How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS
purde.net
purde.net
Obviously, this isn't the secret sauce that can get anyone's idea up to 10k paying customers, and there may be other factors that contributed to your success, but this is your perspective on successful marketing strategies from the point of view of a marketing guy and it looks pretty good to me.
Thanks.
Edit: My beef is with the prescriptive tone of the post, as if getting 10,000 paying users is as simple as 1, 2, 3...
You seem to be interpreting the post very literally. The author's tone is clearly different from snake oil salesman who have a flashing $299 course on SAAS scaling at the bottom of the page.
A helpful habit when reading an article is to ask yourself how the author would reply if you asked them a question. If you ask a snake oil salesman if they're certain, they'll say yes.
Whereas the impression I got from this article was that the author was constantly learning, testing assumptions. If you asked them "are you sure this worked? Would this work for anyone, in any circumstances?" I got the impression they would say "perhaps not" and discuss where they had uncertainties.
You can't include all uncertainties when writing. Such an article would be unreadable. Any writing requires reading between the lines.
In fact, one could argue that the real value of accelerators isn't their mentors but the fact that they provide an immediate source of other businesses willing to try (and pay) for the product. So for a company in an accelerator, it seems much easier to get to 10,000 paying customers than for a company that is building a product in a garage (without an accelerator).
In my opinion, going from 0 to 20 paying businesses seems to be relatively harder than going from 20 paying businesses to 10,000 total customers. Meaning that if you get traction with 20 businesses that probably means you're touching 2000 people indirectly (assuming 100 people companies) already.
I'm sure that it's a great product. That's usually a prerequisite for success, but hardly guarantees it. For every extremely successful product, there are hundreds of equally great products that falter - primarily for lack of luck. This kind of statement shows an extreme lack of perspective.
Of course you would say that, because that's your experience. In your case, the entry fee to the lottery was creating a great product, doing marketing, and generally hustling - just like your competitors. Once you paid the entry fee though, the controlling factor was luck. You won, and your competitors lost. I am not trying to take anything away from your success, because you paid your entry fee through hard work, but as I said it shows a lack of perspective to just say "we are successful because we made a great product". Great products fail every day.
Sorry not trying to detract from the stat, but it's worth adding that bit of context. Per-user priced startups who create an awesome product are in a sweet spot when it comes to ramping up their paying customer metric. I admit I'm quite envious of SaaS startups like this, or like Slack that have nailed it on execution and can linearly scale their price according to the size of an organization.
Definitely something I tell new entrants to SaaS to bear in mind.
(I run a SaaS based on the more traditional "3 plan" model)
Great advice on getting focused and measuring the hell out of everything.
Context; I've been a paying PipeDrive customer for a couple years. Not sure how I originally was exposed to the product, (not appsumo), but I've stayed because the of the product.
and the next paragraph
>The main thing that got Pipedrive to first 100, 1000 and 10000 customers was having a great product.
Building a great product IS marketing. It's the most important part of marketing. It's at the beginning of any marketing plan.
Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the markets the company operates in. Advertising, sales, PR are only communication tools which fall in only 1P (promotion) out of the 5Ps.
The article continues to list marketing activities. In fact, it only lists marketing activities, while insisting they don't do any marketing.
Finding your LTCV is marketing (Price). Localizing is marketing (Place). Content, SEO, email are also marketing (Promotion). Finding platforms before others is also makreting.
All in all, I would advise the author of this article to read the wikipedia page (lol) about marketing before making attempts to speak on the subject.
It also leads to inventing terms like "content marketing", "inbound marketing", "growth hacking". Oh, the irony with the last one. A marketing term, to trick people who hate marketing, to do marketing...
I'm sure it pans out great for people like Rand Fishkin, Dharmesh Shah and Sean Ellis. The problem is, the people who fall for these neologisms get disconnected from the much, much larger marketing community. They get inside of an echo chamber. Instead of reading thorough articles, by authors which credentials are checked, claims are investigated and arguments - reviewed by peers, they get moz.com and quicksprout and kissmetrics, unbounce and optimizely. Well, I guess people get what they ask for - something easy, which does its "magic".
My last line in the previous post was a cheap shot and uncalled for. I'm sorry about that.
https://www.informs.org/ (a couple of the journals are published by them); their Analytics magazine is also good, as well as their site.
ama.org
Any book published by Springer, Emeral Insight and Taylor & Francis Group.
However, while I wish there were more people reading peer reviewed journals and debating the full spectrum of marketing, the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online (we are talking about SaaS here).
Research and empirical work takes time but consumers move quickly, especially online, so by the time reports and data are published it's out of date. The only half decent way to keep up with developments is to buy into some of these "neologisms" or you will be left behind.
Did you come down to this conclusion by yourself, or did you read/heard it somewhere? Also, I'm not an academic.
What exactly is wrong with data and insights from a variety of sources that might include Moz, Optimizely, etc? These are marketing technology companies and have a unique bird's-eye perspective of raw data across numerous companies. Further, people like Rand Fishkin know their shit. You might disagree with it, but I guarantee if you had a conversation with him and voiced your arguments, he'd be able to cite plenty of data to back up his claims and have an honest debate about it.
Marketers who take what they read as gospel concern me, and I fully agree with that. People need to do their due diligence and figure out how things apply to their business. They should also read broader respected industry news sources (ie. searchengineland, searchenginejournal, etc.), and be active in communities of people tackling similar challenges with similar experience to trade notes.
I agree with the other comments though on the fact that building a great product isn't necessarily marketing. Informing great product design through solid market research could come from marketing, but that is very different than physically building a product. The "build it and they will come" fallacy is a dangerous one. Communicating that you have a product is the act of marketing. Even placing it on a website with content is marketing because you may get organic search traffic, or referral traffic if people link to you, etc.
Or optimizely's A/B testing, which depending on your definition is anywhere between wildly imprecise and outright fraud. And this is by design, because they know their customers just won't put the effort into learning experimental design, sampling, normalizing, distributions, hypothesis testing and validating. It's just much better to charge clueless people a monthly fee for what is essentially a redirect script with a WYSIWYG editor, while telling them what they are doing is scientifically sound. And off to the echo chamber they go. Changing a button's color improves CTR by 90%. You can read that on pretty much any blog. Moz, ConversionXL, unbounce, kissmetrics, SEJ, any blog/publication which passes for "industry authority". Sorry, I just don't have the time to sift through all of this self-serving bullshit.
That said, I'm not sure I agree with your take on the new terms. Sure they are buzzwords to some degree, but I see content marketing as distinct from PR in that it largely focuses on content creation, has considerations for SEO, etc. One could argue that PR has those components as well, but I see the distinction as PR focusing more on outreach to key individuals in the media, handling issues management, etc. Again, some overlap for sure, but I don't see content marketing efforts doing everything PR does or vice versa.
Again, people need to read a variety of sources, and part of the problem is there is no great way to tell whether a source is credible. But I think it is better that people start going down the rabbit hole than wander around completely oblivious.
Since you seem have a high threshold for what you consider value sources of industry info, do you have any recommendations for how others might discover those on their own? I'd be curious what you consider reputable sources.
https://www.informs.org/ (a couple of the journals are published by them); their Analytics magazine is also good, as well as their site.
ama.org
Any book published by Springer, Emeral Insight and Taylor & Francis Group.
for websites - the emarketer.com, meclabs family, econsultancy, conversion-rate-experts.com, distilled, butleranalytics.com, dmnews.com, kaushik.net, analyticsvidhya.com, ppchero.com, internetretailer.com, targetmarketingmag.com, SELand.
I don't like SELand much, but haven't found anything better when it comes to news about search. Do you have any suggestions?
I LOVE the Meclabs properties. MarketingExperiments.com is absolutely fantastic in particular. Definitely a fan of the others you listed as well. Avinash Kaushik is my analytics hero and I often find myself linking to his pieces when trying to educate about attribution or how to look at data.
SearchEngineLand is pretty decent for getting raw industry news, but some of their pieces are definitely skewed based on the biases of the authors. Believe it or not, there is actually some decent discussion that happens on Reddit in /r/ppc and /r/adops as well as every now and then in Quora.
My biggest problem right now is finding time to digest all the info. I used to be able to carve out a decent chunk when that was a large part of my role in the agency world, but now that I'm client-side my days are filled with many other items, so I have to fit it in where I can.
The whole quote about "without any marketing is" is:
Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing: by describing it as "it's a piece of sales software" on an uncrawlable site without any design, without onboarding emails, without press mentions, without a single ad and blog post.
I took that as the author using hyperbole to critique how "enterprise" sales systems work by literally just existing.
No. See Wikipedia: Marketing is the methodology of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling that product or service.
Marketing is about communicating the value of the product. Regardless of the actual quality of the product. Building a great product is not marketing.
Building a great product is most definitely part of marketing. For example there are methods and techniques which faciiliate it and are subject of marketing journals and marketing academia. One of these methods is the "segmentation-targeting-positioning" framework.
I can get you many more citations if you wish, or you can spare me the time, and search for them yourself. Perhaps you will learn something of value in the process.
This thinking can occur because often entrants to a competitive marketplace will assess their competition, identify a weakness and deploy a product to meet the need. The development of the product in this scenario is not 'marketing' as you assert.
How would you build your product if you don't know what the market conditions are? How do you find out what the market conditions are? By segmenting the market by behaviour/need/price sensitivity, then targeting a segment which is underserved (or you can serve better), and finally positioning your product to cater to that particular segment with specific product design, messages and distribution channels.
Marketing doesn't develop the product. It just designs it (writes the specs).
Maybe in start-ups or 1-product companies. Even then, this is not a good practice. Your customers will make a choice between you and competitors/substitutes. The product team does not know or understand this process. They don't do choice modeling, they write code.
Good marketing teams will evaluate your product VS the competition and use the good parts for communicating the message. Amazing teams will also take the bad parts and bring them up to the product teams so they can confirm weak parts and put them in the queue to get looked at.
Marketing a bad product will only last so long.
"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."
Marketing is _not_ simply about communicating the value of products. Advertising something that doesn't help a customer create or experience value is not marketing.
I think you'd find this article and the comments interesting:
War is peace;
and everything is marketing.
First, marketing is not a scientific discipline. Full stop. Calling it a science does real science a disservice, and reeks as we say down south of putting on airs.
Second, you're trying to make marketing encompass every piece of a business, from product idea to design to construction and beyond. It isn't everything. It isn't about designing or creating a product (other than marketing materials or services), even if marketing may help shed insight into the targets' needs. At some point you're going to realize that by attempting to fit everything into the marketing bucket that the term marketing ceases to have meaning.
No, teradata.