Product-Led Growth Case Study
November 2024
Dear Growth Designer,
I’m Raman, a growth marketing manager at Navattic. We recently shifted from a sales-led to product-led motion. We have been sales-led for the last three years. So this was a big strategic pivot that pushed us to rethink a lot.
This newsletter shares our early data. We improved our activation rate from 5% to 33%+ and increased our weekly lead volume 2-3x during the launch week.
Hopefully sharing this makes the process easier for other companies transitioning to product-led growth (PLG).
Happy PLGing,
Raman Khanna, Growth Marketing Manager, Navattic
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Why we went PLG
Navattic helps marketing and sales teams create interactive product demos.
In early 2024, our growth, like many SaaS companies, started to slow. Our team started hearing more often from prospects who wanted to try the product themselves before pitching it to their teams and securing a budget.
To respond to this, we created a free plan. We wanted to give users the freedom to explore and understand the value of our interactive demo platform firsthand.
The Process
1. Improving Onboarding
When we had a sales-led motion, our sales team spoke with everyone who used the product. We found that this human touch was helpful in activating users—which we defined as users who published a demo.
Our initial activation rate was ~5%. We knew that to make a self-serve product work, we would have to make improvements in the product that made it really easy to activate.
By reviewing session recordings, conducting user interviews, and analyzing drop-off in the product analytics we figured out where there was friction in the experience. From there, we made improvements weekly.
We had one big initial learning - sometimes users weren’t anchored on a clear next step. We realized we had to break complex tasks into smaller, more guided steps.
For example, we made a more guided flow that helped users create their interactive demos:
And also added a a set-up guide to clearly anchor users on what their next action should be in the product:
2. Building a free plan
Deciding on freemium vs free trials
We chose freemium to let users build and share demos without the time pressure of a trial. It also meant growing our user base and gaining valuable data.
Deciding on what goes into the free plan
We let users build and publish one demo for free, with a seat limit and no integrations to avoid base plan cannibalization.
Creating a monetization path
We added upgrade prompts, buttons, and a self-serve checkout flow to encourage paid conversions after the demo's "wow" moment.
These prompts appeared when a user tried to take actions that were part of the free plan (adding more than 1 demo, connecting an integration, adding more than 3 seats).
Routing leads to sales
We used Zapier to route leads by company size and Koala for sales alerts on key actions like demo publishing.
Nurturing leads
Using Customer.io, we set up onboarding, reactivation, upsell, and feedback emails.
Early Data
We were blown away by the reception from our network. In the 48 hours after launch, we saw 7 organic customer posts around the launch, ~45k impressions, 1.5k reactions and 385 comments (many from existing customers!).
1️⃣ Website conversion is ~2%, peaking at 4% during public promotion. Target: 5-7%.
2️⃣ It’s not just startups signing up. ~45% of sign-ups are over 30 employees and non-work emails.
3️⃣ User base expanded 2-3x during launch week.
4️⃣ Activation rate is ~33%, hitting healthy benchmarks for freemium (30%+). Goal: keep it above 30%.
5️⃣ Conversion from signups to paid is ~3%. Target: 5-10%.
In the last few weeks we also got some great qualitative signals. We saw that our ICP was excited about freemium and that it also opened the door up to more people using, suggesting, and talking about us.
We also had some other unexpected learnings:
- It now allows agencies, partners and consultants in the martech world to recommend Navattic more frequently (many signups now come through this channel)
- We initially expected to see demo requests cannabilized by the freemium offering, but actually demo requests increased WoW since launching.
- Customers are launching fast - we’ve seen many startups and even larger co’s launch the same day after signing up for an account
- Our CS team loves working with freemium accounts that upgrade. These accounts already know the product well and can start their CS journey with “level two” conversations.
Conclusion
We made the transition from sales-led to product-led growth which meant we had to make changes to the product to make sure we could still activate users.
While it's been a strong start, we’re still early in the process. Our plan is to keep improving the product and our approach.
About the Author
Raman Khanna is the Growth Marketing Manager at Navattic. He has worked across growth and product. You can reach out to him in the GrowthDesigners.co Slack community.
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