With over 9M users from around the world, it’s safe to assume that Miro has cracked the code and discovered how to build a successful product-led business. Miro is a secure enterprise-ready team collaboration whiteboard for remote and distributed teams. It makes remote work easier and more efficient than ever, enabling teams to collaborate on the online whiteboard platform from anywhere in the world.
So, what enables product-led growth in Miro?
In this post, I walk you through the main pillars that enable Miro usage growth in hopes that you will find some useful tips and advice that you can use in your strategy for product-led growth.
Why we believe in product-led growth
Miro accounts much of its growth to its product-led growth strategy.
To give you some more perspective of Miro’s growth, here are a few points that reflect just how much growth the company has seen in recent years:
Product-led growth has helped us to onboard and retain users and customers. It drives acquisition, drives our viral loops and word of mouth whilst building our acquisition competitive muscle. Similarly, product-led growth leads to more monetization. With a higher retention rate and increased engagement, the amount of monetization touchpoints that customers come into contact with has also improved.
Seven things enable product-led growth at Miro:
- Customer centricity
- UX
- Freemium model
- Viral loops
- Simplicity and fast time to value
- Users engagement
- Templates
Customer centricity
We always want to learn from our users. Our users can tell us a lot of important things and we can learn a lot from their usage of the product. We have both a well-defined core audience and main use cases (see image below).
Understanding your audience is crucial for product-led growth. However, don’t make the mistake of assuming that your audience will never change. You must re-evaluate your core audience and main use cases regularly. Different audience members will have different requirements and needs. You must address those directly to help ensure that retention does not decline.
A key part of our customer centricity plan is to train customer empathy. Having empathy for your audience is a must-have in any industry and business. Your users must believe that you really care about them and their needs.
Miro trains customer empathy in many ways:
Getting to know your users can really help scale your product-led business. You can identify what made people sign-up to use your product as well as the reasons why somebody decided not to sign-up.
At Miro, we put a lot of effort into putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes. When creating a user map, the team designs and considers every element from the user’s perspective. This is a great way to identify growth opportunities, room for improvement, and basically go through the steps of using the product from the user’s perspective.
Simplicity & Fast time to value
A key to effective product-led growth is making it as easy as possible for users to get started with the product. You want your product to deliver value as soon as possible. It must be flexible but have a low learning curve. If it is too complicated, users are more likely to give up and look elsewhere.
Miro delivers fast time to value using the Freemium model: value first, money later. Users can sign up for the free version of the product, which allows an unlimited number of team members to get started with the product. Users get instant value and become ‘sticky’ before they pay.
Once users have experienced the product and see the value it delivers, they are more likely to upgrade their membership to one of the paid options. Giving your users free access to your product (or at least a basic version of your product), helps them make an informed buying decision. They have already used the product, they got value from it, and they want even more value and they are willing to pay for that value.
Experiment with templates
Miro uses various templates as an acquisition and activation strategy. It provides users with multiple template choices and makes it easier for them to get started since they’re not starting with a blank canvas.
Providing a range of template options also inspires users because it shows them what the product is capable of and what they could possibly use Miro to create.
UX
User experience is very important to us and we strive to create a predictable and pleasant experience for users with diverse backgrounds.
Some users are experienced with the product and do not want to go through any step-by-step guidance protocols. Those users are free to skip ahead and get straight into the product. Users who are new to the product can follow the directions and get the help they need to navigate Miro. This is why Miro does not believe in the one-size fits all approach to UX. Every user is different, and their different needs must be met.
Miro is constantly improving the user experience using prototyping and testing (see below).
Viral loops to Assist Product-led Growth
Viral loops are an essential part of our mission to keep growing as a product-led company. Since Miro is a tool for collaboration, we use viral loops to expand within the organization.
We want to make it easy for users to invite others to join their team and we use viral loops to reduce the friction users may have otherwise experienced doing that. We also use viral loops to allow people to share their boards.
Including sharing mechanics like this has really helped to retain user retention. You can choose who has access to the board, you can invite new members to join your team and share the board link with whoever you like.
User engagement strategies
Miro is a horizontal tool, which has been one of our key advantages. However, people can use our product for a variety of cases. Making users aware of this fact means that we have had to combine product design and communications to help make it clear that people can adopt Miro for different purposes. One of the end goals of this is to increase the frequency of usage.
Another user engagement strategy that we use are in-product tutorials and the learning center. This provides users with directional videos to help them use the product more effectively. It also helps the users have more success with the product and in turn, it helps to create growing champions.
Here is a brief overview of the user engagement strategies adopted by Miro:
Final thoughts on product-led growth
Those are the main pillars that enable Miro usage growth. If you have a product-led strategy, you must track product-oriented metrics including engagement, feature usage, acquisition channels, time to value, conversion funnels, and many more.
Although it may be hard to believe, product-led growth is not just about the product. Marketing, sales, and pricing all play key roles in whether or not users engage with your product and convert.
Above all else, product-led growth is about providing users with a great product experience and that’s what Miro focuses on with each product-led growth strategy we implement.