Thread by @lennysan

Yesterday's post about early B2B sales was so long that I suspect many people missed some of the wonderful stories buried inside, so I'm sharing some of my favorites in the thread below.

Read on for fun stories from Figma, Segment, Dropbox, Asana, Airtable, Box, and Amplitude 👇

1a/ Figma (via @zoink)

“We initially started without any paid plans. Our thinking was that it'll spread faster if we don't charge. Eventually though, not paying became the barrier for companies to adopt it, so we started charging. ..."

1b/ "Timeline-wise, we launched a closed beta in Dec 2015, general availability in Oct 2016, and we didn't charge until 2017. At the end of 2016, we started hearing from customers 'Hey, why aren't you charging, you idiots? I want to pay!" So then we launched our paid plan. ..."

1c/ "Going from free to paid was fully self-service. I'm sure we were on the phone with some key customers, but I don't remember that as a meaningful part of the process.”

2a/ Segment (via @calvinfo)

“We initially launched with a free plan for the client-side only, then added pricing pages about a month later. We didn't actually build out a real self-service system and start charging users until something like nine months after launching. ..."

2b/ "The first thing we were trying to do was nail product-market fit!

I think this helped us quite a bit. We first had to nail the onboarding experience and value users might get from the product before spending a bunch of time on building out the billing systems. ..."

2c/ "It also helped us when it came to understanding how to price the v1. We sent our users the Van Westendorp survey to get a good feel for what they thought was a fair price for Segment. It essentially gives you these 4 pricing curves, and you can plot out what makes sense..."

2d/ "In terms of getting early customers to pay, we worked with our enterprise customers to onboard them, but for the early users, we made it all self-service. We sent out some sort of form to enter a card in Stripe before turning it into a real self-service flow down the road.”

3a/ Dropbox (via @cailen)

“Our Dropbox for Teams coming out party started with a basic HTML landing page that was being hosted out of my Dropbox folder. It primarily highlighted our MVP features, like central billing, more storage, uncapped version control. ..."

3b/ "This was first put out in the wild using our very popular user forum, which was mostly comprised of our most vocal fans and evangelists. As you can imagine, awareness spread like wildfire.

Once we worked through the kinks and felt good enough to launch self-serve, ..."

3c/ "that's when we launched a split test to throttle demand. The first 1k-ish customers either signed up through me or self-serve (routed to me if they had questions; we also had to create a B2B TOS). ..."

3d/ "The first 10 customers were all inbound and mostly SMB or business unit within a larger enterprise (i.e. one of our early customers was the core design team for Mint via Intuit). I believe our very first customer was Queen Mary University of London.”

4a/ Asana (via @mpspradlin)

“In the early days, we engaged in a lot of customer development. So, while we aimed to convert, at the same time we optimized to learn (and tweak) our purchase flow (e.g., where to place sales vs. where to push self-service). ..."

4b/ "We first ran a beta of the premium product where some friendly companies that gave early feedback received X months of our premium product for free, but had a handshake agreement to officially convert at some later date. Self-service was 70/30 of the first purchases.”

5a/ Airtable

“We always technically had paid plans the ability to put in a credit card and but they were super buried and we didn't think anyone would find them (and weren't even enforcing any limits, so there was genuinely no reason to upgrade at the time). ..."

5b/ "But folks literally hunted that very-hidden menu down because they wanted to support the product. We didn't build the ability to charge credit cards until we realized people had been putting them in. ..."

5c/ "At the same time, did a lot of proactive outreach to early active users with the goal of making sure they were super successful and building our mental model of what use cases were both great fits for the product and also solving a truly urgent and valuable unmet need..."

5d/ "(we had hypotheses, but the joy of a horizontal product is that our users regularly did things we never expected and had way better ideas than we did).

Many of those long term relationships and deep engagements with those users naturally evolved to them asking when they..."

5e/ "should pay us. Our first money was from a fire department in Iowa that wanted to mail a check, at which point I set up an invoicing system.

From there we evolved a sales motion.”

6a/ Box (via @cailen)

“Box had a dichotomous user footprint early on consisting of both consumer & professional (eventually pivoted years later to B2B).

Similar to Dropbox, we mostly mined our early individual accounts to parse for business domains (i.e. [e-mail]). ..."

6b/ "We engaged with these folks to learn why they came to Box vs using IT-sanctioned tools like FTP. This was circa late 2007/early 2008, so most of the alternatives back then were online backup tools like carbonite, mozy and not focused on sharing/collaboration. ..."

6c/ "The first 10+ customers mostly came from inbound efforts, but given our aggressive growth goals and interest in going up-market early, we spent most of our time going outbound.”

7a/ Amplitude (via @XOptimiser)

"Christine Yang, Amplitude’s first salesperson, was employee #3. We had sales and success people involved with customers from the very early stages. Philosophically, the founding team wanted users to be able to test out the product for free, ..."

7b/ "and startups to use it for free, but Product Analytics was a new category and building an event analytics taxonomy correctly is an involved process that required guidance. Having that early sales and success involvement was a huge driver of future adoption and retention."

8/ These are just 7 of the 25 stories in the full post lennyrachitsky.com/p/how-todays-f…