Unveiling the Blueprints: 6 Insider GTM Strategies for Scaling Developer Platforms with WorkOS and Retool
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Unveiling the Blueprints: 6 Insider GTM Strategies for Scaling Developer Platforms with WorkOS and Retool
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Unveiling the Blueprints: 6 Insider GTM Strategies for Scaling Developer Platforms with WorkOS and Retool
- 12. ○
Editor's Notes
- Overview only 20m, only so much we can cover Applicable to almost every company For each of these areas, we’re going to share one secret, or a lesson, we’ve learned, but obviously it won’t cover everything in depth
- PLG is “product led growth,” the idea that you can build a software product or a consumer app and it kind of sells itself without having to be driven by more traditional sales and marketing. PLG is very common in the developer space, which is the market that Retool sells to. And the reason product led growth is a strategy that develops per space employees is because developers do not want to talk to sales and marketing people. I had a big sales function when I was at Google, so I don't feel bad about myself, it's just the way it is. You think about a company like GitHub, which was a wonderful outcome. They didn't have people calling engineers, they had open source and they had a very large network of folks who were using GitHub for code who just adopted the service themselves. So that's PLG, and it's interesting to hear David say, “Hmm, maybe it's not such a great thing to chase.” David (08:44): Yeah, I think PLG causes people to optimize for very weird things and probably kills the company, actually. Today, when I talk to founders for example, a lot of founders will tell me, “Oh, we don't have much revenue yet, but it's PLG and the reason we don't have much revenue is cause the revenue's gonna come. We just have to build a great product and it's all gonna work eventually.” That very rarely works. You (to Bryan) are an early investor for Dropbox; Dropbox is a one-in-a-generation company that doesn't happen very often. Chances are if you think you're Dropbox, you are probably not Dropbox, actually. And so for us we were always very sales driven to say, “Hey currently we have this website, we have this product, people are signing up, but people are not paying us. Why are people not paying us?” (09:24): Let's go talk to them, actually figure out why they're not paying us. So then we talked to them, we were like, oh, actually it's totally the wrong market. So one funny anecdote was when we first started Retool one idea we had was, oh, a pretty good market for Retool might be FileMaker developers, Retool's, kinda like FileMaker; like FileMaker 2.0 in the cloud if you will. FileMaker is an Apple product from 20, 30 years ago. And so what happened is I ended up joining a sort of FileMaker user group on LinkedIn and I was like, This is gonna be huge. You're gonna sell all these FileMaker people on Retool and we're gonna find so many customers here. And what ended up happening was, I think we got a list of two or three hundred emails from the LinkedIn user group and I emailed all of them and I think we got three replies out of three hundred. (10:14): And they were all like, “No, no, no,” but one guy was like, “Hey, I'm actually happy to hop on a call with you and tell you why this is such a bad idea.” And I was like, “Well, that's a start,” so let's take the call and see what happens. We took the call and he was like, “Well, it's a terrible idea because FileMaker is good for A, B, C reasons and you're bad for X, Y, Z reasons, and therefore FileMaker is great and Retool sucks. And we're like, “Well, thank you for the feedback, see ya!” And so that's an example of something that if we had done the PLG way, in a marketing-driven way, we would've been like, “It's pretty weird, a lot of signups, but no one's using the product. No one's paying for it. Why is that?” You don't really know actually. (10:52): But then when we did that in the sort of outbound sales way, people maybe feel more okay to be mean when you're doing outbound sales. They tell you the truth more, and that helped us iterate a lot. And so in the early days, the sort of core messaging that we had was almost entirely driven by the outbound sales that we did. And we would test messaging, we would test pricing. For example, how we’re priced today is entirely because we would test, “Hey, can we charge $5 a seat? Can we charge 10? What about a hundred? When we say a hundred, what's their facial expression? Are they happy? Are they sad?” If they're happy, we're like, “Wow, now we learned we charge a hundred dollars per seat, it still works.” And so that is the kind of learning you can only have via sales. And so for that reason, I think PLG is actually sort of a very dangerous path to go down, or a trap to fall into when you believe “Oh, if I build it, the people will come,” or the customers will come. In reality, I think that's very rarely the case. You and I were talking backstage and you were sharing one sort of counterintuitive thing or surprising thing about PMF that Sequoia sees… Bryan (11:56): Oh yeah, well I think one of the things that we see is that many companies actually just never find product/market fit, which is just really tough to admit. And I think that what people tend to miss is that it's not really a science, it's definitely more of an art. It's more of a holistic effort. And as David was talking through his and Retool's approach to finding product/market fit, I think one of the things I would love for the audience to take away is how customer and sales oriented that effort was for them. And I think I know from starting to work with David very early on is that when most companies talk about sales, if it's a bigger company, they're probably talking about the sales people. When you're talking about Retool, when it was two or three folks, the engineers were the founders, the product people were the founders, and the salespeople were the founders. And so whether you're starting a small company or you're building a new product line at a much larger company, when you're putting a new product or feature into the market you're probably gonna be more on the product and edge side, but you also need to think like a salesperson because that's how you're gonna get the feedback from the market on the value proposition; how it's working and what your customers really want versus what you want to build for them. And there's always a little bit of a give and take there.
- For example, like, “Hey, could you intro us to other companies that you invested in?” or that might be building internal tools–which is all of them. And a lot of people would take these intros, but actually it wasn't very effective. (06:21): It was a very low signal intro. People would always take the intro, they would always act kind of interested, but actually wouldn't actually end up buying the product. And so we're like, we gotta be more hardcore about this. What if we just did outbound sales? And so we did that, and through outbound sales we iterated a lot of the messaging. We iterated a lot on the profile that we pitched to even the market actually. So one funny thing about product/market fit is that it's both a product, but it's also the market as well. Leverage your sales team to help you shape your messaging so it resonates better with potential customers. Your sales team is on the frontlines and can give you direct feedback on what messaging is resonating the most with potential customers; or will tell you the simple product specs a customer requires to turn a prospect into a conversion. This is crucial information, especially when you are new and still searching for PMF.
- KRITHIKA
- OpenView report: Three out of five SaaS companies now have some form of usage-based pricing, up from 45% in 2021. But the real trend is toward more complex, hybrid pricing models that combine usage-based pricing alongside subscriptions
- Retool makes for a great case-in-point. The stakes for Retool were high as the company had raised a Series C2 at a $3.2 billion valuation and had seen more than 500,000 business apps built on its platform since it was founded in 2017. They had a strong hypothesis that a free plan would have a positive impact on both the company and its customers – but the results weren’t panning out as expected. As Head of Business Operations Ali Benslimane told me, the company tested two versions of a freemium plan in different markets – neither of which was a runaway success. It wasn’t until the public launch that Retool realized the importance of product marketing and a comprehensive go-to-market (GTM) plan. The public launch of freemium has far outperformed either of the experiments, which Ali chalks up to a better website, more excitement around the launch, and better positioning of the features. “You can have the best product, but if you don’t have marketing around it it’s useless,” Ali admitted. There was a freemium offering, but it was quite limited. Developers could build unlimited apps, but only in the creator view. In other words, they couldn’t see how end users would react to it or collaborate with prospective end users. There was a separate free trial offering; however, it was restricted to just two weeks. In Retool’s experience, that wasn’t enough time for the average user to build something useful. Make Retool as open and accessible as possible to support Retool’s vision of the future of software development Attract a big pool of users at the ‘base of the pyramid’ who are using Retool’s products regularly (North Star metric: # of active customers) Provide a smoother ramp from free to paid plans This hypothesis led to a couple of different experiment iterations, for instance giving a certain number of app building blocks for free versus allowing a certain number of users for free. Retool tested these experiments in two different countries (Canada and India), and monitored the data. They also instituted a feedback loop with customers of the free plans in order to determine if they were seeing enough value in the free product. “After reviewing the initial results in early May, we didn’t find any evidence that either experiment had significantly moved the needle on our goals,” confided Garcia. All of this research led Retool to launch a modified third version. The new free planincludes an even more generous set of product features, an unlimited number of applications, and unlimited collaboration – but a cap of up to 5 users for free. This allowed Retool to show the true value–and full capabilities–of the product, not just a sampling. Audience 1 strategy Who they are: Developers at startups looking for a free way to build apps, but don’t know Retool Sub audiences: Those who don’t know that Retool exists (goal: create demand) Those who are actively looking for a new tool (goal: capture demand) Channels: Demand creation: Twitter ads, developer newsletters Demand capture: Emails to Google ads based on keywords, SEO backlinks Offers: Demand creation: Updated pricing page and new blog post (lessons learned are an attractive blog topic for startups that look up to Retool) Demand capture: Updated pricing page Audience 2 strategy Who they are: Developers who know Retool, but need to be introduced to our new free plan Sub audiences: Developers evaluating Retool (goal: conversion) Existing free plan customers (goal: evangelism) Churned customers (goal: win them back) Channels: Conversion: Homepage update, web banners, email Evangelism: Email Win them back: Email Offers: Conversion: Updated pricing page Evangelism: Their free Retool experience just got upgraded! Win them back: A new experience more aligned to their needs
- Retool lowered pricing - do what’s right for the customer; no need for a committed plan to access basic functionality
- Some stat to bring home impact
- Think about pricing every 6 months
- Events kind of get a bad rap for being shmoozy and salesy. Here’s another example from Mux. They’ve created *the* conference for video professionals. It’s less about Mux and more about creating a new community where there wasn’t one before.
- Retool recently went to Snowflake Summit — our buyers are extremely technical so we optimized our time to show really deep demos. We didn’t “scan as many leads” but the conversations were deeper and accelerated sales pipeline considerably.
- The other thing that gets a bad rap. Outbound emails. Again, it’s probably because you’re overindexing to the terrible ones.
- Here’s another thing that often gets a bad rap. Content. That’s because the world is littered with listicles and shallow content. To get to the purpose of content, picture a funnel. You want to develop the relationship before the buying moment. When done well, like Digital Ocean’s community guides, content can be fantastic for scaling your marketing and reach. Gets 2 million *uniques*. Inspired by Slicehost.
- content for the sake of it (@dang guide) no bandaid for lack of PMF
- My approach is that you can’t often control industry shifts. But, you can turn them into opportunities. PSD2 was a pretty broad set of new EU regulations that impacts everything from customer authentication to how marketplaces operate.
- From a marketing perspective, Stripe was the first to publish a guide to help businesses decipher PSD2. It has helped us re-open conversations with almost every marketplace or platform operating in the EU. In general, you can look at industry events, regulatory changes, and new laws as obstacles. Or, you can take the more optimistic view. I like to embrace the change that happens in the industry.
- When it comes to reaching developers, doing the “expected” thing is often not going to drive the results that you’d want. You have to invest in a mix of scalable and unscalable things to really invest in the audience. A few years back, We’ve hosted what we dubbed the Open-Source retreat, in which we invited three developers to come work on open-source projects from the Stripe office. This proved to be tremendously popular both the years that we ran it, and even inspired a few other companies to try it out.
- If you just get your teams going after just a named account list or a tight list of leads, you don’t take some of these bigger chances that might have outsized impact. Some non-buyers might be investors, your employees, developers that may never use your product, press, and more. I love cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 campaign. They’re not driving leads or signups here. Just offering a service for people fairly altruistically. Ostensibly though, it gets people who might not otherwise think about Cloudflare thinking about them.
- Lower in the funnel, once the sales team is engaged, selling to develoeprs ends up looking a lot more different than traditional B2B operations. Sales to a developer looks deeply technical and highly consultative and customized. It feels like talking and whiteboarding with a technical peer. Retool has deployed engineers who work alongside our prospects’ teams and help them build their apps. Similarly, some of our larger accounts, we sent over engineers from Stripe who help the teams architect their integration. Tactically, it can be as easy as setting up a shared Slack channel with the team on the customer side.
- Every company is turning into a platform company. Developers can supercharge [...]. These are things any company can implement to improve [...]