Who is this field guide for?

Are you an early-stage SaaS founder exploring how to harness the power of Product-Led Growth (PLG) to propel your business forward? This Field Guide, crafted in collaboration with SaaS Compass Captain Madhukar Kumar, is designed to help those in the 0 to 1 journey gain a comprehensive understanding of all customer-facing touchpoints. It is tailored specifically for growth and marketing leaders focused on laying the foundational bricks for a successful PLG strategy. From constructing robust financial models and selecting the right tech stacks to designing an engaging onboarding journey and effective PR and community-building strategies- you’ll discover first principles and proven frameworks to guide you through the key considerations for a PLG motion.   This resource is designed to help you establish the key elements that should be in place from the beginning and all the way to gaining that initial momentum and traction.

In a scenario where a growth marketer is tasked with developing a plan for Product-Led Growth (PLG) for their company’s product, the question arises: What should be the target number of sign-ups per day, and how much budget is required to achieve that goal?

Growth marketers often get hung up with metrics like daily sign-ups, daily active users (DAUs), and monthly active users (MAUs). However, the reality is that if they only measure and pay attention to a limited number of metrics, they can fall victim to the classic misstep of missing the forest for the trees.

The bigger picture of how much revenue the growth marketer is influencing  (if they are in the B2B space) or bringing in and the efficiency of each dollar brought in is often lost in the pursuit of singular metrics like daily sign-ups and the cost of sign-ups. What’s worse is they usually don’t know how much they should spend on their growth efforts and how much to allocate the capital across different channels and campaigns.

A robust foundational plan considers a consolidated set of KPIs and a basis to run experimentation and fast iterations. With this methodology, there is a systematic way to determine the number of sign-ups, budget, and capital allocation and then use that as a starting point to build a growth plan.

In this Field Guide, Madhukar shares his process for building a PLG financial model as a way to align all the stakeholders and establish a way to come up with a budget and a capital allocation model.

Step 1: Define your revenue target

The first step is to define your revenue target and timeline. Let’s say, for example, that you want to generate $1M in revenue over the next 12 months.

Step 2: Determine your Average Selling Price (ASP)

Next, you need to determine your Average Selling Price (ASP). For this example, let’s assume an ASP of $400 per month or $4,800 per customer.

Step 3: Calculate your total number of paid Customers

Using your revenue target and ASP, you can calculate the total number of customers you need to acquire to hit your revenue target. For example, to generate $1M in revenue at an ASP of $4,800 per customer, you need approximately 209 customers. Here, we are assuming that one user sign-up is the same as one customer. This may be different for companies with the model of multiple users adding up to become one customer account.

Step 4: Estimate your sign-up conversion rate

Now that we know how many customers we need to acquire, we can estimate the sign-up conversion rate. For this example, let’s assume a 5% conversion rate from sign-up to paid customer. This varies wildly for different companies, and we will look at some best practices to improve this in a future chapter.

Step 5: Calculate your total number of sign-ups

Based on an assumption of a 5% conversion rate from sign-up to paid customers, we can now calculate that we would need approximately 4,160 sign-ups over 12 months to get 209 paid customers.

Step 6: Break down your sign-up target by month

To make your customer acquisition target more manageable, you can break it down by month. For example, you could aim for 346 sign-ups per month to hit your target of 4,160 sign-ups over 12 months. You can also assume a monthly growth so that the sign-ups are initially smaller and then grow over each month. In our example, we have taken and built a 10% growth month over month.

Step 7: Determine your acquisition channels and campaigns

Once you have your monthly sign-up target, you can determine the acquisition channels and campaigns you will use to achieve that target. This could include paid search, social media ads, email marketing, content marketing, referral programs, partnerships, events, PR, and other campaigns specific to your industry and product. However, once we bring in the channels, we realize that each channel has a different conversion rate, so in our model, with the assumptions listed below, we need about 760 sign-ups in a month.

Step 8: Allocate your acquisition budget

With the acquisition channels and campaigns identified, you can allocate your acquisition budget accordingly. For this example, let’s assume you have a budget of $650K for the first year and want the average sign-up cost to be, at most, $200.

Here’s a sample table that you can use to track your PLG financial model:

You can access the template here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1taWYbcRpNTgIc5yohE6btnVTId-9JoTSHqKDQO6Sciw/edit?usp=sharing

This table includes columns for the channel, unique visitors needed, conversion rate, monthly sign-ups, conversion to paid percentage, number of paid customers, cost per sign-up, and monthly cost. It’s based on the assumption of a 5% conversion rate from sign-up to the paid customer and an ASP of $4,800 per customer, with a target of 208 paid customers over 12 months.

Now, let’s take this same table and spread it out over 12 months. This becomes the base for measurement and tracking KPIs for every month.

With this framework, you can have a cogent conversation with your stakeholders about your budget and show that you plan to bring in $1M with an approximate budget of $650K. That is about spending $0.65 to bring in $1. The table above can be tweaked to meet your company goals and iterate on the channels as the experiments continue to show you over a period of time which channels are working better than others.

In the next chapter, we will be looking at how to create a data and martech architecture to measure and build dashboards for this framework.

Conclusion

In conclusion, building a solid financial model for your PLG strategy is essential for achieving your revenue targets and maximizing your return on investment. By following the steps outlined in this article and using the sample table provided, you can create a detailed plan for acquiring new customers, track your progress over time, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your acquisition channels and campaigns. In addition, with a well-defined PLG financial model, you can set yourself up for success and confidently scale your business.

In the next chapter, we discuss the essential components of an effective Product-led Growth tech stack that efficiently streamlines user experience, data integration, and marketing automation to drive growth through user engagement.