MadKudu Co-Founder Francis Brero on Unlocking the Keys to Product-Driven Growth

Here's the thing: there isn't a single move to scale a product-driven organization, and free forms and trials alone won't generate enough growth to keep a business afloat . Successful businesses nurture a variety of customer journeys and revenue streams, from inbound leads and self-service users to sales-assisted campaigns and ABM. The first step to product-driven growth? Understand the different ways people want to buy software and align your go-to-market approaches accordingly.

For Francis Brero, co-founder and CPO of MadKudu, a platform that helps B2B companies qualify and engage with their prospects, PLG does not operate in a vacuum. If you want to cater to all the diversity of users and stakeholders along the journey and make your product truly easy to buy, it's essential to embrace complexity and develop excellence through these multiple funnels.

This isn't Francis' first rodeo podcast. Last time, we invited him to talk about how AI can boost your conversational support. But today we have something else in store. Over the past seven years, Francis has partnered with many PLG companies and learned what worked well and what didn't. And just last July, he brought together a group of more than 50 growth and marketing leaders to discuss how to leverage product data to drive revenue drivers.

In today's episode, we'll meet Francis to dive into his discoveries and talk about four key ways to drive and monetize product-driven growth.

If you're short on time, here are some quick tips:

PLG is not a one-size-fits-all way to acquire customers. Different people buy software in different ways and understand that broader context is crucial to monetizing your movement. Forms or product listings rely on self-entered data. While this may seem useful and easy to set up, it not only increases friction in the UX - it's not as precise as you might think. At the enterprise level, the user is rarely the decision maker. Using product activity as a guide to monetizing your business will steer you toward SMBs rather than large organizations. When trying to sell to a business, consider all potential users and stakeholders and create a multi-threaded go-to-market strategy that aligns with the entire business.

Make sure you don't miss any highlights by following Inside Intercom on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or by grabbing the RSS feed in your reader of choice. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the episode.

The different funnels of a PLG company

Liam Geraghty: Francis, welcome to the show.

Francis Brero: Yes, thank you for inviting me. Nice to be here.

Liam: Actually, welcome back. You have already participated in the show and we are delighted to see you again.

Francis: Yeah, it's good to be back. Thank you for having me.

Liam: For anyone who hasn't heard that first episode, could you give us an overview of your professional journey so far?

Francis: Yes, absolutely. So I started as an engineer. My university education is in fundamental mathematics. Then I got into the dark side of sales - I was leading everything revenue related at MadKudu, but then moved back into product management.

"One of the biggest challenges companies face when starting to use PLG is being a little too dogmatic about doing it one way or another"

Liam: I'd like to talk to you about product-driven growth from a blog post you recently wrote. You've created a leading product-driven growth platform for B2B businesses. Can you tell me a bit more about the five-step methodology you developed and how to scale and monetize product-driven growth?

Francis: Yes, absolutely. I mean, on a high level, one of the biggest challenges companies face when they start using PLG is being a little too dogmatic to do it one way or another. One of the things we encourage most businesses to think about is that you have different funnels when running a PLG business. You're going to have people coming in, they...