 I hope everyone is doing great. My name is Elena Verna and today I'm going to talk to you about, would you, could you, PLG, product-led growth. I want to get started by saying that I'm head of growth at Amplitude. I've been leading growth functions at many tech companies, including SurveyMonkey, Miro, Netlify, and many others. I'm a growth advisor, so all I do is I pattern match what works and what doesn't across B2B sector, and I focus on coming up with frameworks and how we can succeed with PLG across the board. So let me get started. We all want company to grow. Our growth is measured by revenue. We want that hockey stick growth, that compounding exponential curve to see that we're succeeding both for investors, for our own stock options, and everything else in between. But how do you actually grow? You need to be scientific about it. So we need to figure out first and foremost, what is growth? Growth is not revenue. Revenue is an outcome. We need to figure out how we can result in revenue. So the main two inputs into our company's success is having a product and distribution system for the product. We can have incredible product that you have never be able to get to majority of the population out there because you didn't have distribution model for it. On the other side, I'm sure you can think about a product that you use on databases, most likely in B2B that you don't like, that you wouldn't have picked if you could, yet it's there because distribution model of that product is so strong. But I won't name any names, and I won't throw anybody under the bus on this one. So what do you need to succeed? You need product market fit for your product. And that's the core product management job. You find, identify a problem in the market, and you come up with a solution for it. It's not only about acquiring people and solving that problem initially, product market fit is all about retention. So can you on ongoing basis continuously resolve that problem? However, that's not enough. You need to have growth model for your product market fit in order to have successful company. So how do you build growth model that is not just product, but how do you scientifically, predictably, sustainably, and competitively defensively answer the question of distribution? Well, traditionally, we've been taught to build products, market them, and sell them. This is a traditional way that we've came up to think about how to build companies. However, this type of model creates quite a few problems. We focus product engineering and design on the building stage. We focus marketing on the marketing stage. And we focus our sales team on the sales. And it works to an extent, but what it creates, it creates funnels. It creates linear growth. Why? Because marketing is responsible for acquisition at top of the funnel. You have product that is activating and retaining, hopefully engaging customers. And then you have sales team that is trying to capture revenue. What is the issue with this framework? Well, even if marketing is crushing it in their acquisition of MQLs or new users, new leads, that doesn't mean product is actually able to activate and retain all of them. So there is a leaky bucket starts to happen right from the top. Or if the product is very successful at engaging a customer, that doesn't mean sales will be successful to sell them. So you have constantly leaky issues coming out of this funnel and misalignment and silos that are created by organization. Marketing doesn't talk to product. Product doesn't talk to sales. So even if marketing is succeeding, product and sales can be failing. Have you ever been in a situation where you seem to have a good engagement in the product, but your revenue is not growing? Or when you're really good and solid in MQLs and you're driving top of the funnel, but they're not activating? Well, we need to stop thinking about growth model as a siloed departmental responsibility. The other issue with the funnel is that it constantly needs more, more channels, more dollars, more tactics, more people at the top in order to get something at the bottom. And although that might be sustainable at the beginning, this is not the way to scale. Not most of the output of this will be linear growth, because you will not get exponential amount of money to put on top. There is not exponential amount of channels to go after, and you cannot hire people exponentially to execute on all of it. This funnel framework is not for me. I try to stay away from funnels as far as possible. Instead, I like to think about new framework for growth, which is all around loops. It's the flywheels. It seems simple. You take an input, they take an action or a step within your experience, and it materializes into output that is reinvested into input. If you are able to stand up loops within your product, that creates a sustainable, predictable, and competitively defensible engine for your growth model. But let me give you a couple of examples. What do I mean by loops? Let's start with amplitude. It's easy to pick on. Amplitude has a very strong sales loop. What that means is that they hire salesperson. They pay that salesperson X. That salesperson prospects, finds enterprise buyers, and closes, let's say, 5X of deals in revenue. What that allows amplitude to do is pay that salesperson their X and take other 4X to reinvest to hire four more salespeople. So you have salespeople rotating within the loop and reinvestment of them of the revenue incrementally that they're generating into a bigger sales force. And this scales quite nicely because you are making sure that the payback period is healthy and that you can continuously reinvest revenue into sources that are driving it for you. Let's talk about something more organic. Crisp. I advise for Crisp. It's a noise cancellation AI assistant that I cannot live without because I live on Zoom and I have two small children and dog barking often outside of my office door. But they have very strong word of mouth loop. It means that they acquire a new user, user loves the product so much that they actually refer another user to come in and try out Crisp. Whether it's other coworker or whether it's their friend, they have word of mouth loop that is firing on all cylinders. In fact, most of the new companies start with word of mouth loop. And you cannot discount it. That third-party validation by users done to other users is one of the strongest growth mechanisms that you can possibly drive. Let's look at some other types of loops that can exist. Miro. Miro is a collaborative whiteboard. I had a privilege of both advising and being their CMO for a while. They acquire a user, but they make sure that the experience there that you get the most value out of is collaborative. So in order to get value out of the product, you, the user, will invite somebody else to collaborate at Crisp together with them. That invitation drives new user acquisition for Miro and that accounts for majority of their acquisition and majority of their growth. Now Slack does the same, Dropbox the same, Asana, all of those companies that have one to many relationships that are required to either collaborate to create something or monitor to analyze, rely on the viral loop in order to boost their growth. And I'll give you another one. SurveyMonkey. I've been at SurveyMonkey for seven and a half years, growing this loop which drove companies growth for the first 15 years of its life with zero marketing and sales investment. What was the loop? It was UGC, user-generated content. New user comes in and creates a survey because they have a need to survey their audience. That survey acts as a content piece that then they distribute to their respondents. After you distribute it to a respondent, respondent takes the survey, they in a way get onboarded on SurveyMonkey. And percentage of those converts to a survey creator. Percentage of those actually is fairly small, less than 2%. But it's enough to power the company to get to a $200 million in revenue for the first 15 years. Why? Because the pool of respondents is so large. So we were constantly focused on getting more people interacting with surveys because we knew it will generate survey creators for us. So there's sales loops, there's viral loops, there's content loops. All of them are valid vehicles for growth, but most important thing is not to look at it from the funnel perspective. So the main questions that you constantly need to think about in your growth model is how do I acquire, how do I monetize, and how do I retain my customers? And you need to have solid answers to answer it. Enter the three by three model menu of what growth motions you can pick against those growth levers. So on the rows here, you have acquisition, monetization, and retention. Those are the growth levers that you need to pull. On top of the columns are the motions that you can apply against them. You can be sales led. Your sales people prospect for acquisition, they close contracts and they hold QBRs in order to gauge retention. Great model if you have loops in it. You can be marketing led in acquisition. So you go where prospects are at and you acquire them on Google, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, wherever it is, on LinkedIn that people are actually at. And then you bring them to educate them about monetization opportunities and retention. Or you can be product led. And product led is all the rage right now, especially in B2B. We'll talk about why. But in product led, it's simple. Users acquire other users for you either through virality or user generated content. Product self itself. So you are able to drive self-serve purchase. And then user usage triggers additional usage. So there's loops within retention that are happening which are either environmental or manufactured created by your product. So all three motions, the important thing is to have loops powering behind it with monetization not creating friction in those loops but monetization amplifying those loops especially if you have dollars rotating within them. And look at funnels as the way to feed loops because you need to kickstart a flywheel. It doesn't start on its own. But loops are your engine for growth. But let's talk about product led. Why is anybody and everybody and their mother are talking about product led growth right now? Well, in B2C, PLG has existed for decades. How do you sell consumer products? Through reviews, through recommendations, through referrals, it's all been there done that. But in B2B, it became a new concept that everybody's trying to jump on board of. So why did it actually take off? And why is it such a hot topic right now? First of all, if you're relying on marketing or sales to drive your acquisition, it's getting crowded out there. I don't know about you, but I receive 15 plus outbound SDR emails in my inbox every single day. And every single one of them is the leader in some quadrant. They're loved by all of their customers. 95% of Fortune 1000 trusts them. They're all free to start with. They're trusted by, most popular, rated number one, whatever. How do you break through that noise? I have hard time even opening those emails. And anytime I go on LinkedIn or Twitter, I'm bombarded by the same message by the company. And accessibility to these channels by us, democratizing access to Facebook, to AdWords, to SEO, has created this tension of crowdness. And it's impossible to capture an eyeball nowadays. So even though you might drive an impression, that impression is not likely to be able to ever convert. So how do you break through that noise? You do it through third-party marketing, through user. Because we still trust our peers. But we're losing trust in marketing strategies by the companies. Because they're crowding us. They're all saying the same thing. And they're all in the same channels where it's really hard to break through the noise. The other thing that happened in B2B is that the user gained power of a buyer. 20 years ago, how did B2B decisions were made? A department head or IT head would gather requirements. They would do the demo across multiple products. They would pick a winner. And then they push the product top down into organization. What did that result into? Low utilization. Unhappy users. The problems that did not actually get solved because requirement lists are often incorrect. What we think we need to do is different what we end up needing to do. So what ended up happening is that users started picking software on their own through self-serve experiences and displacing enterprise softwares that were chosen by department heads. And enterprise buyers became a wallet, a cost center, maybe some ability to make sure that privacy is correct or security is correct, but users now make the choice in B2B, similar to consumers. B2B and B2C are converging because we no longer have this hypothetical made up persona of enterprise buyer. We are marketing in both industries directly to consumer. It's just the consumer is within B2B. Next one is blurring roles. We are no longer siloed in our departments. Product managers need to do data analytics because they need to understand the impact that they're driving. Marketers are developing no-code sites on their own. Everybody does a little bit of a design. Everybody does a little bit of content. So why are we still assigning acquisition to marketing only? Why is it that we're only assigning sales to sales team? Let's actually capitalize on these blurring roles that we're all embarking and embracing and make something meaningful out of it. And the last one is data availability. What did amplitude allow us to do? Be self-serve in data analytics on something that wasn't imaginable 15 years ago. In my first job at SurveyMonkey, the way that we would solve this problem, we actually use Splunk logs to stream into Hadoop, do the ETL to data warehouse to push some dashboards through Tableau. Now, all of that is done at the click of a button with one event tracking, and I can do everything self-serve. We now know more so much about our product and what is working and not in it that is not just qualitative feedback, that actual quantitative frictions, and we need to capitalize on that. We need to make it work, and we need to put more accountability on the product to grow our companies. So in this model menu of three by three, which one should you pick to grow in? PLG might not be the right place for you at the beginning. However, the end destination here is that your growth model should evolve across all three motions and levers. Because if you don't play somewhere, you will be disrupted by somebody who will. Think about big-dip placement that is happening with Figma, with Slack, with Asana of traditional enterprise softwares. The traditional enterprise softwares never saw it coming because they came in as a Trojan horse into organization and displaced them with usage and blew them away with delight. So it's not a question of if you should do PLG. First of all, you should understand that competitive advantage no longer comes from your product market fit only. It's not about innovation that you produce in the product. Many new disruptive products are not that innovative, but they disrupt market by different growth model and they apply that growth model as their competitive advantage to win against a neutralizer competitor. So don't put all of that pressure on the product. Put that pressure on the growth model as well because it's not a question of if you should do PLG. It's the question of when. Your audience, your market, your customer may not be ready for it right now, but they will be. Every single industry is going through that transformation. So you constantly have to pressure test the hypotheses and see when is the right time for you to win in PLG. And if you don't, another company with very similar solution will disrupt you with the PLG growth model. So be on the lookout. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. And by the way, remember that one where user became the buyer? It gave another flavor to sales, product led sales. And this is a new category too in B2B that is so exciting where we are no longer just leveraging marketing team to generate MQLs. We're going after usage of products and we're generating sales pipeline on top of it. Okay, hold your applause. Hold your applause. I know this is very exciting, but let me tell you what it actually looks like. Traditional enterprise sales funnel looks like an MQL. That's your pipeline. You transition it to SQL, sales qualified lead, and it results in product usage when the value is actually realized. Well, in product led sales, you flip it upside down and you start with product usage. You deliver value as a pipeline generation mechanism and then you move to product qualification. We'll talk about that in a second. Then you go into MQL and SQL. So you can see that the value realizes not at the end of our sales journey, but at the beginning. And user is deciding whether this is the right software for the company. No longer enterprise buyer. No longer your marketing team. No longer should the sales team sell transformation and the digital revolution of your field. Users see the value and they do the selling in the organization themselves. Now, let me break it down of what it looks like for amplitude. Just because, again, it's super easy to pick on them. Well, it starts with usage. Amplitude has a very robust freemium that meant to commoditize level of analytics. So a free user creates an org, they sign up, they connect their data source, they start looking at the data and making some decisions off of it. To hit a trigger, though, and we think about this a lot, which triggers are they gonna hit to drive monetization awareness and monetization need? It can be a feature wall. I need cohorts, I need advanced chart type, or it can be a usage trigger. I hit 10 million events limits and I need more. So it can be feature, it can be usage, it can be outcome. But regardless, we calculate PQA score on top of them. So what is the PQA score? Product qualification on the account is all about volume of usage, velocity of usage. So how many more users are also on getting or how many charts are being created? It can be about breadth of feature use, certain features or me exploring certain features might indicate that I'm ready for enterprise sale or it can be just behavioral. Regardless, PQA gives us the timing to interact with the account. Because the worst thing that you can do is the moment the user sign up and your sales SDR immediately, hello, what's your budget? Are you ready to buy? No, we don't wanna do that. We want them to experience the value and then we wanna find the right time where we can add additional value by selling them enterprise plan. And that's where it goes into our monetization where user either hand raises and that's the most organic and beautiful thing that you can possibly drive where they submit a sales form into your sales team saying, hey, I'm ready to buy. How cost effective is that? Or based on the PQA, you outbound to them and you try to show them additional value that you can bring to the table. Regardless of which motion that you choose, growth needs to abide by five laws. And five laws are the following. First, you have to reach product market fit. You cannot start growing a product that is not product market fit yet because if you do, you might never get to product market fit. You need to know very clearly what is the problem that you're solving for the market and show some retention within it. You do need data before you do growth. Growth is all about scientific approach to discovering solutions. So product market fit, then data, then growth. Number two, you need to scale with frameworks not hacking. Growth hacking has gained a lot of attention over the last probably five to 10 years, but growth hacking is a lucky intuition. And I guarantee you, if you're building good product, you're not gonna have that many hacks that are very positive for you. You need to have frameworks. You need to have patterns that actually help you solve it on predictable, sustainable, and competitively defensible way. Build loops, no funnels. Say no to funnels or big investments into funnels. Now funnels have their place in the growth ecosystem. As I said, they kickstart loops, and that's important. Sometimes you need to do funnels just to neutralize a competitor that is doing the same funnel to just grab the opportunity, but don't invest long-term into funnels. It will only result in linear growth, at best. Four, growth is an evolution, not a revolution. Your goal is to never pick a motion and 100% focus on it. Your goal is to always overlay new motion on top. So it's a matter of sequencing and adding to your growth model and evolving it, never causing a revolution. And honestly, if you have to do a revolution, it's probably your way too late to the party and that's why you have to revolve. But growth is part of culture. Growth is part of our predictable, sustainable way to grow our business. And last one, the most uncomfortable one. Turn failures into wins and into learnings. We are afraid of failures. Our school taught us that failing is bad because we get a bad grade. However, we learned on failures and that's how we got here. Think of yourself as a child. How do you know not to touch a hot iron? Just because your mom told you so or did you at one point touch it? I don't know about you, I at one point touched it and I learned really quickly. So embrace that concept of failure. Failure means you're learning. Failure means you have perception and reality gap with your market and with your customer base. And that perception and reality gap to understand it is your biggest advantage that you can give back to the company. Because if you release something and you thought the business is gonna take off or you launch a campaign and you thought there's gonna be business growth resulting from it and they didn't or even more so it went down, that is the most valuable data point that your company can iterate and learn from. That's how predictability in wins comes from of us understanding our perception and reality gap. I go as far as goaling my teams to fail half of the tests because I don't want us to optimize for wins. I want us to optimize for learnings. So then we can drive predictable wins in the other half of the roadmap. So embrace failures, know that that means that you're learning and that's gonna be a path to the win and that will drive a successful growth. Because if you're not experimenting because experimentation is at the bottom of all of this, you're still testing just on 100% of the population and without any quantifiable learnings. Embrace growth, explore PLG. My only question to you is what is your next loop? Thank you very much.