Part of finding product/market fit is turning early wins into repeatable, scalable, and profitable sales. In this talk given as part of the Heavybit speaker series, I discuss how to shorten the time to customer conversion from trials, freemium and open source products.
23. • Moving house
• Movers, phones, cable TV, furniture, insurance, etc.
• Just lost my data in hard drive crash
• Backup software/service
• Starting a new software project
• Dev Tools, etc.
• Performance issues with existing app
• APM tools
• Difficulties tracking bugs across multi-tier apps
• Bug tracking software
TRIGGERS
24. Getting to know your Buyer Personae
• What are their key business goals?
• How does our product help them achieve
those?
• What does their Boss expect of them?
• What pain do they have that we address?
• Is it latent pain, or obvious pain?
• How do they describe the pain and what
they are looking for?
• (Helpful for messaging)
• Are they out there searching for solutions?
• If so, how?
• Is solving this pain a high priority for them?
• If not, what features would make it a higher
priority?
• What are the most important features on
their checklist?
• What are their reactions to our
product/company?
• What will they like? What will they not like?
• What are the main questions and concerns
they will have?
• What are the steps in their purchasing
process?
• What are their likely decision making criteria?
• Who else has to be involved in the decision
(e.g. Business buyer, IT)?
• Who influences them? (Sites,
organizations, and people)
• (Helps us figure out how to market to them)
• Other characteristics that are relevant to
this purchase
• E.g. Developers:
• Don't have a budget
• Prefer Open Source, and don't like to pay for
software
25. MAP BUYERS PROCESS TO YOUR STEPS
Research
Shortlist
Vendors
Evaluation
ROI &
Justification
Website Free Trial
BUYER
VENDOR
26. GET INSIDE YOUR BUYERS HEAD
Research
Shortlist
Vendors
Evaluation
ROI &
Justification
Website Free Trial
BUYER
VENDOR
• How are they reacting as they go through our funnel steps?
• What are they thinking as they go through their process?
27. OPTIMIZE YOUR STEPS TO FIT
Research
Shortlist
Vendors
Evaluation
ROI &
Justification
Website Free Trial
ROI
Calculator
Competitive
Features
Matrix
BUYER
VENDOR
28. ADDRESS ALL DECISION CRITERIA
Address
Security Concerns
3rd Party
Security Audit &
Whitepaper
BUYER
30. A few characteristics of developers
• They like Free and Open Source
• They are cheap, and don’t like paying for things
• Talk to other developers to find out about the latest thing
• Highly influenced by super-scale companies like FB, Netflix, Google, etc.
• Can be very viral if they love your product
• Early Adopters
• Typically see it as cool to work on the latest thing
• They are a great entry point for startup technologies
• Have a ton of power over decisions on what goes into the stack
31. DEVELOPERS ARE YOUR CHAMPION
(NOTE: NOT TRUE IN ALL CASES. SOMETIMES THE DEVELOPER IS THE BUYER)
A GREAT CHANNEL
TO YOUR BUYER
32. ADDS FRICTION TO A STEP WHERE YOU SHOULD BE
OPTIMIZING FOR MAXIMUM ADOPTION
COMMON MISTAKE
TRYING TO MONETIZE THE CHANNEL
33. Who is the buyer?
• Head of Ops
• CTO
• VP Tech or Platform
• Dev Project or Team Leaders
• Etc.
34. JBoss case: Head of Ops
• Some characteristics:
• Job is focused on:
• Uptime (reliability, scalability, security)
• Low Latency (great user experience)
• Compliance (security)
• Data privacy, security, and protection
• Secondary focus:
• Doing better on faster product cycles: (Continuous Delivery)
• They want a throat to choke when something goes wrong
• Don’t trust that unless they are paying for it, and have a contract
35. Freemium, Free Trials, Open Source
• The Product is your sales person
• Great strategy
• Free products have a chance of going viral
• Greatly lowers CAC, but at the expense of high engineering costs
• Other positives
• Addresses the Evaluation phase, and answers a ton of questions
about the product
• The customer does the work
36. The Tricky Thing with Freemium
• Usually have to come up with two great products
Free
Product
For-pay
Product
• Where things go wrong:
• The first product is not a great standalone offering
• Sometimes because of fear of cannibalizing the for-pay product
• The for-pay product is not sufficiently compelling
• And the free product remains its greatest competitor
37. MONETIZING OPEN SOURCE
• Open Core seems to be the way to go
• Two interesting places where there is willingness to pay:
• Cloud and SaaS
• Even developers see the power of using SaaS applications and the
cloud, and expect to pay for these
• On Prem Deployments
• GitHub Enteprise
• Jenkins Enterprise
38. WHAT IS YOUR TIME TO
WOW! ?
Thanks to Gail Goodman of Constant Contact
WOW!
39. DEFINING WOW!
Mini
Wow!
A moment where your buyer sees
something cool and exciting
• Motivates them to continue exploring
Full
Wow!
The moment when your buyer gets
excited enough to want to buy
40. TIME TO WOW!
• How many steps?
• How much time does it take?
• How much FRICTION is involved
43. Defining Wow!
• Mini Wow! Moment
Sees a React component wired up to data
with very little work
• Build a GraphQL Server
• Connected to their own data
• Web, iOS and Android clients connect
to that data (React/React Native)
• Full Wow! Moment
44. Buyer Journey (partial)
Validate
how easy it
is to build a
React app
with
GraphQLReact
Developer
Play with it
(Trial)
Demo/sell
to others in
company
CTO &
Backend
Developer
buy in
Play with it
(Trial)
45. Trial involves three hard steps
Set up a
GraphQL
Server that
fetches our
data
Deploy so it
is accessble
by URL
Create
React &
ReactNative
component
Demo
access to
data in iOS
& Android
46. Tons of Friction in first two steps
Build a GraphQL Service
• Have Node installed
• Download a boilerplate project from GitHub
• Npm install some packages
• Run the server
• Open GraphiQL in your browser
• Edit server code
• Switch to GraphiQL in your browser
• Run the query to see the new result
To Deploy to a URL
• Hope your server boilerplate has a
production deploy setup
• Identify a hosting provider
• Install the hosting CLI or tools
• Sign up for account on hosting service
• Run deploy command
• Wait for it to deploy
• Open GraphiQL in your deployed server to
check it's still working
• Done
47. Redesign:
Wow! in a matter of minutes
Launchpad "new" screen: https://launchpad.graphql.com/new
Ticketmaster Example
Launchpad: https://launchpad.graphql.com/9pw9nnkjr
Expo client-side example: https://snack.expo.io/B1Bk_-k7-
For more details:
Video of Workshop: https://github.com/stubailo/ticketmaster-workshop
List of examples: https://github.com/apollographql/launchpad
48. To view the demo, click here:
https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/optimize-your-funnel-by-getting-inside-
your-buyers-head/?23m25s
49. SUMMARIZING WHATAPOLLO DID:
• Clear understanding of Wow!
• Analyzed Friction and Concerns for buyer
• Redesigned, removing steps and friction
54. Cloud Bees
Easy Onboarding & Team
Collaboration
Access Control & Enterprise
Security
High Availability + Elastic
Pricing
CTO
Wow!
VP PLATFORM
Wow!
TEAM LEAD
Wow!
55. RE-THINK THE PROCESS
Source: Josh Porter – Designing for Social Traction
CONVENTIONAL
APPROACH
SIGN UP
FOR TRIAL
Wow! CONVERT TO
CUSTOMER
WOW! FIRST,
REGISTER LATER Wow! SIGN UP
FOR TRIAL
CONVERT TO
CUSTOMER
78. ANALYZE TRIAL STEPS AS THOUGH
THEY WERE FUNNEL STEPS
Create a
full profile
Import
Contacts
Do a
search for
Prospects
See
search
results
Imagine a Sales Rep signing up for the old LinkedIn
Wow!
79. Look for blockage Points
Imagine a Sales Rep signing up for the old LinkedIn
HIGH FALL OFF RATES HERE
Create a
full profile
Import
Contacts
Do a
search for
Prospects
See
search
results
Wow!
80. For an Outlook/Exchange User
Download
an App
Install
the App
Run
the App
Create a
full profile
Import
Contacts
Do a
search for
Prospects
See
search
results
Wow!
81. APPLY BLOCKAGE POINT THINKING
FRICTION
MOTIVATION
CONCERNS
Replace the downloaded App with request for email
credentials and get contacts from Exchange.
Create a
full profile
Import
Contacts
Do a
search for
Prospects
See
search
results
Wow!
82. • Concern:
• I have tons of very private and confidential emails. I don’t
want anyone to read those.
You want me to give you
the password
to login to my email?!!!
83.
84. APPLY BLOCKAGE POINT THINKING
FRICTION
MOTIVATION
CONCERNS
Replace the downloaded App with by
connecting to Contacts on iOS/Android
Create a
full profile
Import
Contacts
Do a
search for
Prospects
See
search
results
Wow!
Hinweis der Redaktion
That would be like hoping we could simply put up a web site and expect that people would just find it and immediately buy our product.
THIS IS A GUESS at users, but is there dev focused example we can use here?