Product-Led Growth & Usage-Based Pricing | SaaS Strategy

[00:00:21][Music] hi everyone welcome to the cpo mastery um series where we talk to product leaders from all over the community to learn more about uh product management and i'm amin murthy i am currently the vp of uh product management for growth at a company called new relic um that makes it easy for developers to figure out um if there are issues in their code and make their life simpler um prior to new relic i've had senior leadership positions and product at ebay intel and amazon where i've led teams that have built products most of us have used hopefully including kindle and also ebay classifieds with me here today is kyle poyer who is the operating partner at openview kyle is an expert at product-led growth optimizing go to market strategies and sas pricing and if you follow him he has been a huge proponent on usage-based pricing and how it can help you with product led growth so selfishly i am super super excited um to hear how he thinks this model can help you attract more customers gain long-term success and increase user lifetime value and uh hear his perspective on companies that are doing it well kyle uh let you take it away thanks so much amy uh well and if you like you're the perfect person to moderate because very few companies have managed to successfully make the pivot to usage-based pricing and i think new relic is the first company i'm familiar with that's done it in the context of being public and so that makes makes for an especially challenging transition but it must be great to be on the other side and off the races with it so i will start sharing my screen and i'll walk through some material uh around product like growth and then uh we will jump into some q a and and so maybe just uh setting the stage here around some context around uh plg and usage phase pricing and so what i think about it is that uh when we first started selling and buying software back in the 80s and 90s it was often deployed via a data center it was sold as like an on-prem uh big upfront purchase so a capital expense purchase for software and because it was such an expensive big commitment often folks used field sales uh and deals took a very long time uh and then once you got the customer up and running you were kind of good to go they paid you a maintenance fee and then uh would come back in five six seven eight years to try to sell you another on-prem solution you know quickly move beyond that into the sas era uh you could think of it as sas 1.0 with folks like salesforce offering products that were available via the cloud uh were at a much more accessible subscription price point uh and so software became more of an operating expense as opposed to a capital expense and with that lower price point we're able to sell it with marketing generating marketing qualified leads and then an inside sales team selling into them well today we've kind of shifted even further uh we could even call this the kind of third wave of software and increasingly software isn't necessarily even deployed it is instrumented via api it's composed it's connected uh software is more and more like a utility or like infrastructure for our businesses and what often happens is that end users in many cases developers go out find products that help improve their workflows they want to start for free test the product you know try before they buy and only pay as they're seeing value and actually adopting the product and that's where product lead growth is the key de facto distribution model for this third wave and then usage based pricing is the key modernization model and you could even think of it as instead of pricing going from capex to operating expense pricing is almost like a cost of goods sold in these days and it's connected to uh the growth uh or you know lack thereof of your business and i think that uh so while these trends have been playing out over time and their number of companies that are at the forefront covet has really accelerated this both in terms of making product led growth even more mainstream uh as well as usage-based pricing and i think this idea of seats as being predictable and so we're a really great way to to buy products got thrown on its head with with cobit and not knowing whether your business wasn't going to do well or poorly you didn't necessarily want to commit to a multi-year contract you didn't know how many people were going to use a product and so there were a lot more concerns about shelfware and a lot more appetite to only pay when folks are seeing value around products and then from from my vantage point there's also a lot of different benefits that a usage based pricing brings to a software vendor and to its customers so first off it really minimizes friction in customer acquisition and so if the customer can start at a low cost as they try out the product really minimizes friction and gets a lot more people to be open to just trying something out seeing if it works for their workflow opens up that that base of potential folks that could become large customers because instead of maybe taking two three four six months uh in a sales cycle that sales cycle really gets accelerated and folks maybe try out your product before having conversations with five or six other vendors uh the other thing is it directly links how much someone pays with how much value they're getting and so that's both great in terms of uncapping the upside uh as folks see a lot of value there's no limit to how much they'll pay for a product and really uh making actually the churn risk really limited in the sense that if someone's only seeing so much value they pay less or if someone's business is struggling they pay less rather than churning and so it really it's a really close connection uh between price and value with a usage model it also just allows more folks to experience the experience the valuable product when companies has charged kind of historic uh subscription agreements priced up front and licensed on on a per seat basis there's often you know folks are not sure how many seats they should provide access to they don't want to make too big of a commitment up front and so they often limit the scope of adoption into a small subset of the opportunity but if you can instead be more generous up front offer broader access to your product to more and more people uh then your customers are going to find use cases that you might never have expected them to find there's going to be more champions who are going to be advocating for your product uh and you're going to be you're going to often find that your product flourishes uh inside of a customer and all of these kind of grow the market opportunity you both unlock the lower end of the market the smb part of the market uh with a lower price point and uncap the high end because you're no longer constrained by flat rates so a lot of a lot of benefits and just an example of how this plays out i think a really smart usage based model paired with product led growth is twilio and they have uh an ability for folks to pay just as they use twilio and the the company has 10 million developer accounts what's fascinating though is that uh many of these companies aren't or customers are end up not being uh super successful with the product and that's fine but they're they're just testing out the product they don't have the best use case uh that 10 million active accounts translates into 200 000 active customers and those 200 000 active customers though once they start adopting that product they keep growing more and more and more and they find a lot more use cases for how to deploy twilio plus as their business grows uh they naturally consume more of twilio's products and so they have a really best in class 132 that expansion rate you can see the typical revenue trajectory with their customers just scales pretty dramatically uh and so 85 of their expansion actually comes from usage so instead of selling new products going out paying commission on an upsell uh that upsell is is baked in and so it's no wonder that their business model is so efficient and uh while usage models have started to become the norm in infrastructure software especially uh infrastructure as a service or platform as a service companies like an aws or an azure they're increasingly being found really all over the tech stack and part of this is that buyers are more familiar with usage-based models i also think that you know when we look at new software products it's hard to see a new startup that doesn't have some sort of angle around ai automation or apis and all of those things actually disconnect the value at how many people are logging in to your product ui and in fact if you're a really great ai or automation product your product might be very successful and that might actually mean fewer humans need to log into the product and so as companies have realized this they've realized kind of traditional seat based subscription pricing isn't actually the best way to monetize and can disincentivize them even investing further in product enhancements for customers and so whether it's in the application layer with businesses like shopify which scales based on payment volume hubspot which scales based on marketing contacts uh as does as does mailchimp or middleware products like stripe uh we're releasing the proliferation of uh usage models in places that you might not have expect expected then and we recently released the results a survey of 600 uh sas companies called the state of usage based pricing and we found that uh this year 45 percent of sas companies have some form of usage-based pricing it split about 50 50 between folks who are largely usage based or pay-as-you-go and those who have usage-based subscriptions and then of the holdouts so of the 55 percent who don't uh a large share of them actually expect to test usage based pricing uh both in the next year or after that and so based on uh the expectations we're seeing in the market usage based pricing will actually be the norm uh starting at the end of next year and so the other reason you know why would a company uh especially successful company think about changing their model uh essentially like midway through their their growth uh and part of what is is drawing folks to a usage-based model is that it used to be something that was seen as unpredictable or that investors wouldn't value usage-based revenue because it wasn't committed and so there used to be a lot of fear that usage-based revenue just isn't a great business model but as companies like snowflake have gone public we've actually seen that the companies that show the best ability to expand their customers disproportionately use usage based pricing in fact of recent sas ipos seven of the top nine with the best net dollar retention all had usage-based pricing models and so in that sense usage based pricing actually becomes very predictable and it naturally expands more and more as customers grow and so instead of investors being a detractor to usage-based pricing they started to pick up on these trends and start to reward them where usage based companies are now valued at i believe 50 higher revenue multiple over their peers and so we're seeing a a huge amount of interest in movement towards usage-based models both at the startup scale a company called cypress which is an openview portfolio company is one example they move from traditional seat based pricing to usage-based pricing earlier this year new relic last year made a huge pivot across their business including a switch to usage-based pricing and based on recent earnings call seems to be really paying off in terms of the relationships with customers and then even like large legacy incumbents like autodesk which is by no means a you know a new sas player have found that they've been able to be more nimble and agile with their pricing introduce pay-as-you-go models and have had success with it with their customers and so there's really a appetite across the gamut uh of sas companies moving to this kind of pricing and so tons of great things to like about it uh but the thing that if you take away anything from this conversation think about usage-based pricing as a different business model or a different way of building a sas company and not just a pricing model as you think about this transition or just scaling a business with usage-based pricing you really have to evaluate it from this from a strategic lens uh rethink your go to market strategy and even rethink financial and operating questions so i'll get into some of these questions we'll also have a q a uh at the end and then i'd plug that uh you should check out the usage-based pricing playbook on the openview website if you want to go in in more depth so starting with strategy and pricing one of the questions to think about is whether a usage based model is right for your product and customers so for more and more companies the answer is yes but it's not true in every case so what i look at look for is whether more usage aligns directly with your customers business outcomes so you can share in their success like if you think about a stripe which has payments api uh as their customers grow revenue they pay more in stripe fees so that's like pretty perfectly aligned in fact none of their customers are shutting down revenue opportunities because of their scrape fees right but you might find that you don't have a product that has that kind of a connection uh and so you really have to think about are you are your outcomes really aligning with what your customer is trying to achieve it also helps if your product is sticky where usage increases over time for the average customer now it's not going to be for every customer there's certainly going to be seasonality uh with with different business models but you want to look at the cohort retention of different usage metrics and be able to see that across your book of business it increases more and more and more otherwise what happens is you might find usage-based pricing might not be the best business model might not have the best financial outcomes uh for the company final thing to think about here is whether it's customer centric and so a lot of companies are increasingly excited about paying for software products on a usage model but there are a number of legacy industries or when you're selling into procurement that they just aren't savvy they don't really know how to predict it they get really nervous about a usage-based pricing model and so that's starting to change uh so even the federal government didn't allow their agencies to pay on a pay-as-you-go model for decades and uh now they're actually amending their rules because they're realizing that this is actually going to align with modern procurement best practices and help save agencies money but like as an example if you sold the government until really just this year it would be really challenging to scale with uh with a usage based model another thing just to call out here is uh this taxi meter effect and so there are products where when your customers are charged based on every usage event uh that they have to think about every time they use the product let's think it's kind of like watching the taxi meter uh run up and up and up and so it makes them have to think every single time do we use this product or do we use something else in my view there are ways to work around this but this just makes it challenging if your customers have this feeling with your products it makes it challenging to be embedded and have the kind of value realization or roi with your customers that you want and so you might find that a more flat rate kind of model that drives more adoption ends up leading to better overall outcomes and then if you do decide a usage model uh makes sense for your business there's a lot of questions around what's the right usage model so it's very different from you know picking traditional seats as an example because you could look at potentially even hundreds of different metrics around usage and adoption uh and so the kind of key nomenclature here is that you're looking for a usage based value metric and a value metric is a unit of value that determines how much you charge or how much a customer pays and the way i think about this is i start with a laundry list of metrics that you can track or your customers can track that in that correlate with being successful with your product and then you really want to gather data and understand how these play out within a within a customer and then i i score each value metric against five different criteria you're looking for these to be value based so the more customer uses it uh the more value they see the better off their business is you want it to be scalable where it grows inside the average customer you want it to be flexible so the customer can start with a scope of their usage before they have to expand uh and then you also want it to be somewhat predictable where even if the customer doesn't know exactly how much they're going to use for the next year you can help them figure it out and get some rough guard rails around it which de-risks that feeling of uncertainty and the final thing is it should be feasible you need to be able to meter it you need to be able to track it bill based on it you need to have consistency across every place you're reporting on that metric so that customers can trust their bill and that's you know easier said than done as as a lot of product experts on the call probably recognize and then one other thing i would just call out here is that it's fairly common in a usage-based business model uh for your largest subset of customers even that top 10 percent to account for a disproportionate amount of your overall revenue and what happens is many companies with the usage business model treat their signups as a portfolio a lot of folks will cluster at the low end with modest usage and a subset scale rapidly and there's there's no limit to how much they can scale and that's very different from a lot of traditional subscription businesses and so when you're looking at your customers don't be that scared by saying that okay if we had had this pricing model instead of our old one some customers would pay way more some would pay way less that's pretty natural with the usage-based business model and i can answer questions about how to navigate that but that's actually the norm that's not you're not the exception if your business looks like that and next is around go to market strategy and while this is a product group you should be aware of how folks uh sell and and adopt your products and product actually one way to think about it is like historically product has sort of been separate from growth and go to market and you sort of like you hand over the product across the fed so that sales demos it customer success implements it and sends you all the feature requests about what's missing uh in a usage-based business model product enhancements are directly connected to revenue growth because the more folks use your product the more revenue you naturally get and so product is actually integral to go to market strategy and growth and we'll talk a little bit more about that so first off at many successful usage based companies product led growth really opens up the top of funnel so you're looking for free freemium offerings free trials or free credits to allow folks to try before they buy and then it's really critical to have a great uh initial user experience and a fast time to value hopefully someone can get up and running within a day or within their first week and this really allows folks to try out your product successfully and without necessarily talking to a sales rep you also want to make sure that high quality support is available in case folks have questions but from a product standpoint this means actually really investing not just in building new features but in usability and time to value it might mean carving out a separate team to work on growth and new user onboarding and activation and it's it's a different mentality because uh product really is the first interaction that your customer has with the business and so you need to have you really have that one shot to either impress them and earn the right to grow with them or to potentially lose them and then after there's some product engagement you then normally bring in sales and sales often take someone that might have been using the product on a self-service basis that helps move them into some sort of committed agreement or a larger overall purchase and so they're often working with what are called product qualified leads folks that essentially have shown signals that they're ready for an expanded relationship and so because your sales team is interacting with folks who are already using the product it's a different interaction instead of you know lots and lots of demos they're working hand in hand with the customer around shared objectives of a broader deployment maybe savings maybe greater predictability of their bill they often need to be much more technically versed and they're helping that customer navigate things like legal procurement and security so very consultative sellers and you might even find that a solutions consultant sales consultant kind of personality might even work better than a traditional uh hunter ae kind of mindset in this environment and then uh when you think about this while sales is often getting committed agreements you don't want them to be undermining a usage model right and so you don't want them to be trying to oversell a deal get a big commitment up front and so for many companies instead of paying sales comp based on the booked arr they're moving away and recognizing more uh or compensating more based on actual consumption actual revenue generated rather than just the commitment and so as a starting point just make sure that committed bookings aren't the only kpi that you're not penalizing spend that happens later beyond the commitment and that you're not encouraging that that rep to uh essentially oversell that account you want to be patient and grow with the customers earn the right to grow with them and then finally on the go to market side is that post sales generally comes in and owns continued adoption and organic expansion and so as you saw with twilio eighty-five percent of their uh their expansion is just from usage and customer success plays a really critical role in in that process what i find is that you're often looking to find leading indicators of future growth so one of the things that a customer should be doing in their first month first three months for six months uh and that might be sending them certain integrations like stock integrations that create stickiness and so customer success really should be driving those activities and making sure that their overall book of business is it is successfully adopting the product understands the different use cases understands the value and that's going to be a really critical foundation for for future growth uh final thing to call it and then we'll stop for questions is on the finance and operations side and uh you know first thing i'll just call out as i as i mentioned before is that there used to be fear that a usage-based model wasn't valued by investors because this wasn't committed subscription revenue snowflake which in their investor relations deck says explicitly we are not a sas model they're a usage-based model uh they are proving that the market isn't viewing this as an issue um but what is critical is showing that despite being naturally usage based you want to show that the business model is predictable that it's growing and there's at least a path to a high gross margin on the business and so from uh from a context of if you're a snowflake you actually need to invest in predicting consumption and this is where product actually all of a sudden partners with finance around understanding adoption trends that happen in accounts uh helping forecast what revenue is going to look like across different cohorts of customers and so it both means your finance team needs to be better versus the product but then also product needs to really be sitting down with finance and helping them understand and communicate the business model externally and so these are the these are the key takeaways for folks uh across strategy go to market and then the the finance and operations side and you know we'll pause here for some some q a awesome i will start with a question we got from one of our listeners uh um he asked can you talk about the trade-off between paying for each use versus a block of usage for example charging for an sql query versus buying a block of queries that roll over and are you seeing both yeah yeah most mature companies will offer both models and a lot of times that pay as you go or kind of purely consumption based is really helpful as part of that product led growth strategy where someone you know kind of kicks the tire starts to set it up they have a pretty small bill initially and then as they're scaling as they're really successful they probably at that point want to get some discounts and have and also have some a little bit more predictability and headroom to grow their overall adoption and so that's when you start to size up all right how big how much does usage grow you know what what what are the different parameters how uh how much does that customer prefer the discount with a larger commitment versus you know wanna want a balanced approach and so that ends up being a conversation with sales but i really like for the pay as you go and essentially be lead gen into selling larger committed opportunities what's been surprising and you know amy can probably speak to this as well what's also been surprising is that there are some even large enterprises that you would think would want to buy on a committed basis and they actually tell you that they want the flexibility of pay as you go and sometimes it's so that they can get around procurement but sometimes it's because uh that's just you know they understand that's aligned to uh them seeing value there's no shelf where they're really able to fully take advantage of a usage model and so you you don't want to necessarily only offer that uh subscription commitment you want to offer both that makes sense and for what it's worth i've seen the same thing um that's new relics done it so makes a lot of sense to me um so the next question is from greg um how do you think about introducing usage pricing to an existing set of customers who are not paying that way yeah great question and this ends up being a pretty big challenge for a lot of companies because of the uh the differences uh that can happen in terms of what happens with with revenue in a given account so the first thing to do is really a mapping of what are your existing customers using today how much are they paying and what would they pay in this new model with usage-based pricing and you'll probably find there's a subset of customers that would pay way more in this new model a subset that would pay about the same and a subset that would pay maybe significantly less you'll probably also start seeing a set of accounts that uh are great areas to test usage usage-based pricing because maybe they're a fortune 500 account that only has like three or four seats and has a certain amount of usage will could you use a usage-based model to unlock a much larger opportunity with that account and kind of hand that off to your sales or account management folks as opportunities to really drive expansion through a new pricing model and so i start with that mapping and then i tend to try to just do testing of the new pricing with this handful of uh existing customers where there is an expansion opportunity as well as with your your net new customers what you're trying to do with that testing is de-risk the transition the last thing you'd want to do is go back to all of your existing customers and migrate them on a half-baked pricing model that you're going to have to redo in six months anyway you would really want to make sure that you were extremely confident about what you're moving forward with before you do that migration and then when you do the migration i would just be mindful of having uh of not trying to be too one size fits all and so instead of saying hey every account needs to move over to this new pricing and if you save a ton of money that's fine if you have to pay three four x what you're paying today like deal with it instead of thinking that way you might need to carve out different tactics or strategies depending on the audience and maybe that's saying hey we'll keep you on your existing pricing for 12 months and or you know alternatively we'll off we'll let you stair step and save 50 or maybe just move on to the usage based model but at your current price point and so you're you're gonna find that there's going to be a lot of those creative tactics or strategies that help uh make customers kind of uh happy with this model and uh really bought into it that you know if you're overly dogmatic about moving forward too quickly and in a one-size-fits-all manner i think that that could end up being limiting uh for your firm for your migration that makes a lot of sense and greg for what it's worth that new relic we used all of the things uh kyle mentioned um for different sets of customers and it was exactly what you said kyle right mapping things talking to some customers to figure out what's the right strategy for different cohorts um and not being super dogmatic and giving customers choices and flexibility so we don't lose people through the transition or the lack of bad awards absolutely all right we have a couple more questions from the audience um we have a question from clarissa have you seen any particular challenges in working with finance as companies transition uh in a word yes i think that one thing is that some finance teams are not necessarily as educated on the opportunity with usage-based pricing and they're really used to like traditional sas metrics traditional sas reporting forecasting and so this shift to usage based pricing really like might be such a context switch that you might not even have the right finance leadership in place like if they're if they're too much of a stick in the mud around it uh but like help educate them on what's required and you you might find for example like let me like point out a few examples you might find that if you're a snowflake you have 160 net retention and so if you get a hundred dollars from a customer uh or let's say a thousand dollars in a customer for your first year after five years that thousand dollars might turn into like ten thousand dollars it's just wild the expansion that they see in their cohorts and so what's the right cost of acquisition for a customer if they spend a thousand dollars in their first year and ten thousand dollars in five years should you spend a thousand dollars to have that one-year payback or are you more comfortable paying more initially because you know you're going to be able to expand with that customer and so this kind of causes you to rethink a lot of about your business as it relates to what is a healthy set of sas metrics look like and one of the right uh kinds of strategic decisions to make as it relates to growing the business and financing that growth and those are like leadership team conversations but i think normally finance drives it but in this case finance might you might need to help educate finances that they can wrap their head around the new model and then finance often gets tasks or finance plus rev ups with all the billing parts of uh pricing but in a usage model product is really critical to that because you have to be really great in terms of gathering that product usage data and sending that off to different people who need it ideally sharing that data in app so that customers have visibility into their consumption making sure that anything you show in app is consistent with what people see on their bills and so i think for a lot of product leaders while it's not super strategic the challenge you face is is on the billing metering and reporting around your usage-based pricing and that's part of the customer experience if you charge based on usage yeah that makes a lot of sense and for what it's worth i manage that stuff for new relic and you're right in in some ways it's not super strategic but in some ways it's the most important thing we do for our business right because literally every dollar of revenue flows through it and every time we bump up the accuracy of our pipeline or make it easier for customers that's that many less queries we get through support that's that much more revenue flowing through so it is very it is very interesting and how you think about it and the scale of it is also very interesting and something product leaders especially for companies thinking about the transition should think very carefully about is how do you draw those lines who will own it and how do you work with finance differently to kyle's point yeah absolutely well and to that point too and i'm curious if you've seen it if you had a different experience for a lot of companies there's not the best off-the-shelf technology especially connecting product and finance around making this transition and so for many companies that i've talked to they kind of have to build a lot of things themselves or hacked together a system that's starting to change i'm starting to see more and more sas startups that are tackling this problem but i think something just to work with finance on with the transition is like the transition will take longer than you expect and you need to allocate resources especially dedicated engineering resources to being able to make the transition rather than just relying on like your traditional third-party billing systems percent we noticed the same thing i think for a time there last year um we were thinking of doing a startup in that area and we got busy with our own product work but otherwise you might have seen a new relic offshoot i mean it's needed it is definitely needed i i still feel like um i've looked at the startup landscape and i think i'm seeing more but i haven't seen anything that maps to um something better than what we we've hacked together so i would love to see more innovation here absolutely especially as your numbers suggest more and more companies are moving to this right totally i expect it'll happen which will be awesome so we have one more question from sagar um his question is can you share some tips on how to tackle taxi meter effect especially for high volumetric usage clients for whom um sas may prove more effective uh cost effective in comparison to usage yeah it's a it's a great uh question i i think that and this especially becomes challenging with the transition uh from traditional fixed subscriptions to usage-based pricing the first thing i think about is that you have to get really good at understanding the uh return that your product has in terms of uh how your customers see real value and tangible business results from it and the closer you can do it connecting more usage with more roi the easier this conversation becomes because the customer sees increased usage as ultimately a good thing with better business outcomes so i mean i can like unpack that as an example so uh twilio one of the most popular products is sms messaging and they charge for every sms message that you send and receive now a business might say well we you know we don't have no idea how many messages we're going to send maybe we should send 500 fewer messages next month so that we can save money uh it could sound really you know potentially challenging and they could run it up against this this issue but then what they're trying to do with customers is figure out what's your use case for sending messages and a common one might be appointment reminders well what's your no show uh rate with with appointments today how much does a no show cost you well if we send appointment reminders via text we think that we can increase uh or to reduce your inertia rate by x and that means here's the amount of sort of cost savings or extra revenue that you can generate well all of a sudden the cost of an sms message relative to the benefit of no shows it's just such a no-brainer that that customer really sees a close connection uh between what the software is doing and what they're trying to achieve as a business and so i would focus as much as possible on trying to communicate that and then i think that otherwise uh there's i think for a lot of companies the goal should be to try to get every customer onto some sort of uh usage-based model so that you're not combining flat rates and usage based pricing uh and otherwise you're gonna essentially find this perverse incentive where your like crazy high usage customers are totally tapped out in a flat freight plan and then your customers that aren't using the product or in a usage based model and you really actually don't get uh very much upside from either and if you are on that full fully usage model and some of these customers might be high usage there are things that you can do to reduce uh the risk or kind of give that customer more certainty and so an example would be uh instead of charging for usage as a high water mark every month what if you offered an annual usage allotment and so the customer drew down that usage more quickly than they expected uh they would just renew their contract early for instance or that would allow them to smooth over any sort of seasonality so that if they have a big spike one month they're not paying a bunch of overages so i would look at the mech the mechanics of your licensing and pricing model and find ways to give that customer more peace of mind with your pricing and not feel like there's kind of punitive overage fees involved and that it's really fair in how it's structured and that makes a lot of sense and i think we use that model quite effectively and neural like we have something we call annual pool of funds to do exactly what you said so i'll ask one last question before i wrap up um one of the things you mentioned in your presentation um that's very intriguing to me right especially as product leaders is as companies move to usage-based pricing it's very important that people get like rapid time to value right so which companies do you think are doing a great job at that rapid time to value and can you share examples of what they do well yeah uh absolutely well in uh there's it's been amazing to see the investment around whether it's product product growth teams or standalone growth teams uh that are really uh kind of taking on innovative approaches to uh lead to faster and faster come to value i think some some companies that come to mind for me obviously like twilio is a great example uh datadogs another one i i personally love shopify's onboarding and time to value and i think one of the things i like about shopify's as an example is that a lot of their customers are small business owners maybe even they're the only employee but then they also have people that are coming in with like a legacy e-commerce system that have you know dozens of employees that want to start on shopify and so they personalize that onboarding and they have very curated paths that their different customer profiles can go on based on whether they're just starting out starting from scratch versus if they're doing a migration and they make it really feel easy and consumer-like acro in that that segmented or personalized way rather than one size fits all and i think that's that's the key thing is that there used to be in vogue of having one activation metric and you're trying to get everyone to reach that point of activation in their first hour but i think more and more people are realizing that their customers are coming in with a very different context and they need to personalize that experience based on the context uh another one i would just call out it would be airtable and so airtable automates essentially document creation or i think of it as like excel on steroids there's a million different ways that you could use air table and that could even be confusing for some people because they might not know exactly how to bring airtable into their workflow and so airtable has hundreds of essentially templates uh that you can sort of find the most relevant ones for your work for your role maybe it's content calendar creation if you're in marketing uh or you know there could be it could there could be some crm workflows if you're in sales and they help people find that template uh and that template really accelerates your ability to understand what you can do with air table and get to a really successful uh base and air table way faster than if you were building it from scratch and what i love is that that's connected with top of funnel too so all of those templates became become great content marketing and helping educate folks um that have these specific things they're trying to do that are really painful without a solution like work like air table and it helps them realize what's possible and connects the marketing efforts with the product and so i love anytime that you can have that seamless customer journey from when someone finds you on google to when they uh when they see value and start paying for your product that sounds perfect thank you kyle um really appreciate um the insightful talk you share shared today and also um answering all the questions from me and from our users um also thank you for the global audience of uh senior product leaders who've tuned in from all across the world uh to listen to the talk really appreciate all of you spending the time with us today with that i'm gonna call this a wrap thank you everyone