🔬The PLG steps that took us from 0 to 150 companies in 3 months
In my last post, I shared how we switched From 💼 Top-down Sales to 📈Bottom-up 🔬Product Led Growth
I’m happy to say that we launched 3 months ago!🥳
Now that we are 3 months in I’d like to share my experience and findings. Many founders who go through the same process have reached out to me following my last post and I’d like to try and help by sharing.
We’ve removed the “Book a Demo” button and switched it with a “Quick Start” self-service offering. We’re totally blown away by the results, we couldn’t have imagined that more than 150 companies would try our product in just three months and use it in their production!
Define a clear mission — our mission is to Prevent Kubernetes Misconfigurations From Reaching Production
Step one: Define the User Journey
We’ve defined our user flow into three main stages:
- Visitor: A person that comes to one of our assets that allows them to download and install our product: Homepage, Docs, and our GitHub project.
- Free: A user that downloaded our CLI, installed, and ran it.
- Active: A user that set up an account and signed it to configure.
It is important to note that by the time the user creates the account for their company, they’ve already ran our CLI to detect misconfiguration in their Kubernetes manifests and understood the value that it provides.
By allowing users to see the value of the product before creating an account, we’ve lowered the barrier and removed friction from trying it.
Step two: Drive people to try your product
We drove people to our product (a Developer Tool) using several methods:
- Provide valuable content that talks about the problem space and hands-on specific solutions like: 10 Best Kubernetes Configurations Practices and content that is relevant to our champion in their day-to-day like: How to build a Helm plugin in minutes
- Influencers: Many of our users hear about new products via community leaders who post content and cover tools like ours, so we’ve researched our eco-system and partnered with some of them in order to hear their feedback and share our solution with their audience. Here is an example:
- Nana Janashia — Teaching DevOps 🎬 💙 Docker Captain | AWS Container Hero | CNCF Ambassador
By focusing on our core audience and going “hardcore” with hands-on tutorials we were able to achieve more than 80,000 monthly visitors. We dropped all “Thought leadership” or any non-hands-on content.
Step three: Product Measurements and Conversions
We’ve learned that it is absolutely critical to define our user journey and measure them on a weekly basis. By doing so we were able to prioritize where we should focus.
By knowing your conversion rate from Web-to-Free and Free-to-Active we were able to understand if the content that we were putting was performing well or if we should focus on improving our conversion from Free to account creation.
Step Four: Listen to your users and iterate
So what's next? every founding team has their vision and what they want to build, but once there is a need for the product, the roadmap starts to write itself.
Here is an example. Originally we’ve launched our product with Mac OS X and Linux support. We did not think that users with Windows would want to use our product — oh boy… we were totally wrong!
A user opened a GitHub issue asking for Windows support and was kind enough to go on a call with us and explain their need.
Then more and more users requested the same thing.
So we decided to prioritize Windows support — but we had no Windows machines in our company!
Our CLI is written in Go so we’ve compiled a Windows version of the product and the community was kind enough to take it and test it together with us.
Someone even wrote a guide on how to use Datree with Windows!
We are really overwhelmed by the amount companies opening issues, submitting PRs, sending emails, and contacting us via any possible medium. Thank you 🙏 we are trying really hard to make sure that we respond to every one!
I hope that by sharing our process and way of thinking we will be able to help other founders who are building Product Led Growth companies ❤️
