Esben Friis-Jensen

Userflow

The fastest way to fast user onboarding for SaaS businesses - Bootstrapped to $4.6M ARR with a team of 3 until acquired by Beamer in 2024.

Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer

Cobalt

Co-Founder and Advisor

A modern offensive security platform enabling businesses to run on-demand Penetration Testing and vulnerability assessments - Pentest as a Service (PtaaS)

Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer

Accenture

Worked as a consultant in the SAP division of Accenture. Key responsibility was to manage the test and deployment of global large-scale SAP implementations.

Consultant

Co-founder (former Chief Growth Officer) of Userflow. Userflow offers the fastest and most user friendly onboarding flow builder for SaaS/Online businesses on the market. Userflow was acquired by Beamer in 2024.

Co-founder (former Chief Customer Officer) of Cobalt. Cobalt enables innovative online businesses to connect to the security community and get effective pentests via our modern Pentest as a Service (PTaaS) offering.

My background is as an Accenture consultant with 3+ years of experience in test and deployment management of global IT implementations.

Happy to announce ProductLed 100. The elite community for Product-led founders.

A big part of me joining Wes Bush and ProductLed was to help bring more companies to become Elite PLG companies with $1M+ in Revenue per Employee. 

To achieve this goal we want to build a high quality community for founders of the top PLG companies, who can inspire each other to reach the goal. 

Thus if you are a founder of a company that has:
1. A solid PLG motion with freemium/free trial, transparent pricing etc.
2. A core belief that the product should be your best salesperson.
3. $1M+ in ARR and beyond the product-market fit stage
4. A goal of reaching $1M in RPE (Revenue per Employee)

Then the ProductLed 100 is the community for you. 

The community will have
- Monthly deep dive sessions with presentations from members
- A Slack community for ongoing convos
- An annual in-person event

Besides from Wes Bush and myself, then 3 top PLG founders have already joined in

- Melissa Kwan co-founder of eWebinar
- Vincent Jong founder of Meet.bot and the author of Productled Sales
- Patrick Thompson co-founder of Clarify

And we are now open for applications to have more fantastic founders join us. So check out the link in the comments and apply today.

#PLG #SaaS #Productled100

Entrepreneur in Residence at ProductLed - Co-Founder of Userflow and Cobalt

$1M in Revenue per Employee (RPE)

In the AI hype Sam Altman and others have talked about the one person $1B company. While that is an exciting vision then the current reality (as you can see by the data from Kyle Poyar below) is that most SaaS companies are not even close to this.

Instead I would shift the focus to bring more companies to a more achievable goal of $1M in Revenue per Employee.  

As someone who grew a company to $4.6M with 3 people, I know this is achievable using a strong PLG motion and a profit-first approach, and with the dawn of AI agents it has become even easier to reach this goal.

Getting more companies focused on this, is a big part of why I have joined ProductLed and Wes Bush.

#PLG #SaaS #Productled #1MRPE

Founder gut feelings matters more than analytics

I have co-founded two startups. In both most of our best decisions were made based on gut feelings, not analytics. 

Jason Fried have spoken about this before and I am a strong believer in this as well.

Many companies will try to overanalyze every single product decision arguing that every decision needs to be backed by data. But having founders who make great decisions based on gut feelings allows you to move faster.

In Cobalt when we decided to pivot from bug bounty programs to Pentest-as-a-Service, it was purely based on gut feelings and a bit of early traction. The pivot turned Cobalt into a success with high growth and predictable revenue.

Similarly in Userflow whenever we decided to increase pricing it was mainly due to a gut feeling that we could charge more. These price increases always worked out, and led to higher growth without having to increase the # of net new customers per month.

And the list goes on. From launching new features to finetuning UX. 

Analytics definitely serves it purpose to validate certain decisions, but nothing beats a strong founder gut feeling.

#PLG #SaaS

Support is a profit center, not a cost center

In most early stage SaaS companies, the founders are doing the support and make sure every single customer is supported closely. They not only make sure their questions are answered, but also listens to learn about their needs and sell and build the product accordingly.

But as SaaS businesses grow they make Support a cost center where they are just doing a bare minimum to answer questions, and they move the high value conversations to sales and customer success. 

But by doing this you limit the communication to scheduled meetings and you create too many layers of organization and thereby lose touch with the feedback loop the support channel gave in the early days. 

At Userflow we did the complete opposite. We made support a profit center and closed many deals and upgrades by providing high quality support. I believe this a trait of any top PLG company.

#PLG #SaaS #Support

How did you handle support as a 3 person team?

I often get this question about Userflow which we bootstrapped to $4.6M in ARR with 3 people.

The answer

1. In-app onboarding - We of course used Userflow to build self service onboarding in Userflow. This included tooltip guides, a resource center and hotspots. By having great onboarding we reduced the # of support questions a lot.

2. Quality over fast response -
Most customers like fast responses. But if the response does not resolve their issue, speed does not matter. we always got back to our customers within 24 hrs (and we mostly got back much quicker) and when we did it was with an answer by a founder who could provide high quality support. 

3. A solid knowledge base - Whenever we launched new features or got recurring support questions we always made sure they were covered in our public knowledge base. In that way we enabled customers to help themselves. When we gave answers on support we often referenced these articles.

4. Fixed the root cause in the product - Besides covering recurring questions in the knowledge base we also made sure to fix the root cause of many questions by enhancing the UX in our product itself. Having the founders (including the founder who coded the product) close to support enabled us to do this. approximately 40-50% of dev time was spent on improving UX. Doing this had the highest impact on reducing our support load.

5. Scaled with an AI support assistant - When OpenAI came out with GPT4 we immediately built a support AI assistant that used our knowledge base as a source. Besides from using this ourselves it also became a successful feature of the Userflow product.

#PLG #SaaS #Support

I would only found a startup in a competitive space 

It sounds counterintuitive. Why choose a red ocean with competitors, if you can go after a blue ocean with no competitors.

1. Finding PMF becomes significantly easier. The competitors has ideally already showed the overall market exists, thus finding PMF becomes more about finding out what your unique value is. Often this unique value does not need to be something mind blowing. E.g. giving users a better UX is often enough.

2. No/Limited market education is needed. As the market already exists, customers will search for your solution. This makes it a lot easier to use things like Search Engine Marketing, Product-led growth and self service.

3. You can easier define the price. As a market already exist you know how solution like yours are priced. This makes it easier to set a price from day 1.

#PLG #SaaS

Let's stop doing sales demos in SaaS

When we were bootstrapping Userflow, we did exactly this. 

After having had a full calendar with demos for a year, we decided to push back on doing demos.

We were tired of too many tire kickers, who were just doing demos to do demos. We saw that the customers that were truly interested in buying would also be ready to do our trial.

We still had a book a demo form as a tertiary CTA on our website, but if a prospect, who had not done our free trial requested a demo, we always pushed back and asked them to do a trial first.

When they did this they often realized a demo was not really needed, and that they instead could just ask the gap questions via support and if they eventually still wanted a "demo", it instead became a conversation based on them already having seen what the tool can do. 

Did some prospects get mad about this decision? Potentially

But after a while our calendars free'd up, and we kept growing.

#PLG #SaaS

Why are generative AI companies killing it with PLG?

Some of the fastest growing companies ever are generative AI companies like OpenAI, Lovable, ElevenLabs, etc. and the majority are growing fast due to them being amazing at Product-led growth. 

But what makes them so great at it?

1. Creating something like an image, a web app or a voice with AI feels like magic, and thereby it is easier to create Aha moment(s) that leads to conversion from trial/freemium -> Paid user.

2. The majority of these companies have a very simple prompt interface (similar to Google search) which makes initial onboarding super simple. 

3. Usage based pricing is a dominant model for these companies, allowing users to start cheap and then pay more as they create more value. 

A lot of SaaS companies (AI or not) can use this as inspiration to build better PLG experiences.

#PLG #SaaS #AI

European startups can reach a global market with Product-led Growth

I see many European SaaS companies selling to their home market e.g. Denmark at first, and later then opening up to other countries in Europe one by one.

And I often get the question from European founders on how to move into the US market. 

But I think this approach and question is based on a conservative sales-led approach. 

Instead if I was a European startup I would go all in on conquering a global market through Product-led growth.

1. Make your website and product in English (and maybe add the possibility to see it in other languages if your audience wants that)

2. Create a self-service free trial/freemium experience

3. Use founder-led marketing on LinkedIn or other channels to reach a global audience.

Lovable is just one great example of this type of approach.

And yes it won't work for hyperlocalized products, but most SaaS are not that.

#PLG #SaaS

taplio

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