When she was about 20 years old, Franciska discovered her passion for traveling. She left Denmark to live and study in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Dubai.
When she moved to New York, Franciska got into venture capital where she spent the next five years of her career. Realizing that she wanted to return to an operating role, she eventually joined Snowplow as their growth manager.
"In my time with Snowplow, I learned a lot about open source, and how to drive the pipeline for sellers for your classic demand generation tactics."
Franciska then met the two co-founders of Iteratively and advised them on the side. She eventually jumped ship from Snowplow and joined Iteratively as their head of growth.
"I joined them in the very early days and was the first non-technical hire. We had like 10 customers and were still finding our product-market fit, and building our product-led journey. I was able to talk to a lot of customers and learned a lot about event tracking on the fly as well."
Iteratively got acquired by Amplitude in 2021, and Franciska became their product manager where she got the opportunity to lead their product-led growth efforts. She then helped establish and led their growth marketing team, which is composed of people across their marketing, product, and engineering teams.
Improving the sales pipeline for sellers
After two and a half years of hard work, Franciska and her team launched Amplitude's self-serve plan in October 2023.
Prior to this, Amplitude was a completely sales-led company and relied on its free plan and sales motion.
"We were very focused on driving the pipeline for our sellers. That was our North Star and it still is today. We also saw a lot of opportunities with our free plan. There were tens of thousands of free accounts who were happily using the product but it wasn't really clear to our sellers how to talk to those free users."
To improve their sales pipeline, some of the things they implemented were:
- Dashboard for their sellers
- Data analysis
- Upgrade moments
- Lifecycle programs
Dashboard for sellers
"We worked with our ops and strategy teams to build a dashboard for our sellers so they can get an overview of their top accounts on the free plan."
This dashboard enabled sellers to see things like:
- What the free plan user was doing
- What features they were using
- How many users do they have in the account
- What their usage was
- Other data that helped sellers own in on the accounts that were worth reaching out to proactively
Data analysis
"We did some simple regression analysis and looked at the customers that converted from our free plan. We looked at what they were doing before conversion, how many users their account had, what the demographics were like.
We then used that data to build some basic product-qualified account scoring to proactively serve our sellers with the accounts that we thought were ready to have a sales conversation."
Upgrade moments
"We built more upgrade moments in the product and drove more hand raisers directly from the product. This created visibility around some of the paid features that we have that are very popular that users simply weren't aware of or didn't think about."
Lifecycle programs
"We built and are still building lifecycle programs to promote our new features, functionality, or products that will require sales conversations as well."
Establishing the Plus plan to help sellers
Prior to the self-serve plan, Amplitude only had the free and growth plans.
"In the early days, we were selling our growth plan and we were quoting around $30K to $50K a year. The conversion rate from free to paid was abysmal but it wasn't a huge challenge initially because we had a lot of users on the free plan, and someone was always willing to pay us that amount."
But with competition, market dynamics, and other factors, Amplitude had to continuously lower their price points to keep up with what customers were demanding:
"We now had our sellers selling $15K a year plans. But as you lower that annual sales price, it becomes less and less efficient for sellers to operate in that space."
To address this issue, Amplitude got the idea of making a self-serve plan:
"Part of the business case for our self-serve plan was, 'Let's pick up some of the slack from our sellers so they can focus on those $30K plus deals, and let the product do the heavy lifting on the $0 to $30K segment.'"
The pricing and packaging went through numerous iterations before they ended up with the current $49/month Plus plan.
The mechanics of Amplitude's free plan
"The free plan created a groundswell. We got tons of signups, and it really opened the floodgates to the broader adoption of Amplitude. It's still one of the primary channels for us today, even for our Enterprise pipeline."
Making basic features available
Just like any other platform with a free plan, Amplitude also applies key limits for free users:
"You can only ingest up to 50,000 users a month. So someone who's growing fast and has a lot of users will naturally need to upgrade after a while.
We also limit different features and functionalities but you can do basic product analytics on our free plan."
Franciska shares that their ideal path is that within the first 90 days of trying out the product, the free user should already see the value and hopefully upgrade to a paid plan.
Investing in self-serve activation and onboarding
To make it easier for users to use their platform, Amplitude's product growth and engineering teams invested heavily in making onboarding as easy and smooth as possible.
"One line of code, low-code or no-code ingestion sources folks can get started with Amplitude by themselves, making the platform more easy to use and accessible."
Franciska shares that they also prescribe their default method, templates, and dashboards so that users have a good experience with Amplitude:
"One line of code gets you a default event tracking that gives you a fundamental set of accurate and rich data you can get started with. We also have starter templates and dashboards where once you have those events instrumented, you will get out-of-the-box insights.
We try to reduce the time to value by making it super easy to get started. Once you have your insights, you can ask more questions and you'll also advance your learning of Amplitude."
Investing in continuous education
"Our Academy and Community are where we get other Amplitude users to showcase their use cases. We're trying to create an environment where if someone is eager to learn more about our platform and how to use it, there are different paths for them to take in product through these two channels."
Providing support for different user groups
While online support is limited to those on the paid plans (Plus and Enterprise), Amplitude provides support for all their users using several tracks.
Amplitude Academy
Amplitude offers various courses, training, and recordings of past webinars, in different languages should a user want to learn more about how their platform works.
Lifecycle programs and product nudges
To drive the right behavior in users, Franciska's team leverages customer data to send the right emails:
"To encourage them to do things like add new use cases, try a new chart, or anything to advance their onboarding, we send them emails based on their current usage of the product, and what we think they should do next.
These are all based on the behavior that we're tracking on our platform."
Amplitude Community
Aside from letting users chat with others, Amplitude also does live webinars and office hours in their Community so that power users can help out other users.
Growing the Amplitude Community
Amplitude started to think about growing their Community sometime in 2022. Their then VP of Revenue Marketing had seen the community aspect being successful at her previous companies and she was eager to make that investment herself at Amplitude:
"So Esther (VP of Revenue Marketing) raised her hand and was like, 'Let me build that community.'
And she more or less single-handedly built a thriving community that we now have across Slack. We also have a newsletter, and these in-person and online events that are really focused on helping end users get better at their job and get better at using our platform."
As they talked to more users, it became clear that the community was a good place for users to learn from each other:
"It was really clear that what everyone was craving was, 'Help me. I don't know how to do this and that. I want to see how others are doing things.'
Learning from others and spreading that learning has been really powerful not just for our self-serve customer base, but also our enterprise customers."
To get their Community of the ground, Amplitude did things like:
- Started a Slack space
- Build an events calendar
- Live sessions with experts on topics that resonated with their users
Making activation as simple as possible
To onboard self-serve users in their product, Amplitude focused on making the process as simple as possible.
Single line of code
"The single line of code I mentioned earlier makes usage a no-brainer. But if it's someone who's more technical, they can drop that single line of code in their product quickly and get on their way."
Integrations
"To help non-technical users get started, we've built integrations with Google Analytics and Segment. You can just import a CSV to see your data visualized."
Lifecycle sequences
Franciska's team also sends sequences so the users get the right instructions at the right time.
"The sequences tell them: 'Now that you have data in, here's what you can do next' or 'If you don't have data in, here are alternative ways to get started.'"
Office hours and community
"Our one-to-many office hours are for all users who are trying to get started. They can jump on a call with a solutions consultant and we will type them through the process to give them the basics of how to get started, and give them the opportunity to ask questions too.
They can always jump into the community and ask their questions there as well."
Once the user is activated and happy, the user will hopefully convert to a paid plan within 90 days.
Ideal customer profile for self-serve
Amplitude defines a healthy customer as someone who has:
- Two or more users in the product
- Active two or more times a week
"It's a pretty strict engagement rhetoric, but that is our engagement North Star. We really want Amplitude to be a weekly usage pattern."
To encourage users to use it twice a week, Amplitude invest in things like Slack or email to nudge users back into the tool.
Some personas that fit their ideal customer profile for their Plus plan are:
- Startups or small teams
- Someone with a side project or small business
- Large companies testing out the product
Aligning with sales teams on the new direction
One of the challenges of shifting from being completely sales-led to having a self-serve plan was potentially offending sellers with the new direction.
"It was a long journey and we were fortunate that we've built a lot of trust with the sales teams in the early days through our product-led sales work and driving that sales pipeline for them through the product.
There was a clear understanding that the product was a powerful lever for sales and a powerful source of pipeline."
Aside from this, they also had to align about what the sales team should focus on.
"We also aligned that our sellers shouldn't be focused too far down market. It's not affordable or efficient for them to sell $5K or $10K plans, and we knew we had to make an offering for those type of customers who were willing to pay a smaller amount for a less feature rich plan."
Franciska shares that the tricky part was preventing the possible cannibalization of their self-serve plan on their sellers.
"So one of the strategic decisions we made was to focus a lot of our sellers more up market to give them more time and space, and focus on these larger accounts.
We also had to gradually show that the product could do the heavy lifting in that sub-$10K to $30K deal sizes so the sellers can focus further up market."
And now that they have their self-serve plan launched, sellers are now seeing how this helps in the sales cycle:
"We've seen a lot of upgrades from our Plus plan to our sales-led growth plan. The sellers are now seeing that there's a lot of paying customers who are already seeing value so the sales cycles are faster and the sales conversations are easier."
Final advice
Do test out free plans or free trials.
"If you don't have a free plan or a free trial, test it out. Putting the product more front and center in the buying journey is becoming more critical for SaaS companies to succeed.
End users want to see and try before they buy so letting them do that is going to be critical, especially if your competition is already doing that."
Don't launch a self-serve plan without healthy metrics.
"If your acquisition metrics, signup metrics, activation rate, and retention rate aren't healthy or at least trending towards healthy, it doesn't make sense for you to launch a self-serve plan."
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