AMA session on Product Led Growth with Rory - Head of Growth at Supabase ⚡️

@nkosanamabuza Ant and Copple, our co-founders, deserve credit for our earliest users, and they played a significant role in discovering what developers want by engaging with our existing network. Our early team (myself included) all have a technical background, which gave us a deep understanding of our users' needs. This has really influenced part of our core philosophy around dog fooding features based on knowing our needs as developers. In the early days, there is no substitute for speaking to as many users as possible. I recall spending a weekend going through over 3,000 developer profiles on Github after had a sign up spike, reaching out to as many as possible to chat with them about their Supabase likes and dislikes. I have found that taking a 'mom test' [1] approach to understanding what users value and the 'jobs to be done' [2 ]framework are both valuable resources when engaging with users, particularly when trying to comprehend what developers are attempting to achieve. Moving from users to first paying customers involved a lot of calls with users to get feedback and start to segment our users and build out ideal customer profiles before landing on initial pricing and opening up basic self serve billing. [1] https://www.momtestbook.com/ [2]https://jobs-to-be-done.com/what...

@nkosanamabuza @rors great story! > In the early days, there is no substitute for speaking to as many users as possible. to quote @paulg: "do things that don't scale."

@edworking This is a great question, we actually don't use any paid ads at all. We have several things that we have found to be effective. 1. Our "launch week" strategy [1] has really been essential as we scaled up. Once every 3-4 months we spend a week shipping a new feature every day. This has been great for both internally to align the team and getting traction within the community. 2. Post launch week, we have a pretty amazing community who make content around these new features for their own audiences. We try and amplify their content within the community. We have a truly amazing devrel team who help enable and engage with the community as much as possible. This is also a huge source of product feedback which helps shape future launch week features. 3. Our monthly email newsletter. We try and send as few emails as possible because we are keen not to spam folks. Our monthly community email newsletter has strong engagement and showcases all the big monthly updates from the team and the community. 4. The less visible / internal operational side of growth which means we can stay aligned as a team and know how to engage with our users. This really comes down to good internal tooling, data pipelines and processes. [1] https://supabase.com/blog/supaba...

@gikashin1973 PLG is an evolving discipline - Kyle Poyars blog [1] is a really good resource and a shout out to the folks at Toplyne [2] too Pocus have put together an amazing slack community too for product led sales minded folks [3] [1] https://kylepoyar.substack.com/ [2] https://www.toplyne.io/blog [3] https://www.pocus.com/community

@conversionrocks Definitely :D

@rahulkrishnan_tl Growth at Supabase is definitely a team sport - and it's not just constrained to the "growth team".....Engineering are heavily involved with all things related to growth. Without a solid product that solves a need for people it's pretty hard to grow anything. A lot of this comes back to iterating based on good feedback loops with our community. My role in Supabase has definitely changed since the early days. Initially I started by needing to wear a lot of different hats depending on the challenge at hand. Today i'm spending more time thinking about how to keep the team aligned and co-ordinated so our users benefit from a more joined up experience. This is usually a combination of tooling, processes, people and data. We usually hire based on problems that we need to solve for and i'm incredibly lucky to work with a whole bunch of folks who are exceptionally good at what they do. We definitely have processes and playbooks to templatize this but like all things in a startup, its a work in progress. Another thing to shout out would be sequencing on picking which things to templatize. There are a lot of things we know we need to standardise but there might be something else that needs to be tackled first. This really just comes back to effective internal communication between teams to set priorities. Codifying a brand.....that's a tough question. I think the brand has really been more of an emergent property which again came as a result of looking at our marketing as a bunch of little experiments based on interactions with the community. There are some things we do at a brand level which I think are well known with developers - don't pester them with spammy emails, give them useful content, be transparent etc. There is some other more off the cuff stuff around community interactions which is where meme master Ant comes in and that is definitely harder to codify.

@rahulkrishnan_tl @rors > Without a solid product that solves a need for people it's pretty hard to grow anything. all starts with a great product. QED. thanks, Rory!