Product Led Growth Metrics and Benchmarks - with Sam Richard, OpenView Partners

**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 informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are so fortunate to be joined by Sam Richard, Growth Director at OpenView Partners. Today, we will be covering three main topics, product-led growth, is it an evolution, or a revolution for the B2B SaaS and Cloud industry? What are the top five metrics to measure progress and success in a product-led growth model? And a little bit more about Sam, moving from a SaaS operator to a VC growth role. Sam, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Sam Richard** (1:13)
Sure. Thank you so much for having me today, Ray. I'm excited to share my thoughts on product-led growth and how it impacts the metrics that we all measure in our SaaS businesses. I originally started out my career in consulting, as many college students do, and they don't necessarily know what they want in life. Then I fairly quickly moved into marketing for a startup-focused agency, really learned about the early days of digital marketing and website optimization, as well as early days of email marketing and interesting things that you could do there. I moved on to be in-house at a company. At the time, it was called Hourly Nerd. It was one of their first marketing hires. It is now called Catalan. I ended up managing all of our digital marketing there, as well as any paid marketing, which is ironic considering that I work in product lead growth today. Then I moved on to a company called Dispatch, where I was fifth hire. It was their first marketing hire. I came in and quickly realized since we were working with very large enterprises and we got paid based on people's engagement with our product that I needed to transition not just from a marketing outbound role to someone who really focused more on driving what made us money, so driving engagement, driving the proper behavior with our product. I actually stayed at Dispatch for almost five years. Eventually, we were purchased by Vista Equity Partners, which was a really great exit for the team. I stayed on for quite a bit to help that transition, help the team.
I was planning on staying there or potentially moving into Vista Equity Partners, but I got a call from a friend who worked at OpenView and it was really the perfect role for me. What I do at OpenView is I help our portfolio companies implement a lot of the things that I was doing at Dispatch, which turns out to be called product-led growth. Some of that is through consulting work, helping folks find their activation metric, helping them define product-qualified leads within their own product. Then some of that is advisory work. The rest of my job is really turning that work and turning those experiences into best practices and thought leadership for prospects and portfolio companies to be able to leverage more at an aggregate level.

**Ray Rike** (3:13)
Wow. You were at Dispatch for five years and really knee deep into the operating side of a product-led growth company, right?
Yep. How long ago did you start at Dispatch? Was that like seven or eight years ago?

**Sam Richard** (3:26)
God, what year was that? That was 2015 That was very early days. We actually started our product as Uber for X in a box. You might remember when on-demand startups were all the rage. We very quickly transitioned to really being an API layer for service-based businesses. That was how early days we were. I was an early user of tools like Intercom and Pendo, a mixed-panel segment, a few tools like that. It was very bleeding edge.

**Ray Rike** (3:52)
Wow. You are a true pioneer. Six years of being right there in the middle of PLG, but I have a question for you. Everyone's talking about PLG's being the up-and-coming preferred or primary customer acquisition motion. Where do you really think we are in the maturity of PLG as a customer acquisition motion, Sam?

**Sam Richard** (4:13)
I think it was really nice of you to caveat that as a customer acquisition motion. I think PLG is all over the map because we haven't really defined best practices yet. I think as a customer acquisition motion, what I typically see in terms of best practices and with some best-in-class product like companies, is everyone is coming in this way and seeing 80-90 percent organic sign-ups, so that customer being acquired by signing up. But I'm still seeing 50-60 percent of folks self-serving maybe a little bit more depending on your ACD.