Our founder was on Calendly’s first marketing team.
18 months later, Calendly was a unicorn.
Calendly CEO Tope Awotona
“Best decision ever!”
Calendly Early Days
PLG Agency has its roots in one of the best product-led softwares of all time.
As one of the first two marketers at Calendly, PLG founder Adam Lambert got a PhD in scaling a unicorns.
“‘Hypergrowth’ was the word everyone kept using once we hit our stride,” said Adam.
But the stride didn’t come easily, despite the inherent virality of a product like Calendly.
Calendly ICPs
Tools like Calendly have such a variety of applications that it makes marketing tough to do. You don’t want your messaging to discourage someone who’d otherwise buy.
Beauty shop owners purchased Calendly regularly, as did other SaaS companies. A large TAM is a good thing.
So instead of committing hard, we pruned hard. Here’s a great question to ask yourself when assessing ICP’s: Who’s always asking for a discount?
In Calendly’s case, it was the education vertical, which had longer sales cycles than most other customers. When you ask the right question, you see easy decisions in front of you—like not marketing to the education sector.
So we know who to avoid, now who do we target? Let’s ask another good question.
What do our top-paying customers have in common?
The only thing they have in common is they’re Fortune 500.
What % of Fortune 500 companies use Calendly?
It’s a bit of legwork, but we do this: find the @domain for the emails of all 500 companies. Compare that to all of our sign ups.
That results in an ad like this, which Adam wrote in 2020, and Calendly still uses today.
Converting Free-to-Paid Users
At Calendly, the free-to-paid conversion rate wasn’t bad. Many companies sit at 1 or 2%, if they’re lucky.
Calendly sat around 4%, but never broke it.
Because it’s so fundamental to ARR when fundraising, the CEO said this was one of the most impactful things we could work on.
Without writing a novel, you’ll take my word that we tried and failed at least two dozen strategies: emails, popups in the UI, more emails, social media, messaging on the login page, messaging on the homepage, and three more emails.
Nothing touched it.
What finally worked was… [This message is redacted; it’s worth $100k. Can’t give that away for free]. That doubled our conversion rate for around a month, from 4% to 8%. It went back down of course—and leveled at 6%.
We’d improved our free-to-paid conversion rate by 50%, allowing Calendly to raise at a valuation of 3 Billion.
[This message is redacted; it’s worth $100k. Can’t give that away for free!].
That doubled our conversion rate for around a month, from 4% to 8%. It went back down of course—and leveled at 6%.
We’d improved our free-to-paid conversion rate by 50%, allowing Calendly to raise at a valuation of 3 Billion.
Want to implement PLG strategies in your business?
Send an email to hello@plg.agency.