We’ve gotten many questions from founders over the years on product-led-growth, so we put together this list (in Notion) of our favorite resources. These articles, videos, and podcasts will help any founder or PM to formulate a winning PLG strategy.
A few of our favorites:
Know Your Customers’s “Jobs to Be Done”
This is a classic from the brilliant Clayton Christensen. I think JTBD is the single best framework for making a great product.
It also inspired my recent Tweet:
From the underrated VC blog from David Skok of Matrix Partners, this provides a framework that’s a must for a PLG or bottom-up product:
Wow! is the moment in a free trial where your buyer suddenly sees the benefit they get from using your product, and says to themselves “Wow! This is great!”
This is the key product distinction for a product-led vs sales-led distribution strategy. A product sold with a sales-led motion doesn’t need a quick, self-serve “wow” moment. A sales rep or an on-boarding specialist can guide users to find value in the product.
The business magic with a product that nails the “wow” moment is that distribution becomes downhill. When users are quickly delighted, word-of-mouth will be high. High word-of-mouth will make every go-to-market tactic much more effective.
This is one of the many great posts on marketing from Foundation and does a fantastic job explaining Canva’s brilliant SEO strategy.
I’ve noticed that many of the most efficient, high growth PLG SaaS businesses used SEO as a major growth channel. Canva, Zapier, and Retool all nailed SEO and are arguably three of the most capital efficient SaaS businesses of their generation - which makes them a lot more likely to grow into their last valuation than the average SaaS unicorn.
The best SEO strategies adhere to both the job-to-be-done and “wow” moment frameworks. They solve a specific problem and create quick value for a self-serve user. Canva realized that many potential users who might try a new design tool weren’t looking generically for a design tool. Their job-to-be-done was to make a specific type of design like a birthday party invitation or a photo collage. So, they created free, valuable templates for specific designs that more directly solved the user need. These templates mapped to common Google search keywords since users frequently go to Google with a job-to-be-done. Canva’s templates resonated with users, which Google saw and rewarded with high rankings in their organic search results.