The Beating Heart of PLG
By: Sidhant Goyal
Tags: Product Market Fit, Product, SaaS, Developer Tools, Product Led Growth

So, is there more to this story than a fuzzy father-son bonding tale? Yes, there is. You see, great software makes us emotional too. In fact, this phenomenon is at the heart of product-led growth.

Software started its journey as a utility. It was a means to an end, a way to get things done. And so, it felt like a utility too. You and I today would barf at these dull, bland, grey why-does-it-look-like-I’m-using-Windows99 screens that characterize SAP, Oracle, or IBM products, but the truth is (as with any utility), software’s function exceeded its fashion for many decades. And even today, outside of the top 1000 tech companies rallying for our attention (believe it or not ), the world still runs on this kind of software. Just ask TVS Tyres, Dalmia Cements, TATA Steel, or Saint Gobain.

Kill me now, please

Mobile-first social networks and consumer internet companies of the late 2000s stepped in and changed the game. When we experienced what it was to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snap, Airbnb, Uber and actually like it, it kind of blew our minds, since that wasn’t supposed to happen. “Wait, so I’m able to chat with my friends, post nice pics of myself, order a cab, book a holiday rental, and enjoy the process? Lol, that’s new. This actually feels quite smooth, and by the way, this app looks incredible!” These companies were smart, they knew they needed to go from nothing to many million MAUs in a few months to even matter in the larger scheme of things, and so they did whatever they could for that competitive advantage. Incredible user experience, sure why not. But what they forced us to do was ask the obvious next question of the software we were so used to: “if these products are so awesome, why does the SAP Hana or the Oracle or the Salesforce I use at work suck so much in comparison? 😂

New SaaS companies born on the right side of 2010 (a number of which were in fact often born from business, engineering, and product teams at these consumer giants) quickly realized that the end-user matters in their world too. It was clear to them that their end-user is now used to the experience of an Uber or Airbnb (and is using it on a jazzy Apple or Android phone, to beat), now there’s a corporate credit card in their hand, and now this person can ignore their boss if he/she tells them to use a software they don’t like. They realized they need to win over the end-user to keep existing enterprise accounts and win new ones, and the way to win over the end-user was a great user experience. In my mind, that’s the short of that’s how the world changed, how UX became a strategic battleground, why companies like SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Salesforce fell behind, and why we have Stripe, Zoom, Shopify, Slack, Notion, Figma, Hashi, and Datadog ruling our hearts while scorching quarterly earnings sheets. You can change anything and everything except company DNA, and if your DNA isn’t architected to care about UX, you can shell out $27.7 billion big ones for Slack but that still may not be the way to your user’s heart.

So, what is ‘user experience’? What do users care about? What is the way to a user’s heart? As a user of many SaaS products (and given it’s my job to speak to many more such users across application SaaS and developer tools to get their feedback 🙈), I can tell you one thing with confidence. Users don’t know what ‘user experience’ is. They feel it. They don’t rationalize or cerebrally analyze how or why they like a product (that’s the job of product teams), they just use it and (almost subconsciously) realize if they care. In this subconscious exploration, rare pieces of great software surprise you, delight you, engage you, and enthrall you when you least expect it. Like that incredible girl on a perfect date, it just gets you. Great software solves problems you sometimes never knew you had, and after using it for a while you find it impossible to go back to the old way of doing things. The ‘aha’ moments stir deeper emotions and forge a powerful subconscious connection, laying the foundation for eventually creating committed, dedicated, and evangelistic power users.

I’ll take Notion and my own example. What blew my mind in the first minute of using it was that I could create an incredibly diverse and good-looking document with photos, videos, poems & prose, quotes, headings & subtitles, bookmarks, weblinks, spreadsheets (you name it), invoking each element with just a single ‘/’ keypress. Coming from a world of Google Docs, Google Sheets, MS Office, and email where you had to slowly & painstakingly format everything to give it a distant semblance of pleasantness, this was a paradigm shift. It didn’t just save me time, it made me want to share these beautiful and easy-to-make custom webpages (with their own custom tab icons ❤️) with my colleagues. I subconsciously wanted something like this all along without consciously knowing I wanted it. Along came a product that does just that, and won me over. My colleagues found their own perfect match, be it with Notion or Clickup or Coda or Roam Research, and that gave rise to heated debates on which is the better productivity tool. I found myself inadvertently defending Notion’s terrible CDN and horrible image/video loads, its shitty reliability (more than once has the world come to a halt threatened when Notion is ‘down’) by championing what it does well. Here are the two things I learnt from these experiences. (1) It’s pretty incredible how a mere piece of software won over a relatively unemotional being like me enough that I would vehemently defend its flaws in public and (2) There is no right answer, there is no better productivity tool, use whatever floats your boat. But the fact that my colleagues & I spent so many hours discussing these tools so passionately proves they touched us in some way. Great art, great music, and great performances used to touch our hearts in the olden days, we’re fortunate to live in an era where great software does this too.

Notion and me — Love at first sight

I’ve seen this strain of thought repeat itself many times across users and across many other SaaS tools. Phrases like “I love it”, “Can’t do without it”, “Blows my mind every time”, “Changed the way I think”, “Changed the way I work”, “They somehow figured out just what I needed 😱”, “❤️❤️❤️”, “🤩🥳🚀”, “makes me feel like 😎” are the norm when UI designers speak of Figma, when SMB merchants talk of Shopify, when infrastructure architects discuss Terraform, when product teams talk about Amplitude, when developers speak of Slack or Stripe or Auth0. Now I rely almost exclusively on this signal above all others when evaluating new products for investment: What’s hidden between the lines in user feedback? Are they using phrases like the ones above to describe the product? Are there early signs of an enduring emotional connection, or is it still just ‘useful’, a utility? I’ve learned that high NPS and positive user feedback may create good companies; but exceptional user love and a perceptible emotional connection with the product, in the right markets, might just create great companies.

It’s also interesting to me that Marc Andreessen says product-market fit (PMF) cannot be quantified or predicted, but when it happens it is extremely clear to one and all that it exists. My understanding of this statement is that PMF can be ‘felt’ even before all the wonderful stuff he talks about, which is pretty natural given true product love is primarily ‘felt’. Revenue, usage, even retention are but lagging indicators, necessary in due course but perhaps irrelevant early on. Exceptional user feedback & engagement with early signs of a developing emotional connection are the only leading indicators of PMF there will ever be.

You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s.

- pmarca

What is the implication for PLG founders? To me, it is that an emerging emotional connection between the user and the product is the beating heart of PLG. Organic viral growth loops, activation & conversion hacks, account expansion drivers are all wonderful and necessary but imagine their impact in the world when you have touched your users so deeply that they go out of the way to champion your creation to the world. Such growth would be truly product-led, it would be unstoppable, enduring, beautiful, a rare pleasure to witness. You can just sit back and spend some more time building to delight your users to give them everything they don’t know they wanted and let your product and your users do the talking.