indicate that improvement in the leading indicator would end up moving the not star metric for you. An example of that could be how many users percentage of users on your basic plan expanding to a larger plan. So think of the case of Netflix if you are on an entry level plan and the next plan is the HD resolution plan with four screens percentage of users moving from the entry level single screen to the four screen plan would be a indicating metric for you. If you nail that growth of that metric your not star metric which is revenue in that case is obviously going to move. So how do we design experiments processes and the culture of tracking all these input metrics is the next step of making sure your growth is in the right stream and the last one is making sure guardrails are set up very well. So you've set a not star metric you've identified inputs you run programs to improve the input metrics but many at times there are trade offs that can get overlooked in the pursuit of improving one or more growth metrics. That's where guardrail metrics come into place and having a good guardrail metric could be something like NPS or net promoter score a measure of customer satisfaction should not go beyond a certain threshold and that will make sure that your product decisions are in the best interest of your user and you don't trade off experience for short term growth and this brings us to diving into some principles and rules that will put us in good stead while trying to problem solve each of the three pillars of growth that we spoke about. You have to make sure that your product adopts to the channel that you where your users hang out. It's the equivalent of selling the right thing at the right place for example you don't sell a protein smoothie at a cocktail bar and you don't sell cocktail at a fitness store or at a gym for that matter. So understand your users figure out where they hang figure out where they spend time and customize your acquisition value proposition acquisition communication to that channel. If your users spend time on video approach it with a video first mindset create content that is suitable for youtube and go about getting users by creating youtube tutorials and mid to long form content. If your users hang out on tiktok or social media like instagram reels long form content will not cut it and create influencer plans that will help you get new users on in your phone. Second thought that we have around acquisition is to understand that all channels have their own rules and not all of them are equal in cases of channels that are owned by parties outside yourself for example social google organic search engine and paid search engine marketing. All have different trend lines over time. Paid search engine marketing is great to start with it gives you short time to value but doesn't scale very well. Getting the first 10 users is a lot easier and cost efficient than getting the next 100 users and so on and so forth. So while it can plant seeds for you to grow out of it is important for you to invest in proprietary acquisition channels like an organic library or creating a referral program of your own or creating a product that itself is viral. And the last thought I will have which is specific to B2B products is that acquisition is not a single touch process. What I mean by that is that we think in software context acquisition happens when somebody experiences your marketing communication and then either says a yeah or need to use the product. It doesn't work that way. There's a series of interactions and in businesses an ecosystem of players that need to be convinced before successful acquisition happens. Most of the times in B2B context it starts with a single user who becomes an advocate and says your product internally so enable them. Assets like case studies, social proof having enough content of brands that use your product can go a long way in ensuring that your advocate in the B2B setup is getting buy in within his or her organization and then making a successful acquisition. Moving on to the next pillar which is retention and this in my opinion as I mentioned is the single largest factor of whether a company is going to be long term successful or not. Acquisition can get you to the first few hundred thousand users or a million users if you spend enough but if you have a leaky bucket and if they move out as fast as they come in it's going to catch up with you pretty fast. Breaking down retention what we've observed time and again irrespective of the context in which the SaaS company is building a product is that most users tend to be least engaged in their first experience and they decide whether they want to stick with you or not pretty fast. What that means is that onboarding a new user and showing them value as fast as possible is probably the most valuable thing and the easiest when you can put out for driving great retention in your products. Think of products where you need to have seven different screen and 30 clicks to create a new account before you even experience what the products do versus products where you get time to value instantly and it just seems to work right out of the box and you will find yourself a lot more likely to go back for the second than the first product. The second theme I would like to talk about is understanding your users ecosystem of products. In today's day and age we switch across products pretty fast. There's at least 10 to 15 SaaS products that an average new age company user would be using. If you are a product manager, products like amplitude, heap, figma, looker, all of these might not be new names for you and what that means is that if you want to become a player in your end user's mind space you have to make sure your product plays well with forward and backward integrations. Think of how your product is used and let's take the example of Canva for example. Canva is a design tool which makes designing super easy and super accessible but user research shows us that every time a user creates a design they need to store it, share it and also export it across different formats. So building integrations with popular export formats, making sure the sharing flows integrate with Slack, email and storage flows integrate with popular Google storage options or Dropbox storage options or local storage options is a key part in making sure Canva is a sticky product in your user's mind. Design import is another feature that we would prioritize to make sure it's not standing out and hard to use in context of everything as the user is doing. And the last thing I would urge you to think about when trying to solve the retention problem is the frequency with which a product is used. What that means is that some use cases are inherently low frequency and tend to hit a retention cap beyond a point because if you don't use the product enough, habit formation is slower. In case of Trouser Stack, which was the company I was at, it was a developer tool and the challenge we faced was that it was the primary use case was for debugging and debugging happened at the time of a new launch, which was not high frequency for most of the SMB use cases. What we did was layer on more and more features on the product, which made sure that the users would come back not only when they wanted to debug, but let's say when they wanted to take a screenshot to see how the product was using, when they wanted to test the performance of their website to check how the product was working across different devices. And with creating those layers, you can ensure that users build a habit of going to Trouser Stack or any other product for that matter again and again and become more sticky by nature. And the last theme that we would touch upon with some principles around this is monetization. Monetization is the process of converting your user engagement into revenue, which enables companies to invest in creating more and engaging products. From the user's perspective, it's friction. In an ideal world, everything would be free for the user all the time. But without monetization, companies can't exist and that's where aligning the model with the kind of product and the user base you have is super critical. Some themes that have helped me create a great monetization flow have been starting by, have started by creating value and showing value before trying to capture value. What that means, classically, is a premium model. A decade ago, products used to be paid first and used later. That paradigm has changed. Almost all products have to show value before being used in their paid state. Every SaaS tool these days has a free plan, which allows you to do the basic tasks, come back to it again and again before you create a need for the premium offering. That's where the layering of use cases also come in handy. Second theme, which kicks in later in a company's growth journey, but is super essential is designing a monetization plan that scales with your users. For example, let's talk about two companies. Company A has a single plan, which gives you everything at a flat rate of $10 per month. Company B has two plans. The first plan is everything basic and the second plan is just a little bit extra at an additional $5 per month. While both of these companies will do similarly while starting, maybe company A might do a little bit better because of simplicity. Over the longer term, there's a path for users to grow and pay more if your product creates a need for itself in the user's mind. That is expansion revenue and is a big determinant of whether your company will continue to grow fast enough over the longer term. Best in class companies take it a notch further and create a variable usage plan where how much you charge relates very closely with how much your user uses you. AWS, Twilio, messaging companies, computing companies are perfect examples of these and they continue to grow fast at scale because they're so deep in the user's ecosystem that the user just doesn't want to leave them and continues to use them more and more paying them more and more and the company grows organically. The last theme is matching your selling motion to your value. What that means is understand how much value each user brings to you in terms of their lifetime value and align on how much you want to spend on acquiring them. Don't expect to acquire million-dollar accounts with just an Instagram or a LinkedIn ad. It doesn't work that way. You'll have to create an enabling infrastructure of sales agents, legal team, and everything that goes around closing a contract of that scale. While that might be expensive, it is required to close high LTV accounts. At the same time, investing the same amount in users that give you $20 a month doesn't make sense and for them, you need to have a low friction, self-serve model, which gets them to value you to revenue faster. We spoke about different themes and around which growth can be focused on. But an important area where I think every team should invest in is setting a great culture and platform for your product teams to do these repeatedly. Oftentimes, we see that there's a growth team that's been spun off in a company and they've been mandated to drive a business outcome, but they're not enabled with the enough supporting infrastructure. Growth is very much a multiplayer and a cross-functional program irrespective of the context that it is set up in. It does not succeed if there is no top-down buy-in to run a growth program. Product teams looking at the roadmaps in silos and not working with a central growth team or not optimizing for growth together are not bound to succeed in creating a product-led growth outcome. The second theme where there's departure from traditional growth or, sorry, traditional product practices is preference of speed or perfection. In an ideal world, you would want to ship perfect products fast, but growth is experimental and if you over-index on getting the last percentile right or validating ideas quickly, you can tend to not try enough and just miss out on opportunities that can inflect the curve of your company's growth. Oftentimes, we've noticed that 10 or 20 experiments need to be run, 19 of them don't work, but the one that does works disproportionately and the process should be to getting to that one fast before investing and doubling down on it. The last one is enabling your growth teams and even the whole company for that matter with data so that discussions become objective. In absence of this, ranks will come into play, decisions will get political and subjective discussions will make sure that your teams run in circles without trying to get to a clear high conviction answer. So that's a little bit about what the general principles are, but let's zoom in a little bit on how it is applied in B2B versus B2C context. A quick primer, B2B or business to business are products that sell themselves to a business or an institution which in turn gets adoption across users who are generally employees of that business. In B2C, there's no business layer and each user buys the product for their own benefit. Product-led growth is actually applicable across the whole universe of these companies and companies that have done this will fall on either or of these buckets. What this means is that you need not have a PLG approach work better for B2B or B2C specifically. What that means is that while PLG is applicable in both these cases, it needs to be modulated in terms of how the target audience is. You see that B2B companies or B2B markets for that matter tend to be finite in volume. You'll obviously have less a number of businesses and business users as opposed to consumer businesses where each individual is an accountant. And the kind of decision making varies slightly. Consumers tend to value simplicity, speed of decision making and also have typically lower budgets to pay for since their income is related to their own salary. Whereas in B2B products, you can have smaller count of high value accounts and revenue per account can go to the tune of a few millions of dollars. And contrary to B2C, we've seen that B2B decisions are relatively slightly more rational, logical and very benefit value proposition focused as compared to an over indexation on simplicity in the consumer context. But the lines between B2B and B2C products are blurring. We have seen consumerization of business products and products like Figma, Slack and a lot of these new age companies that are doing exceptionally well are examples of how B2B users also expect the simplicity of experience and UX that is generally present in great B2C products. Decision making is also decentralized in businesses these days. What that means is there are very few companies that do top down selling where a CEO or a CXO mandates users of a particular product and users thrown around and use that product irrespective of its UX, the days of SAP Oracle and other on-prem custom IT solutions were these days. As opposed to that, users tend to choose their own products these days and can have multiple competing solutions present in the same environment, pushing the behavior a lot more towards B2C and the lines blurring. What this means is that PLG becomes a lot more powerful and if you take a quick look at how many PLG companies have been successful over the course of the last decade, the graph talks for itself. What does this mean in terms of applying and actionable, applying the principles that we learned and how can we action them? We need to apply the principles of PLG irrespective of the context they are in but they need to be fine-tuned a little bit. The kind of metrics you focus on, the marketing channels you go after, your engagement drivers, and the feature development process plus monetization approach needs to be different depending on whether you apply the PLG playbook in the B2B or B2C context. So that brings us to the end of the discussion. Of course, there's a lot more depth in each of these pillars that we spoke about but that's for some other day. To quickly recap, we spoke about defining and measuring what growth means. We spoke about breaking down your North Star metric into inputs and driving programs that experimentally increase those inputs over time and grow them. We spoke about getting to the right leading levers and what kind of principles guide those levers of growth. Lastly, we spoke about how product-led growth or PLG is applied in B2B and B2C context and what kind of tuning can help you make sure that PLG is successful irrespective of the context you are applying it in. So that's all from me, folks. Thanks a lot and have a great day. Bye.