Why we are Introducing a Freemium Plan at Navattic
I remember talking with our Growth Advisor, Andrew Capland about the best time in a sales-led company's lifecycle to introduce PLG.
He mentioned he’s heard it's best to introduce PLG:
- When you first start your company
- When you feel like you’ve hit a natural limit with your current growth motion
Going into 2024, we had been relying only on our sales-led motion, and like a lot of SaaS companies - we noticed a bit of a slowdown.
We knew that budgets and bandwidth for GTM teams were tighter than ever. Talking with marketers at networking events and conferences, they’d mention they wanted to try out interactive demos but were scared to ask their boss for budget for something they hadn’t proven out.
These conversations were the first signals that we were hitting that “natural limit” Andrew mentioned.
Why we waited to introduce PLG
Before going more into why and how we introduced a freemium plan, I want to explain why we weren’t PLG form the start.
When I first joined Navattic, I thought interactive demos were obvious for PLG. Interactive demos are no-code and pretty simple to build.
The product also made sense for a more widespread GTM motion. There are countless use cases for demos, it’s not a niche enterprise product with a small TAM and high price points.
But 3 years into Navattic, I realized just because your product can be PLG, doesn’t mean it needs to be from the start.
I’m glad we waited for two main reasons:
Sales-led let us get closer to our customers
One of our goals at Navattic is not just to help our customers build interactive demos, but to make sure they build successful, converting demos.
Being sales-led lets us work closer with our customers to discover best practices and tips for creating high-converting demos. We got to know our top builders (see some of their stories in our customer interview series) and how they built their demo stories.
We’ve also created two State of the Interactive Product reports. In the most recent report, we analyzed 18k+ demos built on our platform.
Both these reports helped us collect the data we needed to scale teaching users how to build high-performing demos.
Sales-led helped us iterate on our product quickly
One thing we wanted to be mindful of was a PLG plan that didn’t show the wow moments of our product.
Our customers experience that “wow moment” when they first capture their product and see a clone of their software that looks and feels like the real thing.
With countless types of software, in the early days, our team sometimes needed to work closely with individual customers to iron out all possible technical edge cases when creating an interactive demo.
Our early customers worked with us to flag any capture issues that came up. The more capture issues we fixed, the more our product improved.
PLG users may have not given us that second chance and just bounced.
Why we moved beyond sales-led
After 3 years of being sale-led, our product was in a good spot and that "wow" moment was working out of the box.
That plus our sales-led motion slowing down made me think back to that convo with Andrew. It felt like the right time to bring up the internal conversations of "Is now the time to finally introduce PLG".
We knew in the short term it would hurt our sales-led motion, but would be worth it in the long term to introduce a new GTM channel.
Plus it would help us hit our company goal of making B2B buying easier for any SaaS company.
Luckily, other members of our leadership team had gone to those conferences and also heard the same feedback about budget in 2024. We all agreed now felt like the right time and worth the short-term risk.
How did we decide what to include in our PLG product
After deciding we wanted to show our full wow moment, it was clear our freemium version had to include our HTML/CSS captures.
There were conversations about launching a screenshot/GIF version of our tool given the reliability of screenshots, but we worried our PLG users would think that our product was limited to just media assets.
For freemium vs free trial, we thought back to those learnings on bandwidth and budget from marketers in 2024. We didn’t want to offer a limited free trial where marketers would still have to ask for budget at the end of it, without proving the value first to their team.
14 or even 30 days may not be enough for a marketer to build, launch, deploy, and measure the impact of an interactive demo on their sales cycle or acquisition.
To figure out pricing, we knew like our current sales-led pricing, we wanted our PLG pricing to be simple.
So we decided simply on - one demo, free forever.
How you can try it
Sign up here to build one HTML/CSS full interactive demo. We’re still in the early days and would love to hear any feedback on what you think of our freemium product.
And if you’re thinking about going freemium and want to hear more about our experience, feel free to reach out to me over LinkedIn or at my email natalie.marcotullio@navattic.com