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00:05
Paul Sullivan
I'm hoping to have Ramli John from, Product Led coming on board today to talk to us about product-led growth and how to apply it properly. I'm just waiting on Ramli to join us. I'm hoping that we get to see him sometime soon and we can then, kick off the session properly. For those that don't know, product-led growth is, for SAAS platforms and it's the alternative to a sales-led approach to business.
Hopefully, as I say, Ramli John from Product Led will be joining us shortly. I'm just waiting for him to sign in and come online. In the meantime, if you're in your office or you're at home and you're just jumping on, try a, grab a coffee or some refreshments or beer wine, whatever it is you like, and just get ready to join us and dive into this subject.
01:19
Paul Sullivan
If people that have got any questions on product-led, please feel free to chime in and then we'll do our best to answer them for you. I'll put them to Ramli as he's talking or if not, if I don't want to interrupt him, I'll try and save them for an appropriate time, but I do want it to be interactive and to make sure that you guys are actually getting some value from what it is we're trying to talk about today. For those of us that are on, I’m Paul Sullivan, I'm the MD of Digital Bias. We primarily work with SAAS and technology companies across marketing and sales, but that's the least interesting information to share with you guys today. I've just seen Ramli open the email and I'm seeing him connect, Ramli, let me know you can hear me great.
02:17
Paul Sullivan
There we go, and Ramli joins the call, Ramli, thank you for joining. I kicked off early and hopefully, that doesn't impact what we're doing too much, but thanks for joining us. And, yeah, let's kick it off.
Ramli, product-led growth, that's the subject of the day. I'm happy to say that I've actually completed the course. So, one of the converts, but for those that don't know who you are, why don't you tell me about yourself and about the business?
02:48
Ramli John
Yeah. My name is Ramli John, managing director product-led where we help companies, and business leaders to transform the business from a sales led to a more product-led organization. We've been running for five years now. Our training programs have been going on for three years, so we're really passionate about helping more business become a world-class product-led businesses.
03:12
Paul Sullivan
Okay, cool, cool. And why did you choose that? Like where does that come from?
03:19
Ramli John
Yeah, I mean, it's just, we're, I guess I've been on the other end, would just say that the grass always greener on the other side, where I've worked in a sales side organization where, when wherever we made a big sale, we would hit the gong and be like the typical Wolf of wall street celebration. I think that there's definitely some positive side to that, but I saw also the negative side to it where, the product roadmap is sacrificed for pushing features that is not on the roadmap, just because they're trying to close the sale or where marketing becomes really focused on. It looked as approach as more of a cost centre where in a product-led world, every team is working together really to drive, user success. It's not necessarily promising the moon to close the sale. It really is like aligning your success to that.
04:18
Ramli John
I just saw, the whole team dynamic shift, in that world. I'm really attracted to companies that are very product-led and really like, where it's, win-win versus serious situations where it's not always the case. Yeah.
04:37
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. To take that and, manifest product led light that, your online business, what is it about, leaders and try and swim part, the power product lead within the status or within the product development, roadmap? What is it about that really excites you?
05:01
Ramli John
Yeah, I think it's just ego speak to that. I get excited when you hit back the impact that your, you have on people's lives at the end of the day, whether you're in engineering, whether in product where they are in customer success, even at say in sales dare stat impact that you're making in transforming somebody's life. I know that sounds so, like I'm excited, you're waiting, but think about the way that I use the, we use Calendly or restream or other tools that we have. It completely changed the way that we used to do things for Kennedy. The way that I used to do things to book meetings is we would go back and forth by email, oh, that's 5:00 PM work for, two, three, and then it would be three to four emails before you actually find a time. With Kelly now, like I, I can just book it in an instant and that's the kind of transformation that every product really needs to bring about in this product led organization that thus you're really aligning, everybody's work from finance, you're now investing in projects or features or things like that really gets people more successful with product, obviously are releasing features to make it easier for users for sales.
06:17
Ramli John
Now, it's not necessarily about closing the sale. It's more about helping people succeed within your product. Now it's everybody has now there's one mind shift, this paradigm shift of like, how can we make the users more successful in their workplace, in their life and in wherever setting that your product is being used. When that does happen, there's that alignment, desperate success to your team and your organization and your business. Yeah.
06:44
Paul Sullivan
There's a number of kind of nuggets in that last statement that you made one of them was kind of looking at producing, added features for your users, right. And, and that's a big part of what product lead is all about and why don't we dive into that bit? Why don't we kind of look at how companies should really be approaching that from a product-led approach,
07:10
Ramli John
For sure. Yeah. You want to start with the features or where do you expect?
07:14
Paul Sullivan
Yeah, let's start with, enticing the customer and making them happy. Like, if we just keep that in the top of mind that, and then apply PLG across that,
07:24
Ramli John
For sure. I mean that, I mean, there's this concept that Westport put this book around, like three things that you'll need to do to be successful with product-led growth. The very first one is around deeply understanding your end-users. I think that goes back to one of the things that he talks about in the book about understanding, not just the functional outcome, like, what is it, what are they trying to achieve? You also want to understand exactly there, the emotional outcome, what are the feelings that they want to feel as a result of using your product? And I know that's like, oh man, you're like getting too far into like the soft side into the product. I really like, you're trying to find a holistic approach to what success is for your users. And that's just not functional. There's also the emotional side, going back to Kelly, it's removing that frustration and really like, and that's one emotion that you're trying to, help when you use it, but also feeling like they Ave superpower or feeling more productive.
08:29
Ramli John
Now they're not wasting time going back and forth anymore. The very third piece that Wes talks about in his book around success or outcomes with your end-user understanding that is around the social, outcomes where you're trying to understand exactly how they want to be perceived by the boss, by their coworkers or by the colleagues. I know often this is often forgotten in the B2B space where a B to C, obviously when you're using Facebook is very social variety by nature or Twitter, or even restrain where we're saying, we're sharing this in a different, a bunch of different platforms, but in even a B2B product, people use that in a social context. Like, there is that human element we're selling not to a business particularly, but there is a human to the other end of that B2B product that is using that product. What is, what setting are they in? Like what kind of praise do they want to hear from the boss when they use their product? I love this ad that I saw from Canva.
09:26
Ramli John
Canva is an easy way to create, images and logos and business cards. One of the ads says, we make you look good in front of your boss, even if you don't know how to design things, no coding, no design experience required. We're really emphasizing that description and enticing the user is now, Hey, we're not just, a place for you to design stuff. We're not just a place for you to feel like you're a professional designer, but we're also a place for you to a one day be praised saying, Hey, Paul, I didn't know you were so creative. How did you design this logo here randomly? You're a math major. I didn't know. You could design some really cool stuff. When did you learn Photoshop? Like those kinds of words is what you want to emphasize in enticing users when you emphasize the functional, emotional, and the social aspect too, to your product.
10:21
Ramli John
It's a great way to like pull users in and really like speak to them, at a core level and not just the functional or the practical side to what your product really does. That's how, that's how I would approach a thousand users from the get-go it's really deeply understanding your users and what they're trying to achieve with the success. Yeah.
10:42
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. I, and I can relate to that because I'm like, I use like the Adobe suite and, my sister will just come and smack me right out in the part was something that she's just built on Canva. Like, she's just got like no design experience in that field. So I get that. She's like always warm and excited because she can do that. That leads me on to like the next part of that. Right. If we've talked about how you're encouraging users in, you're trying to build a product that, enables them to be rewarded in their job by their job and by the people around them and recognize around them. Right. You have to get those people onto the platform. Right. I have found onboarding as part of the PLG course, was a part where we dived into that a lot. I think that I want to open the floor up and let you talk about that, because I think that's a bit passionate for you there.
11:32
Ramli John
Thank you so much. It's one of the other statement I wrote that book about product-led onboarding. I really am. Like, this is, I can talk on and on about how this is so critical. I think you nearly on the head like D like imagine a first, this is essentially the first impression a user has with the product. We know from social science, whether that's in a date, first date or a job interview where your first interview, like when people first form that first impression, usually they form it within five seconds and that impression lasts. You make an instinctive, but maybe this is like evolutionary, where like you meet somebody for the first time. You already make a snap decision. Whether you like somebody or not. Right. Like you're, oh, Paul's an awesome dude. I want to hang out with him. Like within five seconds, you kinda know already, it's the same thing for Barak's like people, there's this quote, I really love from Scott Belsky, he's the chief product officer, and we're talking about Adobe.
12:26
Ramli John
He's a two product officer at Adobe. He said in the first 15 seconds, people are Lacy, vain and impatient. Really that speaks to that thing that imprint that you got, you have a short period of time. Now what you really want to think about is how do you get people to that success? I was just talking earlier about, functional, emotional, and social, outcomes that products do. What is the minimum number of steps? What are things that they actually need to learn? What features do they need to learn the minimum number of futures they need to learn to achieve that success state, essentially. That's how I usually think about it, is, how can I bring my users through that success, as quickly as possible, whether that is reducing steps, one that's one way to improve onboarding is reduced steps. Second could be to automate, like, maybe there's a way to automate, like, or, skip over steps with templates and things like that.
13:29
Ramli John
The third way is through, and this is something that I've seen often when it requires a lot of setup would be like a white glove approach where like, now there's a human behind the background, like helping you. I've seen this with a company called deputy where like, you're, they're targeting, restaurants and not very digitally savvy customers. One of the things they do is like, Hey, just upload everything, all the images and we'll organize it for you. I think that's one way. I think that there's just a rule of thumb to make onboarding easier. It, what is, how can you make it easier for users to achieve success within your product? and I think that's a good rule of thumb for people to follow when they're thinking about onboarding. Okay.
14:19
Paul Sullivan
Okay. And, who do you think nailed it? Like if the software here that you see in, right. You're, you're like me, you're passionate about software who has nailed onboarding for you.
14:31
Ramli John
I'm a big fan of, I'm definitely a big fan of Canva. Like the way that they, the onboard, like they have, they, one thing I love that they do is like segment their new users very early on. They ask you, Hey, what are you using Canva for? Is it to great presentation? Slides? Are you a small business that's trying to create, are you a nonprofit that's trying to do this? Are you student that's trying to impress your teachers? And based on that, what they do is offer suggestions like we would catalog once again, it's an easy way to create any types of designs and imagine they have thousands of templates. One of the things that we want to avoid with onboarding is overwhelming users. Really like just giving them, it sounds counterintuitive, for sure. When you give people too many options, they get super overwhelmed and they run away.
15:24
Ramli John
What they, what karma does is once they, you tell them which, who are you and what you're trying to achieve, they offer you here are the top five designs for small business owners here in the top five designs for teachers here are the top five designs that students use. Really that makes it easy for you to choose one. I think that's caramel is definitely one of the top ones up there when it comes to onboarding and who tanks all that. I don't want to thank anybody here, but I would say that I think one thing that I've seen there was a quote unquote tank is the crutch with product tours. I think that's one thing I I've seen this over and over again with product tours where now I'm ordering is often associated with product yours and the danger. This is the one that, oh, man, come on again, is when a product tour essentially points every single thing out in the product where he ran me, here's what you do this here, roundly.
16:30
Ramli John
Here's what you do that. Going back to what I said earlier, you want to just show them minimum number of features to get them, to use their success. Analogy that I love about, describing this annoying experience is imagine Paul, you go to a grocery store and somebody grabs your hand and then starts pointing out PayPal. Here's the chicken, here's the toilet paper. Paul here's where the tissue papers are here is the aluminum foil. Like, Hey man, I'm just here. I just needed to get a piece of chocolate bar. And that's it. Cause I'm hungry. Like, why do you need, well, why do you need to point every single thing out when I just need chocolate bar. Well, a better experience would have been like asking, Hey Paul, what are you looking for today? And I say, I need to talk led bar. Okay, it's right there.
17:16
Ramli John
Jess, in a similar way, it will be much better when you understand what the user's success and even segmenting it like Canva. Now if you know that Paul's looking for a chocolate bar, you don't need to point out every single thing. Right? So I think that's one thing that I've seen over and over. It's just crazy. I've gone through hundreds of onboarding, experiences, just like looking at it. This is something that is a big culprit that I've seen over and over again is pointing out things and features and telling what it does, not how it's helpful and why it helps users achieve their success, in, within the product itself.
17:56
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. And, and all of that is like makes a lot of sense for people. What really stuck out in my mind there was, that talked about experience, right? And you talk about what that first taste is. Like. I think it's like when you walk into a high-end or like a reasonable high-end fashion store, and the first thing the sales assistant comes in and does is like, this is all the new stuff. This is this, and this is this, and it's not about you at all. It's about what they need to sell. That feels like what you just talked about was that experience replicating it online. Right. I see that the general wizard, right? This does this 24 steps, and I still don't know anything better. Right. That doesn't help me, as a user. It certainly doesn't make me feel that rewarded right. Time to value that's one of the key things.
18:49
Paul Sullivan
Right. Let's talk about times of value because we're all looking at how our platforms can create that engagement. How quick do you feel from registration to, if registration is even needed first, do you feel you should be looking to get me excited?
19:09
Ramli John
Oh man, you kind of beat me there. Okay. Like going back, you mentioned is registration and human needed. Like that's such a good point. I'm gonna, I'm going to add, I'm going to put an aside here for now. Let's say again around registration. Okay. Going back to Canva again, if you actually Google Instagram posts, templates, or some business card template, usually the first top three is Canva and what they've done and kudos to the growth team is they drop you into a bunch of templates already around like, as Instagram posts and they get you to start designing it. These you're us, you're about to download it is when they ask you to sign up. You've already committed all this time near the end. You're very like, oh, this looks cool. You're playing around with it. That goes back to this cycle, psychological principle called Ikea effect where, it's named after this furniture store called big furnished your style.
20:11
Ramli John
Oh, whoa. Hope people tuning in. No, no about Ikea, but essentially a lot of IQ packages there, they come on assembled. You have to go home, you have to assemble everything. The study found that people who, even though like he, isn't not necessarily super expensive. People found this stuff that they've built themselves more valuable than once that they bought 30 pre-assembled. It's the same concept with this, where as you're modifying things and changing things here, you've already sunk in time and effort and already into it. So you're more likely to register. Yes. You've already spent time to it. I think that's just one point that you made a great point around registration. Like if it's even needed getting them to the aha moment or to that experience, that by experience beforehand, like going back to your, Going back to your question around time to value, I think that's something that really needs to be experimented on.
21:05
Ramli John
The reason why I say this is it's a misconception to say that, the quickest time to value is the best time to value. Let me give you an example, actually, there's this study that Claudio from CEO for new trends, date, where one of the clients, they reduced the time to value to like three minutes, right? Oh, is this good? They've reduced it down. They actually found that the people who experienced the value within three minutes, they didn't stick around as much as people who their time to value was seven minutes. There's definitely a time to value that's too fast where people actually, you're kind of rushing them through the experience so much so that they actually don't learn anything. Like there is that optimal value of time so that people actually are getting used to it and learning things because sure, you can, teach me something in two minutes, but I'm like, you can teach me like physics in two minutes, but I'm not going to retain anything, but it's like, if it takes time, like you really need to say something that you really need to experiment with and look at your data to see what optimal time to value does.
22:20
Ramli John
Does, does it take for me to get new users to experience my value so that they stick around after 12 weeks and really that's what you're optimizing for. You're not optimizing, we're not optimizing for people to experience that value. We're optimizing for people to stick around, like retention is a key variable, the key factor that we're optimizing for. That's something that we just need to realize if it takes 12 minutes and people are sticking around the longest for that. And then so be it. You want to really definitely optimize for that.
22:52
Paul Sullivan
On that note, how would you differentiate? What would you do to understand if your own product was suitable for a product-led approach? Right. Because does it work for everybody?
23:06
Ramli John
Yeah, that's a great question though. We hear, there wasn't I hear over and over again, and it really does depend, and I think it depends on a few things, whether product is, suitable for your business. I think the first thing that you want to look at, yes, you definitely want to look at your users, the type of users that, you're serving. An example I bring up all the time is when people are buying jet planes and you're ultra rich, You don't have time to do a free trial. You don't have time to test drive a jet plane. Right? You have somebody to, just tell me what is the best one and I'm going to get it. I think there are certain users where, they're, they are too busy, but in that particular example, the buyer might not necessarily be, not be the end user. The question now is the end user, do they care about trying things, and experiencing it for most end users? Yes.
24:11
Ramli John
All right. For mosaic use, they are pretty dry, but there are some users who were they just want to be told, what is the best? What is the best one for there? I think that this is the first one is yes, it is your users. The second one that you want to consider if product place is right for you is you want to look at your product. Now, there are certain products that is super complicated, that doesn't have a quick time to value. Like we talked about things like, that requires a lot of education still, like cryptocurrency or anything that requires like it's very bleeding, cutting edge that nobody still understands that situation educate like a huge education hurdle is there. A product-led approach might not necessarily be the right approach for your business. I think that's the user you want to look at your product.
25:02
Ramli John
The last thing that you definitely want to look at is you want to look at your industry. If your industry is shifting more and more towards a product-led approach, a big example that I can think of is way back then customer relationship management or CRMs were very sales led, but, companies, especially like HubSpot, they saw it in the industry that they were starting to see competition pop up where they were offering freemium version of their product, of their CRM. They, what they did was they were smart and shifted the whole business to a more product-led approach. I think those three things are something that I would consider whether the product led is approach for your business. It's something that definitely the people need to consider if it's right for them and the users and the product.
25:49
Paul Sullivan
Two nuggets that you take from there is that typically not necessarily always, but typically with PLG your approach, you're looking for users rather than buyers, right? You're looking for the people that are going to use the platform, whereas in a typical sales lead process, you're looking for the person who's going to sign a check, right straight off the bat, that's where you want to go. Right? And the other thing is potentially you need some expansion, but can you give away too much value under a PLG model?
26:26
Ramli John
Can you Kuwait, to what you value? That's a great question. There's, there's a guy that people, if people are understand, Parkland need to follow Kyle. He works at open view partners and has been pushing really hard. People should be opening up their product more to it. They, he already sent one of his essays that I think limiting features do little kind of limits people from actually experiencing your value and they get annoyed and they leave. Going back to your question, I think there is a point where there's too much value in some of the things that you need to consider. I think, first of all, do you need to support that support, delivering that value, for example, will you support, it tickets go home and it's something, once again, you need to experiment for your product where sometimes people who like free stuff, ask for the most questions.
27:26
Ramli John
Yeah. It hasn't necessarily been the case for center people. Actually. It's super interesting. We have some case studies, from like jungle scout at that trial where, opening up their product, reduces their tickets as long as they scaled up and created support documents and self-serve, support, waste, knowledge base, exactly, support messages like messaging instead of like calls. I think that's one thing that you need to really consider if you're, if you give away all of this value, all of a sudden will your support costs race off. The second thing to that would be around server costs. It really depends on the business where if you are serving a huge amount of data desks that result in larger server costs. And then I think that's. The third thing, the factor that often we hear is around conversion. Let's say you offer too much value, will people convert to the paid version? And I think there's a lot of ways to think about this.
28:33
Ramli John
You want to definitely be looking at the usage of your paid versus your free users. I think they're limiting based on usage is, has it been a big movement in the product side where like usage based pricing where like, you can use that up to X number of users. After that it's now paid instead of like a timeout. I think those are some factors that you need to, people need to experiment with whether there's too much value or not enough value. I would definitely lean on like, how are people who are achieving in the free and the free version? Are they achieving one thing? It goes back to the success, like give, like I would lean more towards what do they really, what do the users really need to achieve success in the free account? That once they achieve that, they're more willing to actually go a premium feature, a premium version.
29:30
Ramli John
I go back to Canva once again, we're like they open up almost every single thing and they figure out which features are exactly, for example, streamlining your Instagram, connecting your Instagram account to Canva. You don't have to download the image. You just click upload to Instagram is one of their premium features. It's like, what are the things that people actually really want to use instead of premium? So I would look at those things for sure.
29:57
Paul Sullivan
Okay. Okay. And, that's interesting because one of my questions I was going to ask was, when you move from potentially like a sales led model and you're going through the process, which I'm not going to get into it. Cause I think your book talks about that in great depth, but, what kind of things that you should be looking for? Right. Because a lot of people say, oh, you want it to look like your, your user leads, you want to dwell time. And, but like what realistically is going to give those KPIs that you should say, right. When we do our first 90 days, this is what we want to be looking for. Do you know what that is?
30:37
Ramli John
Yeah. This is more for companies that are going from sell side product-led. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we've thought about a few ones already. I think, first of all, like what is, how long does it take our first, our Amy users, she think value in your product. I think that's where it starts off, especially that switching where, early on a lot of the companies that we've seen, for example, a company called Jebbit where they create, quizzes to generate leads. Your first version was like people couldn't, people got lost where it were. How do I set this quiz up, this simple quiz for generating leads, right. I think that's the first thing is like trying to identify the milestones that users need to take to get to that success. You want to start looking now at once you, once some users are getting through there, it's not more about optimizing, that time to value how many people are achieving the value.
31:37
Ramli John
Long-term, you also want to be looking as well. Once they've achieved the value, how many, like, what is your free to paid conversion, are people upgrading and what are ways that you can encourage them using, in-app tactics? Like we talked about product Hoovers or checklists or anything like that, or messages or onboarding emails, that you can use to encourage people to achieve that outcome as well as upgrading to the next step. Those were, those are ones that I would definitely look at you. I, it really depends on your user journey. People are people signing up for the free trial or freemium. The next step is, are people achieving success with your product? And the very last thing that I would look at are people actually converting to upgrading to the next level, would be someone who thinks that I would definitely look at.
32:30
Paul Sullivan
Okay. It's product-led just meaning that I can just say, right, we're going to go freemium and that's it I've opened up my product.
32:39
Ramli John
Well, it was the one that, oh yeah. I wish that I want to say it was that there's this there's, this Knology analogy that we've been using, like the iceberg analogy, right? When people see the iceberg as a, usually an iceberg only, you can only see 10% of the iceberg on top of the sea. 90% of the mass of the Eisenberg is blow to see usually what we, what people see is just the free trial of freemium, but to you're alluding to it, like there's a ton of other things you want to consider. We talked about onboarding approach. You also, we haven't really talked about how your culture shifts, how your team shifts. Now that we've been talking a lot about how the culture of the team now back in a sales sled or traditionally you're, when you celebrate sales, you celebrate hitting your numbers, obviously in a product that you want to hit the numbers too, but hitting the numbers is secondary to celebrating the success of your users.
33:43
Ramli John
Because then once again, it's aligning users success with that. Now who is involved in what they're involved in, also changes, in a product-led organization, the sales now transformed from traditionally more outbound approach, and really like showing a demo of the product to now, you're talking to potentially people who are already using the product, they're already seeing the value of the product. Now you're like trying to, help them achieve even more and maybe even break down any barriers. They might have a red tape that they might have to sell it within their organization. So, yeah. There's onboarding approach, just the product organization that shifts, there's also pricing that also might shift tremendously, where you really want to think about how to align your pricing model to use our success. That goes back to usage based model where, you don't really necessarily want to punish people for by increasing their pricing based on their success, but at the same time as users get more successful there, hopefully, especially in a B2B setting, they're making more money as a business, as a result of using your product.
34:56
Ramli John
How do you hide that win to your win. And, once again, going back to he's the expert on all things usage based pricing, and really tying it back to that instead of tying it to some other value metric or not. Yeah, those are just some of the things there's like definitely the biggest impact would be around culture. That's the one thing that we hear over and over again, a company called vendetta, they're still, it's been two to three years and they're still making that shift in the culture and really like trying to understand where, how everybody fits in to a product-led business instead of what they were doing before. And, there's definitely a lot of like helping people get buy-in. A lot of people getting people aligned in the shared understanding because like it is, getting everybody trained up card is just super important on their product organization.
35:57
Ramli John
Cool.
35:57
Paul Sullivan
We'll come back to training, and a little world where there's a couple of questions that I wanted to ask you. I mean, you've mentioned jungle scout, you mentioned the open view and you just remember vendetta. Have you got any stories of some, I know you and wares have worked with different companies and have you got any stories that you can just share.
36:16
Ramli John
About anything just.
36:18
Paul Sullivan
About PLG and companies that you may have worked with, but worked in and what that experience was like give people like an idea of what they could expect to overcome, what hurdles they might have to jump.
36:29
Ramli John
Yeah. Oh, overcome. Right. For sure. I mean, an example that I w I mentioned, Jumbla Scott, like Danny Villareal, he is the head of customer success there. They've done a lot of tremendous work in terms of like, aligning their organizations around product-led growth. One of the things they've done is they looked at how, like, once again, going back to the question, how can we make it easier for our users to achieve success? Once again, jungle scout is a tool for Amazon resellers and they have analytics to our platform. One of the things they ended as they ramped up all the documentation and knowledge base and serve onboarding and product tours that they have for their product. As a result of all of that, they've seen like, over the three times decrease in terms of the support that gets is one of the things that, is a win for them.
37:20
Ramli John
I saw how dry, I think it was from like 1500 to 2000 tickets per month to now like two to $300 within like a couple of months. It was so dramatic that people were like, this is amazing. Like, it wasn't one of the wins that they've seen with that's one example. I think another one that I've heard on the podcast, I chatted with somebody from Jebbit. They were kind of swarming from a sales side to a product-led organization. There were selling this quiz lead platform to like the companies like Disney to like big brands target. And it was very sales led organization. They were like Mo Tom, the CEO being based out of Boston or where Boston is we're open view as a base. He started seeing HubSpot and other companies do product. It told us leadership team like product line when it released freemium, this team was like, this is crazy.
38:14
Ramli John
This is absolutely nuts. They, they were, he got like, he created a small product led growth team, three of them on engineering and mark, a marketing person, a product person. They started working on this freemium product, the first MBV, their release. I told the story earlier, people deep, nobody got it. Nobody got success with their product and people got stuck. One of the stories, one of the wins that ISA where the light bulb switch for everyone was the product is traditionally like very like enterprise level pricing where it's like five to 10 grand per month. Somebody signed up on the weekend, a lead and sign up for the weekend, started setting up their quiz funnel on there, on the platform. Monday, they booked a call with a salesperson, and then Tuesday, they close that deal for a five grand a month. Their sales cycle is usually like six months.
39:14
Ramli John
And, and everybody was like, what the heck? It went from six months to like a couple of days for us to close this. There's this misconception that he's, he told me that he only small businesses, prefer product-led. When he said, even people who are expecting are looking to pay for a huge, budget on a monthly basis, they want to try something out first before they actually make that big purchase. Yeah. There's a great story from then on. They started like grabbing up more salespeople who are pursuing product qualified leads, and really wrapping up their freemium offering without, so that was just a great story they heard from him.
39:57
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. Great stories, great stories. So, I just want to say, like, thanks for coming on, firstly. That we're not wrapping up like quite yet, but I did want to bring it back to, what you guys are doing, especially like what you have achieved. I wanted to kind of let people understand like where your background comes on and how you fit into the ecosystem and the community you guys are creating. Why don't we talk about product lead first and what that is then let's then like lead straight into your books. Cause like we could just make that a seamless conversation and then let's take it from there. It's a start with a platform and an unfinished what of books on?
40:39
Ramli John
Sure. Yeah, we, when we, our product, that's a funny way to put it where, we call it stuff now on more of an education and community, a company where we really built one of the largest, our slack community around product-led. For people to ask, it was super active. A lot of people ask questions. I think we have now 99,000 people in that community. We're even ramping up new you rewards program. That's coming up for that community and ongoing webinar Wednesday series that hopefully will start very soon to share really like to evangelize and talk about and share about product-led growth as a go-to-market approach. We also have this training program now that we help, train share and educate people on the foundational stuff to building a successful world-class product line business. That's a six-week program that runs, yeah, for six weeks.
41:39
Ramli John
The next one is coming up is in November, 2021. We usually do that three to four times a year. And super excited about that. Yeah.
41:48
Paul Sullivan
I mean, I'll back that, right? Just before you jump into the books, I will back that I've done it. It's not like, 20 people, there was like a hundred or so in the cohort where it's a big it's collaborative. You definitely learn a lot. I felt that the people that were there, everyone was there to kind of commit, they weren't there to take. They, they came, they contributed and I felt that it was a really good experience.
42:15
Ramli John
For sure. I think they are. I mean, we you're Sasha one of the best students.
42:23
Paul Sullivan
I'm not sure it's true, but definitely take it. But, yeah. Obviously what, what follows is you've you guys have both written a book, right. So let's dive into that. I mean, just before you do that, I just find the components up and you can see that this one's kind of a BM red and this one's yet to be read, but, I mean,
42:50
Ramli John
Thank you so much. That's a good shout out. Yeah. I mean, was Bush, he wrote, the first one product, like growth book two years ago. It was two years in June. What really follows from that book was the ArcLight onboarding where he had, he dedicated one chapter in his book, all about onboarding and people kept asking him about it. We find often that's usually the first thing people ask companies that are making the shift from sales, that the product lead that's one of the first things that they start asking about first. We, then we put together this, the second book or onboarding and the frameworks that we have are on helping people improve their user onboarding experience.
43:35
Paul Sullivan
Cool. Cool. So, just to kind of bring this full circle on, it's a question I haven't asked until you just said what you said, are you guys still consulting outside of product lead with companies?
43:49
Ramli John
That's like, we are, so we're not necessarily a consulting company anymore, but there is something that we are working out where we have this certificate program, right. It teaches people the foundation, but we've seen companies once again been Desto where they've been at it for two to three years, six weeks for our course, doesn't necessarily, I mean, sure. You're going to learn all the foundational stuff, but one of the things that we're working on is, around some kind of coaching program where we can help people, with coaches that are we're vetting, that can help people really answer the questions, give them more confidence around implementing those changes. Do they have?
44:36
Paul Sullivan
Okay, cool. Cool. Well, listen, Ramli, it's been a good 45. I think there's been a lot of, good information in there and you've shared a few golden nuggets for us. Anyone that gets to see this on a replay, it's a shame that you weren't here to see it. And, I'm going to keep running these LinkedIn lives because I feel like if you really want to learn, come and speak to the people that have done it and be here. I know for some people, in the UK might be a bit late, but obviously I've got to cater for the speaker as much as I got to cater for the audience. We'll be repaying this AR as a video straight off of the company page, but rarely, the course. Great. Where do people go to sign up for the course?
45:20
Ramli John
Yeah, they can just go to the product led growth or product line.com. They should find the link stereo. It's our primary call to action. Now let's run this course that we have.
45:31
Paul Sullivan
Oh, and you mentioned the foundation, there's actually like a, there's a foundation calls before the six week course. Right. You can do.
45:38
Ramli John
Yeah. There's a free course, available. You can check it out as a product-led growth fundamentals that people can check out. And it's also available on product.com.
45:50
Paul Sullivan
Brilliant, brilliant. Before I go, is there any one last piece of information that you think would be beneficial that I didn't cover?
45:58
Ramli John
Yeah. I mean, it really, like, it goes back to this culture around driving, like aligning everybody around, use the user success, and there's a lot of ways to do that. One of the ways that I've seen, and this is somebody I'm still stealing, borrowing from Andrew Kaplan, he's the least lead up growth at postscript Wistia, and then HubSpot, where like he would do like a full story Friday where he would just watch their users sign up for the product. He would invite anybody from engineering, product sale, even sales. Like you really want to shift this culture now around celebrating success. That was one example. Another example I've seen is I got a chance to talk to the head of growth at Miro is this collaboration tool. One of the things they do for like a company meetings where like all hands on deck, they would actually invite customers and to tell their stories into their, literally like when the pre-pandemic they would invite them into their office and they would share their stories on how they're using mural.
47:04
Ramli John
Imagine as an engineer or a product person, or as a product, like when you're so far away from the customer, you seeing the stories gets you excited and gets you more pumped up about the impact that you're doing. The use, this one thing and the success you're building into your customers. Anytime that you can, that's exactly where I was start. If you're thinking about becoming more product-led, tying back to stories and success of your customers to ensuring that within your organization. I think that's just one thing, final parting words that I, that would give to everybody.
47:39
Paul Sullivan
Brilliant. Thanks a lot. Like I really appreciate you coming on board. I'm sure we'll be in touch. I know we're trying to sort some other things out in the background, so again, I appreciate you coming on and thanks for all the information you shared today. Thanks so much. Take care.