The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

20Product: The Secret to Successful Onboarding from Notion and Airtable, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make in PLG Today& Why 90% of Onboarding Today is Done Poorly with Lauryn Isford, Head of Product Growth @ Notion

Wed Jul 19 2023

Growth StrategiesGo-to-Market ApproachesUser OnboardingActivation MetricsGrowth RolesHiring StrategiesProduct LaunchesPerformance AssessmentProduct-Led Growth (PLG)Epo

Description

This episode covers various aspects of growth strategies, go-to-market approaches, user onboarding, activation metrics, growth roles and hiring strategies, product launches, performance assessment, and insights into the world of product-led growth (PLG). It emphasizes the importance of precision, detail-oriented customer value, and integrating PLG with sales-assisted motion. The episode also highlights the challenges and best practices in growth hiring, experimentation, and optimizing successful products. Additionally, it explores the emerging space of PLG in developer tools and the core investments in acquisition, onboarding, conversion, and monetization. The episode concludes with a mention of Epo, a tool for experiment performance analysis.

Insights

Growth teams should sit within product teams

To ensure better collaboration and quality control in early to mid-stage businesses.

Different approaches are needed based on product stage and company goals

Incremental gains may be enough for optimizing successful products.

Understanding what you're building for and how the product is doing is crucial

Metrics, results, and impact should be focused on in growth assessment.

Being smart and thoughtful about the first touchpoint with customers can bring in a certain profile of customer

This customer profile can be served throughout the entire sales funnel.

Referral programs have died down

Fewer people participate or refer others due to changes in incentives.

The biggest challenge of adding a sales-assisted motion to an existing PLG motion is managing the competition between the two motions

Trade-offs need to be made for the business.

Variable comp structures for growth could be explored further

Predictably delivering numbers while managing product changes is harder compared to working as a sales rep with a book of clients.

Collaboration by default has become more common in productivity tools

Building products that balance private spaces with multiplayer engagement is important.

Figma impressed with the launch of FigJam

A smart feature development that targeted a different market segment and complemented their existing product offerings.

Chapters

Growth and Go-to-Market Strategies
User Onboarding and Activation
Growth Roles and Hiring Strategies
Product Launches and Performance Assessment
Epo and Conclusion

Summary

Transcript

Growth and Go-to-Market Strategies

00:00 - 07:18

Growth is the practice of kick-starting, fueling, and scaling business outcomes by building mechanisms that accelerate growth.
Lauren Isford's experience on Dropbox's growth team taught her the importance of precision and detail-oriented customer value.
At Airtable, Lauren integrated product-led growth (PLG) and sales-assisted motion to optimize the customer journey.
For early-stage businesses, it is recommended to pick one go-to-market motion initially before exploring other options.
Experiment with different go-to-market strategies like wait lists, product-led motions, and sales hires.
Product-led motion allows users to experience the product and learn its value from within.
Sales teams focus on existing customers and selling additional value.
Efficiencies in having a product-led motion at the beginning due to a larger pool of potential customers.

User Onboarding and Activation

06:51 - 20:31

Onboarding is important for user success and activation rate.
Activation rate measures engagement/retention and early habit building.
Design patterns like tooltips can overwhelm users, so focus on relevant information.
Ask users what they're here for to understand their needs and reflect value back to them.
Time to value is critical in the first impression of a product-led motion.
Simplicity is better for user onboarding, but consider relevance and wow factor.
For heavy enterprise use cases, more thought may be needed in onboarding.
Loading screens in enterprise deployments should make the end user experience feel more simple.
Significant enterprise deployments may require human assistance in setup, but onboarding can still help move customers forward and make time with customer-facing teams more efficient.
Activation metrics should correlate with long-term retention and demonstrate both retention and sophistication.
Around 20% of customers should be able to reach the activation metric.
Narrow activation metrics tend to over-focus on what the company projects as value for the user, rather than measuring if the user has found value themselves.
It's helpful to do an exercise in correlation and causation to understand if early actions by users ultimately correlate with retention.
The perfect activation metric will evolve over time as your customer base changes.
A good retention rate for a U2B PLG motion is having the large majority of signups come back within the first seven days, roughly 15-20% of teams continue collaborating after a month, and somewhere around 10-20% of teams continuing to find value in the long term.
Common mistakes in user onboarding include using tooltips that define terms users don't understand, relying on checklists or passive opt-ins that have low engagement rates, and not being assertive enough in presenting educational material during onboarding.

Growth Roles and Hiring Strategies

13:29 - 27:26

Onboarding is more effective when it is visual, progressive, and experiential.
Progressively disclosing different pieces of the product over time can help customers focus on understanding important aspects.
In a product-led go-to-market approach, having someone focused on growth early on can deliver scaled impact.
The right tools for experimentation and data analysis are necessary for effective growth strategies.
Hiring for growth roles requires considering the goals of acquisition or improving return on users and revenue.
For acquisition-focused roles, hiring a growth marketer with data-driven marketing experience is ideal.
For roles focused on improving the core product, an engineer or someone comfortable interfacing with engineers is needed.
Finding someone who can do both marketing and engineering in a growth role is challenging.
Interviewing candidates for growth positions should involve giving them access to the product and asking for their ideas on how to improve growth strategies.
Red flags in interviewing include a heavy bias towards experimentation without substantial changes to the core product.
The biggest red flag is an overfocus on experimentation and optimization rather than making substantial changes to the core product experience.
Growth teams should sit within product teams in early to mid-stage businesses for better collaboration and quality control.
One mistake founders make in hiring for growth is assuming that best practices and experience in consumer growth will translate to SaaS, or vice versa.

Product Launches and Performance Assessment

20:09 - 46:53

Assessing and understanding the performance of a feature launch is important in growth.
Focus on metrics, results, and impact can be less central in other areas.
Missing a goal due to disproven hypothesis is valuable learning.
Missing a goal due to poor execution requires post-mortem analysis.
Growth teams aim for a 20% batting average in hitting goals.
Setting goals with a 70% hit rate ensures ambition and pragmatism.
Different approaches are needed based on product stage and company goals.
Incremental gains may be enough for optimizing successful products.
Understanding what you're building for and how the product is doing is crucial.
Experiment duration depends on user exposure and key signals of behavior change.
Investing in and advising startups helps gain insights into different growth tactics.
Being thoughtful about strategies that attract the right customers is important.
Being smart and thoughtful about the first touchpoint with customers can bring in a certain profile of customer that can be served throughout the entire sales funnel.
There is an emerging space in product-led growth (PLG) around developer tools, with new strategies to garner developer interest and bring them into products.
The speaker invests as an angel and meets companies through their work, specializing in PLG and providing advice and guidance on it.
Pessimism around investing in 2023 may not be warranted as there are many great companies currently.
More operators should consider being investors, but they need to understand why they're doing it and how it fits into their fulfillment formula.
The core investments of top-of-funnel acquisition, onboarding, conversion, and monetization have remained consistent over the past five years.
Referral programs have died down, with fewer people participating or referring others due to changes in incentives.
A growth leader starting a new role should spend three months learning about the business, studying data, talking to customers, attending sales conversations, and learning from colleagues at the company.
The biggest challenge of adding a sales-assisted motion to an existing PLG motion is managing the competition between the two motions and making trade-offs for the business.
It may be harder to predictably deliver numbers while managing product changes compared to working as a sales rep with a book of clients. Variable comp structures for growth could be explored further.
The Pinterest growth organization has been admired for its growth strategies. The Dropbox alumni network is also highly regarded for its transition into investors.
Collaboration by default has become more common in productivity tools over the past five to seven years. Building products that balance private spaces with multiplayer engagement will continue to be important.
Figma impressed with the launch of FigJam, a smart feature development that targeted a different market segment and complemented their existing product offerings.

Epo and Conclusion

46:29 - 47:02

Epo sits directly on top of your data warehouse and your North Star Matrix, giving you confidence in experiment performance and ease in conducting deep dives.
Companies like Draft Kings, ClickUp, Momentive, and Cameo rely on Epo to power their experiments.
No more extended analysis cycles needed to understand results.
An upcoming episode will feature Jean Denney, one of the leading CTOs in the business at Pla-