Cabane: Free sidecar products still drive demand if exceptional
Guillaume Cabane · Guillaume Cabane: Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder | E1088 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Nov 29, 2023 · at 3:03
Guillaume Cabane, growth advisor and former VP of Growth at Drift and Segment, discusses whether building free sidecar products (like ROI calculators or website graders) remains an effective demand generation tactic for SaaS companies.
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“If there is interest for a product, people have built a better version of it and have monetized it. So, like, a lot of those niche have disappeared, right? And the second is that the quality has gone down, and people have become desensitized when they say, oh, there's, like, a free you know, cost calculator, return on investment calculator, like, one of those typical things, right? Or website grader. Like, most of those are terrible now, and so people will think, like, oh, I'm not gonna, like, sign up or put my info, my PII there because I'm not gonna get my value's worth of it, right? Those negative effects there. But if you have something truly amazing, does it still work? Absolutely. Absolutely.”
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