
Product-led Growth - yakkomajuri
https://posthog.com/blog/product-led-growth
======
katzgrau
Wow, do _not_ take this advice. This must have been written by someone with
little to no skin in the game. I'm honestly surprised someone would post this.

The idea that a good product will sell itself is a developer's fantasy. Trust
me, I've been there and learned the hard way. Once I realized that sales and
marketing were the missing pieces, I began to build revenue and I'm well past
my first 1M. It only came after I made that change.

Every startup should focus on its inbound _and_ outbound strategies.

Inbound Marketing: Publish great content (blog posts, white papers, videos,
resources, things people will find genuinely useful) on your site and across
the web on topics related to your service so that users find you. Put the most
compelling resources behind a lead form that helps you qualify them as
potential buyers. This gets the user acquainted with you and also gives you
their contact info for follow up marketing or sales contacts.

Outbound Sales: Reaching out directly to the leads you have acquired (best
quality) or off some other list (lower, variable quality). Sometimes the
contact will be happy to engage and learn more. Other times not.

You can and will win sales from the inbound piece alone, especially if you
have a clear and efficient sign up process. But you'll find you can greatly
amplify the number of closed sales by reaching out to users and engaging them
directly. That human touch adds a whole new element.

There are many facets of sales and merketing but I wanted to lay out the most
important items, since taking the post's advice will almost definitely point
you in the wrong direction.

~~~
dnh44
We’ve got to 2M YRR with pretty much no sales and no marketing. We do talk to
customers but only when they initiate contact. We’re B2B though and the value
we provide can be easily communicated in five words.

~~~
simonswords82
Go on...

~~~
dnh44
Basically we built a product that didn’t exist, but knew our industry would
want, so people started talking about us as they found out. And those people
really wanted us to succeed which turned into early sales which allowed us to
fund development of the product.

We didn’t spend many resources on sales or marketing because we knew those
resources would be better spent on making a better product. For example I
spent a weekend making a static single page website a few years ago but I’ve
not logged into our google analytics account in at least over a year.
Inquiries come in through the website regularly still.

I think we’re pretty close to product/market fit now, so we should get a much
better return on sales/marketing efforts than we would have a couple years
ago.

I guess you could say that we knew the product wasn’t good enough for the
majority of our market but it was good enough for the early adopters who
really needed it, and we did just enough to make sure those people could find
us. I spent months of my life working with those early adopters to make sure
they didn’t regret their choice, and that helped guide the development of the
product as well as maintain goodwill in the community, which led to more word
of mouth sales.

Anyway take my story with a grain of salt because we’re not successful yet.

------
polote
This article is complete bullshit. It is based on the fact that they have been
successful at growing a saas company without sales team

Well they sell to SMB [1], of course they don't need sales, no SMB focused
company should have sales team. Try to sell SAP without sales people and write
an article about it ;)

This article is also saying that having a good product will prevent your from
needing a sales team, again this is false. The goal of a sales team is not to
convince customers that they should by your product. A salesperson is here to
listen to your needs and offer you something that match with that

If you are trying to start a company, please dont read this article

[1] [https://posthog.com/pricing?o=cloud](https://posthog.com/pricing?o=cloud)

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gizmodo59
Selling to any real enterprise that costs north of 100K is almost impossible
without a sales team (account executives, sales engineers). A lot of account
executives have relationships from their previous work and they get a meeting
through that. Look at any successful B2B startup like Okta, Mulesoft,
Servicenow and their sec filings. Sales spending is always higher than R&D.
It’s also assuming that your software is bug free and software engineers can
spend time doing poc, demos etc or they like doing that. As much as we can all
hate enterprise sales, just getting a contract from a large fortune company is
a big deal.

~~~
kochthesecond
My, albeit limited experience, does tell me it is hard to sell B2B without
dedicated sales people of some sort.

------
mrhektor
"The concept is based on the assumption that if you build something that is
useful and works well, the users will eventually come to you as result."

Sounds a lot like "Build it and they will come", which has been the death of
quite a number of startups. Certainly it's important to build something
amazing, but I think you ignore marketing and sales at your own peril. You
need someone looking at how a product is _perceived_ in the market, not just
how amazing _it is_.

------
gk1
You have a "Request Demo" button on your homepage. Who's going to give those
demos? Who's going to nurture past demo requesters to make sure their level of
interest only goes up after the demo, not down?

You mention an "Enterprise" option on your homepage and pricing page. Who's
going to do demos for all the stakeholders, uncover the company's pain points
and goals, handle dozens of questions and objections, fill out security
surveys, follow up to a bunch of times to make sure the deal is signed, and so
on?

Who's going to ensure you have a pipeline of enterprise deals to hit your
revenue goals?

When you're brand new, have a small team, and hardly get any enterprise leads,
it's easy for the CEO or CTO to do all of that. Don't assume you can continue
doing that forever if you have any ambition to grow.

------
flavor8
Tempting to believe, but it would be good to see some examples of B2B
companies who succeeded via this route. Posthog were founded this year,
according to Crunchbase, so this is a very young company to be giving concrete
strategy advice.

~~~
Phil-bitplex
Atlassian is one example that grew without a traditional sales team, having a
very low touch sales process

I think they are definitely the exception than the rule though

[https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-
atlassian-b...](https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-
built-a-20-billion-dollar-company-with-no-sales-team/)

------
notahacker
Always good to read marketing pieces about how a company is too focused on
their product to do any marketing.

------
Jugurtha
Sure, but that's like saying you don't need an airplane to go from point A to
point B just because you were able to walk anywhere hitherto. It _depends_.

You may not _need_ a sales team for distribution now, but that's due to
selection bias, the stage of the growth PostHog is at, and what PostHog does.
The product itself can be kept outside of the company's network, with a
Javascript snippet sending events to PostHog.

Some products make it that some clients, especially in sectors that are
heavily regulated or sensitive cannot just _start using_ the software, and
even if you don't need to engage them and reach them, somebody at some point
must _close_ even if it means greeting them at the door or formalizing a
purchase decision.

It may not be a sales team/sales rep, but they'll need to sit down with
someone and go over a few things, with legal, security, etc in order to green-
light the purchase.

Some enterprise clients are afraid you might be a company that's really an
agent of their competitor, and even if you're not, some clients may be afraid
that a competitor might buy you and access sensitive information. How much
this is true differs (sector, what the product does, etc.).

So, a product lead growth, great. I suppose there is an enterprise offering,
with maintenance involved. There is a CIO/CFO somewhere who has the authority
and/or purchasing power or who has the ear of someone who has either or both.

So, you don't need a sales team or marketing team or PR team right now, but
wishing all the best to PostHog and given the product adoption, you might need
them very soon. In fact, you probably already have them in the form of one or
many of your team-members who are dealing with enterprise clients.

Disclaimer: perspective shaped mainly from my context. Custom, turn-key, data
products for large organizations. From conversation, problem-statement, to
data connectors, learning subject matter, model training & deployment,
sometimes making hardware, and web application that goes with that for
acceptable figures. The demand is high and we became the bottleneck, so we
built a machine learning platform to make shipping these products way faster.
We're trying PostHog for usage data, too, so there's that!

------
raghava
\- May work for situations where the buyer is the user

\- Doesn't work for B2B/enterprisey products/SaaS, where often buyers and
users are separated by many levels of corporate hierarchies.

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KaoruAoiShiho
Product is definitely the most important, but somewhere in the piece it talks
about how marketing and sales become unnecessary, which is so dumb. Once your
funnel is optimized and working well marketing just becomes free money as
every cent you spend turns into dollars on the other end. But for most
companies where there is a lot of room to improve on the product, spending on
product should have more returns than spending on marketing.

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mathattack
Seems the article isn’t as black and white as the headline. Is the marginal
dollar better spent on engineering or sales and marketing? The answer varies
over the course of a product’s lifetime. The higher dollar value the purchase,
the more important sales becomes over time.

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gk1
The comments in this thread are a pleasant surprise. Glad to see the deserved
pushback to this article from people who've learned from experience that sales
and marketing play a crucial role in growing a B2B startup.

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sfifs
Did this startup founder just seriously make a case for their B2B product's
growth model with Facebook's B2C network effects based growth model?

Sounds like a company headed for
[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

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jim-jim-jim
>posthog.com

lol really?

