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An Intro to Product-Led Growth from MarkovML

August 2, 2023
Written By
Piyush Bhopalka
August 2, 2023
Written By

Want to grow your product organically? This blog post breaks down understanding costs, setting up starter plans, and pricing premium features using MarkovML as an example. Learn how to engage new users and encourage upgrades, enhancing user experience and fueling growth through actionable insights.

I recently gave a talk at super{summit} about how we are implementing product-led growth at MarkovML. MarkovML is Figma for ML teams - an easy-to-use collaborative interface for understanding data quality, evaluating models, and automating ML workflows.

In this blog post, we cover what product-led growth is, and a playbook for achieving it that you can implement at your company.

Let’s get started!

What is product-led growth?

Product-led growth is a model where instead of relying on salespeople, you build an intuitive product that markets and sells itself. People start using your product, find value in it, and then want to use it more and pay to access additional features. 

For example, Google built Gmail as a free product that people loved. When they wanted to use it for business, Google was ready with their paid G Suite plans. Google didn't need salespeople to sell G Suite—they built a product that sold itself through the value it provided.

To implement product-led growth, here are the key steps:

1. Make sure your product is good enough that you don't need demos. 

The key to product-led growth is having a product intuitive enough for users to adopt without much hand-holding. At MarkovML, we asked ourselves: is our product good enough that users don’t need a manual to get started? If the answer is yes, you have a solid foundation for building a product-led business model.  

Our goal became optimizing the user experience to guide people through important and high-value actions, without them needing support. If we could achieve that, we knew we’d built something people would pay for.  

2. Track what your users are doing. 

Next, you need to have a quantitative understanding of how your users are currently using your free, self-serve product, so that you know which features to gate behind paid plans.

At MarkovML, to gain insight into how our users use our product, we implemented two analytics tools, Amplitude and Hotjar. 

Using Amplitude

Amplitude is an analytics tool that lets you track events and user actions in your product like button clicks, page views, feature usage, etc. This can help you understand how users are actually interacting with different parts of your product, and which features users engage with the most, and which ones they rarely use.

For MarkovML, we tracked events like:

  • Datasets on Navbar clicked
  • Add dataset button clicked
  • Dataset details page opened 
  • Different tabs of data set details page clicked 
  • Time spent on page

We also used Amplitude reports to analyze metrics like new users, dormant users, and active users. 

In the below reports, we could see users drop off in key flows like the data set registration process. This revealed that the process was too complex. We have now used these insights to simplify and optimize the data set registration flow for better conversion. New results are yet to come in! 🤞🙂

Using Hotjar

Hotjar is an analytics tool that records visitors' sessions, including mouse movements, clicks, taps, and scrolls. This generates heatmaps and recordings you can then analyze.

In our case, Hotjar heatmaps revealed unused screen real estate we could remove. For example, the heatmaps showed us that no one was clicking the buttons in our "Explore MarkovML" section. The live videos of user interactions also helped to highlight areas of friction or confusion that we could address.

To fix this, we rejigged the interface and now we have better results than before. More work is ongoing to further increase engagement on our dashboard page. This is how data and real insights should drive decision making.

3. Determine costs

Next, you need to understand the costs associated with your product so you can price subscription packages accordingly. 

For example, at MarkovML, AWS Fargate and Lambda are two of our largest expenses. We used Metabase and Snowflake to analyze usage data and see how much compute, storage, and other resources customers were consuming. Specifically, we tracked the below metrics and mapped them to cloud costs:

  • How much data people were uploading when registering data sets
  • How many model experiments and evaluations people were running  
  • How many hours of notebook usage customers logged

4. Determine usage caps for your starter plan. 

The insights from the usage and cost analyses should help shape your starter plan usage caps. The idea is to balance between hooking new users and encouraging them to upgrade. 

For example, at MarkovML, we have seen that most people upload less than 1GB of datasets, so it makes sense to set a free dataset storage cap of 1GB. This enables the majority of users to be successful with their first experience with MarkovML. Note that this is what we want! If we are short-term greedy and set caps too low, and users are forced to pay before ever completing their first workflow with MarkovML, they are likely to just churn. The idea is to give users enough access to become engaged, then incentivize upgrading as needs grow.

5. Decide which premium features to build and how to price. 

Apart from free usage caps, the data will also help you determine which additional features and resources to offer in paid subscription plans. For example, if users are running many model experiments, additional compute resources or custom model support may be appealing as a paid feature. 

Note that premium features should extend and build on your core product capabilities. If you’re at a loss for what to build, start with the simplest, most important thing that users want and are willing to pay for. Just make sure the revenue potential of premium features justifies the development effort required. 

The Ongoing PLG Process

In summary, product-led growth relies on building a product that markets and sells itself through the value it provides to customers. The keys to success are: build the right product, gain data-driven insights, optimize user experience, nail your starter plan, listen to customers, and never stop improving. Observing analytics on usage patterns, and monitoring costs will get you started, but the key is to think of it not as a one-time audit but as an ongoing process for optimizing user experience.

For more, watch the full video of my super{summit} presentation here, and find more videos at youtube.com/@supersetstudio

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Written By
Piyush Bhopalka
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How Engineers Should Talk to Customers with Empathy

Do you get an uneasy feeling anytime you get added to a customer call? Do you ever struggle to respond to a frustrated customer? Peter Wang, Product lead at Ketch, discusses how customer feedback can help drive product development, and how engineers can use customer insights to create better products. Learn best practices for collecting and interpreting customer feedback.

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Why I'm Joining super{set} as Chief Commercial Officer

Announcing Jon Suarez-Davis (jsd) as super{set}’s Chief Commercial Officer: jsd tells us in his own words why he's joining super{set}

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Infrastructure Headaches - Where’s the Tylenol?

Head of Infrastructure at Ketch, and Kapstan Advisor, Anton Winter explains a few of the infrastructure and DevOps headaches he encounters every day.

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Navigating Juneteenth

Considered by some to be “America’s Second Independence Day,” Juneteenth has only recently entered the national zeitgeist. Celebrated on the third Saturday in June, it became a federal holiday just last year under President Joe Biden. Many companies are left wondering how to acknowledge the holiday. We sat down with Eskalera’s co-founder Dr. Tolonda Tolbert to get her take.

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Tom Chavez in The Information: "TikTok Is Not the Enemy"

Tom writes a nuanced take on the TikTok controversy and outlines ethical data principles that will restore people’s sense of trust and offer them true control over how and when they grant permission for use of their data.

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Understanding The AI “Alignment Problem”

Vivek Vaidya recaps his conversation with AI researcher and author of "The Alignment Problem" Brian Christian at the 2023 super{summit}.

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The Four Types of Startup Opportunities

In our last post, we discussed how data is the new general-purpose technology and that is why at super{set} we form data-driven companies from scratch. But new technologies are a promise, not a sudden phase change.

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Data Eats the World

The wheel. Electricity. The automobile. These are technologies that had a disproportionate impact on the merits of their first practical use-case; but beyond that, because they enabled so much in terms of subsequent innovation, economic historians call them “general-purpose technologies” or GPTs...

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The super{set} Entrepreneurial Guild

Has someone looking to make a key hire ever told you that they are after “coachability”? Take a look at the Google ngram for “coachability” — off like a rocket ship since the Dot Com bubble, and it’s not even a real word! Coaching is everywhere in Silicon Valley...

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Not Just On Veterans Day

This post was written by Ketch Developer Advocate, Ryan Overton, as part of our #PassTheMic series.

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Pivots and Possibilities

Discover how lessons from law enforcement shape a thriving tech career. Ketch Sr. Business Development Representative Brenda Flores shares a bold career pivot in our latest "Pass the Mic" story.

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How I Learned to Stop Optimizing and Love the Startup Ride

Reflections after a summer as an engineering intern at super{set}

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Too Dumb to Quit

The decision to start a company – or to join an early stage one – is an act of the gut. On good days, I see it as a quasi-spiritual commitment. On bad days, I see it as sheer irrationality. Whichever it is, you’ll be happier if you acknowledge and calmly accept the lunacy of it all...

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Lessons of Grit from my Immigrant Parents

This post was written by Ketch Solutions Engineer, Sahiti Surapaneni, as part of our #PassTheMic series.

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Q&A with Accel Founder Arthur Patterson

Arthur Patterson, founder of venture capital firm Accel, sits down for a fireside chat with super{set} founding partner Tom Chavez as part of our biweekly super{set} Community Call. Arthur and Tom cover venture investing, company-building, and even some personal stories from their history together.

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From Watsonville To The Moon

This post was written by Habu software engineer, Martín Vargas-Vega, as part of our new #PassTheMic series.

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The Balancing Act For Women in Tech

This post was written by Ketch Sales Director, Sheridan Rice, as part of our #PassTheMic series.

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From Chords, to Code, to Chords Again: The Story Behind Boombox.io

super{set} founding general partner Tom Chavez wasn’t always set on a life of engineering and entrepreneurship – music was his first love. For a time, he was determined to make a career out of it. With boombox.io, Tom has combined the best of both worlds into a product that inspires and delights both the engineer and the musician.

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The RevOps Bowtie Data Problem

Go-to-market has entered a new operating environment. Enter: RevOps. We dig into the next solution space for super{set}, analyzing the paradigm shift in GTM and the data challenges a new class of company must solve.

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Navigating the Startup Journey from Launch to Finish Line

Are you a launcher, or a finisher? The balance of conviction, a guiding vision, and the right team to execute it all make the difference between entrepreneurial success and failure. Tom Chavez delves into his journey as a first-time CEO and the invaluable guidance he received from a key mentor.

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How To Avoid Observability MELTdown

o11y - What is it? Why is it important? What are the tools you need? More importantly - how can you adopt an observability mindset? Habu Software Architect Siddharth Sharma reports from his session at super{summit} 2022.

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Why I'm Co-founding @ super{set}

Pankaj Rajan, co-founder at MarkovML, describes his Big Tech and startup experience and his journey to starting a company at super{set}.

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High-Velocity Personal Growth

What's the price you put on personal growth? In his most recent note to founders, super{set} Founding General Partner Vivek Vaidya outlines 7 points of advice for startup interviews and negotiations. Vivek explains his compensation philosophy and the balance between cash and the investment in personal and career growth a startup can bring. Here’s the mindset you need to reach your zenith at a startup.

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We don’t critique, we found and build.

The super{set} studio model for early-stage venture It is still early days for the startup studio model. We know this because at super{set} we still get questions from experienced operators and investors. One investor that we’ve known for years recently asked us: “you have a fund — aren’t you just a venture capital firm with a different label?”

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Silicon Valley’s Greatest Untapped Resource: Moms

This post was written by MarkovML Co-Founder, Lindsey Meyl, as part of our #PassTheMic series.

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Founder and Father: A Balancing Act

Making It Work With Young Kids & Young Companies

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How Boombox Nurtures Customer Collaboration for Success

In a conversation with boombox's co-founder India Lossman, the discussion pivots to the art of fostering customer collaboration in music creation. Lossman unveils how artist-driven feedback shapes boombox's innovative platform, with a glimpse into AI's empowering potential. Understand the synergy between technology and user insights as they redefine the independent music landscape.

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Jamming with Habu’s Matt Kilmartin on Partnership Strategy

Discover how Habu, a trailblazer in data clean room technology, utilizes strategic partnerships with giants like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS to expand its market reach and foster the potential of an emerging category. Learn from CEO Matt Kilmartin's insights on how collaboration is the secret sauce that brings innovation to life.

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VCs Write Investment Memos, We Write Solution Memos

When a VC decides to invest in a company, they write up a document called the “Investment Memo” to convince their partners that the decision is sound. This document is a thorough analysis of the startup...

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Lessons from the Startup Circus

super{set} Technical Lead and resident front-end engineering expert Sagar Jhobalia recaps lessons from participating in multiple product and team build-outs in our startup studio. Based on a decade of experience, Sagar emphasizes the importance of assembling the right engineering team, setting expectations, and strategically planning MVPs for early wins in the fast-paced startup environment.

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