Why product-led growth is the future | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Surveymonkey)

The game is a layering game. It's a sequential game. Which one will you introduce first, and how can you layer the next one on top of it? So if you're sales-led now, if you continue being sales-led, you have a high chance of leaving product-led to be disrupted by it from the bottoms up. But also going from sales-led to product-led does not mean you have to abandon sales-led. That means you have to hunker down on your sales-led and overlay product-led on top of it to amplify already existing growth, never to switch. So in the most successful companies, whether they go from product-led to sales-led to sales-led to product-led, they're able to execute both correctly and together, as opposed to saying, "I have to switch or pick one versus the other." And I think it's the biggest mistake when people view it as a decision-making of which one I should be, versus a sequential play.

(instrumental music) Elena Verna is possibly the single most experienced and smartest person on growth strategy in the entire world. I am not being hyperbolic. Elena led growth at Miro, SurveyMonkey, and now at Amplitude, and she has worked with companies like MongoDB, Netlify, and HP to help them figure out their growth strategies. In our chat, we cover B2B growth strategies, what's changing in B2B growth, why freemium is usually a better path than going trial, why every company should be thinking about their product-led growth strategy, how product-led growth often gets crushed as you move up market and how to avoid that, the emergence of product-led sales and how that might be the future of growth, and also how to hire your first growth lead. My brain is always buzzing after I talk to Elena, and I suspect yours will too. Enjoy the episode. This episode is brought to you by Persona. Persona helps founders, product managers, and engineers easily solve any identity-related problem, including handling KYC, AML, and basically all manner of identity fraud. You can integrate Persona in an afternoon and personalize your flows using their SDK to meet your users on any device. Persona's identity building blocks allow you to manage your entire end-to-end onboarding flow, verifying that each new user and their data are legitimate. Persona is trusted by both startups and the world's largest companies, including Square, BlockFi, Gusto, and Udemy. And for a limited time, Persona's offering listeners of this podcast a free end-to-end KYC and AML solution where you can collect a user's government ID and/or their selfie and automatically verify that those two pieces of data are legitimate. You can also enrich that information to automatically see if the person exists on various watch lists. Just go to withpersona.com/lenny to get started. Do you want to reduce friction in your onboarding flow? Then let me tell you about Stytch, and that's Stytch with a Y. Stytch is on a mission to eliminate friction from the internet. They're starting by making user authentication and onboarding more seamless and more secure. They offer super flexible, out of the box authentication solutions for companies of all sizes. From email magic links, to SMS passcodes, one-tap social logins, to even biometrics, Stytch is your all-in-one platform for authentication. Stytch customers have been able to increase conversion by over 60% after spending just one day integrating. And with their API and SDKs, you can improve user conversion and retention and security, all while saving valuable engineering time. Your engineers will come and thank you for using Stytch, because Stytch keeps you from having to build authentication in-house, and the integration process is super fast and super smooth. To get $1,000 in free credits, just go to stytch.com, and that's Stytch with a Y, and sign up, and just mention that I sent you. Elena, welcome to the podcast. I've been so looking forward to our conversation, and especially all the things that listeners are going to get to learn from you and that I'm going to get to learn. And so thank you for being here.