Unlocking the Power of Product Led Growth Marketing
Madhukar Kumar, CMO, Singlestore and a PLG expert, shares his insights on the world of product led growth in this episode.
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Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today I am joined by our special guest, Madakar.
How are you?
Very good.
Nice to meet you again and looking forward to this conversation.
Yeah, likewise, really excited to chat about Single Store and all the cool
stuff
that you all are doing and of course get into your background in marketing.
So what was your first job marketing?
I actually started off my career as a journalist a long time ago in my early
20s and 1997-ish.
And I was a journalist for a newspaper called Hindustan Times in Delhi.
And at that time, a friend of mine and I, and then we figured out how to make
web
pages from just looking at the daily edition of the newspaper.
And that eventually evolved into what is today Hindustan Times.com or
earlier version was digitalitst.com, but that really got me into computers.
So I came to the US, a teach web design at Kansas State University and
had a full scholarship for doing my master's in Masscom.
And I really got more and more into telling stories not just by words, but
also in website, that's for the brand new medium.
And so I also ended up doing my master's in software engineering and became a
developer.
And as a developer, I first did like a one year consulting things around
the East Coast and then ended up in the Bay Area.
And in the Bay Area, as I started off as a developer, I was a database
developer.
And so I used to write SQL for a living and some of those companies are not
even around.
And then finally, I started doing what used to be called professional services,
which was prior to the cloud.
And that's where the team that would come in and help you install the software,
help you customize it.
And so I was pretty good with customers.
So I was going through one company to the other, my former boss who became the
head
of that company called me back and he said, look, you're very good with
customers.
Why do you run product management?
And that kind of made me go from being a developer to running product
management.
And then finally a company where I was running product management called
liaison technologies.
And there I had a counterpart in product marketing.
And one day the CEO came up to me and he said, you know what?
We really liked the roadmap that you created.
We would like you to now do product marketing as well.
So I ended up doing both.
And then from there, I went to Oracle.
It was another person Sean Price who worked with me at Zora.
He became the head of cloud at Oracle and he pulled me into Oracle and said, go
run product
strategy, which was classic product marketing.
And that kind of got me into product marketing side of things.
Then I ended up joining with the tech startups, of course, Nutanix, Redis,
where I ran product
marketing developer relations.
And then I really got into product lead growth because that was one place where
you can bring
in both code or technology as well as the creative side of it in the one single
place.
So last few years I've been working about your different startups and I've been
helping
companies adopt product led growth and use it as a way to really spark, bring
in the,
I would say, pipe as well as new users from a PhD motion versus just the
classic ones.
Yeah, it really is such an interesting career because you've blended that
product centricity
from building product and now, and then with product marketing and now with PLG
, which
just feels like the culmination of spending a career in product that now
product leading
marketing is now the new normal for a lot of companies.
It's pretty fascinating.
Yeah, that's right.
I think that's like that term, it's product led marketing.
And you're absolutely right.
When it comes to PLG, you have a lot of product design built into the
creativity because in
PLG, it's not just about customer acquisition, but it's also about customer
adoption.
And unless the customer becomes a paid customer, whether you're a marketer or
whether you're
a product person, you're not successful.
And so I think that's where the psychology of marketing comes in, brand
awareness comes
in, but then it's from the product management side where you're thinking about
the user
journey, where you're thinking about the design, you're thinking about
interaction design,
along with the visual design.
And then it all comes together because now you have automation to make that
easier and
less friction for the end user to become a faster, adopt of your product.
But yeah, you're absolutely right.
That's kind of the place where I love to work, which is creativity and
technology.
And that's where product led marketing as a cultural marketing is.
Yeah, it's funny.
I just saw a post on LinkedIn where they interviewed a bunch of CFOs and they
're saying that the
number one thing that CFOs are worried about right now in regards to buying
technology
is shelfware, which is you buy it, sits on the shelf, doesn't get adopted, and
then they
have this burning hole in their pocket.
And it's so funny to think about that as a marketing problem, not just as a
product problem.
And it just fuels that side of marketing, that lifecycle component that we've
started talking
about more in the recent years, but in the past, who cares?
Once they convert, who cares?
And then customer marketing and all these other lifecycle marketing and all
these other
things started cropping up.
It's like, hey, this stuff kind of all matters.
But it's funny to hear CFOs.
That's what they're worried about.
And it should be something that we put in our marketing, right?
It's like, hey, if you have great adoption rates, that should be in your
marketing because
that's exactly what CFOs want to hear.
I just did slides on this, my call before this, we were working on a slide deck
We were talking about it was the adoption for our podcast series.
Like how do you look at adoption and things like that?
So you don't create a piece of content that nobody ever consumes or something
like that.
For that exact reason that CFOs want to justify their marketing spend.
Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, one of those things that I learned as we were getting into the whole
cloud thing
was that in a classic B2B, the goals were very different.
The goals for the marketing was let's create a marketing qualified lead.
And then we have a number and as soon as we hit the number, we take a victory
lap.
And sales on the other hand is taking those leads plus the ones that they have
created.
And they're turning that into dollar for turning that into revenue.
And because the goals are always misaligned, the marketing team would often say
, yes, we
finished our goals, whereas the sales team would say, at least this lead was
mine.
And you get into the attribution discussion and so on.
And one of the best things about PLG is now the application has started to
merge with
your website, which was traditionally in the zone of purely marketing and
content.
Yep.
And when that happens, you can no longer say, look, I got in 500 people to sign
up.
Okay, great.
I got 500 people to sign up.
But what happened?
Like, why did those 500 folks not take the next step?
And why did those become dormant outcomes a day later?
Turns out you find out there's wrong segmentation or you will replace where
people are just
curious to just sign in or there was some sort of an unreasonable incentive.
So I think finally now, the thing that you raised about shelf life is a joint
responsibility
between marketing and product.
It's no longer about marketing brings in somebody and then people don't adopt
the product and
it becomes self-aware.
It's actually one and the same game, which cuts across both product and
marketing.
All right, let's get to our first segment here.
Yeah.
The Trust Tree, where we go and feel honest and trusted and you can share those
deepest
darkest marketing secrets.
Tell us a little bit about single store and what do you do and who do you surf?
If you're familiar with databases, think of it as a distributed, sequel
database that
can do more transactions, but also analytics in milliseconds.
So if that didn't make sense to you, let me try and explain.
Typically what happens is when you're creating an app, you have a bunch of data
that goes
in and comes out almost instantly.
So for example, if somebody's at the checkout, you would create a user ID, you
would create
their address information, you would create a record of what the purchase and
so on.
All of that is transaction.
And that's a different database typically in today's world.
And then later on, if somebody in the team says, "Hey, tell me how many socks I
sold
on this day between this time and this time and it's less than $10 because I
want to
go offer them an instant discount coupon of $5."
That's a point in time analytics that happens in a different database.
Typically that would be snowflake, BigQuery, those kind of data warehouses
because it's
your archive.
The transactional data is literally your bookshelf, whereas the archive is your
attic or wherever
you have stored an archive all your data.
So analytics is always point in time.
But I'm sure you've realized this too in the last few years, especially with
the shutdown
and everything.
The two kind of merged because anything that could be converted to code, turn
into code.
And with that, a lot of the data that were being generated turned out to be
really fast
moving data.
So for example, if I'm doing write share or if I'm getting something delivered,
it's
not just a point in time data, it's real time data.
It's data coming in and you need to act on it or the app needs to act on it
based on
that information that splits second.
And to do that, you really need a database that can do both transactions, which
is really
fast mission critical data in and out without failure.
But also the point in time analytics turns into millisecond analytics.
So single store is that except that it's based on SQL.
So which means SQL is a language that was used to talk to databases.
It's almost like plain English.
But you can use that data in real time while you're pulling in the data.
So why is that important?
Well, one example would be let's say I am and this is a real story by the way.
I got to rally a few months ago and we all wanted to play and we all went to
the designated
area where we would get Uber or Lyft.
And I just looked over there are four or five other people who are going to the
same destination
because I spoke into one of them earlier in the plane and they all take out
their app
and they all request for a Uber and they all request for the same destination
to go.
But each one gets a different price.
And why is that?
Because maybe somebody requested a premium delivery or a priority one.
The second one could have requested for two car.
So based on whatever I did in a split second, less than a millisecond, I got a
different
promo.
So in a way, right share and anybody or any company that's making these kind of
apps
or real time or instant apps, whatever you call it, I found a way to generate
running
all of it.
So instead of keeping all data into our files, if you can take that data and
really turn
this into a segment of one marketing campaign, that's a revenue.
That's how you grow the company today's days.
That's where single store use cases really shine where you're very fast moving
data and
you need to reason on it in split second in order to give a better user
experience.
That's what single store does.
I love it.
And who are your target customers?
What does that ideal customer profile look like?
Yeah.
And that's what I feel like it has been an epiphany for me as well.
If you talk to any database company, they'll tell you that their users are
developers,
which has changed by the way.
It used to be DVA's or database administrators.
But with the advent of cloud, now it's the developers who use the databases a
lot more.
And then there's a buyer, right?
The buyer could be, oh, I'm an IT or I'm an engineering.
I have a budget.
I'm either a director or VP and I make decisions for the team or what to buy.
But I feel like for us, we are that invisible technology that is needed.
We were talking about electricity earlier, right?
The only time you notice when there is electricity is when it's not there.
Yeah.
It never goes away because you're used to it.
You're used to the internet.
You're used to the TV.
You're used to your phone already being charged and so on.
And when it goes away, you realize that all these other things actually rely on
it.
And your day to day life sometimes critical activities depend on it.
I think database is like that.
It's that invisible technology that is needed to build any apps that you're
building today.
And what size companies are you traditionally working with?
We work with across the spectrum.
So one hand, we have a lot of these marketing analytics companies, startups.
And of course, that would make sense because these are companies that
specialize in real
time product analytics or real time marketing analytics that they monetize and
then sell.
And then there are bigger companies that are looking into doing inventory
management without
naming names of company.
Let's say there's a medical insurance company.
And this is true story.
One of our customers.
What happens is when you go to the pharmacy and you request for a medication,
that real
time application looks up in real time to say, are there any new companies?
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Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Are there any new companies that are looking at it?
Who would have thought that you could buy a car without talking to anybody?
But today you can do that.
Who would have thought that the car would magically appear once you bought it
and they would just leave it and walk away?
But I have seen cases where people don't want that.
People would say, "No, I actually want to go sit inside a car.
And I want to talk to somebody before I buy it."
And so it's all about choices.
I do feel that there are maybe just my opinion because I'm kind of like that
thing.
I don't wake up in the morning saying, "I'd love to see a pitch deck from a
sales rep." I would rather go.
I would rather go and talk to my friends.
I would rather go.
And if they have a product out, I'd love to try it out.
In fact, for somebody like me, I'm in marketing and marketers are the most
common consumers
of most technologies and average.
They have 26 or 27 different tools for everything that they do on a day-to-day
basis.
And every time I see there is no option to try out the product,
and instead it says, "Hey, book here.
Call this number for a demo."
I'm out of there because there are 20 other people who are letting you just try
out the product. But you're absolutely right.
There's also this other kind of users because of the requirements.
They don't want to just try it out.
They also want to talk to people to see if they have a hip-hop plan to see what
are your security practices
and what are the customizations that are available.
So I think it has to be, like I said, typically we do as humans.
We either are at one end of the spectrum or the other end.
Then eventually it comes to the middle ground.
I think that's what makes me very excited about working and marketing at single
stories
because it's right at the middle.
It's not just either ours.
It's not just, "Oh, just do PLD and nothing else."
And that's going to cannibalize our sales.
And it's not the other way as well.
Or we'll only do sales because PLD is for only other companies.
It has to be a full marketing mix of both.
And that's where I think the most potential is in the next few years.
All right, let's go to our next segment, the playbook where you open up that
playbook and talk about the tactics that help you win.
You play to win the game.
Hello?
You play to win the game.
You don't play to just play it.
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items?
Yeah, I think that answers my mind changes every year or at least
when you build out a strategy and a plan.
I think this year I've already seen a lot of people coming back in person
and people hungry to meet in real life as well.
So the first one I would say for me would be events.
And then of course hybrid events too, which brings in the webinars as such.
I would try not to cut it.
And there are ways to do that in a very economic fashion.
The second one would be developer relations because we do sell to app builders,
developers.
And what I mean by that is that is not just going into paid,
but building tools that help the developers but makes them also use our product
Things like Visual Studio Code extension.
It could be a chat GPT extension for writing SQL, those kind of things.
And then the third one I would say definitely SEO important.
That is changing quite a lot because of the higher and other stuff.
But as of today, it's still extremely important of how you get found.
I definitely agree with you there.
And I think it is changing so much every day and all the different types of
content that you can create.
So we can definitely dig into that in a second.
I want to jump back to events though.
First, do you have a mix or a blend of the type of events that you want to go
to?
Or is it not a blend?
And you're like, I want to go to every single big industry one.
And I want to have a small presence there.
I want to have a big presence at one.
I want to have like, how do you think about that?
From our main constituents, audience perspective, mostly developers, technology
IT folks.
And so for them, there are certain events that are big watering holes for them.
And those would be, if you're in the cloud, it's AWS re-inbed,
Google next, those kinds of events, CNCF, if you're doing Kubernetes.
Those are, I would say, some places where you have to consider where you have
the most
visibility, but also more meaningful conversations that you can have.
But in addition to that, I feel there's another category which is us creating
our own events too.
And what I mean by that is a little bit more like an extended version of Meet
ups,
right, where you're talking to developers, but it's only for two hours, not for
the entire two days.
And in that two hours, you're going through a happens on experience.
And it's also hybrid.
So either you come in and do that two hours and then go to dinner,
or you just stay at home and watch that entire two hours and follow along in
front of your computer as well.
Those are far more economic, but a lot more engaging in my mind.
Now, there's always a little bit of friction when there's some people in person
and some people online.
But the last one that we did was in New York City, we had overflow of people.
Like, we had to turn away people because it was full completely and they were.
So I do feel that those kinds of events is really coming back this year.
You mentioned developer relations, it's a tricky thing here.
And I don't know how you feel about this, but I have seen some developer
relations budgets get cut in over the past six months with budget reordering an
allocation because the CFO says,
what's the ROI on that?
And I'm just curious, like, what do you think about, like, how do you justify
quote unquote ROI of a program like that that seems pretty critical if that's
who you're selling to.
I'll go back to why code driven marketing of product led marketing really comes
in because you want to tie it back to, did you bring in from valid signups
because of these things that you did.
And when you're talking to the developer, I still like to code in my past time.
And at that time, I don't want to go and look at a deck or I don't want to go
look at some marketing content, but I do like to go look at a tutorial.
And if you have created a Udemy course, which we did just by the way, and you
're giving it to me for free so that I can learn something and do something
valuable, then I'm going to be one of your biggest fans because I get that that
you're trying to help me out.
And so I think from developer relations, one thing at least in my experience
that works quite well is education and tools that help developers do their job
better.
The tools can have an attribution to sign up.
An education can have a sign up to your overall pipeline as well.
So they're not just, it's no longer just wackwurst because of POG, you can tie
it back to your ROI.
And I think in some ways, it's the right thing to do.
Otherwise, it used to be, oh, I'm going to get a very famous influencer and
have them come and speak at the office.
But nothing happens after that.
So I think those are the ones that are getting cut.
And I wholeheartedly agree because I think it's about, we always heard that 13
impressions equals a sale thing.
It's like, if you were to just take John Doe, a developer at your target
company who's not a customer, how many interactions are you going to have with
that person over the course of the year?
You got to have that 13 interactions with this person.
And I think that so few people when they think about their developer relations
is like, it doesn't have the depth to get that level of engagements.
And some people like to listen to podcasts and some people like to watch
YouTube videos and some people like to go to in-person events.
And some people like you have to have that portfolio approach to both your
content and your events and your experiences and your tools, like you said,
that you are touching multiple different ways.
Because some people are not going to opt into some of those things.
And like, I think that you got to have that array.
In several ways, it is similar to me watching a TV ad or me driving past 101
and looking at a billboard, right?
How do I calculate the ROI for it?
So I do think you're right and DevRel has a component to that where fame
matters and that's what drives inbound.
And if I'm not aware of something or somebody and suddenly I go and say, "Hey,
go try out this product."
It'll be like, "But I don't know who you are. What do you do?"
You're absolutely right.
There has to be a gradation of experience across multiple different mediums,
across multiple different events, channels.
And then eventually, I think you can then see if what you're doing is leading
to more signups or not.
It doesn't have to be just, "Oh, we just had one million impressions and
nothing came out of it."
I think this also goes back to what I would say, social media.
And in my experience with social media is you can put out a tweet or a LinkedIn
post every day.
And you could get zero and I mean zero engagements with it.
But at the end of the day, I personally have experienced where people come and
say,
"Hey, I read your article or I read what you said on LinkedIn."
And then I feel like, "Okay, so there are a lot of people who are just lurking
around.
They know who you are. They know what you're written about."
But for whatever reason, they don't engage with the content.
And so there's this notion of a dark social as well.
That doesn't mean I stopped doing it.
You know, I have to continue trying out a bunch of different experiments.
And if the overall metric is still moving to the right top,
then I think you continue to double it on.
But if you're spending a lot of these, at the end of the day, your signups are
still zero,
then I will start to question what's going on there.
How do you view your website?
I think website is one of the most important tools both for marketing,
but primarily also for brand awareness and brand identity.
The two aspects, one is the tangible SEO of finding and learning more about
aspect
and then eventually going and trying out your product aspect to it.
And the other aspect is just to get a feel for what is this company about?
What do they stand for? What do they do? What is their story?
So from that perspective, I feel like the website is the first,
all quite often the first point of contact with your prospect,
which gives them an idea of your brand identity, your brand experience.
And that's where the story telling and the messaging comes in.
That's where the emotion comes in.
It doesn't have to be exactly like all other competitors
doesn't necessarily have to talk about feed and speed.
We are thinking, at least I'm thinking of how we tell our story
that helps builders build on top of a single store
some real amazing applications in real time.
So for us, the website is a very important piece of both communication
as well as the recovery tool.
Alright, let's get to our next segment.
The desktop where we talk about healthy tension,
whether that's with your board, your sales team, your competitor,
anyone else, have you had a memorable desktop in your career?
Quite a few, I would say, and that kind of is part of what you do.
It's part of what makes you better as well.
There have been instances where, just like I was telling you,
where as a product marketer, you build a message
and the straight up sales team will tell you,
"I don't use it.
I'm going to use it the way I want to use it."
And that is fine as long as you have a very well trained sales team
and they can go tell their stories.
But I worked with companies where you had 20,000 sales.
And if everybody starts telling their own story,
then it becomes a problem because you have a suite of products
that you're working through.
So there are a lot of bunch of desk steps as you would call it
around those scenarios.
And then of course, there's always,
marketing is one place where everybody feels in the company
that they can do messaging and they can do it better than everybody else.
And so that's always the place where you have some sort of a healthy tension.
All right, and we got about two minutes left here.
So we're going to get to our final segment, Quick Hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like how Qualified.com helps companies generate pipeline faster,
tap into your greatest asset, your website,
and identify your most valuable visitors,
and instantly start sales conversations.
Quick and easy, just like these questions, go to Qualified.com to learn more.
We love Qualified.
They're the absolute best tool in everybody's toolkit.
And they're just our best friends in the whole world.
So go to Qualified.com to learn more about a car.
Quick hits. Are you ready?
Of course.
Number one, do you have a hidden skill or talent that's not on your resume?
I learned how to play the guitar when I turned 40, so I can play a few strums
now.
Do you have a favorite book, podcast, or TV show that you've been checking out
recently?
My favorite book that I'm rereading is When Breath Becomes There.
Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby that maybe indirectly makes you a
better marketer?
I love to take pictures, and I've really started enjoying making videos,
like where the early stages are storytelling through videos.
Oh, that's awesome.
Photography and video is like every single marketer.
We should all be doing that. It's such a great skill.
Final question here.
What would be your one piece of advice for a first-time CMO
who's trying to figure out their marketing strategy?
Don't be afraid to experiment, and I would say take risks,
because the thing about marketing is when everybody is doing the same thing,
it's not longer effective.
So only the ones who have the risk-taking ability and the creativity to go try
out using the ones who hate out the core.
I love it. Fantastic advice.
Do experiments, y'all. Thanks so much for listening.
For all of our listeners, you can go to singlestore.com to check out the
company and go tell your developer to sign up.
Start for free.
Click the Start for free button, Madoka.
Again, thanks so much for joining and take care.
Thank you.
Nice talking to you.
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