Product-Led Growth - Evolution or Revolution - with Wes Bush, ProductLed

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Wes Bush, founder and CEO of Product-led. Today, we will be covering three main topics around this key area of Product-Led Growth, and that includes how Product-Led Growth has evolved over the last few years. What is the current state of PLG adoption, and what does the future hold, and how to measure the performance of a Product-Led Growth program. Wes, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics and Measure Up podcast.

**Wes Bush** (1:08)
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Ray. This topic is near and dear to my heart, and I absolutely love it. So to give you some context just around how I fell into the world of Product-Led Growth, honestly, I was doing this stuff well before it was called Product-Led Growth. So it started for me. I was doing demand generation at these B2B SaaS companies that are venture backed, growing super quickly, and I was basically the hired gun to figure out how to get as many leads as possible for our sales team. And so I honestly tried everything I could think of, whether it was white papers, content syndication, you name it. If there was a program that involved getting leads, I had at least tried my hand at it. So as I was going through this process of trying to grow these sales led B2B SaaS companies, I started to have some serious questions around, you know what, is this the best way to build demands for this particular business? And so I looked at that and said, you know what, we're getting people to sign up for these white papers and content guides. And although it's great information and it's super useful, at the end of the article or this guide, it's always like sign up for a demo. And so I always had a hunch, I'm like, there should be a better way to generate more demands for these companies. And so it wasn't until I was at Vidyard at this time, where we launched this freemium product, went from zero to 100,000 users super quickly, that I started to look at the product as something that we didn't just sell, but ultimately what we used to serve our users. And so from that journey of launching that successful freemium product, I started to think about the product as the growth engine for your business. And I think it's always been that way. But now it's really coming to the forefront of SaaS, where we're looking at our products and saying, you know what, this isn't just the thing we sell at the end of the day. It's really how we help people. And that's really the short kind of story of how I fell into the world of the product and why I'm super excited about it, because I was first impacted by this, got into it, and I think there's so many more applications of just how you can use your product to grow your business that we haven't even scraped the surface of, but it's just beginning.

**Ray Rike** (3:21)
Well, it's interesting. So it was at Vidyard where you really kind of launched this learning experience for yourself. Do you find that certain products are more applicable for a Productled Growth Motion, or do you think almost all B2B SaaS products could use at least some portion of PLG Motion for some customer acquisition and expansion?

**Wes Bush** (3:41)
Yeah, honestly, such a good question, because when I was at Vidyard, we were technically, if you had looked at our website, we were Productled back in 2016 And what was cool about that, we had a trial and it was for our main product, which was a video hosting product, so you could see the analytics of the videos. And so we had this trial, and it just wasn't really all that successful. And the sales team itself was treating these trialers more like a demo request than a straight up trial, whereas we obviously want to help you get to access the value of the product as soon as possible. So it was interesting because we had that motion. But this new freemium product, the one thing it had difference was it had a very quick time to value. And so it was a simple Chrome extension. It took about three to the five clicks to kind of set it up. And within about a minute, you could record yourself in Chrome, send a video to a colleague, send it to a prospect, and it was super quick to create a video.