What are the specific challenges that companies face when implementing a product-led growth strategy?

Yeah. I think for both Dropbox and Slack, at a high level, the challenge they had was all about moving up market, and shifting from being a really end-user/consumer-driven, bottoms-up adopted product to one that could be adopted at enterprise scale.

I think there's a few shortcomings to the pure product-led growth strategy that might have resulted in that challenge for them.

One is that the adopters of your product aren't necessarily the buyers of your product. So we are seeing more and more functional leaders and line managers have budgets to just buy software, right? A lot of people have credit cards today. They can swipe. So it's certainly easier than it used to be, but also, it remains the case that end-user adopters of products aren't necessarily the ones who can buy.

There's also a complex success/sales process you need to go through now to compile all of the end-users and turn that into a sales strategy, like:

Who are all of the end-users we have? 

What teams are they on? 

Is now the right moment to try to turn this into a sale, or should we just let people continue to use the product?

That is now a decision that the sales team needs to make. That's a way different motion than just reaching out to the buyer and pitching them and trying to drive them through a funnel, right?

And I think that kind of leads to what I think of the second shortcoming, which is layering on sales after the company has scaled up, and there's a ton of users, and you're growing really fast.

Tons of operational complexity there, and I see two parts of that. One is what I was just referring to, which is if you already have a lot of users, then the sales process is just going to be way different. Different metrics matter. It's a whole different system.

Something we talked about sometimes at Airtable, and I've been thinking about this a lot, is it's almost like fishing a pond. And you are stocking that pond with every new user, and you're letting those users swim around and grow.

There's a moment when you should go fish, and you want to go try to sell to them, and help them get even more value, help them upgrade. But you don't want to fish too quickly, because you need the pond to remain healthy.

So then there’s a whole other set of metrics that you might think about from a systems design point of view: 

What is the input rate of new leads? 

What is the activation rate, evolution rate, where a lead becomes warm enough that it's worth reaching out to?

What's the replenishment rate of the system?

Those are things you want to care about. Those are not normal sales metrics. That's not the normal way for a sales team to run itself. And so that's a hard transition.

There's also this operational complexity just around where the centers of power are within an org, right? If you've grown to hundreds of thousands, millions of users on the back of product and maybe some marketing, then all of a sudden sales comes in, you're setting the stage for a political battle, whether you like it or not.

A long time ago, this was all sales lead, and then it was sales plus marketing, and now it's just sales and marketing and product, right? We just need to be working even better together, but I think that's a transition that people are somewhat uncomfortable with.

The last shortcoming, which definitely I think is typified by Dropbox and Slack but other companies as well, is that the kind of bottoms-up, simple, viral product design that won them all of those initial users, that design is undermined by enterprise customer needs. 

All the enterprise features that you need to build undermine the simplicity that won you the bottoms-up growth to begin with, so that the bottoms-up channel ends up getting somewhat ruined. But if you haven't figured out the top-down channel yet because your sales team is dealing with all this complexity, then all of a sudden you're in a lurch.

I think those are three big shortcomings with the pure product-led growth approach. And I think we saw some of those at Airtable.

I've also definitely seen these at peer companies, like other folks that we worked with, and I think that there's a better way that companies are figuring out.