NPLG 1.12.23: Transitioning from Human Onboarding to PLG
NPLG 1.12.23: Transitioning from Human Onboarding to PLG
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NPLG Startup of the Week: Equals
38% of office workers’ time is spent using Excel. This is an eye popping stat, but I believe it as I currently have multiple Google Sheets tabs open and have two Excel files open. Today’s popular spreadsheets are powerful, but there is so much more room for improvement. Enter Equals. Equals is building a connected, warehouse-native spreadsheet that makes it 10x easier to build and automate analyses with multiple data connections. I keep hearing from friends at startups how much they love Equals so I am thrilled to go deeper with Equals this week.
For this edition of Notorious PLG, CEO and Co-founder Bobby Pinero shares with the NPLG community how they initially went deep with early customers to iterate towards PMF and are now emerging with PLG for scaled customer acquisition. I hope you enjoy this writeup from the Equals team:
Transitioning from Human Onboarding to PLG
“Over the past decade we’ve been pitched countless new data tools - all trying to take us out of the spreadsheet into things like BI tools (god help us if we need yet another BI tool), notebooks, or spreadsheet “alternatives.” Equals starts from the premise that the spreadsheet is actually the best way to do analysis. The reality is that we all, always, end up back in Excel or Sheets. Equals exists to make a spreadsheet fit for this era’s work.
Our First 20 Customers
We launched our first sneak peek of Equals to the world in April, 2021. It wasn’t much - a simple landing page with a demo video which we shared on social media. The reaction was not something we were fully prepared for. Things took off. We had folks like Patrick Collison, replying and sharing their enthusiasm and excitement for Equals!
However, we didn’t want Equals to be self-serve, PLG from the get-go. Our initial goal following that launch was to find 20, highly engaged users - to deeply understand why and how they used Equals, and to be close to them throughout their entire onboarding experience. As a result, we gated access to the product and required every team to jump on an onboarding / demo call as we identified their use case, data source, and first model to build in Equals. In the early days these calls were *super* valuable. They helped us hone in on the Equals buyer, use cases, missing data sources and features, and to very rapidly get feedback.
It worked so well that we decided to keep this high-touch model in place for the next 6 months, onboarding hundreds of new companies to Equals, which eventually culminated in our $16M Series A led by Kristina Shen at Andreessen Horowitz.
From Human Onboarding to PLG
Equals is one of the most ambitious projects we can imagine working on. Every company runs on spreadsheets. It’s a fundamental building block of the modern worker, used by over a billion people.
Our goal with Equals is to build the next Excel but looking back, our human-led GTM motion was clearly misaligned with this ambition. Our dream is in 10 years, you walk into a Starbucks and 1 out of 3 computers is using Equals. In order to get there, we need to have +100 million users on the product. Given that, we knew we needed to invest in ways to allow people to Self-Serve. We’d never get there through a human-led motion.
The second clue came from user feedback. Prospects kept telling us that they just wanted to get their hands on the product - not jump on an onboarding call. We were clearly losing out on potential users. The decision was obvious, we needed to pivot to a self-serve, freemium model.
The early days of PLG
Opening Equals to the world and fundamentally changing how we go to market was a big decision. We sought counsel from our angels and investors, and debated it healthily internally. We understood it would mean tearing up much of what had worked for us so far, and learning a brand new way of operating. It also required quite a bit of patience, which we had more of with the close of our Series A. Typically I think of the trade off between sales/human led vs self-serve on revenue as looking like this:
We made the change in November 2022, so in a lot of ways we’re still learning and iterating on how to be “PLG.” That said, the primary areas of focus have evolved to the following:
Redefining our North Star Metric:
We run a weekly team meeting where we present progress updates on Weekly Active Domains, the company’s new North Star metric
This gives the entire company visibility into performance and helps motivate everyone around a common goal of growing our user base, with a heavy focus on repeat users
Rebuilding the Funnel:
We mapped out our sign-up flow and set up weekly GTM meetings to review performance at each step of the journey
We’re hiring for growth engineers who will be fully responsible for building and launching experiments across the early user experience
The goal here is the build the best self-serve onboarding experience so we convert as many visitors to our website into Weekly Active Users
Casting a Wide Net:
PLG is much more of a volume game. So we’re thinking a lot about how to expand our Top of Funnel
We’re bringing on our first Head of Marketing to focus on this
Lastly, investing in tools to manage customer feedback at scale has been critical (through things like Canny, for example)
So far the transition has gone better than expected. We’ve more than 2.5x’d the number of companies using Equals since launching self serve 2 months ago and we’re excited to keep going!”
I would love feedback. Please hit me up on twitter @zacharydewitt or email me at zach@wing.vc. If you were forwarded this email and are interested in getting a weekly update on the best PLG companies, please join our growing community by subscribing:
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