Why Product-Led Growth Isn't Just for SaaS Anymore

Hi there 👋,

We've all heard about the product-led growth hype for SaaS.

But what brands with physical products, like D2C?

Can a physical product be more product-led?

Although it may seem challenging, you can apply the principles of product-led growth to D2C to amplify your growth beyond traditional marketing channels.

End-of-the-day, product-led growth (PLG) focuses on delivering value through your product in acquiring and retaining customers.

So let's walk through four ways you can use product-led principles.

From Marketing-Led to more Product-Led

1. Try before you buy

Whilst you may not be able to offer the equivalent of a free trial, make it easier for your customers to try out and share your product.

One brand I worked with has a starter kit of their most popular products. As they are an eco-friendly cleaning brand, ensuring people buy their refillable bottles makes them more likely to repurchase.

Don't go straight for a subscription or high purchase first-order. Instead, make it easy for them to get to know your brand.

2. Test on price

Too many companies set their prices based on their competition and then NEVER test them. 

Price is a huge lever for PLG organisations: they continuously test and improve their pricing to see what gets the best balance of conversion rate and profitability.

You can do the same, use your ads/email to test different pricing, and measure the performance at each level.

Want to learn more about finding the right price? Check out the Van Westendorp Pricing model or Lenny's podcast on pricing your product.

Side note: price issues can result from not communicating value clearly. Always focus on understanding what drives value before asking what people are willing to pay.

3. A robust onboarding

At Heights, a customer once told our product manager:

“Life is too short for you to have to teach me how to get pills out of a bottle”.

He was right; something so core to our product should be self-explanatory.

Product-led companies excel at this: onboarding is made easy, and where support is needed, they use a range of notifications and emails.

Let's apply this to a physical product:

• Minimise what you have to explain about a product, and use your product to guide customers’ behaviour. The user experience should lead over design, not the other way around.

• Create an automated onboarding process that helps users get the most out of the product by using email or SMS flows and providing helpful information about the product.

4. Referral loops

Slack drives engagement by making it easy to invite colleagues, making a company more likely to convert.

Or a B2C example: Pinterest allows you to share pins and boards with friends via various social channels.

A key driver of product-led growth is referral loops.

Make it easier for your customers to share your physical product or brand. 

For example, one brand I'm working with is developing travel-size packages that can send samples but also give to existing customers to make it easy to share with friends/family who want to try the brand out.

If your product doesn't have a way to make sharing easy, consider developing content loops that encourage users to create and share content.

This tends to be far more potent than a typical financial reward referral loop (give £10 off, receive £10).

Recommendation

In every newsletter, I also share a related book, individual or newsletter to check out related to the week's topic.

The classic book recommendation is Product-Led Growth:

If you haven't read it, it's worth checking out, as even though it focuses on SaaS, you can apply a lot when you have a physical product.

The alternative less well-known recommendation is to check out The Product Experience; I did an interview for them last year and since then have loved listening to their product-led approach to growth across various businesses.

A big thank you to Rommil from Experimentation Nation for requesting the topic "how to migrate from marketing-led growth to product-led" for the newsletter.

I still want to tackle this a second time, in terms of how to approach that from a broader organisation shift, but that is a whole other can of worms. I thought I'd start with some actionable tips to help everyone get started.

Please keep sending in your requests and feedback. I try to cover as much as possible of what gets sent in. Till next week,

Daphne

P.S. Did someone forward you this? Sign up to receive free weekly D2C startup growth advice here.

P.P.S. Last week I launched my crash course in Message-Market Fit, if you are struggling to resonate with your target audience, check it out.