Perhaps, you can analyze and summarize based on actual cases. In this article, the author extracted 21 common characteristics from a large number of cases to help companies find PLG characteristics suitable for their products. Let’s take a look.

If users have to look for prices around, then your product is at risk of user churn. Prices should be easily found by users, and users can clearly know what functions each price contains, and users should not know this information by asking sales staff.

Case: DooFinder

DooFinder is a tool that provides search engine services for e-commerce websites. It uses artificial intelligence to help users find the product results they want.

Its price page is in the navigation bar, and users can clearly see different price packages. The different prices and corresponding function lists are clearly listed on it, and the most popular price packages are also marked, which helps users determine the package that best suits their needs.

supporting products (also known as new products) can foresee the pain points of new users and provide solutions to facilitate users to combine their main products to give full play to their advantages.

Case: Cazoo

In 2018, Cazoo as an used car website subverted the automotive industry in the UK and Europe. Users can search and buy a used car at home, and Cazoo also offers a home delivery service, with each car with a 7-day money-back guarantee and a 12-month warranty.

Although the idea of ​​spending less money to buy a good used car is a great standalone product, Cazoo sees the opportunity to create a supporting product to solve the pain points of users in the process of buying a car.Most people like to sell their old cars before buying a new one, but what if your car is out of service? Cazoo thought of the matching product: old car replacement.

Their old car replacement service provides users with a place to sell or scrap old cars, and can instantly give corresponding valuations, which is simple and practical. At the same time, Cazoo also has a service center, providing users with car repair and cleaning services. Both products provide corresponding services on the same platform, thereby simplifying the buying and selling process.

Tight Feedback Loop refers to obtaining executable feedback from different user groups to understand and improve the product. In this process, you must divide the user into:

. This will help you solve problems such as friction, communication and pain points in each user group and get their feedback.

Case: Zapier

Zapier is a tool for automating workflows between applications. The platform integrates more than 4000 applications and supports multi-step automation without code.

Let's take a look at the following Zapier growth chart:

If you have ever tried creating a customer feedback loop, you will know that it is difficult to quickly get what you need to make changes. Zapier figured out how to build a tight feedback loop in their products to adapt them to users’ needs. Their method is to do this by conducting research on new features to be released, and they will sync feedback data to an Airtable form through Zapier itself.

When the data on this form meets a specific standard, it will be synchronized to another Airtable form to form a personal interview list. In this way, Zapier can receive feedback from users in a timely manner and improve corresponding functions for key users.

product team is often very excited about the new features, but forget to tell users why they are excited about it. In a product-led company, it is necessary to describe why users need these features and how these features will solve their problems.

Case: Oyster

Recruitment in the post-epidemic era involves more and more cross-border talent recruitment, which has increased the burden on the human resources department in ensuring compliance with international contracts and labor law . Oyster provides a solution to helping new international or local employees to automate their onboarding, helping SMEs in the U.S. recruit global talent in the post-epidemic era.

After a simple registration, Oyster will give the user a recruitment list that contains the timeline and instructions on why these steps are necessary. As shown in the figure below, each step has the action to take to complete the step and the timeline required to complete it. This process teaches users to know the causes of the corresponding problem, which is a good opportunity to build trust between the product and the user.

Aha moment refers to the magical moment when users realize the value of the product, which is related to turning ordinary users into loyal users. This is a moment when everyone in the team needs to work hard to build.

Case: Typeform

Typeform makes the form more interesting through customized and colorful expressions. The purpose of this is to maintain user engagement, thereby giving more detailed feedback and improving completion rate. The process of

Onboarding is not just about registering and using products, but about creating products in this process. Let's take a look at Typeform's Onboarding process. First, you will need to enter some basic information.

will then let you choose the relevant industry, which will give customized solutions based on different industries.

Next you can select the content you need to ask for.

Finally, you can choose the purpose of the questionnaire and the corresponding template. The entire process only takes about 2 minutes, and you can come to a personalized dashboard and half of the questionnaire.There is no charge involved in the entire process, but it is to discover value and quickly guide users to the Aha moment.

Depending on the user base, appropriate registration resistance is beneficial, but most products will benefit from less registration resistance. If your underlying users encounter too much registration resistance, the potential user churn rate will be greater than expected.

Case: CloudAppp

Some people will pay more attention to visual expression. CloudApp provides this group of people with functions such as homemade Gifs, screen records and picture annotations to help them better participate in communication and convey ideas. The entire basic registration process of

CloudApp is very simple. From registration to downloading the application to experiencing the product, the whole process is seamless and there is no need for email verification.

When you think of the Onboarding process, you will usually want as little resistance as possible. But appropriate resistance is actually beneficial, and you can determine the type of appropriate resistance based on three questions in the DAD framework.

• Can the additional steps allow users to recognize the value of the product faster?
• Does it increase the personalized experience of users onboarding?
• Can it please users and make them excited about the product?

Case: Twilio

Now we know what the appropriate resistance looks like, let's take a look at the Twilio example. It is a programmable cloud communication platform that helps enterprises communicate effectively with customers through voice, text messages or email. Twilio does not require a credit card when signing up, as this step does not bring users closer to their Aha moment.

But they will ask targeted questions and provide corresponding options for users to choose. This series of problems will bring some resistance, but it will help segment the user group and provide personalized products and services to the corresponding groups, thereby achieving rapid transmission of value. This is a purposeful resistance.

When a SaaS product becomes more complex and needs to be set up, users will feel overwhelmed. Helpful empty state is a great way to guide users to do meaningful operations, especially when it is combined with help content that guides users to the next step. This can make the product more personalized and help users realize meaningful value faster.

PS: The empty state refers to the state that appears during the Onboarding process where there is no other data display except for the feedback of the main process status.

Case: Heap

Heap is a digital insight analysis platform that helps users understand how and why customers use their products, and then leverage data science to give the best potential opportunities.

Since the product needs to be installed, Heap uses this empty state to gradually guide users to complete the most technically difficult part. At the far right there are additional help resources. After completing this step, the user will come to a custom dashboard with additional pop-ups to explain how to use the product.

Product Tours may be really boring, but when combined with meaningful actions, it lays the foundation for users to discover value, which can really help users discover high-value features.

Case: Zendesk

Zendesk was founded in 2007 when social media is growing. It is mainly used to help companies deal with complaints on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Zendesk has many moving parts. In order to ensure that new users are not overwhelmed by the numerous functions, Zendesk has specially set up an action-based product introduction to tell users the characteristics of each function. After logging in, the user will come to a dashboard, and the corresponding function list is displayed on the left. When the user clicks on each function, he can see a guide task or video. When the user completes each part, the corresponding completion mark will appear.Product journeys like

are very efficient because they teach users to complete the corresponding configuration by teaching them to use functions.

Most products have many functional features, but most users may use products just for one of them. User classification can help you understand the problems users want to solve and guide them into the right channels to help them see how the product meets their goals.

Case: Pendo

If you are a product-led company, you may have heard of Pendo. It is a product analytics application for both customers and employees. These data analytics help improve users' Onboarding and product adoption processes, helping software companies quickly and effectively guide users to product value.

Pendo understands that the way products interact with users depends on the problems they solve and the corresponding market segments. Therefore, when users register, Pendo will ask users for their needs and guide users to the relevant information page according to the corresponding needs, thereby helping them understand the product.

Rapid Prototyping refers to methods that allow users to try products before registering. For example, for Freemium or Free Trial products, you need to provide at least an email and password to create an account before you can experience the product. However, using the rapid prototype experience, you can directly experience the product on the product landing page. The usual function of this type of prototype is to use fewer functions to inspire users to register and experience the full version of the product.

Case: WebPageTesttml16

WebPageTest is an open source platform used to improve page loading speed and SEO (search engine optimization). Since its inception, the developer community on the platform has always played an important role in the development of products. The tool provides free and in-depth front-end performance testing, including testing for web page loading visuals.

WebPageTest's user journey spans three stages of user needs to help developers improve efficiency:

• does not need to register (free)
• registration to get more value-added functions (free)
• subscription payment to get value-added functions (month/year)

Users can run tests directly on the landing page prototype (no registration required), and these data will be stored for 30 days, and other functional features can be experienced in the prototype, such as global connection, browser and connection speed tests. The registered Freemium product includes all the functions in the prototype, and additional data storage for 13 months, free codeless A/B experiments, etc. The paid premium version will also have more value-added functions.

To experience the instant value of the WebPageTest tool, just enter the URL you want to test on the landing page, and you can get the website's performance insight analysis report within a few minutes. No registration is required, no email is required, just enter the URL.

6. Personalized User Onboarding (Personalized User Onboarding)

Most companies use the same Onboarding process to face different user groups, but as the product matures and functions increase, you cannot only have one type of user group, but multiple types of people with different portraits. This is where personalized methods come into play.

Case: MongoDB

DoubleClick founders need a database that can support 400,000 ads per second, so they set up MongoDB. This is a platform built on a scalable architecture, ideal for developing scalable applications.

MongoDB knows that their products can be suitable for different situations, so they guide users to quickly obtain value through the way they target.

Then, by segmenting the population, ensure that different users get what they need for value. Once the user has selected the configuration, they can start working, or they can choose the basic configuration and experiment in the sandbox model until they finally get what they need.

7. Free Solutions For User Pain Points (Free Solutions For User Pain Points)

Our primary goal is to attract users, and the product-led growth strategy is to transform users into lifelong supporters of the product. The way to do this is to help users make good use of the product in their daily lives and make the target population of the product easily accessible to your product. The key to making a product stand out from many competitors is to build trust.

Case: DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean's goal is to create a small and medium-sized enterprise that can afford it and experience the best cloud server .

Even though they have grown, they still insist on the strategy of putting customers first. Given the importance of the developer community, they put 6 free developer tools on the resource page. These 6 free tools can help developers save a lot of time, thus solving many of their pain points, and making them willing to promote DigitalOcean.

8. Being Human (Being Human)

Many companies are not humane. Most of these behaviors can be attributed to meaningless resistance. The same situation often occurs when we deal with some large companies or bureaucrats in our daily lives. No one feels happy when doing these things, like doing the chores that have to be done, which is frustrating. Specifically, when trying a product, you encounter email verification or paid to use it.

Case: Basecamp

Since its establishment, Basecamp has provided a free time-based trial solution. Users can experience the project management system for free to see if it can meet their needs.

In addition to the simple registration process, Basecamp's CEO also explained the relevant content of the user's journey in a signed letter and stated that if the user has any questions, he can contact him directly. This signature letter can make people feel more humane and friendly, rather than a cold business.

and you can really try to send an email to the CEO, and he really responded seriously. Of course, it may not be realistic to let every CEO do this, but you can find ways to make your product more humane when facing users, making users feel friendly and warm, so that they can also win the trust of users.

9. Reverse Trial (A Reverse Trial In The Sign-Up)

Have you ever wanted to experience Freemium products but accidentally fell into the trap of Free Trial. Have you noticed that normally there is no way to go directly to Freemium mode. If this doesn't happen to you, you should consider yourself lucky. This situation usually makes you feel frustrated because you have to re-register an account, or you may give up on using this product and switch to other competitors.

Case: Trello

Trello is a visual project management tool. Trello has an intuitive and friendly interface, which is very flexible. It revolutionizes people's ideas about traditional to-do lists. Trello solved the problem of the wrong user falling into the wrong sales funnel through the Reverse Trial mode (If you want to know more about Reverse Trial, you can read the previous article – one article explains the pricing model of PLG products in one article).

As usual, you can click on the Freemium package to start the experience, they have a very useful free product, but they also want you to try all the features of the premium product, so the next step will take you to the premium version page for free 30-day experience.

You can choose to use the free version directly on this page, or experience the premium version of the 30-day product. Even if you choose the wrong one, you can also select "Start without free trial" in the next credit card input interface to return to the free Freemium version.

0. Recurrence of Value

Recurrence of value is one of the principles that help optimize a product-oriented strategy, which is also one of the four major principles of the PLG strategy. By allowing the first value to continue to reappear, it can help improve the retention rate of user .Leaders in PLG (such as Zoom's calendar plug-in) will continuously evaluate user retention cycles to help develop product development strategies and insights.

Case: Miro

Miro is a whiteboard platform that supports collaboration in ideas. It patents a whiteboard with cross-platform versatility and flexibility, thus gaining its own unique competitive advantage. One of Miro's strategies is to target specific audiences because they know that if a product tries to please everyone, the end result may be that it cannot satisfy anyone. To ensure that their target users remain pleasant, they create a real-time user feedback loop to adjust products according to different user needs.

Because memo and brainstorming are part of many things and play a very important role, Miro focuses on these two things to the user's team or customers. This trustworthy memo allows everyone to be consistent, while also intuitively helping users to recognize what the process is like and whether there are any loopholes.

1. Showcase Social Proof

The concept of social identity was proposed by Robert Cialdini in the book "Influence", which means imitating others in certain situations to be what they are. There are 6 common types of social identity:

1. Expert’s stamp of approval
2. Celebrity endorsement
3. Trust icons
4. Data
5. Customer testimonials
6. Reviews (Reviews)

Case: Notion

Notion is an workflow management software that provides visual layout of projects and tasks to help teams collaborate, plan and organize using the Kanban view. Notion has added a large number of social recognition certificates to its official website page. The following figure is the logo of some well-known companies, indicating that Notion is trusted by these company teams.

Then turn down and you can also see more social recognition proofs of Notion evaluation content by the heads of well-known software companies.

In addition, there is a full page dedicated to customer recommendation stories explaining how Notion can help them solve their problems.

Finally, there is a section showing the ratings of G2 (a third-party software evaluation website), with various data on G2, explaining why Notion has been rated as an industry leader by G2. These four sectors confirm the six common types of social identity mentioned just mentioned. If you want to know more, you can read the previous article on the decomposition of the noise reduction software Krisp in the Deep Thought Circle - see how the noise reduction tool with a valuation of over 100 million yuan can be used to create a PLG flywheel.

2. The underlying commonality of PLG

After we have read the above features and corresponding cases, I believe everyone will be familiar with some features because you have seen them in actual operations. When these characteristics are combined together, a powerful strategy for creating the ultimate success of the user is formed, and together they bring a feeling of excitement or joy to the user. The following is a summary of strategies that help success:

• Your Freemium (free value-added) product should highlight the uniqueness of the product and the practicality of the . When users have a meaningful experience in the process of using the product, they will not only pay for conversion, but also actively promote the product.
• Cancel mailbox verification, which can be frustrating, waste time and unnecessary.
• allows new users to interact with products through a quick experience of prototypes, unresisting registration and action-based Onboarding process, which can lay the foundation for a valuable product experience.
• predicts the pain points of new users while ensuring that the production of products has an action-based user journey, a tool or rich resource library can quickly eliminate obstacles.
• The current world needs more humaneness. Don’t be an inhuman company, a company that users are willing to go out with you, and implement this concept in every action.

Reference material

[1]https://productled.com/blog/product-led-growth-examples

Original author: Gina Allman

Original title: We signed up for 50+ SaaS companies. Here are the best product-led growth examples.

Author: Shensi Circle; Official Account: Shensi Circle (ID: gh_352a572cf923)

Original link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/kt3S7lMWH_QejyvDM1iFEg

This article is authorized by @ Shensi Circle. Everyone is a product manager. Reproduction of

Without the author's permission, the title picture is from Unsplash. Based on the CC0 protocol

The views of this article only represent the author himself. Everyone is a product manager. The platform only provides information storage space services.