Wes Bush, author of 'Product-Led Growth', explains his Bowling Alley Framework onboarding audit exercise for startups and software companies.
Insight
Bush: Sales-led companies solve complexity; product-led companies must solve simplicity
“In most kind of generalizations like this, I find a lot of sales like companies Are fantastic. It's solving for complexity... For a product-led company. It's like, that's actually your detriment sometimes is you create something that is so complex, does so man…”
Insight
Bush: PLG requires onboarding and pricing design, not just free trials
“It's just a free trial. But in order to do that, oh my goodness, is it ever a lot more than that? It's like, oh, we got to figure out onboarding. We got to figure out pricing and we got to figure out, you know, a great free offer that people want. We got to Fi…”
Assertion Supported
Bush: 97% of B2B software buyers want to try before buying
“When I wrote the product by playback, I did a ton of research to see like, okay, 97% people want to try before they buy versus three percent just want to talk to sales.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bush: Live onboarding assistance was economically viable on Paubox's $29/mo plan
“What they did is they had a bit of a hybrid motion and we kind of did this in their onboarding where as soon as they signed up, it's like, Hey, Liz, do you want us to set this up for you? Or do you wanna, you know, do this yourself? And so if they said, Hey, I…”
Insight
Bush: User onboarding friction decomposes into product, skill, and knowledge gaps
“That's the way I always look at the equation of, okay, what are they missing? Is it the skills? Is it the knowledge? Is it the product piece? And Okay. If it's the product piece, let's make that easier. How do we make that easier? Sometimes it's people initial…”
Insight
Bush: Free trials fail when enterprise code deployment takes a quarter
“So for instance, with like app queues or user flow or like any product adoption tool, you could have a 40 day trial and the product manager signs up. Who is the user? They got that part right. But then to actually put the code in their application, they got to…”