The Future of Growth Is Product-Led with Wes Bush

Speaker A: Welcome to Tip Top. Grow up your business with Metronomics. Join me, Shannon Burn Susko and Metronomics certified coach, Jed Roberts.

Speaker B: We'll be talking to business thought leaders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and business team coaches who have all taken the journey to grow up their businesses to their Tip Top.

Speaker A: We'll be sharing strategies, systems, um, stories on how you can grow your company up at the speed you want.

Speaker B: If you're searching for your path to the Tip Top and feel your time is running out, then this podcast is for you.

Speaker A: Well, welcome back, everyone, to the Tip Top, uh, podcast, where we're growing CEOs and leaders to where they want to end up. I'm so excited to have Wes Bush with me today. Welcome, welcome. It is a pleasure to have you here. Can you just give our listeners a little bit of your background? I'm so impressed with your background. We're going to talk a little bit more about it and we'll talk a little bit more about, you know, we'll give an O a good opening so people understand sort of what the sweet spot is. But I just, you know, just give it in your own words, your background.

Speaker C: Yeah, I'll give the, uh, TLDR on my entire story, basically. So I got into the software space in about a decade ago just helping software companies grow. And at that time, they're all sales led, so the only way you could sell was with the sales team to sell that software. And I was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month giving people, like, the guides, the white papers of the day of like, hey, here's how to do video marketing, all that stuff. And the sales team would just follow up with them and go through. And I always thought in the back of my head, I'm like, really? Is this how we buy software today? Like, I don't recall ever doing that with Slack or Zoom or anything like that. So then at this company I was at Vidyard, we eventually launched a free trial. We didn't know what we were doing. It just bombed. And then we launched a freemium product and it just, like, explod, like, first year, 100,000 plus users, um, that were using it, and then now it's like millions that use it every single year. And so that was like my, uh, I call it the PLG to Jesus moment, where I was like, oh, you know, there was like this old way of growing a company where you just, like, tell people about it, you go on demos and you really try and educate them as best as you can to make a really Good buying decision. But then I was like, what if, what if the future of how people want to buy is just try before you buy and if they have an amazing experience, guess what? They've sold themselves. The product has actually sold itself. And from that point on I've just been hooked. And at uh, Product Led, the company I run, we've helped 455/ companies generate over $1 billion in just self serve revenue. And so I'm a little obsessive about this topic. I love chatting about it and helping more people just figure out like how can you lead with product and really grow through that?

Speaker A: So this is exactly why it's pretty rare that I don't do an intro of the guest on our podcast. But I wanted you to intro it because it's so like I was so attracted to this topic and I want everyone listening in to actually learn why product led growth is so important. And it's just not about, you know, software as a service. It's just not about software. And we're going to talk about that. And the biggest thing that as CEOs and leaders we're spending our days sort of working, trying to build our companies that grow year after year. That's what we do, you know, that's what we've set out to do. And one challenge, you know, this is why I was so attracted to your, to your session at Ace Tech. And learning about what you did is one challenge almost every CEO and leader has and they're facing it right now. It's just looking to make growth, you know, simple and, and I'm going to say less expensive because it's just more expensive right now. It's just getting more and more and everyone thinks they just have to put more in advertising costs more, sales cycles are longer. Buyers trust companies less. Right. And product led and you know, that value time, it's all about trust. And then customers want proof these days before they commit. Right? And so when you think of software that's a little easier, you know, hard goods, whatnot, you know, what, what's the ideas there? And I really want to talk to you about that. Some companies seem to make growth less like, make it like less effort. It's like effortless, not sound. Growth and effortless usually doesn't go together. And people, people, you know, try products, right all the time. Like I was, you know, talking about one just before we got on here. Try products, they tell others and then they become customers. And so I really, really want to unpack, you know, product led growth, your experience because it's a great, amazing story. But the impact you've made and that you just shared, amazing and so welcome. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here.

Speaker C: Thanks so much for having me. I'm pumped to go through this and, uh, really break it down because I'm like, every time I hear like, oh, yeah, like product that go, this is new thing, I like, I'm a big history buff. I love reading all about history. But I'm like, there's so many examples of companies that do this. Like, you think of like at the airport, cologne, perfume, all that stuff. You're like, is that, uh, a product, like growth experience? They're like, technically, yes. You are trying before you're buying and sometimes when you try on like cologne or something, you're like, you know, after a couple hours you're like, oh, uh, it's not even, I can't smell it anymore. You're like, it smells weird. Like, my wife hates me now and is avoiding me. Okay, not the effect I wanted, but

Speaker A: if, if I can just follow up from your opening and just give a little bit more detail for those who haven't followed your work. Give people a little bit more detail on how you have become the product led growth guy. That's how I think of you. You're the product led growth guy. So give people a little bit more, give, uh, context. You've got lots of great content out there and just you know what you're doing today and sort of like from the opening story to where you're spending your time today.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, okay, we're going back in history as far as this whole journey. But yeah, it's kind of weird because you're like everything in, like looking back, you get 2020 vision, but it was never this clear, like, is what I'm going to share. But it started like at that experience with Vidyard, we were seeing amazing growth. And then after that, I started doing consulting for some companies and this was before it was even called product led growth. I was basically telling people founders, I'm like, it' kind of like conversion rate optimization for your product to get users to value. And then they're just going to like, you know, upgrade once they get to value. And you know, the founders I was working with, they kind of got it. They're like, yeah, we understand, like trial free to paid conversion rate, all that stuff. Fantastic. But when it came to telling other people that had a sales led motion at that time, it was like super confusing. Like, why would I do that? That makes no sense. And so finally the one firm came up with the word, which is Open View Ventures. They're like a, uh, VC fund. And I was, ah, that's it. And for like a year it was literally just Open View and myself talking about this new concept of product led growth. And I wrote a bunch about it. I, um, got asked by a couple companies to like put together a course. And I'm like, I, I guess I'm, I guess I know a little bit about this topic. But I remember at the end of that program, uh, it was like this live cohort. I was just like, oh man, I don't know this topic that well. I need to dive deeper. I thought I knew about it, but you know, with like that iceberg analogy, like, I just knew the top. And, uh, so then I dove deeper. And I was at this one conference and I had one of my friends, she was like reminiscing about the first day of the events and she's like, but I had this great idea to write a book. And I was like, aha, Uh-huh. That's it. I need to write a book on it to really dive deep. And I think one thing we both have in common, like with, uh, Ironman and training and stuff, it's like there's. I think there's some things I'm rigged better to do than others, which is endurance, like long, hard stuff. I'm like, a book is exactly that. I love writing books. Then I wrote the first one and I think it was because it was first and it was timely. It just became like, that is, if you want to understand the topic, that's what everybody started picking up.

Speaker A: And just say the title of the book again. Just because I know you wrote a few books.

Speaker C: The first book you wrote was, uh, Product Led Growth. How to Build a Product that Sells Itself.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's attractive. Okay, going. I just wanted to make sure, you know, listeners can go get that book. It's on Amazon. It's on all the places you'd expect, correct?

Speaker C: Yes. Yeah, you got it.

Speaker A: Good, good.

Speaker C: Yeah. So then it was, that book came out. It, uh, really did. Fantastic. And then throughout that time, I, we were helping a lot of different companies understand product growth, start to implement it. But then I, I just analyzed all of our customers. I was like, I don't actually know what separates the companies that see this, like breakout success with product led growth versus the ones that like, they try it and they invest, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in rolling this out. And it Just flops. I was like, how can I be the PLG guy if I don't even understand the basic answer to that question? And that ended uh, up in like a two year quest of just trying to understand like what are the patterns, what are like some of the basic stuff you need to have in order for this to work. And what kind of came out of that was the product LED Playbook, which that is like the nuts and bolts of like how do you actually do this and operationalize this in your company? And so we identified like there's these nine core components you got to go through. And actually the order does help quite a bit when you're rolling it out for the first time and things like how does this connect to your strategy? Who's your ideal user, it's not the same person as your buyer, your free model, all that stuff. Um, and then we started rolling out uh, implementers to actually make it easier for other companies to roll this out with them. Because when you're alone implementing this just a system is usually it helps and it gets you there to like a good B1, but to get to a world class PLG motion, it helps to just partner with another operator. So yeah, that was the second evolution. And then I just recently rewrote the first book because AI is completely changing the game. I was just like this book I wrote seven years ago, it needs updating because the way you sell products today, it's, it's so different and uh, it's exciting at the same time. But it's also can be scary because if you're not at the right end of the, you know, the spectrum here, it's like it could disrupt your entire category. When you think of like people aren't even using the product, they're just plugging into cloud and like, oh yeah, it's got a connector. I'm using your product, but I'm not even using the actual dashboards and everything that you built out for it.

Speaker A: Right. So when you like. So for anyone who's brand new to thinking about product led, what's the premise? Like what's the absolute premise that uh, like you know, unlocked everything? What's the definition of product led?

Speaker C: I think there's a belief that you got to have which is world class products are built to be experienced, not explained. And if you believe that, and if you believe like, okay, like you were talking a bit about like uh, trust. And trust is like the most important thing when you're gonna buy something. But do you trust something that you've used and you got value out of ideally quickly. And it's like, yeah, of course, like you trust your own first person experience now even if you got the best reviews, you got the best sales rep that will help you to sell that product. But wouldn't it be amazing if you didn't even have to do all that? Even if you have like two case studies or whatever on your site, but the product just delivers so quickly on its value, it will still stand out more than some of those other alternatives. Unless you know you're the salesforce of the category. You're like people just choose you because you know that is the default option in some categories. But even that is changing pretty quickly.

Speaker A: So when we think about traditional selling was, you know, isn't necessarily the, the greatest path to growth in learning this, you, you learned that this is how you've got into this space and really focus on the space to understand it. What were some of the mistakes? What's the most, you know, like what, what were the biggest mistakes that sort of led to the biggest lessons early on that you experienced? Because you, you, you got here through like going oh, uh, I'm m going to try this, going to try this, going to try this. What were some of those? Because I'm sure others listening in are uh, experiencing some of those.

Speaker C: Yeah. So is this more just for the product that companies that were going through this journey or like more for my journey of.

Speaker A: Yeah, from your journey? Yes, from your journey. Like what really? Like pick the big ones. Pick like two. What were the two big ones? Think TSN turning point. I can see that because you're Canadian for sure.

Speaker C: I think I always look at building your team. It uh, kind of feels like a muscle up. If you ever have a time CrossFit or you're trying to get your body above the bar, it's like, it's kind of awkward. You're trying to figure it out, especially the first couple times. And so I think my biggest mission and this has been a reoccurring thing where I'm like, okay, finally I'm going to get ahead of this, this third time. But there's. When you're in a industry where your IP needs to be refreshed pretty quickly, you um, can have like, let's say you launch new book or something like that, which has a unique piece of IP in the market which stands out, it's unique and people are like, oh my goodness, I need that and I need to implement in my business fast. It has a shelf life. And so that shelf Life might be. So let's say two to three years. It used to be two to three years in our industry.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And then it's like, okay, great, we have the products, we built the core products around that. Let's scale up the leadership team. Let's go through that. And then I was a little slow in the, like, okay, around year one and a half, maybe two years. Uh, that's where we build the big team and then double down on growth. And then, oh, we're at the tail end of that ip and Wes hasn't created something new. It was just like, it happened to me twice. And until I realized. And then now I'm like. Like, with AI, it's like that shelf life of your ip, it's less than like two to three years. Uh, it's maybe six months. Lucky. You're lucky if it's six months. So it's like, how do I design this business to. Not it sounds selfish, but to revolve around me so I can just do what I do best, which is create the ip, understand the patterns, and then have the team scale up and operationalize, commercialize the rest of the pieces. So, um, that would be probably my absolute biggest miss. Uh, that's been a bit of a reoccurring thing where I'm like, okay, I gotta get ahead of that. Because if you don't, if you just have like, old, yesterday's growth stuff that works, uh, it's not gonna be that effective for the people that do implement it.

Speaker A: So, like, today you advise companies, like, around the world, what. And you talked a little bit about patterns, right? What are the patterns right now that keep showing up over and over? And I'm sure they're evolving as you allud to with AI, with how products are getting used very differently than they did. What. What are some of the patterns that you're seeing?

Speaker C: So if people use your product in some way, uh, this applies a little bit more to software products or stuff like that. But there used to be a lot of, like, all the rage was make a good, like, user experience. And that's like, make it easy for people to use your stuff. Now it's actually about output experience. Like, people don't want to use your.

Speaker A: Your tech prompts.

Speaker C: Um, it's just like, hey, what is that output that you're going to give me? And then along with that, the expectations have changed quite a bit with how fast can I expect somebody to get the value in my product? And wondering, yeah, but like, even if you're in a kind of sheltered industry that usually targets tech laggards that are like usually like 5 to 10 years behind, like some of the fastest moving industries. They still have that expectation of like somebody in that space has used one of these tools that gets them the value extremely fast. And so that's the bar now that they have in your market, your tool or whatever you do for your business. And so, um, that expectation gap is changing pretty quickly. And like right now it's about 60 seconds. Time to value is kind of the new standard. I uh, bet you by next year it'll be 30 seconds. And then eventually is not even going to be people using your app. It could be agents. And it's going to be about agent experience. Like we're not even at that stage yet, but it's coming. Like if you. The thing I study right now for the pattern recognition is what is happening in the development industry because that part is always at the top. They are always at the forefront of like what is possible. Mhm. And so like when we interview like the founders of Netlify, uh, as an example, it's like 80% of their signups are just agent. I'm like, how cool is that?

Speaker A: It's quite different. Yeah, very. I love, I love that you talked through that flow because you know, when you think 20 years ago, okay, companies educated buyers, right? Salespeople demonstrated products, then the buyers purchased, right. Today that, that time to value, as you said, like you're at 60 seconds and you're thinking a year from now is 30. It's probably exponentially. Yes. And then it may not even be, uh, a human, right. Uh, you know, looking for that. What's, you know, when I think of product LED growth and you know, what I've learned about what you do and how you do it and how you think about it. What's, you know, there's that value, you know, experience of time, right. That that's going to get you to take some action. What's like, can you talk a little bit more? There's the software side of it. Can you talk a little bit more about like the hard good side of it or not just software. What, what, what are you seeing out there?

Speaker C: Yeah, actually, so I, I gave a talk a couple weeks ago when I was finishing up a nice rafting tour. Pretty close to where your, your event is these weekends. But um, it was funny, awesome. But uh, the one person that came up to me after, he's like, okay, I am um, working on this company. We help people with cerebral palsy, uh, with this Headset where like they, in the past they couldn't do anything, but they have this headset and now they could like, look at that light bulb and turn it on. They could, uh, look at that blender, turn it on. And so it now gives them, um, the ability to actually, actually, uh, do amazing things that they couldn't do before. And so it's got this heavy hardware component. And so he's like, well, how does this even apply to what we do? And I'm like, okay. With hardware, the thing that's different is there's actual costs involved when it comes to giving away something for free is you're not going to send that like, you know, $2,000 headset to anybody. But what you could do is understand where do everybody, uh, who has that, where do they hang out? Like maybe it's a convention, maybe it's a event or something like that. And you could have, uh, whether it's a booth or just hand some of these out and really craft that first experience where, you know, in two minutes they can learn how to use it. They can do three to really cool things with their parents there that now their parents can start seeing like, wow, look at them. That's amazing. And then they can have that like, aha. Moment of like, oh. And then like, this is three to five minutes of time they invested to do that. Imagine, uh, what, you know, the first hour could do. And that is what you could do to kind of craft those experiences with hardware, but give people that experience where it's like, you don't have to pay that $2,000 upfront price tag, but you could, you know, invest three to five minutes, try it out in a place where you're already going. How convenient is that? And like, I see you probably notice this too, at like high end hotels, you'll see a, uh, peloton, usually a lot of them, I try to work with them on their travel experience because it sucks. But I think they're doing a good job of getting into the hotels and really giving you that experience. Like if you want to try it out, you don't have to buy one of these bikes. You can just, just see for yourself and go through one of those group rides and, and get a good feel for it. So, uh, that's one of the, the ways you can adapt this, the same strategy, but you just got to think a little bit more of like the distribution of where are those places where people can actually make it easy to try it.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I love that because I know when we were Talking before this and when we originally met, it's like it's, you know, giving something away for free. Right. And whenever CEOs hear the word free, they immediately think, oh, so we're giving away our margins, we're giving our way. You know. You know, that's obviously not what you're talking about. What actually is a free offering or a free product? How do you define that?

Speaker C: Yeah, and it's different for every company. So sometimes it might just be, hey, like uh, with a lot of these AI products, like it's a certain amount of usage because they're is hard costs involved. Uh, at the end of the day, that is like the newest thing for the software space, which is kind of funny. It's not 99% margin. What? Okay. Um, for software products, it can be like eternally free because they can't afford that because it doesn't cost them a ton. You know, going back to even just uh, outside of the software space as well. Like you see this all the time in gyms as well. It's like, hey, try the first week for free. Go through this or try the first class for free. It is a subunit of value at its highest level that allows people to experience your core value prop.

Speaker A: That's all it is.

Speaker C: It's just something where they can experience what it is now where people mess up and they think, oh, it's just, let's slap on like a 14 day free trial to this, you know, very enterprisey tech. And I've done that. And it doesn't work because it's really not solving what I call the beginner problem in your industry. And every industry has this like, what is the beginner problem? The easiest thing to solve that everyone will struggle with. And so that is where you would like apply that free model so that if you think about your total adjustable market, everybody's going to have that problem, so why not offer that for free? So you are the first choice and you have the best, easiest way to serve people in that space, um, from the very beginning. And then it's like, great, land and expand, go from there.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Now like, you know, lots of people are definitely thinking about this. Lots of companies have put in that offering, but they might not be seeing that, you know, time to value that. Like some of the things that you've talked about and experience. Um, I know we, you know, I was definitely attracted to your work because of the framework, because of how you've, you know, sort of broken it down, thought about it. Can you talk about the framework that that product led growth works and just give you know, listeners a little bit more, you know, like what, what are they? How do you do this? What are the actions to do this?

Speaker C: Yeah. So I mean the two books where I always recommend like people start is like product that growth, how to build a product Sell self is like literally the framework of should we do this or not? And like what it is, should we consider it? And so in there like the first version didn't have any of this stuff because I was like here's how you do it. And uh, you don't have to worry about like you know, the leadership team. Get everybody else on board, just do it. And uh, very um, naive. And after working with a lot of companies I'm like actually all this other stuff does matter. Um, so yeah, getting conviction around it is probably the biggest thing for the founder and CEO. Like if you're not all in, you don't get it. There's so many things, it's just going to fall apart. So that's like base level one of the pyramid of like the five levels you got to get into. The second is the commitment from the leadership team. So like are they bought in? Do you actually have resources that you're going to dedicate towards this? Like it still miss me. Sometimes I see our work with public companies like thousand plus employees and they're betting their entire company on this new product that has a free motion because it's, they think it's cool. It's just five people working on it. I'm like come on, we can unlock a little more resources here. We don't have to be so resource constrained for this. Uh, but it's because they don't have full commitment. And then it's like once you get commitment, what are the capabilities you need to do this really well. And it's like oh, you have a junior UX person uh, that like they're part time and like okay, so you're probably not going to have an amazing easy to use product. You need like, like really good people for that. And so yeah, that's like the level three of the capabilities and that is actually the construction which is all about the product LED playbook. Like that one goes through the full system and I could talk like another hour about that one but that is like the, what is the easiest way to build it out. And then lastly it's cash. Like if you don't actually get this thing generating a good amount of cash, it's going to get scuffled or at least Even in some of the other companies we've helped where it's, they still have a very strong sales motion, but the uh, free motion is feeding like it's touching every single one of those deals. Everybody starts there and then maybe a sales ARP reaches out if they're getting some good usage and then it expands. But like, you gotta have that, like it's generating 40 to 60 or to 80% of the revenue of your business for it to become core for how you're actually going to go to market?

Speaker A: Yes. And so can you share. Are you able to share an example of a company that absolutely nailed it and why did it work?

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm trying to think of like some more public company examples that like, maybe people would understand a lot better than uh, just like some of the smaller ones that we might help. And so for public, uh, one, one of the ones that's like probably the most infamous is just Slack. So it's like, okay, look at Slack, if you communicate with other colleagues, okay, great, you'll just easily sign up, you'll share it with your team. And uh, long and behold, okay, if you want access to more of your history, okay, you just upgrade. It's like six bucks per user. And then you, you go through that. But what a lot of people who have big companies might be thinking is like, I don't want to do that because that's just $6 per user. We could, we can make a lot more. We got a big value prop that is worth a lot more than that. Well, guess what? Slack still has that motion. Like once it's one team in a big company and let's say it's 10 people using it, like they can still have that salesperson reach in and be like, hey, like, do you want to roll out Slack across your entire organization? You can unlock SSO and a lot of other security benefits, um, to do that. And so it's also, it's $20 per user now, but you can land and expand that much easier than you could otherwise.

Speaker A: And you said that very first thing is that commitment, ah, of the leadership team. The team. And this is a strategic decision. So who inside an organization should own this free product strategy? Is it marketing? Is it sales? Is it product? Is it the CEO who owns it?

Speaker C: Yeah. So this goes back to when I was trying to answer that question of like, hey, like what separates the companies where this really works versus the ones that it doesn't? And, and so the first probably five years of our business, our ideal, uh, customer was, was the senior product leaders, because they're just like buying in droves and they're like, oh, we need plg. This is like literally us, uh, product led growth and uh, we want more of this. And then I looked at all the data of like which companies actually successfully rolled this out and founders were like 20% of our overall customer pool and yet they represented 80% of the overall success of product led growth. So I was like, interesting. Why? So I started talking with all the founders and what I found is when you apply product led growth as a product thing, just a product thing. Okay, great, we got a free product. Let's give it some little resources and see how it works. Usually it never works, it never takes off. It doesn't get the full company buying. But when the founder gets it and they're like, oh, oh, okay, as far as how do we differentiate in the market? How do we win in this market? Uh, and they tie it back to their vision too. It's like it's baked into the DNA. That's why I'm much more excited about building product led organizations than product led growth motions. Uh, like you need a product led growth motion as far as like how do we have that free trial conversion mechanism but the back ends, that organization structure, that's the sexy stuff. That's the stuff where it's like it's going to last long term. Like if you think of canva, like how else could you democratize design, I don't know, like any other way other than you have a product like growth motion, easy to use product and you give it to the masses and they, they help you share it out to a lot of other people, uh, much lower customer acquisition costs and they still created a amazing multi billion dollar business out of that too.

Speaker A: Yeah, amazing. So if I'm a uh, CEO listening it, right? Founder listening and entrepreneur listening and leader listening in and they love this. They're like, ah, uh, I so want to learn more about this. Where do they start? What's the first step that like they could, you know, walk away from this and go, yep, I'm going to go do what's, what's the next step?

Speaker C: Yes. So the first step is so easy right now. So it's the uh, just read the product of growth book. Because that one, I literally rewrote it this year because I was like, I want to create something that is actually that like perfect first step is so you know what it is, is it right for you and then if it is, how to actually get started with it in the easiest way possible. Because everything, every framework I go through is just, how can I make this stuff way more accessible to many people, not just in the software space, but every industry to really figure out how you can use this as an advantage to stand out in a market where trust is at an all time low. And how can you really stand out?

Speaker A: Awesome. When. Okay, so let's just say we took that step and we got those steps in place and we're working through the framework. When do you know you're, you know, following this methodology? When do you know it's working? When do you know it's working? When is your free product, you know, yay, our free product's working.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's pretty straightforward because people will start upgrading, they will just start paying. I remember talking to one of the founders. He had this, uh, really easy to use. It was like a Canva alternative. So it made it easy to make graphics and stuff. But he was like, yeah, I still remember the day. Like, it was really weird. I turned off stripe notifications from my email because every day I'd wake up and there would be like a bundle of people just upgrading with like a $10 per month plan. But you know, over time that still adds up to a lot. But he's. Yeah, I got a little annoying. And uh, so you will see that, but also you'll hear from people like, wow, your product is so amazing. I got so much value out of it. Um, so those are the signs you'll see where you don't have to talk to people, you don't have to onboard people, uh, because they're just getting value out of your product. They love it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Time to value. Time to value, right? Trust the value. So here's a lightning round. Just quick, quick answers. Uh, and then we'll, we'll bring it around to a close. I could keep talking, but I'm looking at the time going, whoa, all good. So here, what's one company everyone should

Speaker C: study, I think for if you're looking at product LED companies like Canva's Super Interesting is easy to use and go through that whole experience from like a product admotion. So I'd start there.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good one. What's one business book that's influenced your thinking?

Speaker C: Oh, this is a hard one, Shannon. There's so many.

Speaker A: You gotta pick one. I know there's so many, but usually there was like a turning point, right? You read at a certain time and.

Speaker C: Yeah. Oh, uh, I forget the name of this one. You actually have them As a speaker. So, uh, Daniel Priestley, he wrote the book Oversubscribe. It was one of his. His wasn't oversubscribed. It was his earlier one. I think it was like, key person of influence. Yes. That actually goes back to the first question you asked me, like, how did he become the PLG guy? Well, I read that way before and it put together a, uh, really good framework for how do you craft yourself as that key person of influence in your industry. So Daniel's a smart guy.

Speaker A: Love it, Love it. Yeah, we're excited to host him at Tip Top this year in Toronto. What's one habit that's made you a better leader?

Speaker C: Oh, this year it's been meditating. You know, if stress goes up. And I'm, um, like, I had all the workout, like, habits dialed in. Good health, eating good, but then I was like, why am I still stressed? And so I was like, that is hands down the best one for me.

Speaker A: Love it. Well, this has been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. For people who want to learn more, what's the best place for them to go? Website. LinkedIn, maybe share that.

Speaker C: Yeah. Uh, so you can always check out productled.com, whereas my bank will say product and then like LED, like the light bulb and like, yeah, just like that. Hilarious. Or I'm also on LinkedIn, just Westbush.

Speaker A: Awesome, awesome. But I think people remember the product led, so I love that. And if you're curious, like, this is the thing, right? We need to earn trust before asking customers to buy. And so free isn't about free. It's about what are you willing to invest to create the value. This has been amazing. And it's not just about software. This applies. I loved all your examples. Soft and hard. This is a profound shift. And in the world that shifting really fast, a really important topic to understand. And Wes breaks it down. So simply pick up his second. Well, second version of his first book. Right?

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: Uh, thank you for sharing your thinking. Thank you for being here and, uh, good luck. In four weeks from now, we are talking about Ironman Ottawa. So good luck, Wes. Thank you. You're very, very welcome.