MKT1 Courses

Choosing the Right Growth Lever: PLG, CLG, ABX?

Emily Kramer

Founder @ MKT1 Newsletter, B2B Marketing Advisor & Investor

Mallory Contois

Head of Community @ Mercury

Leah Tharin

Product & Growth executive / PLG Advisor

Assess your product, market, and audience o identify whether PLG, CLG, or ABX is your primary path to growth.

Determine which growth engine fits your business model

Inside stories from high-growth B2B startups who've successfully implemented these strategies.

Hear real-world growth case studies

Understand how to adjust your playbook to handle changes in how companies find and buy products.

Learn how to adapt to decline of inbound & outbound

_____________07:00 PM (19:00), GMT+2, five sessions over 2.5 Weeks_____________ The top quartile SaaS companies between 5 and 20m in revenue are growing over 70% year over year, with an 8 month CAC payback, 110% Net dollar retention while having an 85% Gross Margin with an average Annual Revenue of over 250’000$. (Source: Growth Unhinged 2023 Report) And at the heart of most them sits a deep understanding of Product-led Growth. * How do we in B2B adress the growing problem of everyone asking for an improved buying experience and self-serve? * How do you package your offering with freemium, trial and/or interactive demo? * How do we activate individuals, teams and accounts in B2B as cost efficient as possible to drive our pipeline? * How does Product-led Growth work with an existing Sales motion? * How do we structure a strategy to bring product-led growth into our business? Leah Tharin brought product-led growth as an operative, executive, and advisor to dozens of scale up companies to optimize their user acquisition, retention, and monetization. She's recognized as an Industry leader on the topic having written some of the most referenced Product-led Growth &amp; Sales material to date. Learn how to structure a (product-led) growth strategy that works for your business. It is designed for leaders from all functions who want to understand and not just blindly execute. The course runs over 2.5 weeks (5 live recorded Zoom classes). All sessions have prerecorded material for you to study in your own time, the live sessions are solely focussed on world-class guest speakers, collaborative group exercises and your questions. You can expect per week about 2-3 hours of study for the asynchronous material at your own pace + 60-75 minutes per live session. Over 20 Guest speakers from past cohorts for example :* Adam Fishman, SVP new products @ Mozilla, Investor &amp; Advisor* John Cutler, ex- Evangelist @ Amplitude &amp; Toast* Itxaso Del Palacio, General Partner @ Notion VC* Benjamin Lamson, Head of Paperspace Revenue @ DigitalOcean* Casey Hill, Sr. Growth Manager @ Active Campaign* Henrique Cruz, Head of Growth @ Rows.com* Sara Gattoni, Senior Lead Growth PM @ Lokalise* Andrew Davies, CMO @ Paddle...and many more This course is not a good fit for: * Companies pre product market fit which are extremely early in their journey. * Non-software or D2C companies * Highly regulated industries that deal with government contracts

How experienced Growth operators use PLG in B2B SaaS

…the definition of PLG…where PLG sits in the market…when you might do PLG…PLG vs Saled-led Growth…Enterprise vs. Midmarket vs. Micro businesses…Best Conditions

What is product-led Growth

…freemiums…trials…reverse-trials…case studies, examples in the wild

Freemium, trial, reverse-trial

…understanding customer success stages…segmenting your users into ICPs (Ideal customer profiles)…turning funnels into loops, focussing on what matters

Defining customer success & ICPs

…separating the creation from capturing value…smart goal setting company wide

PLG strategy and goal setting

…Classical vs Growth Teams…(Growth) Product Skills…Your first Growth hire

"Growth” teams & PMs

…What is Product-led Sales…Shifting your perspective from users to teams… Product-qualified Accounts &amp; Leads…Expansion Revenue

Combining PLG with Sales: PLS

Course syllabus

We use the majority of the time to discuss as a group your specific challenges and questions you had from the async learning materials and to address Q&amp;A questions.

6 x one - hour long sessions with Leah

Before every session you get ~30min videos to ease you into the topics including some interactive exercises for you to prepare beforehand.

Asynchronous learning material

Miss a session? Not a problem, you will have access immediately afterwards.

All sessions are recorded

Course schedule

Senior level product, growth &amp; marketing leaders in B2B who want to understand and leverage PLG as a distribution model to optimize growth.

Ideal for companies in B2B with some revenue traction post product-market fit.

GTM leaders wanting to understand why PLG is disrupting many classical distribution models.

Who is this course for

What you’ll learn

<ul><li>Review the core principles of product-led growth (PLG), beyond just trials and freemium</li></ul> <ul><li>Look under the hood of leading industry examples</li></ul>

Understand PLG and its impact on B2B growth initiatives

<ul><li>How to objectively measure customer success and operationalize it with meaningful, outcome-driven team goals</li></ul> <ul><li>How to establish growth in your organization that sticks with growth teams and culture</li></ul>

Increase the efficiency of your distribution model

<ul><li>How to move from activating individuals to teams and subsequently to accounts.</li></ul>

Individual vs. Team vs. Account Activation

<ul><li>How to find, define, and identify meaningful ICPs (Ideal customer profile)</li></ul> <ul><li>Driving them through our acquisition funnel and retaining them for long-term revenue</li></ul>

Find ICPs in Product-led Growth

<ul><li>How to combine the best from PLG and Sales-led Growth: Product-led Sales</li></ul> <ul><li>How to apply the principles of customer success signals, and their ICPs to qualify deals and drive efficiency in mid-market / enterprise segments.</li></ul>

Combine sales and Product-led Growth: Product-led Sales

<ul><li>Create a long-lasting Strategy to acquire customers while they are small and grow into bigger clients with time.</li></ul> <ul><li>Creating the conditions to have a product that grows with your customers</li></ul>

Drive expansion revenue through PLG

<ul><li>Community sessions to network and discuss with other cohort participants</li></ul> <ul><li>Access a dedicated Discord community after the course</li></ul>

Interactive community & special material

Understand Product-led Growth to formulate a strategy that includes PLG without wrecking your existing business.

PLG Cohort 7

PLG Cohort 8

Is your app getting traction and showing the signs of a product-market fit? Do you have dozens of ideas, features, and marketing tactics to test now? During the course you'll discover the key concepts of product-led and marketing-led growth as well as ready-to-apply tactics that will help you grow your app business. You'll explore all the app marketing channels and PLG mechanisms worth focusing on and prioritize your work on them

Take a structured, full-funnel approach to growing your app's userbase & revenue

<ul><li>You'll examine the performance of your app across the whole funnel to see if it's ready to scale</li><li>You'll build a hierarchy of metrics and break down your goals to find the most impactful levers and growth opportunities</li><li>You'll define how to measure success and calculate the impact of various growth scenarios and marketing activities.</li></ul>

Your app is getting traction, now what?

<ul><li>Plan tactics to not only get a user to download your app but to also become active in it</li><li>What is good retention, how to measure it, and how to keep it moving forward</li><li>Will your product benefit from viral loops? Explore different types of virality, and ways to build them into your product</li></ul>

Activation, retention, virality, and their importance for sustainable app growth

<ul><li>Analyze all revenue-related metrics and find the parts of the revenue funnel with the highest impact</li><li>Plan and prioritize experiments aimed at increasing trial opt-ins, upgrades, renewals, or resurrecting paying customers</li><li>Review your pricing &amp; packaging strategy to make sure users get the value of your paid offer</li></ul>

Improve your app's monetization and LTV:CAC ratio for sustainable growth

<ul><li>Paid user acquisition on mobile: search ads, social media ads, influencer marketing, and others</li><li>Organic acquisition: ASO for AppStore and Google Play</li><li>How to test creatives in the everchanging landscape: the What and the How</li><li>Non-obvious tips for optimizing paid campaigns' performance</li></ul>

How to acquire new users: which channels to focus on

We'll meet for live workshops at 17.00 - 18.30 CET. We'll go through the material, do light exercises in breakout rooms, and I'll answer all your pressing questions during the Q&amp;A at the end of each workshop.

Five live workshops

Throughout the whole course and after it's over I'll be answering all your questions in our Slack channel.

AMA / Q&A

In between workshops you'll be looking into data, your users' needs, and work on the strategy, tactics, and roadmap for growing your app. I'll be happy to give feedback on your projects!

Weekly projects

Founders (Seed-Series A/B) who want&nbsp;to learn the mechanics and design a winning strategy for scaling the app's revenue and acquisition

Paid UA, ASO, CRM experts trying to break into growth roles, build a holistic approach to marketing, and work closer with product teams

Product Managers who want to understand the value of marketing and approach growth not only through the lens of product features and UX 🚀

Marketing executives turning a mobile app into an extra revenue stream or transitioning from digital marketing into mobile 🎯

Other professionals working in app growth teams and interested in learning about app growth, user acquisition, retention, and monetization

This course is for:

During this course you will:

<ul><li>Break down your growth goals and KPIs into actionable metrics&nbsp;and measure the impact of moving each of them. </li><li>Assess the growth of your app and identify your biggest growth opportunities.</li></ul> Bonus: Templates for funnel analysis, scenario

Decide which parts of the app growth funnel and methods to focus on

<ul><li>Learn the paid and organic strategies to drive efficient user acquisition.</li><li>Apply the best practices, current trends (like UGC), and creative experimentation strategy.</li><li>Learn how to optimize the channels' performance in the post-IDFA era.</li></ul> Bonus: Channel matrix template

Develop your user acquisition strategy and define the marketing channels' mix

<ul><li>Examine the potential of viral and content loops for decreasing your CACs.</li><li>Review the state of your activation and retention to make sure they contribute to user and revenue growth.</li></ul> Bonus: Templates for engineering your product viral and referral loops

Dive into product-led growth and learn how to integrate additional growth loops into your app and power up your user acquisition

<ul><li>Build and prioritize a roadmap of monetization experiments to scale revenue.</li><li>Optimize your paywall, pricing, packaging, and discount strategy to increase conversion rates.</li><li>Apply top tactics for revenue growth.</li></ul> Bonus: Experiment launch and analysis templates, interview guides.

Maximize subscriber conversion, retention, and increase LTVs
 

Apply Product-led & Marketing-led Growth principles. No 'hacks' but a structured approach to growth by creating value for users and business

Ekaterina Gamsriegler

Cohort 7

Cohort 8

Leveraging community as a growth channel requires a nuanced understanding of human behavior, scalable strategies, and a deep commitment to delivering value. This course will teach you how to build, grow, and scale a thriving community-led growth engine that delivers powerful, long term results: Increased Brand Loyalty: Consumers who feel a sense of belonging to a brand community are more likely to remain loyal to the brand over time. Emotional Connection: A strong community fosters emotional attachment, which can increase retention rates as people are less likely to switch to competitors. Influence of Social Proof: Community-driven consumers are much more likely to recommend the brand to others, reinforcing their own commitment and reducing churn. These recommendations also drive much lower marketing costs and higher conversion rates at the consideration phase. Resilience to Negative Experiences: Consumers embedded in a community are more forgiving, as they perceive a deeper relationship beyond mere transactional value. Why learn with me?I've been driving growth through user behavior for over a decade across multiple industries. I've gained critical insights about how to build user-led growth loops, ecosystem engagement and brand affinity.I've road-tested my strategies across multiple operator roles and organizations, and learned how to define what CLG should look like for each business, based on its unique model and goals.In this course, I'll equip you to do the same, for your specific use case. You'll leave this course with: A thorough understanding of CLG as a concept and strategyA wide variety of examples to pull from as you ideate on your own CLG approachSpecific feedback on your existing CLG plans, ideas, and questions

Supercharge your brand’s growth and retention through natural human behavior.

<ul><li>Overview of community-led growth tactics and strategies</li><li>Case studies of successful CLG implementations across B2B and B2C</li></ul>

Foundations of Community-Led Growth


<ul><li>Driving brand loyalty and community engagement</li><li>Psychological frameworks that prompt desired user actions</li></ul>

Leveraging User Psychology for Growth Loops


<ul><li>Community surfaces and types</li><li>Paid vs free community models</li><li>Software tools to support community growth</li></ul>

Implementation Strategies


<ul><li>We'll meet for 15 min to discuss your current problem set live, then you'll do some asynchronous work which I'll provide feedback on to help you make real progress</li></ul>

Your current problem set


What we'll cover:

Fundamentals of Community-Led Growth<ul><li>Overview of CLG tactics and strategies for user acquisition and retention</li><li>Case studies of successful community-led brands</li><li>Measuring success and results</li></ul>

Monday: Live session


Leveraging Psychology for Growth<ul><li>Tactics for brand loyalty and hype creation</li><li>Psychological frameworks for building engaged, sustainable community loops </li><li>Psychological frameworks for encouraging desired user actions</li></ul>

Tuesday: Live session


<ul><li>A 15 minute slot to discuss specific challenges and problem sets to you and your role, 1:1</li></ul>

Wednesday: Office hours


Implementation Strategies<ul><li>Community surfaces and types</li><li>Paid vs. free community models</li><li>Software tools to support community growth</li></ul>

Friday: Live session


<ul><li>Submit your plan or ideas for how to implement CLG in your work</li><li>Receive async feedback, ideas, and suggestions within a week</li></ul>

Week 2: Personalized feedback


Schedule

a marketer tasked with finding new growth channels and paths beyond paid media

a product builder thinking about creating growth loops and driving PLG

a growth owner who wants to harness to power of word of mouth to lower acquisition costs

This course is for you if you're...


You'll leave this course with:

Well-designed community-led growth looks different for every brand and company. We'll review a variety of well-tested strategies across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C models in order to help you define what it could, and should, look like for yours based on your model and goals.

A clear understanding of how to integrate community-led strategies into user acquisition and retention efforts.

By studying a series of psychological frameworks and triggers, we can design our growth efforts to be multitudes more impactful and effective at driving our desired user actions. We'll dive into the ones most relevant to CLG motions, and analyze when and how to implement them.

Practical insights into leveraging psychological triggers to build loyalty and create buzz around your brand.

Community products are generally loss leaders for larger brands, but someties it does make sense to position them as an upsell or paid feature. We'll discuss the pros and cons of each approach, and how that might apply to the problems you're solving.

Actionable frameworks for deciding between paid and free community models.

Having the right tech stack is critical for CLG impact and success. I'll provide recommendations for tools to drive high quality user experience and the measurement and automation tools you'll need to scale sustainably,

A toolkit of recommended software and resources to scale your community initiatives.
 

Following our live sessions, you'll submit your own proposal for how to implement CLG into your work. I'll provide personalized feedback and suggestions to optimize outcomes and set yourself up for long term success.

Tactical feedback on your specific problem set and proposed solutions.

⚡ Get the tools, frameworks, psychological insights, and tactics to sustainably scale your CLG
👉 Create new, high ROI growth loops

5x startup operator @ Linkedin, Pinterest, Cameo, Metafy & Mercury

March cohort

Growth leaders and teams are expected to bring impactful results at high speed. However, in that high-paced environment, it's easy to get into a trap of constant local optimization. 👉 What is good for USER is good for BUSINESS. The biggest changes that drove product Growth for companies like Miro, Notion, Figma didn't happen due to local changes. These products combined both components: high-quality user experience and ethical PLG strategies. 📌 Growth teams face many challenges like: — Getting caught in a trap of local optimization and constant A/B testing with no impact?— How do we uncover new growth opportunities to impact Activation, Habit-forming, and Upgrades?— What behavioral principles can help create the most user-friendly and ethical solutions?— Finally, how do we receive a buy-in to implement meaningful product changes and drive Product-led Growth? I've been facing these challenges myself and collecting knowledge for years to address them. 📌 What prepared me to share this knowledge with you: 1.&nbsp;For 6+ years at Miro, I covered all parts of the Growth funnel holistically&nbsp;(Activation, Engagement, Monetisation, Community-led Growth).2. As a part of Growth Leadership at Miro, scaled from 1 Growth team (5 people) to a stream of 15 teams (170+ people).3. As a founder of Growthmates, collected knowledge directly from 20+ leaders from Notion, Canva, Dropbox, and4. As a Growth advisor, helped 10+ B2B and B2C companies in SaaS, Collaboration, Education, AI, and other sectors. 📌 What to expect on this course: ✦ Take an end-to-end look at 3 key Growth flows: Activation, Habit-forming, Upgrades ✦ Apply Behavioural science methods and uncover new opportunities through a user-centric approach ✦ Turn your ideas into roadmap by applying 5-step Growth Flow review and prioritisation framework 🎯 As a result — you will create a diverse roadmap that will translate your ideas into Quick Wins, Meaningful shifts, and Big bets that you can present and get a buy-in. 📕 Resources that you'll get as a part of the course:— 30+ product flows for Onboarding, Adoption, and Upgrade experience from Notion, Canva, Dropbox, and more— User Research Pack for Growth initiatives (Survey templates, Interview guides, and more)— Live time with Kate Syuma on sessions to receive feedback ——— ❗️ This course is NOT about abstract growth strategies. It's about real product examples, behavioral science knowledge, and PRACTICE that you can combine with your real work project. — Products that use only Sales-led model (course is about Product-led Growth)&nbsp;— Too early-stage products in the development phase (course is about your flows to analyse and improve).&nbsp;&nbsp;— If you want t learn deep Data analytics&nbsp;(course is more about Qualitative user-centric approach)

Create your Product-led growth roadmap — from Quick wins to Big bets.

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

📅 Join on Tuesdays for Live sessions

Bring your real growth challenge with Activation, Habit-forming, or Upgrades, and work on it by applying the frameworks shared in the course.

✏️ Work on your work-related projects during the week

Get feedback directly from me on Q&amp;A parts of live sessions, as well as from a small group of peers who are solving similar challenges — let's learn from each other!

🙌  Get feedback on your work

PMs and Product Designers working on Growth — apply frameworks and feedback to produce a roadmap to immediately take into work

"Growth team of one" — Product and Design Leaders who drive several parts of growth simultaneously (like Activation, Habit-forming, Upgrades

Growth Marketers, User Researchers, and other Product members who want to deepen their knowledge of PLG practices and Behavioural psychology

What you’ll get out of this course

You will create a draft of the roadmap and will apply the "3 types of initiatives" framework to articulate the value of Product-led Growth and get stakeholders' buy-in.

Create a diverse growth roadmap to get buy-in

You will get feedback from me directly and like-minded peers on the growth flow you're working on.

Get direct feedback on Growth flows improvements

User-centricity requires understanding how people behave and make decisions. You'll get access to 30 main behavioral principles; we'll practice 3 Behavioral methods — all of which are complemented with real SaaS examples.

Practice key Behavioral psychology principles

You'll practice using my 5-step Growth Framework to take a helicopter view of one of the flows you'd like to excel in —activation, Habit-forming, or paths to Upgrade. After the course, you'll learn how to incorporate this approach into your work.

Take an end-to-end look at 3 key Growth flows: Activation, Habit forming, Upgrade

For your Project work, you will apply this knowledge on 3-5 critical steps of the flows by combining Growth frameworks and Behavioural science.

Uncover new changes to impact Activation, Habit-forming, Upgrades

To inform your roadmap, you'll get 30+ flows of Onboarding, Habit forming, and Upgrade examples from the best B2B and B2C SaaS, learning how they address Activation, Habit-forming, and Upgrade experience.

🎁 Access to 30+ Growth flows visual base with best practices

Combine behavioral science and proven growth strategies to create a diverse roadmap, get buy-in, and drive impact with high quality.

Lightning Lessons

Choosing the Right Growth Lever: PLG, CLG, ABX?