129. How to learn product-led growth 🚀

An invite to the Product-Led Summit, notes on startup growth, and a map of every marketing tactic you could choose today

Jul 20, 2020

I share a weekly update on ways to be a better marketer, brand-maker, team-builder, and person. If you enjoy this, you can share some love by hitting the Substack heart button above or below.

Hi there 👋

If you happen to be working in marketing or product for a SaaS company, then I highly recommend the upcoming, virtual Product-Led Summit. The summit is completely free to attend live (there are paid options for lifetime access to the replays) and runs from the July 27 - 31.

I got the Buffer team access to all the talks, and I’m very lucky to have the chance to present on some of our Buffer learnings as well. My talk is about the value of audience building in 2020 and will walk you through how to properly invest in brand and content so that you can future-proof your acquisition.

You can get more info on the summit’s other speakers, and grab your free ticket here.

If you end up attending, I’d love to hear what talks you enjoyed and what you learned!

— George Saunders, Congratulations By The Way

Startup School library

from Y Combinator

I’ve loved dipping in and out of Startup School talks over the past couple years, so I was thrilled to see the whole series available in this format. Here’s a look at what you can find for Growth (there’s a Sales & Marketing section, too, but it skews pretty heavy into Sales):

Lots of good stuff there! I can personally vouch for the Scaling Growth talk from Gustaf Alstromer and Ed Baker — it’s a great listen.

The entire marketing landscape in one graphic

from Against

I used this graphic in my Product-Led Summit presentation. It contains pretty much every single way you can market a product — go from left to right in the diagram in order to decide your objective, channel, audience, and more.

(This graphic is also part of the university course I teach on growth marketing. Big thanks to my friends at Against for creating the graphic and inviting me to teach on it!)

Email onboarding teardown (of us)

by FunnelFly

Want to know what others love about Buffer emails — and where our emails can improve? This review of our onboarding sequence was hugely informative. I can’t recommend teardowns highly enough, whether they come from a helpful customer or from your own dogfooding.

Takeaways:

leverage the user’s data to send emails to help move the user down the funnel and towards the many activation points—and finally to a paying customer.

Thanks so much for reading. Have a great week!

— Kevan

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