B2B Product-led growth — Mona Akmal // Falkon

Quotes

• "The two examples that pop up are Dropbox, and I called them out because they did the highest-intensity version of product-led growth. They were doing product-led growth when it wasn't even a term we understood or discussed. The second example I have in mind is Figma. They built a phenomenal community of customers who loved the product, brought it into the workplace, and turned it into a B2B SaaS offering." - Mona Akmal

• "There is the business model of PLG, and there is the philosophy of being a product-based and product-led company and the internal culture you build. And they are potentially pretty different things." - Mona Akmal

• "Companies obsessed with building products that solve customer problems will always win because there's a certain intellectual truth to adding value to your end users' daily work life. You can make a deal by being a phenomenal seller, but if your product fails to deliver on the promises that you've made, what's going to happen?" - Mona Akmal

• "In the B2B SaaS world, the buyers are potentially different from the end users. So, for instance, in our case, our buyer is a CRO, but most CROs don't log into Falkon, and that's fine. But suppose you have to worship one God; which God do you worship: your buyer or user?" - Mona Akmal

• "Product-oriented companies will always bias toward creating value for users. The philosophy is that if you can make users happy, they will create the internal momentum to handle all the internal objections. The philosophy of product-led companies is a highly data-driven assessment of product market fit." - Mona Akmal

• "Founders are very guilty of happy ears when it comes to product market fit because every investor wants to hear that you've hit product market fit. However, product-oriented companies have the intellectual honesty and the data-driven mindset to say when they have hit product market fit and not declare it prematurely." - Mona Akmal

• "If you invest in a good feature flagging system, have a close relationship with early customers, and incentivize them to be your test bed for ideas, you can get very far in a non-PLG motion by rolling out new things, new capabilities, and not risking the health of the business or the health of your customer's business." - Mona Akmal

• "For a non-PLG company, we achieve PLG motions through close customer relationships, product advisory council, product roadmap reviews, high-fidelity mocked-up experiences, and getting feedback on those. And then feature flagging things on and off testing, then rolling out to our entire customer base features that we see has high adoption." - Mona Akmal

• "This is where a lot of product-led founders go wrong. They don't talk to their customers, and they'd instead look at the metric because they're scared of talking to people because they could say things that hurt our feelings." - Mona Akmal