My name is Kyle Poyar. I'm an operating partner and I help our portfolio companies
accelerate their revenue growth. Openview is a venture capital firm
investing in expansion stage software businesses.
We've invested in awesome companies like Datadog,
Expensify, UserTesting and Workfront.
We have a major focus in investing in product-led businesses
and we believe that's the future of how companies are going to build software products.
At Openview, we were looking at the patterns of our most successful portfolio companies
and they were growing in a completely different way than the traditional SaaS playbook.
So back in 2016,
we really studied these companies,
how they succeeded, what were the most common stumbling blocks.
And we called it product-led growth and started creating community around it.
Product-led businesses have been outperforming their peers,
both in the public markets
and their private markets and more than half of recent IPOs are now
product-led businesses. Product-led growth is all about focusing
on the end user, delivering value really quickly to that end user
and then scaling from user to team to organization-wide.
That's the real opposite of traditional software patterns,
where folks built expensive products that are hard to use.
It focused really exclusively on the executive buyer at the expense of everyone else
that was actually using the product. Product-led growth isn't just a pricing strategy.
It's not about freemium, it's not about free trials,
it's about an end user focus growth model where the product is front
and center in how you acquire, attract, activate, convert ,and expand your customers.
And absolutely free products are a major part of that
so that folks can try before they buy and you're leading with the product experience.
People often think of product-led growth as anti-sales.
I mean if you can buy via self service without a sales rep,
what is the role of sales? I'd argue that sales is really important
but it acts differently in a product-led business compared to a traditional software company.
It's a good product-led growth sales is actually taking that
customer that started their journey via self service
and helping guide them to a shared promised land
that is recognizing, what is possible with the software,
why they might want to adopt it with more people and helping them
unlock barriers or friction points that get in the way of rolling it out more widely.
You need to design pricing
and packages that allow folks to see real value before the paywall
and that allows you to scale
as folks adopt the product from an individual user to a team to company-wide.