Ramli John: Product-led onboarding

Transcript of episode 18

Matthias:
Welcome, everyone. This is a new episode of the audience Explorer. And today, my guest is Ramli John, the famous product-led book author. And I’m happy to welcome you here. Nice to see you.

Ramli John:
Thank you so much. I’m super excited to talk about product-led, audience building, onboarding, whatever you want to talk about.

Matthias:
That’s cool. Thanks, Ramli! So first of all, to get started, please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and what you usually do these days.

Ramli John:
Yeah, I mean, what I do these days is I lead up the training program, at product-led growth, or “ProductLed”. What we do is we help sales-led organizations apply product-led principles and strategies to really scale their business faster. And really, we’re seeing a lot of trends, especially with what happened with the lockdown pandemic, people really crunched their budget. And we’re seeing more companies looking to how do we target the small medium market with some kind of product-led offering, but as well as a lot of enterprise companies.

Now when they buy products, it’s changed. It used to be this whole buying process that takes six months. But nowadays, especially with end users having more power and more access to their laptop, they know it’s not, it’s not as locked down as before, where you can’t install anything on your laptop. But now, larger companies are even allowing their employees to install or try out new apps. And really this is trend and we are building out this, this community and education and thought leadership around product-led growth with Wes Bush and myself and the team.

Matthias:
Interesting. How long does ProductLed already exist?

Ramli John:
Yeah, I mean, entity ProductLed has been around for five years, started by Wes Bush five years ago. I mean, product-led growth this just brought up two years ago. So Wes is definitely a pioneer of this space.

Matthias:
Nice! What does “product-led” really mean? You mentioned sales-led and product-led. What do you see as a main difference?

Ramli John:
Yeah, I mean, in a traditional sales-led motion, you’ve seen it before, when we say Oracle or back then with Salesforce where to purchase and try the product, you have to talk to somebody, you have to do a demo, request a demo, talk to somebody to explain to you what the app does. And then when you purchase it, you need to actually have to sign a contract. But buyer mentality has changed.

The risky part is not the sale, it’s “will I find value in this?”

Ramli John:
And we’ve seen product-led, or it’s not a new term, we’ve seen this in the consumer side, the best example I can think of is Costco. When you walk into Costco, you have this experience where you can look and browse and try and you don’t, you don’t have to talk to a salesperson to jump in, then when you try out one of their samples, like this sample hotdog, or the sample, ketchup or whatever that is, they’re trying to get you to try it before because the riskiest part of the buying process really is not the sale, it’s “will I find value in this?”

Ramli John:
Because if the perceived value exceeds the actual value that you paid for it, then it’s a no-brainer. It’s absolutely a no-brainer. And that’s what product-led is: If I had to sum it up, it’s just hyper focus on the customer buying experience that really cares to their need. And that’s where you know whether you have a free trial or freemium, it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re focusing on “how do my buyers buy and prefer to buy?” And how do I serve them to do that and align my goals as a business, my pricing model, my revenue model, my organization completely to the user success. So when they succeed, then we succeed as well. So I mean, that’s that if I do sorry, that’s it, that there really is that it’s not about free trial, it’s not about freemium. People can have a free trial and not be product-led, which is a misconception over and over again,

Product-led is more a mindset than a set of tactics

Matthias:
So, this sounds more like a mindset thing, like, then like concrete practice thing, right?

Ramli John:
Yeah, mindset is a huge part of it. It’s also a reorganization or organization of your company that really, hey, what does our customer want? How do they buy products? And how do we create this experience, whether that’s online or offline, or in-app or email that really gets them pumped up and excited in front-loads the value so that when they purchase it, they’re going to stick with us for a long time?

Ramli John:
Because we’ve gotten to the value I mean, in a sales-led org, it’s a year contract, so they try to sign a few for a year. And it’s like, “my hands are done, we’ve already made the sale”.

Why should we care if they experienced the value, but the problem is when the renewal period comes in, they haven’t yet experienced or tried out your product. They’re not going to renew, and we’re seeing with product-led orgs their scale is faster, their growth scale is faster by this whole retention is better, because really people who stick around they stick around not because of a contract, but because they want to because it’s helping them do their job better.

Retain customers, not by contract but by helping them do their jobs better

Matthias:
That’s a much stronger force, right?

Ramli John:
Exactly. And that is exactly:

• It’s a mindset.
• It’s an org design.
• It’s a go-to-market strategy that really aligns everything you have on this amazing buying customer experience for your customers.

Matthias:
Wow, how did you get the idea to specialize on this? There must be a reason for that!?

Ramli John:
Sure. I mean, I got through it through onboarding. I mean, my background is in marketing, and I was acquiring a lot of users for this. Before then it wasn’t called product-led, but they just had a free trial.

Audience development: Dig down and find out why customers churn!

Ramli John:
And what I was like, as a marketer, my mandate was to get more signups. And okay, one of the things that I asked the founder or the leadership team is like, hey, you’re happy with my work? You’re saying that, hey, I’m getting signups. But I want to know, if I’m actually making an impact in the revenue I’m making an impact in the sale. And what digging into the data, I realized a lot of the people who are signing up are not actually sticking around. And really like it’s, it’s this disconnect with like, hey, marketer, you’re getting sign ups.

Ramli John:
And I started digging into how to solve this problem. How do we align this org so that marketer, sales and customer success and product are completely aligned, and that’s where what led me to product led growth and Wes Bush. I ended up reading Wes Bush’s book, and I found out we both went to the same school like in different years. So we both went to University of Waterloo. And really that’s that’s been the journey I’ve been I just like helping companies fight just getting users especially for marketers really drive home the point that hey, let’s get more people actually using your product and falling in love with it and not just getting user signups.

What Ramli and the team at ProductLed are doing

Matthias:
Yeah. Interesting, because user signup is not a goal in itself, right? It’s nice if they sign up, of course! But if they don’t stick around, then nothing has been done. Is ProductLed more an academy, a community, a consulting firm? What is it exactly?

Ramli John:
Yeah. It’s funny, we’ve just been talking about this. I mean, what we see ourself as Yes, definitely a community but on a larger sense, whether this community that does that training, we don’t do any consulting anymore.

At this moment, we do network of consultants, we see ourselves as a way. We are an enabler and to empower product-led leaders in their in their organization, this very sales-led. We provide them with training, we pride in the community to get the questions answered. And really just like, how do we help that what usually starts with one person and organization to say, hey, maybe we should be looking at this product-led growth thing, then they buy Wes’s book.

And now they’re like, what do we like they get this all these ideas in their mind and they get super excited. Well, how do I actually apply this to my business? How do I get everything aligned? And that’s where we help people work through the “messy middle” of transitioning from sales- to product-led with everything that we do.

Helping B2B customers go through the “messy middle”

Matthias:
The “messy middle”, I like that! Yeah, it describes exactly what happens when you when you go from a very structured, sales-led process to a more unstructured, product-led process, and you have to go through this “middle”. Yeah, that’s right. And it also sounds more like business to business market, right, that you work for?

Ramli John:
Mainly, I mean, because the business-to-consumer have already figured this out. (laughs)

Yeah, I mean, like, you look at all the apps in the b2c or space, like when I say b2c, maybe b2b professional consumer, like Evernote, Dropbox, and Netflix, like all this stuff at Spotify, like they they know that consumers have low buying tolerance.

And b2b is just trying to play catch up, and that’s usually where we end up helping the most is the business-to-business companies just because they’re so ingrained in them to just like “let’s just hire more salespeople get more marketing qualified leads, get more sales qualified leads and get more calls, get more demos”.

And definitely, there’s a better way to do it.

Audience building: How did ProductLed find the first customers?

Matthias:
And how did you get the first customers for your company? When you think back in the time when you get your first customer?Where did they come from?

Ramli John:
Yes, that’s how we started, that’s just how Wes started: He built this audience, he built this community, and it started off by positioning himself as a thought leader, with his book “The product-led growth”.

One of the first steps to building the audience because you’re totally in line is offering a ton of value for free upfront, like we’re trying to be product-led with ProductLed itself.

Ramli John:
And so we offered a free summit where we invited speakers to come speak, from Netflix, Dropbox, all those people who are pioneers and product-led, offered all of those talks absolutely for free.

And that built up our email list! With one summit, we got 5000 emails a day that allowed us to scale up. And really like when we came out with a training program for the first time, last June, June 2020, we didn’t have any problems getting like 60 or 70 people to join us!

Building an audience using a “we want to help you” mindset

Ramli John:
And really just because we built that audience, right from the get go by positioning ourselves as “we want to help you”, we want to help you with this, and got people to really resonate that, you know, they’re consuming free stuff, then they’ll flow down eventually to just sign up for one of our training programs.

Matthias:
Well, that’s really the power of an audience! Did you use any media to build this audience? Did you simply have a website? Or did you use Twitter or Facebook or whatever?

Ramli John:
Yeah, I mean, the biggest one is, you know, that summit, the summit is where we threw everything at it. Like we had Facebook ads, we had LinkedIn ads, and we had a blog for sure.

Where we built, it is our email list that is our community and Slack. That summit was the thing that really kick-started the whole community, because it really identified a problem that the audience was having around product-led growth.

And when you build an audience around a problem, or a need, or a pain point, that’s that’s when they really resonate with you, in this case with Wes Bush as the one that can help them through, once again, going back to the messy middle. We’ve created that space, that community space, on Slack, as well as email, and our blog is where we really doubled down in terms of growing our audience.

Go after the audience that has already become problem-aware!

Matthias:
This sounds like the people already wanted to make the transition from sales-led to product-led, right? If somebody wants to go through this “messy middle”, they have to know that there exists such a messy middle. Is it? Was there already some previous knowledge on the customer side?

Ramli John:
That’s a great question! I forgot what model it is where like you start off with problem unaware that people don’t know they have a problem and problem aware?

(Matthias: Eugene Schwartz)

Yeah, yeah, Schwartz, you got it! And definitely, like we targeted the ones that were already, like, problem-aware that they already like “yeah, our caucus going out, our sales, our revenue per employee is decreasing and we’re seeing competitors in our space releasing freemium or free products”.

Ramli John:
And we’re just we just this is this is not, there’s got to be a better way. Like they already know problem. Set a problem and and they just start looking around.

And we rank for several keywords. Usually, when people get stuck, they either google something or ask a friend. And that really is where they were. You’re right. Like originally, it’s already people who have who are problem-aware!

And for a lot of audiences, you want to double down on those first. I had a chance to talk to Louis Grenier. He is a podcast host for “Everybody hates marketers”. Oh, he built his audience around this! And he, really, he does his point.

And my point is small: Don’t focus on the ones that are problem-unaware. Like, you’re gonna have a hard time trying to convince them. Or do you find the ones that have are already problem-aware? They’re looking starting to look for solutions! Those are your people. Those are the ones that you want to attract first, because they’re gonna create the culture from the get go.

What does your audience call themselves, if anything?

Matthias:
And the people who were already problem-aware, what do you think, what do they call themselves, what’s their role name that they use for themselves?

Ramli John:
Oh, man, that’s another like we’re we’re going through this exercise as well right now. I mean, it’s, we’ve realized that it’s not a job title, like we it’s not we in our program, we’ve seen people from customer success from sales, from marketing, from the leadership team. And really, it’s this dare though, our ideal customer profile, or ICP, or ideal community member profile, yeah, it’s ones who are the ones leading, or they’re the first one that the genesis of product-led in their organization. And, and they’re really like champion In the organization, they’re probably already read Wes’s book. Because if you’re, if you Google product-led growth, first one of the only books on product, like grow this as was was his book. And really like that’s, that’s a signal for us that their problem we’re assuming they’re starting to look for a solution is “have you read Wes’s book?” And really that’s like a signal for us that hey, you’re you’re you’re you’re probably a fit for our community as well as to our some of our training programs.

Matthias:
That’s amazing. So these people are kind of scouts, or champions, right, the first ones who have this idea in mind that they want to go product-led and, and pulling the rest of the organization behind themselves.

Ramli John:
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it is. We actually have a nickname for them as well, we call them the “product-led growth Trailblazer” was Yeah, was made that up! It just they’re the they’re the one pioneering and blazing the trail for the organization. From this old way to the new way.

Matthias:
Yay, that’s cool! And how do you develop this audience further, now that you have them? What do you regularly do for them to keep them engaged, to keep them developing, going forward, and so on, to grow? What do you do there?

Ramli John:
This is another thing that we’ve been thinking a lot about, about intentionality. I mean, before I can tell you about what we did before.

Ramli John:
A lot of the effort was around summit. So product led summit, we do three or four a year. And in between, it’s very quiet. It’s like a very quiet space. But I mean, in this, that’s events, now we’re trying to look at doing it weekly, where we’re actually looking to, to have somebody take that on full time, this whole community success. We’ve done a few networking events or like just meetups around like topics like product qualified leads, but really like this, we’re, we’re not looking for consistency, because like, how do you bring this online community together with some way to celebrate something?

Ramli John:
that’s the event site, I mean, the community site on Slack. It’s like, just right from the beginning, when people introduce themselves, it’s really jumping on and encouraging. There’s just saying that “you become what you celebrate”. So the more that you celebrate something, the more that your community will follow that behavior, the audience will follow that behavior. So one thing I’ve started doing on Fridays, is just highlighting all the people who introduce themselves because an audience or a community is very much like a party, you come to the party. Right? It’s do introduce yourself to the people is very nerve-wrecking. It’s very risky, because somebody could be like, oh, “Ramli, you suck!”

Ramli John:
But, uh, but like, it’s risky. So it’s how do we encourage them and make them feel comfortable, like as hosts of this party, right? You make people feel comfortable to introduce themselves, and not just introduce themselves to ask a question, to drop a link about value to share what they know, and really get that going. So one of the things we do is just really encourage that we reply back as quickly as possible. I know, I know. And now we have people in the community who are the ones replying, so we set up I celebrate that as well. In the Friday, every friday I message, we do announcement. “Thank you to all the people who responded to questions, here are their names.” So I’m thanking them to the community because they’ve been so generous of the time.

Matthias:
Do you do that on Slack, where the people hang out?

Ramli John:
Yeah, Yeah, I do. Every there’s an announcement channel. It’s just every Friday, I would be like, here are all the new intros welcome. If everybody welcomed them, introduce Dave introduce themselves. Here are the Here are the top three questions we’ve gotten. Thank you for asking questions. So now I’m encouraging that: “here are all the replies, here are all the people who responded to questions. Thank you so much.” And then “here are all the job postings that our community members have posted up in the job posting area”.

Ramli John:
So it’s really like I’m in this is an experiment, right? What I’m trying to encourage and celebrate people in the on the community for doing things that most our tendency is to look, our tendency is not the status quo is to do nothing. Yeah. And this people have have have stepped up, so I do it every Friday on Slack and then announcement channel.

Matthias:
I like that. I find that fascinating because you’re doing two things at the time. First, you’re offering a kind of space, a protected space where people can speak up and you encourage them to speak up. And you also offer a kind of attractor right in the middle. There’s something there’s a reason for people to come back. Because for example, the questions or the job board or whatever, so you have a space, and an attractor in the middle, I really like that.

Ramli John:
I love that analogy. I might, I might use that somewhere. That’s a good way to put it.

Matthias:
That’s really cool. What made me aware of you was your book with Wes these days about onboarding. Because I’m a SaaS owner. I’m a very young SaaS owner, although I’m old as a as a man, but that the SaaS is young, I started out in October, building in public. And now I’m in the middle, right in the middle of onboarding new users. And it’s a such a hard thing I find, it’s really a problem to onboard users, and to make them aware of what this thingy can do for them, and who they are going to be if they use it. So it’s really I have such a hard time and I saw your book coming out. And I thought, “Oh, yeah, let’s get this onto the Kindle. Let’s read it.” And I’m right in the middle, I think, five, five or six chapters into it. Could you tell us a bit more to our listeners about this book you have written?

Ramli John:
Yeah, the book “Product-led onboarding” is something that we have implemented and applied to companies that we’re working with, to implement, improve their user onboarding. It’s also something that we’ve taught to people in Mixpanel, and Microsoft and, and you this off in other places, really, like it’s a six-step framework or process or evolution where you go from, you know, here are the six steps you should be doing to really improve your onboarding:

Ramli John:
First one is to establish an onboarding team. Second one is to understand what’s excessive look for new users. Third, is to refine those milestones for your onboarding. Fifth is, so that’s ours as to analyze and optimize your experience, K is to keep new users engaged in your app. And A is to apply and repeat.

Ramli John:
Now, those six things, if you take the first letter spells out “Eureka”, it helps me to remember even now I’m like, what’s that floor? Oh, that’s an “A”. Oh, yeah, that’s analyze and optimize your new user flow. So I mean, that’s a framework that I’ve created just as a mnemonic, this is a way to remember easily six-step Eureka framework that if you go through it, there’s a higher likely chance that you’re going to be able to improve your onboarding experience for users.

Matthias:
What I found particularly interesting was, you said in the book somewhere, or I read it like that, that if you don’t know what your users find important, or what they what job they want to get done, or what, what their success criteria are. So in principle, if you don’t talk to your users, for example, you won’t know that, and you won’t, you will guide the onboarding process into a direction, into an unknown area. I found this very impressive. So ask us to people first and find it out. Right.

Ramli John:
I love it. Yeah, I mean, totally. I mean, often when we think about product tours, the first thing people talk about, though, when people think about onboarding, the first people think about his product tours. “Let’s just slap on a product tour, and it’ll improve our onboarding!” By like, to your point, if you don’t know what success is for your user, if you don’t understand what is it they’re trying to do? What is it you call it customer job? What is it that they’re trying to hire your product to do? Then you might be directing that that tour to the wrong place. And you often what happens when you don’t know what you truly want? is a product tour becomes “Oh, look at this. Look at this. Look at this button. What it does.

Matthias:
yeah, one feature, another feature…

Ramli John:
exactly. There’s like, oh, here, here is all that we do, and the way that a man is, and they force it the way that I think about it. Going back to that Costco analogy. You walk into Costco, and some random employee from Costco grabs your hand and tell you: “Hey, I’m going to give you a product tour. Look at this. Look at this Honey, look at these tater tots, look at this chair!”

Ramli John:
It just doesn’t make sense. It’s better to ask us people as people coming in. Hey, what are you looking for? Are you looking for food? Are you looking for meat today? Are you looking for some chairs today? Oh, yeah, it’s right there, aisle number five. So it’s more aligned if you ask users or find out what that is, what are you looking to do today? If you have a doubt that alone will really improve like, it will improve your onboarding if you just straight up, find out what people are looking for and get them there as quickly as possible.

Matthias:
I think I even made this mistake because my product has the goal of helping people establish an audience on Twitter. So first thing that I’m trying to get them to do is “create an audience”, audiences are a special thing in the app. And the next thing is fill the audience with people. The next thing is analyze the content conversations of those people. Fourth thing is engage with the people now that you know what the conversation is about. So it’s more or less a feature tour, although I’m trying to guide people towards the value that they get. So it’s a little bit mixture of both. I’m not sure I got it right, though more customer interviews will tell me whether or not.

Ramli John:
it’s 100%, and I love that you’re looking at user interviews. I mean, that will bring you the insight. I mean, it’s one simple trick as well, that, that I’ve talked to people from Oculus, as well as Andrew Kaplan, from HubSpot in PostScript, and Wistia, is as people, as soon as people log in, if you … right in the early stage, as you’re building out your onboarding, just do a little up in app survey. And you can use hot jar or something that just pops up on this site. And just ask a simple question like, “what are you trying to do today?” What is what is your goal? Or what are you trying to achieve with my app today, or whatever that is, whatever your app name is, and then you start seeing patterns, you’re starting to see, oh, that’s what they’re trying to do. We’re here and … God, I’m glad you’re doing interviews as well, you’re really finding that pattern as to what people are trying to do with your app.

Matthias:
But this brings me to an interesting question. What do you think are the most effective patterns to use in onboarding? Is it surveys? Is it these wizards that guide you through the process? Or is it videos? Is it emails, like onboarding emails? What do you think would be effective patterns?

Ramli John:
Yeah, I mean, just one principle that would be super effective, regardless of what tool you use, is really find out your users learning style. And what I mean by that is onboarding is learning.

Ramli John:
And some people like to learn with videos, but some people hate it. I’m not, I’m not sure about you. Some people like reading, I mean, if I go to IKEA, I buy furniture from IKEA. My wife Diana loves reading the manual, every word step by step until she starts building. For me, I hate that! I’m just gonna start jamming things in, things like, “Oh, this thing fits here. Oh, well, that’s why it doesn’t work. Let me backtrack.”

Ramli John:
But the point is, meet the users meet your users where they are in terms of their learning ability. If your users or your audience are ones that are not as tech-savvy, you need to get her that they might want to want more of a white glove guided tour versus some people, they just want to click around to figure it out.

Ramli John:
My point is give people options that give them a learning style. So an example would be product tours, one of the things that I’m starting to, to suggest to people is ask people in the get go “Hey, welcome to my app. Do you want to tour? Yes, yes or no?” And If yes, then doesn’t go to tour. Or “do you want to watch a video from our founder walking through the app. Yes or no?”

Ramli John:
So just giving them the power is giving the user the power, instead of forcing them to do what you think they should do. And just, once they close it, I’ll just make it easy to pop it up again. And really, it’s about giving users the power to choose I still how they want to learn it with their learning style.

Matthias:
Interesting, interesting, because I know people for example, my wife, same thing with IKEA, right? She likes to jump in into stuff. She doesn’t like manuals, and I’m always making sure that every screw is positioned (Ramli starts to laugh) on the table (Ramli: “oh no…”) before mounting that stuff. Yeah, yeah, it’s so good. I like this picture because it describes the situation so well.

Matthias:
I remember I put a video on my homepage that had a demo in it. And almost nobody was watching it. Then I moved it away to one or two pages deeper into the site. And suddenly later, a totally enchanted customer came around and said “Why did you move this video away? This video made me understand everything? How could you move this video away?” And I thought, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Some people said “I don’t like videos. There were only one or two percent of people who were watching the video. So I thought the video is not effective, but some people really like it. It’s crazy.

Ramli John:
Sure, I mean that’s a great example I it’s really just think your users like, what do you think about it there’s other people like “videos are the worst!“. I need to be, I need to be there right at the time to actually watch it, and it’s super annoying. And then a thing with tours, we got this one side of the camp “tours are the worst, this sucks!” and people who are like me, sometimes we’re like, “oh my … I love this tour. This is cool. You’re getting me to where I need to do really easily”. So you’re you’re totally right.

Matthias:
What do you think about onboarding emails? These days I wrote about five, six or seven onboarding emails, one for each day after signup. How effective will they be? Probably?

Ramli John:
Yeah, in terms of emails, it once again, it goes back to your users: chances are they have an email, and at least welcome them. That’s the first thing. He says welcome email that’s personal: “Welcome to the app, here’s how you find help. Here’s the next step. Once again, here’s the value of it”, and just really get them excited about it. And then what happens next depends on your users.

Ramli John:
Like there are some users who want a ton of emails and guidance, as long as you’re providing value. You’re you’re showing other ways to use it, or inspirational stuff, or you’re giving them tips on how to get started. One tip I have about email is to make sure it’s it’s behavior based, that means that you’re taking into account what users are already doing in app. So you don’t say “hey, do X”, but you’ve already done x! That’s, that’s gonna get annoying. What if you just like, “hey, Ramli, have you done x”? I’m like, “Yeah, I did”. Alright, here’re the instructions. I mean, “I already did it! Why are you telling me to do this again”, I mean, that’s a good example.

Ramli John:
But if you know what they’ve done, and have it done that, now you can be more like, “Oh, we noticed you haven’t done this, here’s the value of it to you. Here’s what’s in it for you. If you do this, here are some inspiration, I get stuck. If you get stuck, if you haven’t done, step number Y but you’ve done x, here are success stories. If you do that last step number Y letter Y, then your look at the success stories you’ll get if you do that.”

Ramli John:
So it’s really going back to, Hey, I know what you’ve done, what you haven’t done, what are ways that I can help you to get that? Is it to increase your motivation with stories? Or is it to make it easier for you with templates or other things?

Ramli John:
So that’s how that’s how I see that and in terms of frequency goes back to your user. Do they want it every day? Because some users want it every day. Do you and for developers, if you’re targeting I mean, if you’re an app targeting developers, developers hate getting emails. I mean, for people who are building the audience, like what you’re doing, maybe finding the middle ground exactly as to how frequent they want the emails is really … as long as you’re providing value that it would get them to succeed with the app.

Matthias:
Yeah, yeah, behavior-based. That’s, that’s a good, good point. I’m currently trying to make it behavior based, for example, if they just signed up, and they didn’t create an audience, and I recommend to create an audience. If they have created an empty audience, then I recommend to fill it with people, and so on. So I’m trying to make it behavior based. Yeah, absolutely.

Matthias:
This book of yours, the onboarding book, how was it received, then on the market when you came out with it? Where did you launch by the way?

Ramli John:
Yeah, we launched on Amazon on June 8th. Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s been overwhelming in terms of response want, going back to building an audience? If I had to do it again, I love what Rob Fitzpatrick hero is writing a new book called “write useful books”. Yeah. Yeah. Rob Fitzpatrick wrote the book “The Mom test”, which is about a product people are might be quite familiar off. And what he did was he built a community around his book, writing useful, and it’s the problem, how can you, as nonfiction authors, write books that will resonate with the market, and he released the chapter one at a time. So essentially, building in public, but a book instead of an app?

Ramli John:
Oh, really an interesting way to test out the market and figure that out. For me, I started trying to build the audience. When I wrote my first Polish job in February, and I announced it, and that was beta reading season where I invited a bunch of people to read the beta version of the book, and I got a ton of feedback. Even one chapter, I totally removed from the book because of a feedback from one of the beta readers, so … to your point. Really, the groundwork very early on and getting people excited about it helped us succeed with our sales we had. So far we had over 3000 sales most book Don’t, don’t get over 2000. And we did that in a week, just because of the amazing team of behind product-led, and the community, the audience that we built up here, product-led,

Matthias:
Amazing, 3000! And you said you launched on June 8, so that’s only a week ago? You sold 3000 in a week. It’s amazing!

Matthias:
When you think about product-led, where do you want to go guide this … this child so to say? If you think about it in one or two years, where do you want to be with product-led? And with onboarding?

Ramli John:
For sure. I mean, just, I mean, going back to your to the point where like, meet people with their learning style. I mean, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is like people love books. Some other people like to listen to it. So that’s the other thing, how do we release an audiobook version of it. And the other thing is around video, so I’ve been putting out more videos. But longer term, I’ve been thinking a lot about, like how we can use videos to help people get excited about product-led, we’re going back to that. Now, now we’ve tapped the problem-aware and solution-aware, how to get people, people who are problem unaware. And one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is shooting a documentary in 2022. And just releasing that on YouTube and Netflix and Amazon Prime. So like just establishing ourselves continually as the product, thought leader in the product, like growth space is where I want to take that whether I can’t say whether this documentary, whether there’s more books, whether it is more audio, whether that’s scaling up the community, that’s really where my mind’s at with this, as you call it, “baby”.

Matthias:
Wow, a documentary! So it’s, it’s more like, like a film … of what length?

Ramli John:
I haven’t decided it will be most likely between 50 minutes to 90 minutes. So isn’t something that I’d love to? How do we Yeah, the main focus of it is to get people aware and excited about product-led growth as a way forward.

Matthias:
What would you show in this documentary? Would you show existing customers? Or would you show the methods that you use? Or what would it be?

Ramli John:
That’s a good question. I mean, it could be a series. The first one is probably more focused on “what is product-led growth”, which companies are pioneering it, and it doesn’t have to be our customer. The main goal of that first documentary, is get people excited about product-led growth, and really like describe what is what it is, and how highlight companies who have made that transition to the product-led growth.

Matthias:
Amazing. I wish you very much success with product-led and with your books and videos, audios and documentaries. It’s amazing!

Ramli John:
Thank you. I appreciate that.

Matthias:
And thank you for being here on the podcast show.

Ramli John:
Oh, yeah. I appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me!

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Outro

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