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📅 GEEKS OF THE WEEK

5 bookmark-worthy links:

• Saas + Recession = Doom?!

• Combining the data warehouse and clickstream for maximum profit

• 4 Ways ‘Office Hours’ Maximizes C-Suite Decision-Making and Performance

• Kyle’s Guide to GTM Metrics 2.0

• 10 Behavioural Principles and Dark Patterns in User Onboarding you need to know

🧠 GEEK OUT

Build to be Discovered

Playing hard to get doesn't work in PLG.

A while back I was invited to host a mastermind session with my friends at OpenView about one of their 11 principles for ‘The Age of Connected Work’: Build to be Discovered.

In this post I want to briefly summarise what we discussed in that session, and why it’s so important for PLG.

In a nutshell, for me, 'Build to be Discovered' means meeting users where they are.

That can mean being easy to find in their moment of need.

It can mean being visible in the context of their task.

And it can also mean just having a positive presence where they spend their time.

Or simplified further, being there when they are

• 👀 Looking

• 👩‍💻 Doing

• 👥 Hanging out

Let’s take a look at each of those three areas:

1. Be easy to find in your users moment of need

Industry by industry, we're continuing to see go-to-market models being disrupted by the ‘consumerisation’ of software, which implies a shift away from in-your-face selling and presenting, toward a motion of user-initiated discovery.

We see users being increasingly empowered to self-medicate through software.

Of course, this is the norm in B2C, but nowadays, in B2B, if I have a problem or feel pain in my day-to-day, I'll just go and seek out a solution myself.

So for B2B PLG software vendors, this creates an imperative to make yourself easy to find in a user's moment of need.

Which typically means making sure you're there when users are explicitly searching for solutions to their problems.

Tactics here include:

• Programmatic SEO with company-generated and user-generated content
  
  Good examples include Miro templates, Snyk Advisor package pages, and Zapier integration pages.

• Editorial SEO through landing pages, how-to guides, documentation, …

Don’t be Waldo (Or OG Wally for my UK readers 🇬🇧).

If you are not easy to find when your users need help, they’ll inevitably find help elsewhere.

2. Be visible in the context of your users’ tasks

The next place you need to be seen is where users are getting things done.

The goal here is helping people find and become aware of you when they are going about their day-to-day at work.

They're not actively looking to solve a problem at that moment, but get introduced to a novel or interesting solution as they are working.

PLG products will usually stand up this motion through either collaborative viral loops where users invite others to collaborate with them, or through branded viral loops:

To re-engage existing users you can lean on environmental triggers

3. Have a positive presence where your users spend their time

And finally, you need to have a positive presence where your users (and potential users) hang out.

Community.

It should never be about being there to sell,

You have to show up and be present with generosity.

Contribute and be helpful.

Before my time at Snyk, the first vehicle for growth was in-person community events with a narrow focus of developers building using Node.js.

The goal is to become front of mind as the go-to solution for a user problem when it becomes important enough to them to want to take action to solve.

I advocate for onboarding and activation flows starting before users come close to your product, and being a helpful presence in domain communities can help build trust that makes your product not only an obvious choice to try first, but also provides additional motivation for them to overcome whatever friction is involved in getting started with the product.

Closing thoughts.

Ultimately what Build to be Discovered means is simply meeting users where they are.

Being there when they are looking, when they are doing, and when they are hanging out.

Get these three things right and your product-led acquisition efforts will get a meaningful boost.

😂 GEEK GIGGLE

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THAT’S A WRAP

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Until next time!

— Ben

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