Another meetup, another success!
“We are a company that designs and builds digital products” - with these words our host, Matt Hallmann commenced the second meetup in the series “Finding Product-Market Fit”. On March 21st around eighty guests gathered at Factory Berlin to meet with our specialists for lightning talks, workshops, and networking sessions. Read on to learn what they could learn there and what the atmosphere was like.
Table of contents
After a successful first edition in Amsterdam, we wanted to mark our presence in Germany and make use of our new venue to share our knowledge about tools for maximizing your app’s potential.
Can you lead your growth with your product?
Matt’s welcome and introduction set the mood in the room for Karla Sutil - our product strategist. Buzzing with energy, Karla walked on stage to give her lightning talk about product-led growth — a business model that bases a company’s growth on digital products rather than sales.
She started off by explaining that every digital product should have one goal: to achieve product-market fit. The traditional model of sales-led growth is fine, but only for enterprise businesses and niche products. Examples of such companies are SAP, Salesforce, and Slack.
Karla then moved on to explain the product-led growth (PLG) model itself: that it’s powered by great user experience and lets products become viral. It has three viable types of market strategies, namely:
- dominant strategy: available to 1% percent of businesses who are market leaders (e.g. Netflix, Spotify)
- differentiated strategy: customers need something aligned with their approach (e.g. HubSpot)
- disruptive strategy: a proper freemium model, but to make it effective you need at least 50 million users (e.g. Canva).
The major difference between a lightning talk and a lecture is that it’s more of a dialogue than a monologue. A big part of Karla’s time on stage was dedicated to answering questions from the audience. Some of them were quite insightful and on more than one occasion Karla had to give herself a minute to think. For example, our guests asked:
“Can I assume that B2B customers are more desirable for PLG? Or is it more for B2C? Can you give any examples”
“How would you figure out what kind of minimum marketing you need to do at the initial stage”
“How would you onboard a product team in the user acquisition context?”
Karla received a big round of applause for her answers. She got off stage to make room for Ula Augustyniak, who had prepared a lightning talk about pirate metrics. But before that, Matt Hallmann invited everyone for a small networking session.
How to measure product-market fit
The guests in Berlin were asked to turn to the person sitting on their right and ask them three questions. One of them was “What makes you laugh?” and Matt openly admitted that for him it was TikTok videos, especially the ones with a cat named Miguel or the one with a monkey riding a golf cart.
There was also a networking session for the online guests. Our Scrum master, Tomasz Murzyn prepared a series of fun speed-dating type questions about ducks, Mondays, and Berlin in general.
Unfortunately, Ula couldn’t make it to Berlin that day, so instead, she connected with the audience online. She talked about measuring product-market fit with the AARRR framework, a set of metrics divided over five different stages: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.
The concept of pirate metrics will be covered in detail in a separate article, needless to say Ula gave an extensive introduction to the idea. As with the previous talk, there was time for a little back and forth between the speaker and the audience. Once again, the questions were very insightful:
“How do you know when to be happy with certain metrics? Is there a framework for that?”
“Often when we hear about NPS it’s not a good metric because it’s not actionable. Do you have any framework that could make NPS more actionable?”
After Ula’s talk, Matt took a moment to invite our guests to join the Agile Product Builders Community: a Slack group for people interested in digital products. At the time of the meetup, the community was 170 people strong.
Now it’s time for practice
With the second lightning talk over, our guests could take part in one of the three workshops that we had prepared:
- How to build a winning value proposition with Aneta Orszewska, guiding people through the value proposition canvas
- Analyze your business model, where Ola Czechońska introduced attendees to the business model canvas
- For guests attending online, there was a workshop with Kateryna Kaida, who introduced them to the opportunity solutions tree.
All three workshops inspired interaction between our guests and our team in Berlin, which set the tone for further networking over drinks and snacks. Our last guest was on their way back home just a little after 10 pm.
Goodbye, but not farewell
Our partnership with Factory Berlin offers us many opportunities to strengthen the relationships that we have built. That night we could once again see the value in running our series Finding Product-Market Fit. The relationships that we forged that night and the welcoming atmosphere of Berlin’s tech community were second to none. We are already quietly planning another edition, and when the time comes we will announce its location. Make sure to follow us on social media to see if we are coming to your city.
Share this article:
