Omer (00:10.240)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In the in this episode I talk to Blake Bartlett, a partner at OpenView, a venture capital firm that focuses on B2B companies in the expansion stage such as HighSpot, Calendly, and Expensify.
These days it seems like everyone in SaaS is talking about product led growth or PLG.
But for many critics it's just a buzzword and for others it's not even a new concept.
So I decided to sit down with the guy who actually coined the term Product led growth and explore this topic in more depth.
With if you're not familiar with product led growth, then I'd suggest you listen to episode 251 first where I cover the fundamentals of PLG with Wes Bush, who's the founder of Product Led Institute.
In this interview with Blake Bartlett, we build on that and answer questions like Is product led growth a new concept or is it just a new term for something that many businesses have already been doing for years?
What exactly is the new customer journey and why is it important for SaaS companies and leaders to understand it?
Can you build a product led growth company without a free trial or freemium offering in your product and if so, how?
And what's the role of marketing teams versus growth teams versus sales teams in a product led growth SaaS company?
We also explored how a fictional sales led SaaS company might transition to a product led growth model and we examined some of the challenges the company would face trying to do that and how it might overcome them.
I think it's a great conversation with someone who thinks deeply about product led growth all the time and is involved with a number of PLG focused B2B SaaS companies.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Blake, welcome to the show.
Blake Bartlett (02:16.380)
Great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Omer (02:18.700)
So do you have a favorite quote?
Something you can share with us?
Something that maybe inspires or motivates you?
Blake Bartlett (02:23.500)
Yeah, actually I have two and they're both related.
The first one is a popular phrase in investing which is that in order to be successful and be a good investor, you need to be contrarian and right.
And then the other quote is the one that says be yourself because everyone else is taken.
And I think that those two things are very closely coupled with if you see the world differently than others, investigate it.
Do your research, make sure that it's actually true and then have conviction to act on that.
Because whether it's investing or whether it's anything in business, if you try to be like everyone else and try to fit the consensus, you're not going to stand out and so you're not going to be successful.
But if you do it differently, if you're contrarian and right and you're being yourself and you're sort of leaning into your perspective on the world or your perspective on your space, that's what's going to break out and really stand out.
Omer (03:14.440)
Love it.
Two great quotes.
So for people who aren't familiar with OpenView, can you just tell us a little bit about the company?
What do you guys do?
What kind of companies you work with?
Blake Bartlett (03:26.999)
Yeah, so openview is a venture capital firm and so we invest in startups and specifically our focus is to invest in exclusively in SaaS, hence why we're talking about.
And that's been our focus since day one, back in 2006 when the firm was founded.
We're also pretty specific about investing at what we call the expansion stage, which is really what we think about as companies that have a product in market, they have customers using it.
There's product market fit, starting to see some initial growth in terms of the go to market engine and ready to raise and ready to scale.
And so that's our swim lane, that's our focus.
We've invested in great companies like Datadog and Expensify Calendly, many others and that's really openview in a nutshell.
Omer (04:06.880)
Awesome.
And tell us a little bit about your role at OpenView for people who aren't familiar.
You are the guy who originally coined the term product led growth, but you do a lot more than that, right?
Blake Bartlett (04:21.760)
Yeah, so I'm a partner at the firm, so I'm one of the individuals looking for the next great company, looking to then write a check into that company.
And then we're very involved as VCs as you would expect after making the investment.
So take board seats.
And then we also have a large group at OpenView that we call the expansion team that helps with things like recruiting and go to market and as you mentioned, product led growth.
And so this has been a big area of focus for us.
And so building out and carving out this idea of the new way that SaaS is being done, which is increasingly bottoms up and increasingly starting the customer journey with self serve, that is what product led growth is.
And that is kind of the space that we're looking to Carve out and to build a movement around, to build a community around, because we really do see it as the future of SaaS.
Omer (05:05.500)
So let's just start from the top and let's go through just some of the fundamentals to make sure that everybody's on the same page.
Tell us, what exactly does product led growth mean?
Blake Bartlett (05:18.699)
So product led growth, it's a go to market strategy that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion and expansion.
And that would be as opposed to relying on sales and marketing as being the primary driver of customer acquisition, growth and expansion.
So you're leading with product as opposed to leading with a human based sales effort.
Omer (05:42.620)
Okay, so there's probably people who are listening to this saying, well, that doesn't feel like, I mean there's a lot of people who get excited about product led growth, but maybe that doesn't sound that new to them and it could be because they couldn't afford a sales team or they didn't like sales so they actually had to spend a lot more time thinking about how their product could drive sales for them.
But what do you think it is like from your experience and since, you know, in the last few years, why do you think it's sort of taken off so much and resonated with so many people and companies in the SaaS space, this whole idea?
Blake Bartlett (06:22.510)
Yeah, I agree with you that it's not new.
I would say going back to the first instance that I can think of of classic product led growth, there's two, there's SurveyMonkey comes to mind, which was started in the late 90s, early 2000s and really had this awesome viral loop with how they went to market very self serve and were able to serve consumers and prosumers and business users and then expand into the enterprise.
And also Atlassian, right, Atlassian was also started in the late 90s and that's a really good example that you point to, which is maybe they couldn't afford a sales team or maybe there was some other motivator.
And I really think of Atlassian as being a perfect example because out of necessity almost they had to be self serve.
Atlassian was started in Australia and if there's certainly other companies they could sell to in Australia, but it's a relatively small local market and so if you want to go much broader, you have to sell outside of your country.
But it's.
Australia has a couple of challenges.
One, it's an island.
So if you want to go and see people in person, which was certainly the way that sales was done back in the late 90s, early 2000s.
You're talking a very expensive plane flight just to get anywhere to attempt to try to get a customer and that could be cost prohibitive for an early startup.
And two, if you want to do phone based sales, another challenge, especially if you're thinking about selling into the us Australia time zones are almost perfectly aligned to not be convenient to have phone conversations with people in the US as an example.
So almost out of necessity, if you set it up as a self serve, you know, almost E commerce like way to use the software, you know, all the Australians can be sleeping soundly at night and the product can be still selling into the U.S. right?
And you don't have to jump on a plane in order to sell it to a customer that might be based in the UK or elsewhere.
And so out of necessity they went self service and then fast forward the tapes a couple decades later.
And Atlassian is one of the most important companies in enterprise software today, but they still continue to be built off of this backbone of self service and of an E commerce online business model as they describe it in their investor materials.
Omer (08:24.720)
Now you took a lot and I've heard you talking recently about the new buyer journey and I think that's maybe another way of looking at just product led growth and helping people to sort of understand why that's different to maybe sort of a more traditional sales led approach.
So can, can you sort of just explain that a little bit and what you mean by the new customer journey?
Blake Bartlett (08:47.050)
So it really is back to that, that concept of what I was saying before, which is in the old world, sales leads and product follows.
If you think about the buying cycle, even if it's a fast buying cycle, which might be 30 days or maybe 90 days or somewhere in that zone, you're still starting with marketing touch points to begin with to educate the buyer.
And then if they're qualified and if they're interested, then they're moving into a sales funnel, right?
You're initially qualifying them with an SDR as they continue through the journey.
Then they're talking to an ae, you're doing a demo, you're showing them the product and then you're negotiating contract and hopefully again within 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever it is, you're getting that closed one or you're getting that gong.
And then what happens afterwards?
Well then you're passed over to the customer success team, they help you get implemented, onboarded, trained and ready to go.
And you know, again, if you're Doing it well, that might be another 30 days.
And so start to finish, we're talking, you know, multiple months before the software is even ready for the users to get their hands on the keyboard and start using it.
And so very clearly sales leads and much, much later product follows.
And in this new customer journey, it's exactly inversed and it's exactly the opposite, which is I'm finding products these days.
You're probably finding products these days.
All the listeners are probably finding these products these days by just going online or seeing a tweet or getting a link to something that's being shared with them, or serendipitously discovering something on an app store or a marketplace, clicking one button and then boom, they're using new enterprise software.
And so they're almost instantly into the product and they're able to try it out, kick the tires and see if it's going to add value to them.
If it does, then they'll tell their coworkers about it, they'll start sharing it out externally and, and the adoption and the usage will grow alongside it.
Right.
And then later on as you start to see that expansion, you start to say as the vendor, again, as the software company, you say, I think there's opportunity to sell more.
They're really picking up what we're putting down.
Maybe I should call in and maybe I should see if we can do more to help them.
And that's the sales call.
But it's a sales call that feels a lot more like customer success than it does like traditional sales.
Cause you're not pitching them to use your product or to adopt your product.
They've already done that.
They did that on a self service basis.
But you're trying to help them see what else they could do with the product and how they could get even more value out of it if they're adopting new features or expanding to additional teams and things like that.
And so the product leads and then the sales effort or the human effort follows.
And so that's what I mean when I say the old customer journey versus the new customer journey.
Omer (11:23.970)
So I think Calendly is a great example of this.
And I've had Tope on the show kind of to tell the story of Calendly and how it all started.
But for them, having a freemium product seemed like that was a big part of sort of a big driver in helping that business grow.
Where does sort of free fit into this model for you?
Is that something that has to be part of this customer journey?
Does it make it Easier or does that really just depend on the product and the market?
Blake Bartlett (12:00.740)
I think it's pretty darn important.
I'm not going to say 100% of the time it has to be there, but I think it's pretty close to 100% and here's why.
So the other mindset that I think about is that today, again, in that new customer journey and the old journey, you're going to the executive who had budget and you were cold calling him or her, trying to convince them to allocate budget to you.
So it was all about this executive and courting the executive.
And then in the new world, the people that are self servicing and finding the products tend to be more the actual users themselves rather than the executives with budget.
And so there's also this fundamental shift you need to think about about the Persona, the buying Persona and the product Persona, and that you're no longer going after, building for and going after this executive, but instead you're building for and going after this end user.
And so with that in mind, I think about end users as being, they're just consumers, right?
You as a person, me as a person.
I'm the same guy whether I'm at work or whether I'm at home.
I have the same preferences, the same likes and dislikes.
And so if I think about that in the context of adopting new products and new technology, again, as a consumer, if I'm signing up for a new app or a new service and I have to talk to somebody, you know, no chance I'm going to continue in the funnel, right?
Or if the, even if the signup form or the checkout page is overly cumbersome and there's too many fields, or I'm getting confused, or I got surprised by, you know, how much they're asking me to pay up front, I never even got to give it a spin again, that's going to cause me to bounce.
But if I instead have, you know, signing up for Netflix, signing up for Spotify, it's almost always that you get 30 days free and you're able to very frictionlessly and very quickly sign up and adopt that product and start using it to see do I like it.
Can I start binging a few shows on Netflix before I, you know, upgrade to paid?
Can I build a few playlists on Spotify before I upgrade to paid?
That's how we think as consumers.
And again, back to the context of enterprise, end users are consumers who just happen to be at work.
You need to lean into that.
And so that's the setup for a core pillar of product led growth that I think about, which is that in this journey of finding the product and trying the product, you need to deliver value to the end user before requesting value in return.
And so that means that some component of free to show that proof of value is, is incredibly important before you ask them to whip out their credit card.
And that could be time based free, which is a free trial.
You get all the features, but you only get them for 14 days, you only get them for 30 days.
Or it could be feature based free, which would be freemium, which there is a free tier that you can be free forever.
But if you want additional functionality and additional superpowers or additional usage in the product, that's what causes you to sort of cross the paywall.
But this fundamental idea of delivering value before you request value is incredibly important right now because again, we're going after consumers and they just think differently than the traditional executive that we used to sell to in a prior era.
Omer (15:01.760)
Right, that's great point.
What about sales?
So I think, you know, I've had some people sort of look at the whole idea of product led growth and sort of think like, okay, that sort of is minimizing the value of sales teams.
But I don't think that's what you're saying.
It's just sort of really saying like sales is just as important as it's always been.
But there's a different way you should tackle sales rather than leading with that.
I think that's really what you're saying.
Right?
Blake Bartlett (15:36.450)
Yeah.
So product led growth is not anti sales.
I think that's one common misconception that I hear.
Oftentimes we are big fans of sales in the product led world, but as I mentioned before, you just change the order of operations.
So instead of sales being at the front in the very beginning and really the access point to the customer journey into the product instead later it comes in and helps to amplify the usage of the product and really help people continue to get to where they want to be in their product adoption and in their customer journey with you.
And so yeah, it's, it comes later.
You don't hire them first, you hire them a little bit later once you have traction and once the customers are showing that they, they're ready for it.
And then it does look a lot more like calling into existing accounts for an upsell or for an expansion.
And as I mentioned before the conversation because of that, because you're calling into somebody who's adopted the product, who loves the product and probably wants to use more of it.
You have more of a consultative customer success like conversation.
And it's a much warmer, it's not just a warm lead, it's a warm relationship.
They already have positive feelings towards your product and so it changes the nature of sales.
But sales still fundamentally is very much needed.
I mean, nobody is going to put a $100,000 deal on a credit card.
Nobody is going to just accept the T's and C's with one click of a button, again for $100,000 deal or much larger than that on a totally self service basis without talking to a human.
And so when you get to that point of the journey, again, it all starts with self service.
When we start to get to the point of the journey where your internal champion or your internal users are starting to hit their own internal friction and bureaucracy, quite frankly, budget limits and approvals and you know, at this point or a budget or at this point of adoption, we need to get legal involved or we need to get sort of, you know, finance involved for additional executive overview.
On a budget that's that large, that's totally acceptable.
It's totally understandable.
But your champion probably needs some help navigating that internal bureaucracy and that internal red tape.
And so the salesperson, again acting more like a customer success person can kind of be hand in hand with the champion and say, hey, we're going to tackle this together.
We're going to navigate your internal buying process together.
Because we both have this shared goal of you using more of my product.
You want it because you think it's valuable.
I want it because I want to sell more.
And so we're locked arm in arm navigating through this next phase of the customer journey together.
So again, that's a long way to say that we're big fans of sales.
It just looks a little bit different in this new world.
Omer (18:05.600)
Okay, I want to kind of try to do a little exercise with you and sort of, maybe let's just sort of think through.
If somebody is listening to this, they're the CEO, they're the founder of a company, let's say it's doing reasonably well, but it's not a product led growth business today.
Maybe, you know, there's, there's a reasonable size salesforce, the product is decent and this person is sort of thinking, listening to this conversation saying, okay, that sounds all great and I'm really starting to understand the value of product led growth and what that could mean to my business.
But where do I start?
I mean Obviously there's, there's sort of the product itself and thinking about what you need to do there, but there's also other aspects about what does this mean for my people and the way I organize my teams or what kind of process or goals do I need to have in place to sort of make this work.
And obviously, you know, we can't come up with, you know, a detailed plan in the next 15 minutes or something, but it would be great to at least sort of pick your brain and sort of talk through that a little bit.
Like, where would somebody start?
Blake Bartlett (19:23.650)
So what I'll say first is that if you are a company that fits that profile you just described, it's not easy to go from a sales led motion to a product led motion.
You know, the company's been going for 10, 15 years and you have the customers, you have the adoption, you have a way that you build product, you have a way that you go to market to fundamentally rewire that from the ground up.
To be now product led is a lot harder than it sounds.
And I think this points to one of the misconceptions that I often will see for existing companies who want to embrace product led growth, which is that, okay, well, all I have to do is take my existing product and put a self serve signup form in front of it.
Right.
And then I'll be off to the races.
And now I'm going to be product led.
Omer (20:04.950)
Yeah.
And I'll just have a premium or a free plan as well.
Blake Bartlett (20:08.030)
Exactly, yeah.
And we'll just make a free tier and like, you know, now we're going to be the next slack.
No, it's a lot harder than that and here's why.
So if you take an example of say you're a finance tool and say you've been going for a while, again, as we've been saying, maybe the company was started 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
Because of that time period, you probably built for a primary Persona of the CFO or maybe the VP of finance, because they are the folks who make the decisions for technology adoption for their team and they also hold the purse strings of the budget.
So it makes sense that you built for them, it makes sense that you're targeting them.
Makes sense you have sales conversations with them.
So if you're now putting a self service signup form in front of that, I have some bad news for you.
CFOs don't self service products, at least not big products like you know, your accounting package or something like that.
They're just got bigger Fish to fry.
They got too many things on their plate and they're not clicking around in the Intuit Marketplace or the Zero Marketplace or looking on product Hunt to figure out what they should use for their team next.
Right?
And also similarly, if you're somebody who is lower down on the finance team, say you're an individual bookkeeper or you're an accounts payable specialist.
If you see this website that's oriented towards CFO language and CFO messaging and CFO features and functionality and executive dashboards and all this stuff, even if it has a self service signup form in front of it, it's not speaking to you, it's speaking to your boss.
And so you're not going to be compelled to sign up for it because you said that's for them, that's not for me.
And so in both situations, this thing that you thought was the answer of just putting a self service signup form in front of your existing product is going to fall flat on its face.
And so that is the challenge.
Now, there is still an answer.
There's a way to navigate it.
It doesn't mean that you're sort of doomed that you're never going to be able to embrace product led growth.
I think the answer is that it just looks a little bit more like you're adopting it in components.
And a great example here is HubSpot.
So we all know and love HubSpot.
We all know and love their work, their calling card as well, which is Inbound Marketing.
They kind of created the category, they kind of popularized large scale blogging and using content to generate the top of the funnel and then sending those MQLs into an SDR team and all the rest.
I mean, the name of their conference that they still host to this day is called Inbound.
But in the last Handful of years, HubSpot has evolved from that to become much more product led rather than marketing led.
And the way that that happened was not because they did a rehaul of all of their products kind of in one fell swoop.
They actually did it by launching a new product and knowing the story behind it.
It was their sales product and they launched it initially as a startup within a startup.
And so there's a couple folks like Brian Balfour, Christopher o', Donnell, Mark Roberge and a couple others that sort of basically went into a cave.
Still HubSpot employees, but sort of were hived off from all things HubSpot and said, Go build some sales tools and build them in the way that you think we need to build them in order for this Persona to adopt.
And so they built some early very simple tools like email tracking.
I think the product was either called Signals or Sidekick.
And that was a self service tool that looked a lot like a yesware or a tout app or one of those, you know, earlier AE solutions for sales reps. And they launched it as a self service integration that you could just one click purchase and plug into your Gmail.
And so they started, whether intentionally or not, they started that way and it was product led, it was self service.
And then they expanded on those features to be more sales tools, more acceleration features, again with this self service adoption at the front end.
And then that started to expand to where they now have a full fledged CRM and a full fledged sort of sales stack that you can adopt from HubSpot, but it still continues to be product led and self service in its adoption motion.
And then as they saw the success of that, as the startup within a startup became a real department and a real sort of mainline pillar of their business, and they also started to see the landscape change with inbound marketing and its efficacy.
They started to then roll out some of these product led principles and self service principles into their core marketing suite as well.
So it didn't happen all in one fell swoop.
It didn't all happen at once.
It's been a multi year process.
But you look at HubSpot's performance just generally as a public company, but you also look at their performance and their ability to have rolled out marketing and sales and now service clouds and to have been able to, to have success across those areas with so many different users.
It really shows the way in which they've been able to successfully navigate this hard transition from marketing led or sales led into product led.
So that's what I would point to is find a way to, you know, create a new product or maybe create a component of your product that is available on a self service basis and then let it sort of slowly boil the frog of the rest of your product.
And then over time you can become increasingly more and more product led.
Omer (24:56.780)
Yeah, and it sounds like taking that approach, it's going to be a lot easier to test with a free plan or a freemium type model rather than trying to rehaul your entire product that you've been, you've been selling in a very different way for, for 10 years or whatever it is.
Blake Bartlett (25:16.200)
Yeah, exactly.
In that case, HubSpot didn't have to make their core products, they didn't have to add new pricing and packaging to their core product.
They were just able to roll out this new thing and say, hey, it's free from the beginning and we'll figure out monetization later.
So.
Exactly.
Omer (25:29.160)
And you sort of touched on this a little bit earlier, but there's also a really important point here about the buyer or the user that you're targeting.
And when you're moving to a, a PLG model, you're going to be looking at somebody very different in the organization.
Right.
So you gave the example of the finance product and it's not going to be the cfo, it's going to be people on the ground sort of working day to day.
So everything, it's not just the product, but everything in terms of the way you're messaging on the, on your signup page or whatever has to be really focused on a very different customer to what the rest of your organization is thinking about.
Blake Bartlett (26:11.640)
Exactly.
The way that I think about it is again, if we have the primary Personas being an executive versus a primary Persona as being an end user, they think about pain differently and they think about value from a product differently.
If I'm an executive, I think about the world of ROI and KPIs because that's what I'm gold with, that's what I'm tasked with and that's what I do as a leader.
And, and so if I'm fundamentally thinking about a technology purchase and allocating budget to that technology purchase, I'm thinking about what's the ROI of this going to be and what KPIs is this going to improve?
It's very businessy, as you would expect.
But from an end user perspective, they don't really think about KPIs and ROI.
They think about their own personal experience and their own personal, I just frankly call it annoyance.
They think about the things they have to do every single day that make them roll their eyes or curse at their screen.
And that's the opportunity in the end user era to lean into that.
Right.
I'll point to an example of Calendly which we've talked about and I'm sure you and Tope talked a little bit about this.
But you know, if you built Calendly not as a self service product oriented towards individual end users and instead an executive product like look, it's used by salespeople and it accelerates, you know, you're able to book more meetings with Calendly and so you could ostensibly see a world in which you're calling up the VP of sales as a cold Call and being like, hey, do you want to buy a scheduling link today?
It's going to be great.
No matter what you, you say to them, they're just going to say, a scheduling link, no thank you.
And they click the phone, right, because they got bigger, bigger fish to fry.
It's really hard to show like, prove the ROI out of the gates of, you know, more efficient scheduling.
But if you're going to an end user, what does the end user think they're not thinking about, what's the ROI of this thing, what's the KPIs this is going to improve?
They think, I hate scheduling emails.
Every single time I need to find somebody to connect with.
It takes, and statistics show this, it takes six to eight emails back and forth before you find a time that works for both of you.
And if you're a high volume scheduler, if you're a recruiter or if you're a salesperson, as I mentioned before, or maybe you're, you know, individually, you're a personal trainer, you're a therapist and all you do is scheduling.
It's incredibly painful, it's incredibly annoying and it's incredibly repetitive and there's gotta be a better way to do it.
And then you go to calendly or you receive the link from somebody, you go to the website and you say, schedule a meeting without all the back and forth.
And you go through that elegant experience of scheduling on calendly and not having to do the six date emails, you're instantly sold, you're instantly converted.
Again, you don't know what the ROI is, you don't know what the KPIs are, but you don't care because it's removed pain and it's removed annoyance from you.
And now you're loyal and you're never going to live without this thing, right?
And so thinking about if you're building for one Persona over the other, you have to understand how they think about the world, how they think about their day to day work and how they think about pain.
Because that's what you're going to try to be alleviating with the product that you build.
Omer (29:09.150)
Great.
Okay, so our CEO of our finance product has figured out there's a small feature or an aspect of the core product that they can spin off and turn into a brand new product and that's something that they can focus on the end user rather than the cfo.
And that's underway.
And that all looks good.
The next question I guess is sort of more people oriented.
You know, we Talk about marketing and the importance of product, but there's also the role of growth teams.
And you had an interesting post on LinkedIn a while back where you were sort of talking about this.
But so for our CEO, like how important is it to have a growth team?
Can it be just done through the existing marketing and product teams kind of working a little bit differently?
How does all that fit in in terms of thinking about organizing people?
Blake Bartlett (30:11.159)
When I first started hearing about growth teams, it seemed like this mystical, magical thing.
What exactly is a growth team?
It sounds really, really cool.
And all of the best companies are starting these growth teams, but what do they do?
And it was kind of mysterious to me.
And the more that I dug into it and the more that I talked to growth leaders and growth managers themselves, I realized, okay, I think this is actually the way to think about this is this is just a squad or a team on your product organization, on your broader product team.
And instead of traditional product managers and product leaders thinking about features and functionality of what's the next thing the customer wants, what should we ship and then what's the feature adoption rate of that, what's the CSAT and the nps?
That's what core product thinks about.
Super important, obviously.
But growth product thinks more about instead of those shipping features and functionality, they think about accelerating people through the adoption phase.
And so they're more focused on the customer journey and getting people from one stage of the customer journey to the next.
And how can we implement and instrument the product in order to make that customer journey, that self service customer journey to more accelerated?
Right.
And so they're thinking about things like, you know, if marketing is delivering signups to a self service funnel, then how do we take that sign up and activate them?
Because just because you created an account doesn't mean you're actually going to do anything.
So how do we make you take those first steps to get past the cold start, start getting, you know, some momentum and start getting some value.
And then what's the aha moment that we're trying to get you to, to where you're, you're bought in?
What's that sort of North Star metric that we're focused on that will sort of indicate that you are going to be a loyal user of our product and how do we remove friction and how do we make the navigation of the early stages of the journey something that more and more people get to?
That North Star metric, more and more people get to that aha moment.
So you're thinking like a product manager, but you're thinking about a different problem.
And so that's kind of what I learned about growth teams and where they sit in the organization.
And it also helps to demystify it a little bit because, you know, anybody can add a new squad to their product team and focus them on new metrics and it helps to make it a little bit more accessible, I think, to the average company.
Omer (32:21.330)
So the way I'm hearing this is you're saying marketing in this sort of model is really about acquisition, getting the signups.
Growth is more about activation, getting to the aha moment.
And the core product team is really focused on continuing to build a great product and figuring out how people are going to use it more.
Blake Bartlett (32:47.660)
Exactly.
The other thing in there is we talked about sign up and activation.
There's also conversion in a truly self service funnel.
Growth teams typically own initial self service conversion as well.
And so that you get to the aha moment and again back to the idea of delivering value before you request value in return.
So you deliver value before you hit the paywall.
So you want to get to that aha moment and then the paywall appears and then somebody's happy to swipe their credit card again.
That's kind of the zone of growth as well.
And then back to the earlier part of the conversation again.
Salespeople then come in after the initial conversion and they're able to help with the expansion as the account continues to mature.
Omer (33:30.540)
Got it.
So going back to our fictional CEO, it sounds like there's probably a possible sort of different ways that they could go here.
Like one could be okay, they've taken a specific feature or aspect of the product, they spun that off, and that's maybe now a freemium thing like the Sidekick example that you gave, which I think is a great one, by the way.
And then over time, maybe they're just continuing to add more to that offering.
And eventually, you know, the core product, all those features are slowly moving into this, this new, new sort of product LED model.
Could the other approach be something around the.
I guess what probably happened with Sidekick, right, Which is you're sort of working on this sort of the acquisition, the activation, you're getting them in there.
But then when you talk about the conversion or upselling, then maybe that's the opportunity for the sales team to come in and maybe talk about the.
The core product.
Is that kind of a way that that could also work?
And is that something that you've seen?
Is there an example of that maybe out there?
Blake Bartlett (34:46.489)
I definitely think there's potential for that you would just want to make sure that the component of the product or what you built that was self service, that there is sufficient connectivity to the core product itself that you would then try to offer up through a sales con.
Because if I take that HubSpot example, if you adopted their, you know, sales acceleration tools, like you know, Sidekick signals, those kinds of things, you're probably an individual AE or an SDR using the tools and loving the tools.
And if you get a sales call from somebody at HubSpot saying Hey, do you want to buy some marketing automation software?
They're going to say that's not my department, that's not my job.
Why don't you call our marketers?
And so you need to make sure that you can get from here to there and it's not sort of, you know, there's not a chasm in between and you're not sort of trying to sell those wrong thing to the wrong person.
Omer (35:33.410)
Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point.
All right, great.
So is product led growth something that can work for any SaaS company in any market?
I know that's kind of pretty broad, but generally do you think that there's something out there or do you still hear a lot of pushback where people are saying yeah, well that worked for so and so, but it wouldn't work for us because of whatever reason.
Blake Bartlett (36:00.980)
I think that it's applicable to almost all situations and I think that I often hear that, well yeah, that doesn't apply to us, that'll never work for us.
I think that that's oftentimes an excuse or a dismissal in order to not have to do something really, really difficult.
But you know, to give an example of what I see there, you know, a lot of times people will point to, well, I work in a traditional industry.
I don't sell to Silicon Valley startups like Slack does.
I sell to manufacturing or I sell to something that's much or construction or maintenance or something that's much more of a traditional industry.
And they'll never self serve, they don't like emojis and like all the stuff that you know, you could hear as a criticism.
But I would push back on that and say, yeah, but end users are everywhere.
And whether you are a desk worker at a startup or at a law firm or if you're somebody who's a non desk worker, you still have access to all the same tools and technologies.
And in fact, if you're a non desk worker, you have a smartphone like everybody else does and you're wandering around with your smartphone constantly in your pocket.
And you're also very used to finding apps for things.
And so you can go after end users who are non desk workers in traditional industries through just a different channel, which would be a mobile app or a mobile strategy because that's how they live and work.
And you know a great example that I could point to there is a company out of LA called Upkeep.
And Upkeep serves maintenance and facilities managers very much non desk workers and very much traditional, mainline, not early adopters of tech.
But all of these individuals are still fundamentally walking around with smartphones in their pocket.
And so Upkeep found a way to deliver a self service product led growth freemium solution that's oriented towards individual technicians and facilities managers for work order issuance.
That is way better than all of the old school stuff that's decades old at this point that's tethered to an actual physical laptop, which again for non desk workers, they don't work in that environment.
And so they took a challenge that could be very easy to dismiss and say, well, product led growth will never work for us.
And they thought about it from a first principles level and realized actually it will work for us.
We just have to go mobile first.
And so that's a specific example to sort of demystify or sort of unlock this idea that it only applies to certain types of users, use cases or certain types of industries.
Omer (38:23.100)
Awesome.
All right, There's a lot more that I think I would love to get into with you and keep picking your brain, but we should wrap up.
So we're going to move on to the lightning round and I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
So just answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready?
Blake Bartlett (38:43.260)
Ready.
Omer (38:44.060)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Blake Bartlett (38:47.940)
Expect things to go wrong.
Omer (38:49.860)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Blake Bartlett (38:53.060)
The Everything Store, which is about Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
It's the world's most successful company, the world's richest person and they've definitely done a few things right to get there.
And understanding the philosophies and the mindset behind that and the decisions they make and what's behind things you hear about like your margin is my opportunity or it's always day one.
What does that actually look like inside the company?
It's an awesome read and applicable to all things, all industries you can think about as a startup.
Omer (39:19.820)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Blake Bartlett (39:24.940)
So going back to my favorite success quote, being contrarian and right, but also not being dogmatic.
I think having an open mind to understand where your conclusions about a market or conclusions about your business or your customers might be correct, but also might be wrong.
And you need to be able to have a strong opinion, be willing to be contrarian, but also get the input of others to make sure that you're not off your rocker.
Yeah.
Omer (39:49.450)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Blake Bartlett (39:52.410)
So it's more of a habit, but I would just describe it as be less available, specifically by turning off email.
I turn off email when I'm doing other tasks so that I can't be distracted.
And then this is more truly at a personal level.
If you can turn off email on the weekends and especially when you're on vacation, turn off email, remove it from your phone, don't open it, make vacation sacred.
That'll prevent burnout.
And it'll also, when you're working, it'll help you get more towards deep work and in the flow state versus, you know, constantly being distracted by the next Slack message and the next email that comes through.
Omer (40:25.920)
Yeah, I love that.
And I was actually looking at a book yesterday.
I think it was called Do Nothing and basically she said something similar where she'd basically said kind of an auto reply when she was out on weekends or vacation.
I think it was weekends saying, if you need to get a hold of me, if it's urgent, call me.
And she was like, I did that like two years ago and no one's ever called.
And it was like, okay, well, probably those emails you're getting at the weekend aren't that important as you think they are.
So that's good things.
Okay, yeah.
Blake Bartlett (40:56.570)
And I'll do one even better.
So, yeah, I like that idea of an external response which is call me.
I say call, call me or text me.
I don't put my phone number there.
Which is also strategic because if you're important enough to have an emergency that I care about, you will have my phone number.
If you don't, you fundamentally aren't important enough to disrupt my vacation.
And so, yeah, it's a little bit of a psychology hack, but again, nobody's ever texted me like you said, yeah, I love that.
Omer (41:22.820)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
Blake Bartlett (41:26.820)
So there's a show called American Pickers where these guys drive around the US and find random antiques and things like that.
I would love to do American Pickers in Europe.
Just scouring all over the place and seeing what kind of interesting things you can find, you know, in back rooms and blow the dust off of and see what kind of finds you have.
In particular, I'm a huge World War II buff.
And so when I've been in Europe and wandered into antique stores, there's just goodies galore to explore and discover.
Omer (41:56.880)
Love it.
And I love that show.
I love Mike and Frank.
Definitely would recommend watching that.
Blake Bartlett (42:02.240)
They're great.
Omer (42:02.880)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Blake Bartlett (42:05.840)
So I'm from San Diego, California, but I hate surfing.
Omer (42:11.360)
Are you the only one?
Blake Bartlett (42:12.280)
The water's too cold, you have to wake up too early?
No.
Thank you.
Omer (42:16.320)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Blake Bartlett (42:19.520)
So, for me, it's reading, but specifically reading biographies.
I love stories and I love history, and biographies are the perfect combination.
And I think it also helps to really understand an individual or understand a time period versus, you know, criticisms thereof, you know, 100 years later.
So three great examples.
You know, people oftentimes will refer to the robber barons and that they're these evil people, you know, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie.
But I read Titan about John D. Rockefeller and I read the First Tycoon about Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie about, you know, the eponymous man by David Nassau and all three of those.
Yeah, there's some things that those guys did that were distasteful, but it puts it all in context and helps you understand it a lot better.
And there's also, quite frankly, a lot of, like, really interesting business lessons learned from that as well.
And so rather than just, you know, hearing people's opinions about things and people's beliefs about things, like, you know, first principles, you know, first hand research, go to the actual source and hear the story.
And.
And also, again, they're just fascinating as well because of the historical element, the personal story and narrative element as well.
Omer (43:24.660)
Love it.
And you sneaked in some additional book recommendations there.
I think they were great ones.
Awesome.
Great.
Blake, thank you so much for joining me.
It's been great.
I'm really glad we've had the chance to sit down and have this conversation.
If people want to find out more about OpenView, they can go to openviewpartners.com and I think it's also OV VC, right?
Blake Bartlett (43:47.120)
That's our website.
Yep.
Omer (43:48.240)
Yeah, I love that, love that, love that domain.
Blake Bartlett (43:50.560)
Yeah.
And then the final plug that I'll give is.
So I post a lot of stuff about product led growth on LinkedIn and so you can also check me out on LinkedIn and follow me there or add me.
Omer (43:58.480)
Great.
We'll include a link to your LinkedIn profile as well in the show notes, so people can grab that and follow you and.
Yeah, and if they want to get in touch with you.
I think I know what you're going to say, but what's the best way for people to do that?
Blake Bartlett (44:10.800)
Yeah, LinkedIn.
Omer (44:14.800)
Awesome.
Thanks, Mat.
