šŸ‘‹šŸ½ I'm Pulkit, co-founder & CEO of Chameleon. AMA (especially about PLG, UX, user onboarding etc.)

@Krish Iā€™m not sure this is formalized, but the way we approach it is:

  1. Passive learning: feeding information into our Slack so we learn by osmosis. This includes competitor and industry news; support tickets; customer activity; user feedback etc. We also use Feedly and sign-up to lots of email lists to keep us in the loop. We record customer and sales calls and make them available in a shared space, share insights in a weekly meeting, and invite non-customer facing team members to customer meetings.

  2. Active learning: where we go out to seek insights on a particular topic. This often centres around our content calendar. E.g. we recently wrote an article on growth strategies and so asked a bunch of influencers for their perspectives. We recently interviewed Kieran Flanagan (VP Marketing @ Hubspot) for insights on freemium models (weā€™ll be publish on our blog later this month). Or we run beta programs and require customers to set up times for us to dive in.

I actually think most product teams are not doing a good job with customer research today. It often gets outsourced to design/UX teams only or happens only when developing a new product. Instead customer research should be continuous and a great way of enabling that is through in-product microsurveys. These make it much easier to collect very targeted feedback at scale, in both a passive and active way, and can substantially speed up product success.

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Yeah, part of this is the benefit of being in a startup hub; other startups are used to working with new teams, and itā€™s easier to build personal connections with founders. ā€™

We started working with Amplitude when they were only about 20 people, so very much a startup! We found every startup we had a personal connection to and then also cold emailed all recent YC startups with our pitch. That allowed us to have interest before we built a product, and then we built the product alongside our customers.

One mistake we made was to revamp our early product after we raised our seed round. This meant we went back to the drawing board and spent ~9 months bringing the revamped startup to market. In that time our existing product (which was semi-functional) didnā€™t see any progress, and so we lost some of the customers (including Amplitude) that were using it. We believed it was important to revamp the product so that we didnā€™t get locked into bad/poorly considered design decisions, but in hindsight this was not a lean approachā€¦ we should have focussed on evolution rather than revolution, even in those early days!

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haha thereā€™s a lot of that kool-aid going around :roll_eyes:
i guess i answered part of this question here

Iā€™d say you could consider adapting the framing of the question away from is ā€œa particular productā€ a good/bad candidate for PLG to is ā€œa particular workflow inside the productā€ a good/bad candidate. Maybe the onboarding does need a CS rep but maybe you can drive more usage through PLG. Or maybe enabling a new feature requires a sales person, but maybe you can drive more invites via PLG.

I would suggest doing a friction log audit for the most important workflows (that relate to product success) and then identifying the most painful steps. Once you know those then you can determine how best to solve; whether they can be automated/self-serve (i.e. using PLG strategies) or should involve a human-assisted approach.

Does that answer your question satisfactorily @ncameron?

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i love some of the biggest benefits of Silicon Valley (I moved there from London in 2013):

  • access to startup best practices (youā€™re just immersed in them everywhere)
  • opportunity to build relationships (for mentors, investors, customers, partners etc.)

However in the age of COVID thereā€™s not much benefit to being there! This pandemic has catalyzed the move to digital, remote, and asynchronous, so I think the teams that best embrace this new way of working will succeed the most.

Investors will have to adapt and adjust too, so I expect to see more opportunities to develop relationships with investors from afar!

Where are you based @ncameron? :raised_hand: for a fellow Brit!

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Hey @pulkit,

Thank you so much for taking the time out for answering all the questions in such depth and for sharing so many of your personal tips! Iā€™m sure our community will find a ton of value in them. :slight_smile:

Loved your succinct take on picking the right battle with the stages of the user journey! And totally bookmarking this: ā€œIā€™d say you could consider adapting the framing of the question away from is ā€œa particular productā€ a good/bad candidate for PLG to is ā€œa particular workflow inside the productā€ a good/bad candidate.ā€ Itā€™s a rather unique and powerful insight! :raised_hands:

So glad we could get to learn from your remarkable journey and help the community do that too. Hope to have you join us soon again! And thank you again!

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Also, a big thanks to @ncameron, @Logesh, @raviramani, @Akhilesh, @kush, and @Vengat for joining in today and making it a wonderful conversation. :rocket:

Weā€™ll see you around for the next AMA soon. Stay tuned for more details!

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Hey Pulkit,

Thank you for the detailed answer. And Iā€™ll try to add my experience as well.

We (founders) let go of day-to-day operations of sales when we feel comfortable that we have someone who can optimise the processes and also run experiments to figure out new processes that is suitable to build our own playbook. As you said, someone to replace us. And many a times it turns out to be a VP of Sales - we were lucky to find an ex-founder (generalist) who decided was willing to take up Sales and learn on the job and scaled with us.

Our pipeline development was owned by marketing (inbound).

Just to expand on Pulkitā€™s answer:

  • demand gen / pipeline development - a leader (founder initially) needs to own the pipeline $$ delivery and drive this (marketing or sales).

  • founders typically end up playing the role of a sales engineer, product manager and sales person; it is difficult for a sales person to play all the roles; we should provide cover for the sales person to make them successful till we have specialists to support them

  • Operations - deal progress and review of CRM process - founders should drive this till you hire the VP of Sales; then monitor this monthly; our growth is dependent on the funnel and it is important to learn this discipline

  • sales coaching - every person could use a coach to listen to the conversations and talk about what could have been better; till there is a process established at scale founders should play this role of listening to customer calls, write notes for the sales person. The delivery of product value prop, objection handling, competitor questions are unique to your business and sales team needs help. Founders should spend time doing this to help sales person be successful as the context is hard to transfer and product value prop continues to evolve.

I tried to address this as various hats we wear in the sales org till we have specialist support for everything.

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