NPLG 12.8.22: Building a PLG Content Marketing Engine in an Economic Downturn
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NPLG Startup of the Week: Air
If you have ever tried to rummage through your Dropbox folders looking for a particular image or video, you now know would have better luck winning the Powerball than finding it. Now imagine having tens of thousands of content assets and you need to quickly locate the perfect picture for an upcoming marketing campaign. Not fun. Legacy tools like Dropbox and Google Drive are the backbone of most marketing departments, yet they weren't made for visual assets or a remote-first world. Enter Air.
Air is a Creative Operations platform built the way that marketers and creatives actually think. Air returns hours back by automating the manual parts of the creative process - starting with how teams organize, find, and share their visual assets. Fresh off earning Product of the Month on Product Hunt, CEO and Co-founder Shane Hegde shares with me Air’s approach to building an efficient PLG content machine in the middle of a recession. You don’t want to miss this writeup:
Building a PLG content marketing engine in an economic downturn
“My co-Founder and I launched the beta version of Air on February 28, 2020. Three days earlier the CDC announced COVID-19 was heading towards a global pandemic. Since then? Well… It’s been an uphill battle.
Amidst one of the greatest economic downturns our industry has faced, we’ve found product-channel fit with a go-to-market strategy that experiments on top of the classic SaaS playbook. Putting platitudes aside and speaking plainly: we’ve built a resilient top of funnel through a content marketing strategy that is opinionated, channel-specific and creative-first. ****And… my CTA for you and the 1,000 words below are a plea to attempt two things at your PLG startup: 1) spend time re-sharpening your business fundamentals and 2) find creative ways to add unique value in the channels you’re betting on.
1. Analyze the physics of your GTM motion and codify your value prop.
We can complain that Slack, Figma, and Airtable before us weren’t obsessed about burn multiples when they were our age (pre-Series B) or we can be students of the Mendoza Line and T2D3 and meticulously attack the channels we believe in with boundless creativity. How do you pick those channels? What defines success? When do you reinvest and push scale? I’m not here to posture or think-fluence, the only story I can tell is the playbook we used. This year we drove 3x ARR growth with declining CAC/payback periods by first articulating and rearticulating the physics of our GTM motion and the definitions of our value prop.
At Air, we have a dual GTM motion: self-serve and sales-assist. We use ads + outbound (for this discussion let’s call that “paid”) to fuel a high-velocity sales motion and content + product-led virality (let’s call this “organic”) to fuel self serve. AAARR goal is for our organic efforts to constantly own a greater share of total sales leads and signups. Given this, content and the channels we distribute content through are critical drivers to the success of our business. As a GTM team we come back to the above chart each week to place our performance within the context of our economic model.
Because content is so important we are also constantly returning to our comms strategy and product marketing efforts. Who we are we built for? Why do we exist? This ongoing internal dialogue is crucial because it serves as the foundation for how we storytell. What gets our ICP promoted? Why would they get fired? If we can answer these questions on an ongoing basis we have a story to distribute that will resonate with our prospective customers.
2. Bet on a few channels and use creativity to force efficiency
I believe the unique value of your content matters more then where you distribute it. Call me a purist, but LinkedIn and Twitter are our core organic acquisition channels because that’s what we’re good at, that’s where our customers are, and that’s where we can add unique value. Because of these factors, we’ve made the math work. Limiting the channels we work on allows us to over-index our time on incremental increases to quality and efficiency. We’ve placed our bets, our efforts are zeroed in on authentication, optimization and scale.
We create with influencers to authenticate our work. Influencer marketing is the wild west and in SaaS results are decidedly mixed. At Air, we have an incredible network of operator investors who genuinely love the product and category. But they’re not just going to send emails to their network because we want them to. We have to earn it. This summer, we approached Nik Sharma, DTC influencer and Air investor, with a simple idea: “Great creative lives inside Air. We want to make a cereal box with a Nik Sharma t-shirt inside it. And we want to call it Lucky Sharms.” He was game. We worked with illustrators from Deli & Grocery and leveraged Nik’s network to ship hundreds of boxes all over the world. All of a sudden, scores of influencers right in our ICP were talking about Air and asking what we were about. We didn’t pay Nik. This was an organic partnership with an investor in the business. He also wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t love the idea. It was a win-win and for us it was a unique way to drive leads to our business from an investor that isn’t just cajoling them to send out emails. Clever influencer marketing brought his network into our world.
We’ve optimized a content engine that is beginning to feed itself. I often sound like a tool on LinkedIn. I know. It pains me as much as it pains you. Honestly our early experiments on the platform didn’t find much success, but we knew our customers were there—and they were active. Our big insight, wasn’t revolutionary: we realized people don’t engage with businesses, they engage with people. So we worked to bolster my engagement, posting organically and consistently over the last six months, and more than doubling my following to over 12k readers. This new following means a bigger halo around every post I publish. It means more engagement and that in turn enables a systematic content development motion we’re running. Today, 6 people across the business have access to my account. Our mechanics are simple:
Every Monday we inbox around 100 people in our ICP. We have a 24% response rate. Each week I get on 10ish calls with these strangers. These research calls turn into sales calls, more content, and the occasional referral. Yes there are no shows, but this funnel works. It landed us our first Fortune 500 customer. We believe the magic here is the honesty of the approach: I genuinely want the advice and feedback from these individuals. Their advice in turn becomes part of our content flywheel. If the person happens to show interest in the product, then it’s an easy pass over to our sales team for a demo. Through this we’re growing our network, engaging people in our product, and getting some fantastic content from world class leaders in the industry we’re targeting:
Our tentpole moments allow us to extend our reach. Generating buzz as an early-stage start is everything. Product Hunt offers some extraordinary visibility…if you win. Not an easy task and one we took to heart earlier this year when planning a launch on the platform. We decide to commit fully to the endeavor, focusing on building a network of supporters all over the world, deepening our customer community with a tantalizing day-of-launch offer, and doing something off the wall for the launch video. Instead of the typical product description, we went all in on a Steve Wozniak Cameo.
We had no idea what he would say, how it would look, or if it was even going to work. But two days before we got it and, awkward selfie Woz nostrils flaring and all, we knew we had a hit. Product Hunt profiled the launch in their daily newsletter, and 24 wild hours later, we were Product of the Day. Three days later, we clinched the Week. And on December 1st, we learned we got the Month.
Product Hunt is more than just a vanity hit. Web traffic soared by 5x, single-day account creation was up by 8x. The day of launch was our best day of organic sales-leads ever. Nearly 2,000 users emailed to claim the launch discount. An added bonus: the quirky Woz video ended up doing so well organically that we started running it on paid. It’s now at a 20% CPL against all controls.
I don’t have to be the one to tell you this is a challenging time. I’ll leave that to VC Twitter. But survival is the name of the game and we all know what best-in-class looks like. I believe you can find efficiency across any channel if you obsessively get creative in your approach within it. In a world of finite resources, the only way to differentiate is the amount of creative risk you’re willing to take to find success. That’s what determines who grows and who doesn’t.
Or maybe I’m wrong and we can all just ChatGPT some SEO-optimized blog posts?”
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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PLG Tweet(s) of the Week:
Recent PLG Financings (Private Companies):
Seed:
Clerk, a software application designed to provide a high-conversion sign-up and sign-in page for any website, has raised $6.2M. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from S28 Capital, Fathom Capital, and South Park Commons.
Series A:
Fleek, a startup aiming to build an interface and protocol layer “to make the base layer of web[3] services” like storage, hosting and billing, accessible to anyone, has raised $25M. The round was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Protocol Labs, Arweave and North Island Ventures.
Series B:
Deepgram, a company developing voice-recognition tech for the enterprise, has raised $47M. The round was led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Wing, Alkeon and Citi Ventures.
Recent PLG Performance (Public Companies):
Financial data as of previous business day market close.
Best-in-Class PLG Benchmarking:
15 Highest PLG EV / NTM Multiples:
15 Biggest PLG Stock Gainers (1 month):
Complete Notorious PLG Dataset (click to zoom):
Note: TTM = Trailing Twelve Months; NTM = Next Twelve Months. Rule of 40 = TTM Revenue Growth % + FCF Margin %. GM-Adjusted CAC Payback = Change in Quarterly Revenue / (Gross Margin % * Prior Quarter Sales & Marketing Expense) * 12. Recent IPOs will have temporary “N/A”s as Wall Street Research has to wait to initiate converge.
This isn't bad advice, but I think people are done with Listicals and content marketers farming and wasting time. Everything I read on a corpo-blog makes me vomit. Except Stripe, they do a good job.