Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Leo Bosuener founder of a product launch agency specializing in Product Hunt shares his career journey from freelancing as a B2B consultant to focusing on product launches. He emphasizes the importance of aligning product, sales, marketing, and customer success teams for a successful go-to-market strategy. Leo discusses the iterative nature of go-to-market efforts, the role of clear messaging and case studies, and the value of patience and continuous learning.
Listen to the podcast here:
Product Hunt Launch Secrets: A Conversation with Leo Bosuener
Signature question: How do you view and define go to market?
Yeah. Great question. I really like that as an opener. So I think the success, well, the essence of a successful go-to-market strategy lies in the seamless coordination between product, sales, marketing, and customer success teams to deliver a unified customer experience. So I think, like all of those are super critical and vital. And before, I think it’s very important to like before you even consider like whether you’re ready to go to market, I think it’s super important to consider your target audience, defining your product’s unique value proposition, and then selecting the most appropriate sales and marketing channels. That’s something that we obviously work on quite a bit and then also ensuring exceptional customer support. So we’ve seen it too many times where products prepared for the GTM but didn’t have their customer success teams dialed in.
And then that can lead to all sorts of issues, right? And ultimately, I think your go-to-market strategy isn’t a one-time effort, but more like a dynamic process that evolves with your business and market conditions over time.
Oh my God, I think you are one of the rarest or fewest guests on the podcast who has literally taken all the right elements of go-to-market. You covered the alignment between product marketing and sales, and you didn’t mention customer support and success earlier, but you added in very appropriately. You also mentioned ICP, and then you also hit the most important point, which is it’s not a one-time effort, it’s an iterative thing.
Exactly. I fully agree with you, and I really appreciate the feedback from an expert just like yourself.
Yeah. And I mean, I listen to and I hear and learn from founders, marketing leaders, product leaders, and revenue leaders. And it’s pretty much along the lines of what you stated earlier. But more often than not, they leave 1 or 2 components.
When they shared their thought about go to market. But this is the message of the essence of the podcast, which is my little effort in trying to promote or amplify the message that go to market and encompasses all these functions. And it’s not a one time. It’s an iterative, ongoing process.
Yeah. Fully agree. And just like I said, like we see that so many times that companies only focus on like let’s say two functions, like only sales marketing, but they forget about like customer success and like product teams or they only focus on like product and customer success, but then they forget to like, consider sales and marketing and like how to kickstart the engine for growth. So I think all of them are equally and crucially important.
Yeah. Very cool. Let’s zoom out a bit. Why don’t you talk to us about your career journey and what led you to start your own agency that turned Product Hunt? I mean, it’s a very unique space. So really curious about learning your journey and what they do to what you’re doing today.
Yeah, happy to dive in. So after college, I bounced around from like a few larger organizations until I decided that working for, like, large corporations wasn’t really my thing. So then I actually started freelancing as a B2B consultant. And in the beginning, I just I mean, like anyone who’s like, early on doesn’t really know what they’re doing. I focus on, like, anything and everything, like any kind of growth channel that I could deploy to drive traffic and user signups. So I focused on creating content, SEO, and PPC, mostly for like B2B, and SaaS companies until I realized, like if you’re trying to focus on everything, most likely you’re not going to like, master any particular thing. And a recurring topic that we saw and that we had like SaaS companies reach out to us and repeatedly request help for were like product launches and like general like product launches, right? So you can obviously do like the PR angle, which is something that we’ve done in the past, or like for example, like content, and like announcements, as I mentioned as well.
But we realized that we had really good success for a very particular type of company when it comes to like launching their own product. And so then we decided to like niche down and only focus on offering product launch services on the product and as a platform specifically. And I’ve been running with that ever since.
Very cool. Yeah, it’s a typical, again, go-to-market scenario, right? It’s a best practice, which is. Yes. Ideally, you would want to lock in on a niche and an audience and a problem, a specific one. But it’s super hot early days. You want to spread your wings and then figure out and then iterate. And what you’ve done so well is okay now. Yes. Growth B2B, absolutely. But then Product Hunt and for startups.
Exactly. And again, like we still like I speak to dozens of founders every single week just to see where they’re at and whether they’re like, what channel is the right channel for them to to launch on and get more traction, and visibility from.
Right. And often we recommend things that are not in line with our service. So sometimes we make recommendations to start up with content. Or we even have like people reaching out to us that have more of an SLG strategy rather than a plg strategy. And if it’s anything SG related, I’m like, hey, just focus on like content and outbound and on like PPC platforms rather than doing something like Product Hunt. So it really comes down to what the company is what its needs are and what its strategy and approach are obviously as well.
Yeah. So I just want to dig into some of the other aspects of how you shaped or how your career trajectory got shaped. in so many ways. Right? Yes. so one critical thing that you did mention is you’re not a large company guy. So yeah, no go on your own. So kudos to that. Not many people realize. And even if they realize not many people have the courage to make that decision and jump.
Yeah. I’m actually curious at some point to hear your background on that as well.
But yeah, what I’ve noticed is that I’m way more excited to be in the startup space where things are like super fast-paced and constantly evolving and changing. And if you’re working like a large corporation, if you might have done that in the past, you know how slow things are. And like if you want to push things forward, if you have like really cool new ideas, like it’s so frustrating to get anything done. And within startups like for better or for worse, they move really quickly, right? That might also then include like frequent pivots depending on where you at in your journey. But I enjoy that environment and the fast-paced like respect aspects of it a lot more.
Yeah for sure. I mean, yeah, sharing my experience and perspectives as well. Definitely. What you did mention aligns with what motivated me to go down the path of doing things on my own, which is large companies. It’s good, it’s scale, but at the same time, as an individual, you can only do so much that’s within your control.
A lot of the things are not within your control, and it’s an entirely different skill set. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an entirely different skill set to influence larger groups or other teams within a large corporation. yeah. For better or worse, it is what it is. But for me, I enjoy the fast pace and a lot of learning as well. I mean, that’s the other thing that I look forward to is learning at a quick pace, doing new things versus the same thing repeatedly over and over. So some of these things got me attracted to working and moving more towards the early stage and younger companies.
Yeah, 100% agree with you there. I feel like every time I stop learning, like when I’m at like the learning curve is starting to plateau, I feel like it’s time for me to start doing new things and not that’s a bad thing, but I feel like many people in larger organizations, they sometimes they at certain times just become more comfortable where they’re at and they’re like, they stop pushing the boundaries and like the envelope and like what’s possible.
They’re just like, we’ve been doing this for like, such a long time. It works. It doesn’t work great, but we’ll just stick with this for an hour, right?
Yeah, absolutely. So then you transition into B2B as a B2B growth expert. So what was that process like, especially like how did you get your initial set of clients, what kind of projects did you do, and so on?
Yeah. Great question. So for us, the way that I approached it in the past is that when you’re starting something like a consulting company or like an agency, it’s more like a sales growth engine. Right? So, so what are the things that you can do? A lot of it would be like targeted outbound using like lead intelligence platforms and really having a good grasp of who it is that you want to be going after and who would find the most value in the services that you propose. And that’s something that’s actually still super valuable for us nowadays, in the sense that we have a pretty strong lead prequalification mechanism, like when we take on new clients like we need to make sure that they are 100% sure like of who their target users are and that they’ve tested everything extensively.
So yeah, that’s essentially like how I started the agency that we did like a ton of like, targeted outreach. And then it’s just a matter of like conversion rates, right? Like, how many people do you have to get in front of until someone says yes? We’re very fortunate that the more we honed in on our offer, that’s the higher response rates became. And so then nowadays, like, we’re pretty well known in the space, and now we have a lot of inbound and we still do outbound. And then we obviously do content as well.
Very cool. Yeah. So inbound outbound and content. So they’ll say different channels and then of course reference. Clearly it’s a big channel for you guys. Exactly. Yeah. So curious. Like what is the iteration process like? And your thought process in terms of assessment. and how did you narrow it down to, hey, Product Hunt offer is the one that we need to do, like walk us through that iteration process? Yeah.
Great question.
So the first consideration was results like how can we produce results in the most efficient and quickest manner possible. And then also like what does the competition look like. Right. So if you’re offering like SEO services for SaaS companies, that’s a that’s a red ocean. Like that’s very tricky to get any traction in that market. Right.
Like I mean you don’t see results right away. It takes long to see any traction.
And the thing is, with startups like we just discussed, they move really quickly and they have little patience. So telling an early stage like precedes B2B SaaS company like, hey, we’re going to need like half a year until you got to get any significant amount of traction from your SEO endeavors, then, yeah, it’s going to be a hard sell. Right. And so then the thing is, like with the other channels, like let’s say you consider like PPC, like paid ads and Google or LinkedIn or any other platforms. Those are pretty capital-intensive.
And again, that’s not something that all early-stage startups have access to. And so then when we tried out all these different channels, at some point we realized when we focused on like launches on like indie hackers or content promotions on Reddit or let’s say, Product Hunt, you could drive results relatively quickly. By quickly, I mean still like a month of preparation, right? But a month is better than six months for SEO. And that the results were actually, like, really good when it comes to a CPA perspective. So like cost per acquisition, like how much do you have to pay for a new user? Sign up if you’re running LinkedIn ads versus how much it would cost you if you consider and factor in the time that your team needs to prepare for a successful launch and like how many users you can get from it. But it really depends on like what your product is. So for example, nowadays when we have inbound queries from, let’s say B2C companies like something like a, like an I travel product, right?
For those types of companies, we still recommend focusing on other channels, like yes, you could still get something out of launching on Product Hunt, but for something that’s more like consumer-facing, we recommend hey, like try influencer marketing on TikTok depending on what the product is. Absolutely right.
Yeah. I mean, that actually brings me to my next question. I mean, there are so many besides the more quote-unquote traditional acquisition or awareness channels, which we talked about, like SEO, PR, and a bunch of others. You also mentioned the new, quote-unquote, new-age channels like influencer Reddit. Those are all new and upcoming. So, yeah. What was your experience like and why did you focus on product only versus influencer TikTok or Reddit?
Yeah, so I think it comes down to who we prefer working with. So like our ideal clients are like considered like Slack, Asana, and Notion these guys but super early on. Right. But those types of products. Whereas if you would want to go after clients that might be interested in like influencer marketing campaigns on TikTok.
It’s going to be more like B2C travel, saving apps, or anything that you can market to consumers directly, and we just enjoy it more like the productivity, like SaaS space. We also like I’m a big fan of like sales enablement platforms, sales intelligence platforms, or any kind of productivity tools. Like I’m a massive fan and user of like super human email. Like that’s probably one of my favorite tools that I came across on Product Hunt. So yeah, that’s the clients and the companies that we focus on and that we enjoy working with the most.
Right. Cool. Yeah. Good stuff. So I think that’s a good segue into like, who are your quote-unquote ideal clients, like who should reach out to you and what should they expect?
Yeah. Great question. So we typically focus on serious startups that have a PLD motion. So as I mentioned early on like we’ve tested lots of different approaches and we’ve looked at the results between PLD versus SLG. Plg is definitely our bread and butter.
That’s where we can derive the best results. And we make sure that, like everyone that we get in a call with and where we’re trying to figure out like, hey, is this actually a good fit just yet? We see what the onboarding flow looks like and whether it’s like streamlined. We’ve made sure basically we ask our clients like, hey, how many people have you gone through this? Because we want to make sure that, like, if you’re actually launching on product and, and you open the floodgates, that there aren’t like bugs that are happening on the back end, and then all of a sudden you get a ton of like, negative user feedback. So yeah, we try to incorporate a holistic approach between like consulting on the front end and then also making sure that like the client is actually ready and getting the assets ready and everything on the back end.
Got it. So there is a qualification process to see that if I mean a couple of ways. One is to see if you are the right agency for the CDA series a company.
That’s one. The other one is product. If Product Hunt is the right channel and if now is the right time, there are quite a few things. So walk us through the checklist. So if I’m a series A founder and I’m trying to figure out the next growth hack, if you will walk me through like a checklist of what to expect and what to do?
Yeah. Great question. So fully transparent. Right from the beginning, we typically turn down like 70% of the people that we talk to, not for like malicious reasons, but just because we want to make sure that they are in the perfect state to get the most out of it. Right. Like for us, it’s we follow, not necessarily like a hard sell approach, but more like a consultative selling where we’re trying to figure out like, hey, is this the right solution for you at this moment in time, could be the right solution for you, but maybe like the next quarter, right? So the first thing that we take a look at is like as I mentioned before, like what your onboarding flow looks like and what it is like on your website.
Can I come to your website? And social media users nowadays have very short attention spans, not just in production but also on other platforms. So if someone comes to your website, is your marketing copy is so concise that within 10s they can immediately understand what your product does and who it serves. Yeah, and let’s say if I’m in the target market, would I want to sign up right away? Right. So superhuman is like an example of that. Like I come across that website and I’m like, yep, sign me up. And so that’s the first thing. Then the second thing on the call, we ask them like what other marketing channels they’ve tried already. Because for us, it’s important that you’ve experimented a little bit and you ideally have like a few results already. So if you’ve tried outbound, what do your response rates look like? If you’ve tried PPC, what your cost per acquisition, what is your cost per acquisition look like? And based on those metrics, we can then make recommendations on whether a product and launch would be the logical next step, or whether we recommend trying other channels first.
So if I talk to startups that haven’t done any marketing just yet, we typically recommend like depending on what the product is like, hey, try influencer campaigns, try organic approaches or anything else first, and then finally, if they’ve tried other channels, they have a very smooth, self-serve onboarding flow. Their website copy is crisp and clean, they have a few hundred users on the product and there are no bugs. Then we are able to help them.
Yeah. So clearly you’ve gone through so many iterations of the discovery process. You know, what are who is the ideal client? And when is the right time for them to invest in Product Hunt?
Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. Very cool. So one question. Are you solo or do you have a team?
No, we have a team of five full-time employees.
Very cool. And like when you are building out your team like this is more of an agency growth approach or a question like, at what point in time did you realize that, hey, I need to build out or hire maybe freelancers or a team? Yeah.
And what are the roles like?
Actually very early on. So obviously, like anytime you have like an agency, you typically hire like customer success managers first because depending on how many clients you have at some point it’s just like a bandwidth issue, right? Yeah. And then after that, we hire like partnership advisors. So people who were really good at trying to figure out like, hey, what are the companies that we wanted to go after and how can we create synergies with, let’s say, VC funds so that they would send us their portfolio companies? So that was an important step as well. And nowadays is like just building more of what we already have. So more customer success people more marketing assistance and more partnership advisors and strategic advisors for partnership collaborations.
Very cool. More on a lighter note. What does your family think? What do you do for a living?
So okay, for them just venturing into like founder territory, like starting your own thing, right, is something that is hard for them to grasp. Yeah. And then what we do specifically, I think they would just say like he’s in tech and leave it at that is my assumption.
Very cool. Yeah. And did he have any friction or challenges? Hey, why not go the employee route versus why are you starting your own thing?
Luckily I did not. So my family was very supportive when I left the corporate world and I wanted to start my own thing, that they trusted me and they’re like, okay, well, we don’t have any experience in it, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out. So I was very fortunate in that regard that my entire family was supportive and didn’t hold me back on anything.
Very cool. So something that you said earlier actually caught my attention, Leo, in terms of, I think one of the important criteria that you mentioned, whether CS, a company can be successful on Product Hunt, is a solid website with a clear marketing message, a clear copy.
And because if you’re talking about Plg, it has to be very evident for the individual user to see if this product is right for me or not, whether I should invest my time in even signing up for the free trial. So flipping things, I checked your website, and social growth labs, and very impressed with the way you thought about it, designed it, the content, and messaging. So walk us through your approach to designing redesigning or developing the message, the copy, the visuals, the resources, and so on for your own website.
Yeah. Great question. So for us, we want to focus on our like users in mind like the ICP that we’re going after, which are B2B and B2C SaaS companies that follow Plg. One of the main things that I mentioned earlier is that people nowadays have very little time. So we want to make sure that like we put our main marketing message at the very top, above the fold without having to scroll. And I think that’s true for the greatest SaaS companies today.
I think like Calendly actually does a fantastic job at that. So there’s Monday, like a few of the tools that do a really good job where they position their marketing message right at the very top. And then we want to go right into like, what is it that you can get out of using our service? Or let’s say if you’re a SaaS company, like, what can you expect from the product? What are the pain points that users typically face? And then we just focus on case studies, because that’s the main thing that that our clients want to see is what we’ve found, and we’ve dissected them between B2B and B2C case studies. And we’ve seen by using tools where you can essentially track like heatmaps on your website, where most people like click on what they check out. And it’s literally they spend 30s reading the main value proposition on our homepage. Then they click for two minutes to five different case studies, and then they book a call. and we do have like tons of free resources on our website as well.
But few people read that. It’s literally just like, what can I get out of this? Is this relevant to me? Who else has used this before and what results have they seen? And then users or clients decide whether it’s relevant for them and book a call or not.
Yeah. So in a nutshell, what you’re saying is what really is helping, at least in your sales process, is a clear messaging in the hero section. That’s the first thing on the top level of the site. That’s one. The second is case studies, because everyone wants, sociologists that that’s very critical and then schedule a meeting or book a call. It’s those exact things.
We’ve also tried to pay attention that we select very different case studies because if you scroll through some of them, you can actually see that there are some startups that we’ve worked with that have received hundreds, if not thousands of signups. And then there are startups that we’ve worked with that have received dozens of signups, but all of them considered it a success depending on what their product was.
Because if you’re selling a B2B enterprise solution, which again, is not what we typically work with, but we have tried it a few times in the past and their contractor values are like thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then even if you have like 20 leads, that’s a great success. Whereas if you’re selling like a, like a SaaS, where the freemium model is like a 999 paid plan, then you’re going to need like a few thousand signups to, to make it work.
Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah, I’d like to take maybe a minute or two just to go through the copy and the messaging on your website. And this is more for the listeners as well. I’ll be reading out snippets of it because. So on the home page up front. You mentioned Product Hunt Marketing Agency, so it’s very clear what you do. And below that, in the subtext you mentioned, increase your user sign-up by up to 300% and gain brand awareness, increasing revenue.
So it’s a very clear value proposition and what someone should expect when they work with you and your agency. So that’s really key. And then the text that you have in the bowl over there, we are 100% performance-based. If you don’t get your results we don’t get paid. That’s a bold statement. That’s a bold offer. That’s a bold guarantee.
Yeah. This is actually so for my background in performance marketing. Right. So when I was a B2B consultant focusing on growth, I was always performance-based because my notion is like, I only want to get paid when I deliver results. And so when I did this, traditionally speaking in, let’s say, P2P and PPC plays, I would charge profits like a percentage of the profit rather than like a flat retainer because anyone can charge a flat retainer and not drive profits. But if I’m driving profits and I’m taking like 5 to 10%, then that worked really well. And so we continue to have this model going forward.
Very cool.
And did you write the copy yourself?
Yeah. And we did this. And this is again what we recommend our clients do. So typically the products and the teams that we work with, they’re building for like a few years and just working on the product. Right. But we always want to make sure that they’ve informed all of their like whatever they’re building, whether it’s like new features or like the whole product, the way it’s designed, that it’s all been informed by customer feedback, right? So we’ve been on like thousands of calls, and we have tried to figure out what are the main things that our clients are looking for and what are the main things we can help them achieve. And the first one was always like brand awareness and early adopter feedback. Again, early-stage startups. The second is just to drive traffic and signups. And then the third one is to get in front of tech bloggers, influencers, and investors. So like the PR angle. And so we try to embed that in the copy at the very top of our website.
Pretty cool. And did you do an exercise of hey, I’m looking at all your discovery calls, customer case studies, and even recordings like how did you arrive at those like 4 or 5 sentences?
Yeah, we do actually. So within RCM, we have like custom activities where we plug in. What is it that the people are looking for? What is it that they’ve tried so far? What is it that they want to try going forward? And then we’ve just analyzed all the data across thousands of calls and categorized it in what is most important to our clients, and then used that to inform our marketing.
Very cool. All right. Switching gears, so another popular segment for this podcast and for the listeners is a go-to-market success story and a go-to-market failure story. So if you can share, you clearly have tons of case studies. So I’d love to hear a success story and a failure story. That’d be great.
Yeah, sure. So when it comes to a success story, we’ve worked with a company called did they essentially have generative AI agents? I personally love the product because that’s one of the things that I’m most excited about when it comes to using AI.
Essentially, using generative AI avatars and agents to help facilitate the process on customer success teams and cost-poor teams and streamline the process, reducing the query times and just getting better responses quickly. So essentially, they have a few different products. They’ve been around for a bit now, and one of the launches that was very successful is this avatar feature where you can embed it on your website, and then you feed it with your company’s knowledge base, and instead of having to come to a website and chatting with like an intercom chat agent, which those things can be automated or human powered. You are essentially chatting with an AI avatar, which those things can be quite fun, and if they’re fed by the entire knowledge base of the company, then chances are that you’re going to have your questions answered way faster than if you’d have to wait on, like, a human-powered intercom chat. So that went really well. And again, like for them, if you consider go to market, they’ve had everything dialed in from their sales team, their marketing team, their product team, and their customer success team.
So it was actually quite easy for us to work with them because they were so well prepared. And then when it comes to failures. So I wouldn’t necessarily consider anything a failure. I just consider it like a learning experience. I don’t think I wouldn’t want to consider like that, that we’re failing in life. I feel like it’s either we win or we learn something. And I think the learning piece is actually quite crucial because if you don’t learn if you never fail, that means you’re not experimenting enough, you’re not trying enough new things. And so we try new things all the time. And that often comes with like, well, learning lessons. Right? And those are super important for us because we have this model that everyone’s allowed to fail, but ideally not more than once, because we want to make sure that you learn from, every failure and like a valuable lesson. So one of the most important lessons that we’ve learned throughout our journey of, like advising companies on launching a product hunt, is like, what works well? Is it plg or is it SLG? In the beginning, we didn’t have any idea, so we tried a lot of slow approaches.
None of them works. So actually there it took like 2 or 3 times until that lesson really sunk in. But nowadays we refrained from taking on any clients that have slow motion because we just know it won’t work on Product Hunt as the platform.
Very cool.
Yeah, again, I mean, so many of our thought processes aligned over here. Leo, in terms of the way you rephrased, there’s nothing like a failure. It’s more like feedback and a learning experience. so kudos to you for highlighting that value. And also it looks like that’s a core value within your team as well. So kudos to you for that. So appreciate that. Going back to the success story and the failure story, let’s dig in a little bit more into each of those. So what was the duration like the approach in terms of what you had to do in terms of coaching them and what they had to do in terms of preparing like a list and driving virality if you will?
Yeah. So for the success story, like the first thing again, that we do, like on any other intro call is figuring out like what other marketing channels they’ve tried before and what results they’ve seen.
And for them, they’ve actually done like a few different channels. Anything from like content, influencer marketing, paid marketing, and SEO. And, for that company, they actually wanted to use the product primarily for the brand awareness that they would get from it because they’ve had so many other channels that drove a significant amount of user signups already. Like I always considered, if you’re getting like, let’s say, 2 to 5000 new users per month already, then launching a product might not necessarily be worth your time if you’re doing it only for the user signup perspective. If you’re doing it for brand awareness, sure, then that still makes sense because you’re not going to get the same credibility, social proof, and like brand recognition from running ads on LinkedIn that you would get from a successful product and campaign. Right. and then we worked with that team to make sure that the assets that they had already on file for other social media platforms, that we would format for the product and audience, because, again, production users, they’re very tech-savvy, and there are a lot of them are early adopters.
So they want to come to a product, understand it right away, understand whether it’s relevant for them or whether it isn’t. Then come to the home homepage, check it out, sign up, get started, try it out, and ideally do all of that within like a 5 or 10-minute time span. Then they come back to the product and provide valuable feedback. So we just had to make sure that like their onboarding flow was optimized for the product and the experience that users expect on the platform. And that was it. And then we basically helped them spread the message across various social channels. That’s part of our main value proposition. And again, like one of the key things here that I always tell to our clients, if you’re a big company, you have like a decent-sized email list. So like anything over like 5000 subscribers, an email is what you really want to do make sure that if you want to leverage those folks to support you for your product launches, that they’re properly warmed up in advance.
You don’t want to be blasting a list of 5000 email subscribers on the launch day and say like, hey, we’ve launched on product, and come support us because that will definitely backfire. So we basically help our clients as well, like warming up their audiences if they have any.
How long was the warmup time like, what are the steps like for the warmup? What you mentioned is very critical. Yeah. The launch. Yeah.
Yeah. So we do require like a lead time of one month. Got it. And then, for the failures. So the SLG, approaches that we’ve tried in the past. It’s essentially the same process in the sense that we’ve made sure that the onboarding flow, which for SLG usually requires like a call that was pretty streamlined. Again, I’m pretty sure like the people behind it. Calendly, they would know all about it, like what it means to have like a streamlined booking experience. And there are so many SLG companies that still don’t have that right, which is quite fascinating to me.
But we made sure that it can be that it was as optimized as it could be for SLG and that the assets were optimized on Product Hunt. But what we failed to consider, what we didn’t know at the time, is that few users, on the product hand, will actually have the patience to sign up for a call and then wait three days until they can actually speak to a sales rep and then understand the tool. And by that time, no one would come back to Product Hunt and provide feedback. So that’s why those approaches typically don’t work as well.
I mean, sharing some of my own personal experiences when I was at a company responsible for product-led growth and overall growth at a series B startup. One of the things we did was so prior to my joining the role, we were primarily inside sales lead go-to-market notion. And the pivot idea was to go from that to plg. So my message to the team was always the points that you mentioned, Leo, which is if you are really serious about product growth and if you’re driving decent traffic.
We were like 300 to 500 a week, recent traffic coming on to sign up for the product, but it’s really critical for that user to see the value, ideally on the same day or the next day. After that, you lose them. They lose you. Yeah. That’s it. It’s over.
And they’re also trying to layer on sales assistance. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t call it a sales lead even though this is the thing. Right. The startups this is where I really feel that the mindset of the leadership team is really critical. Yeah, especially if you’re transitioning from sales lead to product lead or even sales assist product-led growth, it’s really critical to make sure that, hey, it’s not about delivering so much like a daily, weekly, monthly quota for your sales team. It’s about delivering value from a customer success perspective to enabling guiding and onboarding that free trial user initially.
Yeah, no, I agree. So many companies, just focus on getting the user signups, but then they lose them right after because they haven’t optimized and streamlined the onboarding.
And as you said, if you like, we consider like time to value. So how long does it take from the moment that the user signs up they get value out of the product? And if that takes more than a day, then again, you’ve lost the activity and the retention of that user. They would have signed up once, and they won’t be coming back if they don’t get the time to value immediately. And I feel like that’s just like a societal change in general. Like people nowadays just expect instant gratification. So if you sign up for something new you want to have like the shiny thing that you were coming for right away and you don’t want it to be delayed. Right.
Yeah. And it also actually is a prerequisite if your onboarding process and if you’re looking at the stats internally, the metrics of, hey, is your pretrial user getting value and converting to paid within ideally a week or less than that? Maybe if you’re not seeing those, maybe that’s an indication that you’re not really ready to push product growth so much.
And maybe the Product Hunt launch is not right for you at this time. Yeah.
Very cool.
All right. I know we are, reaching towards the end of our scheduled time. So switching gears here. What resources do you lean on to educate yourself about growth, product, and or maybe things outside of work?
Yeah. So good question as well as we both talked about already, I think both of us are pretty big fans of like continuous learning and personal development. So for me, I focus on listening to my favorite influencers and seeing what content they put out there. So, for example, I’m a big fan of like Lenny recently did a newsletter collaboration with him as well. I’m always staying up to date on what he’s sharing and honestly, like your podcast was great as well. I only recently discovered it when we started chatting with one another, but I think it’s so crucial to listen to industry leaders who come to podcasts and share their wisdom to understand like what’s working in different companies, right? Because sometimes, or I find it’s quite common that you’re just so heading down focusing on your own company, on your own startup, on your own endeavor, not paying attention to like, what’s happening around you.
But I think it’s quite important to understand, okay, what are the market trends like? What’s working for other people? And are there maybe some things that we can copy and try in our own startup to see whether that works the same way for us?
Very cool.
And yeah, the final question for you, Leo, is if you were to turn back, plug, and go back to day one of your go-to-market journey, what advice would you give to your younger self?
So I think, one of the things that I still struggle with in the state is just patience. So my main, my main recommendation to my younger self would be just to be more patient. If you know about the marshmallow experiment. tell me more.
About that, I don’t.
Know. So the marshmallow experiment, I think they ran it in the 60s at Stanford. I could be mistaken here. So. So don’t quote me on it. But it was essentially an experiment where they put kids in a room and they.
Yeah, I think I know what you’re talking about. Yeah, but for the listeners, just complete the story. Now I get it.
Okay, so they gave kids the choice to either have one marshmallow right now or let’s say the researcher left the room and he told the kids, like, if I come back in 20 minutes and you haven’t eaten your first marshmallow, you’ll get two. So that’s essentially like delayed gratification, which I seriously struggle with. So when it comes to like go to market strategies, just be more patient with like the lessons that I’m going to be learning. Because many times when I was learning lessons, I was like, man, this sucks. Like, why didn’t this work right now? And I was just frustrated at the moment. But I failed to consider that in the long run, this would teach me something very valuable so that it wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
Now, totally, 100%, right? I mean, there are so many things and advice you wish we could give to our younger self, and that’s definitely one of my things as well, is how to balance a sense of urgency and having patience.
Yeah, it’s a dichotomy. I mean, you need to have both every single day.
Agreed. Yeah. For sure. If you have too much patience, then whereas a sense of urgency. Right. And what gets you, like off the ground and get moving?
Yeah. And one of the things that I found interesting and curious to hear thoughts is especially when it comes to good market initiatives and experiments, more often than not, people want to talk about the KPIs like maybe it’s revenue take. I mean, let’s take revenue as an easy example everyone can relate to. Yeah, but so many steps have to fall in place. And that’s where I believe in looking at leading indicators. And then the revenues are a trailing indicator at the end of the day. Yeah for sure. Yeah I mean just go back goes back to yeah. The whole thing about patience is the leading indicator. Right. So I need to be patient to see that end result play out 100% degree.
And like like you said, like the leading indicators will tell you whether you’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing right now.
But if you’d only like to pay attention to revenue, then you wouldn’t be able to make any valuable decisions up until like a month after you tried a new initiative. Yep.