“Each new data he encountered in product impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new (anecdotal) evidence loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: the product seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a…
When we talk about growth in Product-Led-Growth, we mean scaling, i.e. increasing user adoption and engagement. There is something really enticing about a product that gains momentum through (product) design and not through (marketing) effort. Yet, growing too early is still the main cause of startup failure. So here’s a 5-point checklist to help you…
One mistake I have seen more than once in the startup industry is to tackle both primary challenges at the same time: The first: product-market fit, i.e. making sure your product meets the needs of the market while maintaining a viable price range; The other: technical implementation, i.e. overcoming the technical hurdles in developing and…
PLG can only thrive in organizations that are culturally and structurally aligned. Unlike other approaches, this approach requires extensive cross-functional collaboration between product, engineering, and marketing to address the inevitable conceptual, technical, and market challenges. Below are the three organisational barriers to product-led growth and suggestions on how to overcome them:
Starting a business with a product-driven growth strategy may seem easy at first, but the struggle often begins after a few months or years: The team is torn between an unattainable vision and a minimal set of features chosen for their feasibility rather than user expectations. Product launches take forever. User retention is disproportionate to…
“Any organization that designs a system (the term here is broader than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”
Over the past 15 years, I have spent a lot of time working with startups. I have worked with software, hardware, analogue, VC-backed, bootstrapped, and Kickstarter startups. Some of them went public, others went out of business. Some of them found the right product-market fit, while others did not. Here’s how to approach startups and…