Merci Grace

Whether you thought about it consciously or not, you have already decided whether it is going to be product-led or sales-led. If it is the type of a solution that you need buy-in from the head of HR to use because you need to integrate with systems that have a lot of PII in them and no IC has the keys to that system at any size of a company, boom, you know have a sales-led motion.

If you have a product that even if it's for a specific function but anyone at any seniority level in that function could pick it up to use it, so DevTools are probably the most successful product-led growth companies that we don't talk about being product-led, but that's totally how they grow.

The other one that I don't hear people talk about very often is whether there's really day zero value in the tool. That is not something that is valuable if they've been using it for months. It is not something that can be product-led because there's product-led in one direction, there's product-led back out in that same direction.

I really like something that is not pasted on top of the experience but something that uses the product to teach someone else how to use the product.

Every pitch should start in the middle of the action, like a thriller or like a drama, like Mission Impossible movies always start with Tom cruise doing some crazy shit in the middle of the job right before the job that the actual movie is about because it gets your attention.

If you are going to say that you're the only founder that could start this company, or you have this really unique insight, start there. Even though it feels like you haven't built up to it yet, or anything like that, you don't have to, you'll backfill all of that later.

There is nothing broken about a 35 message one-on-one email conversation. It's totally fine. It's a series of letters back and forth. As soon as you add one more person to that, it gets a lot messier.

One of the best things, honestly, that the early founding team at Slack did and were able to give to those of us who followed them was the understanding that this is a tool for work. And that made thousands of small decisions instant and obvious.

The truth is for every week that you continue to let people use it, you get incrementally more people who do convert because their timing on buying your product has nothing to do with your schedule or how quickly you want revenue and everything to do with, where in the quarter is it for them?

I always make people do work. I think we've gone back and forth on Twitter about this. And it's funny, it's definitely something that it's just in the last, I don't know, five or six years, I feel like people are really pushing back on doing what they I think unfairly characterize as free work for a company.

You have to understand that people have really limited attention and no one cares about your product the way that you do. And so it can feel like you're dumbing it down or oversimplifying. And if you don't feel that way about your onboarding, about the growth work that you're doing, it's probably too complex.

If you can think about even an online product that you're working on from that first introduction, 'What will it be like for someone to come in here? What will I be asking them to integrate with? Will I be asking them to upload something, to invite someone else? What are the steps between the user and the full value of your app?' is something that's very useful to think about literally from the first days that you're designing the product.

Unfortunately, many people think about onboarding at the last minute and it ends up being the final piece of product work, or, and this may be a little bit controversial of an opinion, but I'm not a fan of the plug and play frameworks for onboarding for that reason.

The point at which you should start to hire someone else to do that is when you, as the founder, absolutely cannot meet the demand even though you're getting up really early and staying up really late and building your investing deck on the weekend instead so you can continue to meet with customers.

The other time to do that, apart from just being maxed out, is when you are moving in to and usually up to a customer that both wants and expects to meet with a salesperson.

It is time to start working on growth when you feel like you have product market fit. It doesn't have to be totally perfect because you absolutely use a growth team to really accelerate and improve your product market fit.