Goodish Show [S1E5]: Product Led Growth for SaaS in 2021

Author: Gasper Gracel

Welcome to another episode of The Goodish Show where we’ll discuss the business opportunities of “Product-led Growth”! For our 5th episode of the Goodish Show we invited Oscar Bader, the CEO& Founder of “DesignWithValue” and Co-creator of “SaaS It Up” podcast. Oscar’s podcast is well-known in the SaaS industry for discussing topics such as top notch UX/UI design and growth hacking. So let’s get right into it!

Who is Oscar Bader?

Oscar’s journey started over 6 years ago, when he was helping small companies with their UX & UI design of their website and apps. Shortly after we moved from Austria to Munich, Germany where he joined a strong design team whose mission was to improve websites and conversion rates. Just a year ago Oscar decided to open up his own company DesignWithValue. Nowadays he helps companies and entrepreneurs to not only gain but also retain customers.

What is Product Led Growth?

Product-led growth is a term that’s been around for a while but has recently become increasingly important in the SaaS industry. You can think about product-led growth the same way we think about buying a car; you won’t buy a car without test driving it first. And that, our dear readers, is exactly what product-led growth is. The aim of product-led growth is to give your potential customers a test/beta product to see what they like about it and they struggle with, before launching it to the general public. You can offer these public a free trial with full features in return for feedback.

Oscar emphasizes the importance of giving “time to value”. In a nutshell, this basically considers the amount of time that your potential customer needs to find the value of your product. To retain as many visitors as possible, try to make your “time to value” as short and clear at the beginning.

How & When Are the Users Finding Value in Your Product

In order to understand what about your product/service the user finds valuable you have to track the user journey. And the best way to find out if people are satisfied with your product and if they would be willing to pay for it in the future, is to contact your most frequent users and ask them.

Use your user feedback to help to optimize your site/product and ensure your new users can find the value of your product or service even faster and with less friction. Start your product-led growth by asking your customers what about your product do they value the most. Then, start tracking those moments and optimize accordingly.

How to Convince Free Users to Start Paying for Your Product/Service

One effective way of convincing your clients to start paying for your service is to add more “premium” features. For example, let’s say you have an app that is free to download and free to use. You could add some extra features that would provide your users with additional features and value.

Another way of going about this is offering the users a free trial – a freemium model where they’re able to access all the feature that your product/service offers but ie. for 1 week only.

The Importance of Experiments

According to Oscar, web/app experiments are extremely important in developing any product/service and should be performed on monthly, if not on a weekly basis. Keep in mind that the point of doing an experiment isn’t to confirm your hypothesis, but to learn something new and make sure you don’t make the same mistake again.

It’s okay to make mistakes, you just have to learn from them!

Oscar Bader

Designer

We hoped you enjoyed this summary of our product led growth webinar and received useful tips that you’ll be able to implement in your SaaS company. To receive even more value, take a look at our previous episodes of the Goodish Show! We have plenty of excellent content coming up in the future so make sure to follow us on our social media or sign up to our newsletter to receive the best and latest advice regarding digital marketing for SaaS.