How does a digital whiteboard become a multi-billion-dollar sensation?

By convincing everyone that remote meetings are more fun when you can draw mustaches on your coworkers.

How Miro Grew to $17.5B

Why Read:

• Learn successful strategies for product-led growth, enterprise adoption, and community building from Miro's impressive journey in the SaaS industry. It offers valuable insights for scaling a product.

Featuring:

• Aakash Gupta (@aakashg0), Chief Product Officer at Product Growth

Link: 

• “How Miro Grows: Tactical Lessons From The $17.5B Whiteboard”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Understanding Miro's Market Position:

  • Point: Recognize that Miro has achieved significant success in a highly competitive market.

  • "Miro — the online collaborative whiteboard — is a beast of a SaaS product that's seen some incredible growth (~10x) over the past 3 years. Here's a peek into their resume: $17.5B valuation, 45M+ users, 99% of Fortune 100 companies as customers, 1,500+ employees"

• Leveraging Multiple Entry Points for Enterprise Adoption:

  • Point: Create multiple user personas to increase chances of enterprise adoption.

  • "If Spotify's marketing team are not interested in Miro, but their designers love using it to brainstorm with engineers, then that persona becomes Miro's point of attack to break into Spotify and win the account. It's like hedging their bets."

• Implementing a Freemium Model for Product-Led Growth:

  • Point: Use a generous freemium model to drive adoption and product-led growth.

  • "Miro uses a freemium model to provide value first, receive money later. And they are certainly not stingy with the freemium version — it offers a lot of value upfront, allowing an unlimited number of teammates to get started. This was designed to get teams hooked as quickly as possible, in turn driving an internal viral loop."

• Personalizing User Onboarding:

  • Point: Tailor onboarding experiences based on user personas and roles.

  • "For SaaS with single player and multiplayer modes, think of onboarding as fundamentally different for first-time users creating the workspace, vs others joining an existing team."

• Leveraging Templates for Rapid Value Discovery:

  • Point: Use templates to reduce time to value and expand use cases.

  • "Each core use case unlocks new pools of users, expanding Miro's total addressable market. For example, by launching templates focused on Strategy/Planning/Roadmapping, Miro started to compete with products like Aha! and Productboard."

• Implementing Product-Led Sales:

  • Point: Combine product-led growth with targeted sales efforts for enterprise customers.

  • "To build a strong, durable business, you need to be customer-centric. By adding marketing and sales layers on top of PLG, we increased our investment in customers, since before, it had been a transactional, self-service business. By doing that, we increased the depth of relationships we have with those customers, and we increased the breadth of customers that we can serve"

• Leveraging Community for Growth:

  • Point: Use community-driven initiatives to enhance product value and drive growth.

  • "Community isn't just a buzzword for Miro; it's an integral part of their strategic DNA... Miro understands that the path to success lies in fostering a community that adds an extra layer of value — a reality that echoes across their various community initiatives."

Run Product Experiments To Fit Reality

Why Read: 

• Learn how to efficiently validate product ideas through structured experiments, from quick tests to robust ones. It teaches risk minimization and maximizing learning when developing new products.

Featuring:

• David Pereira (@davidavpereira), Chief Executive Officer at omoqo GmbH

Link:

• “Product Experiments: Dropping Bad Ideas Fast Enough”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Embracing the "Fail Fast" Mentality:

  • Point: Adopt a mindset that embraces small failures to avoid big ones.

  • "You have probably heard the 'Fail Fast' motto a thousand times. Yet many organizations are reluctant to follow it. The reason is simple: It goes against human nature. We hate failing, which hurts, so we will find ways to avoid it."

  • "Avoid big failures, or you're dead. Embrace small failures, or you're dead."

• Use Product Experiments to De-Risk The Product Idea:

  • Point: Use product experiments to increase knowledge and reduce risk when developing new ideas.

  • "At the beginning of most ideas, our knowledge is as limited as possible, while the risk of failing is the opposite. I find it hard to understand why companies waste energy discussing what to do next for hours. The only option I see is starting with small experiments to increase our knowledge and de-risk the product idea."

• Addressing Key Aspects Through Experiments:

  • Point: Design experiments to assess desirability, usability, feasibility, viability, and ethics of your product idea.

  • "Product experiments done right will help you address the following: 

    • Desirability: Gain confidence customers want what you aim to create. 

    • Usability: Learn if customers figure out how to benefit from your idea. 

    • Feasibility: Understand if you can transform your idea into reality. 

    • Viability: Figure out how you can collect enough business value. 

    • Ethical: Your idea would do good to customers and the world."

• Implementing Quick Experiments:

  • Point: Start with simple, fast experiments that can be run in hours to get initial direction.

  • "The following experiments can be run in hours. The result will show you which direction you could take, dropping the idea being a realistic one:

    • Survey

    • 404

    • Painted Doors

    • Paper Prototype."

• Conducting Moderate Experiments:

  • Point: Progress to more elaborate experiments that take a few days to run for deeper insights.

  • "As you gain evidence suggesting advancing, you can benefit from running more elaborate experiments before committing to delivery. Such experiments would take a few days to run, not weeks. Here are some of my favorites:

    • Interactive Prototype

    • Concierge

    • Wizard of Oz."

• Executing Robust Experiments:

  • Point: Use comprehensive experiments that take weeks to prepare and run for shaping up your idea.

  • "Moderate experiments can already give you enough evidence to create a solution, but depending on how much it costs, I'd suggest you run a few robust experiments to shape up your idea. Such experiments will take a few weeks to prepare and run. Here are some of my favorites:

    • Landing Pages

    • A/B Test

    • Proof of Concept

    • MVP and its variations."

• Structuring the Product Experiment Flow:

  • Point: Start small and gradually increase investment based on evidence.

  • "The core mindset of running product experiments is starting small and gradually growing the investment. Use evidence to decide what to do next. Another critical aspect is remaining open to the new. It's not about proving yourself right. It's about learning what you don't know and making your idea a better fit with reality."

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