B2B marketers love making up new acronyms to overcomplicate things.

It feels like PLG (aka product-led growth) is the new kid on the B2B marketing acronym block.

On DGU this week, get an inside look at how we added a PLG motion at Metadata and launched our first PLG product this month.

Listen to Mark and Jason chat all things PLG or keep reading for the top takeaways.  

Three top takeaways: 

Takeaway 1: Initial MVP experiments aren’t meant to be pretty

Marc Randolph (co-founder and first CEO of Netflix) tweeted this out yesterday and it hit home.

“If you’re building an MVP…you’re building too much. You want to build an MUP. A Minimal Unviable Product. It doesn’t need to be repeatable or scalable. Just enough to prove that someone really wants what you’re building.”

We cringed after we launched our MVP experiment for MetaMatch. The registration page looked brutal. The checkout process wasn’t smooth. But that’s not important here.

The goal of any MVP experiment is to get real feedback and validate learning. Not make it look on brand or feel like something you’d‌ be proud of.

We needed to get people to sign up for MetaMatch, start using it, and get meaningful feedback. We can iterate and make the next launch “prettier” after we prove out the experiment.

Takeaway 2: People need to use your product, not just sign up for it

Getting people to sign up for any freemium or PLG product is‌ the easy part.

The hardest part is activating new users. They need to know how to use your product without talking to anyone from your Sales and CS teams.

New users need to experience “aha moments” in your product as quickly as possible. They need to see how easy it is to use your product and how it helps them do their job better.

We’re learning this on the fly with our MVP experiment for MetaMatch. We made educated guesses on where these “aha moments” are using qualitative feedback. Now we need the data.

Takeaway 3: Show people how much value they’re getting out of your product 

Loom does an amazing job at showing me how much value I get from using their product.

You can see how many recordings you’ve posted, how many times they’ve been watched, and most importantly: how many meetings you’ve avoided by using Loom.

Find the benefits and metrics your users care more about than anything else. Then use in-app notifications and good, timely emails to show them how much value they’re getting.

Companies who do this well convert new users to paying customers AND turn paying customers into huge fans of their product.