In this episode of the GrowthTLDR, we talk to Xenia Muntean, the CEO, and co-founder of Planable.
Planable is a four-year-old company based in London with 20 employees and 700 customers. They provide a tool that helps social media managers better collaborate.
We talk to Xenia about their journey to 700 customers. We get into why they went from a free plan to a free trial and back to a free plan. We talk about some of the biggest hurdles Xeina had as CEO in growing planable and how they differentiate themselves in a saturated market.
Happy Growing!
Time Stamped Notes
[3:00] - Planable is four years old, have 20 employees, and over 700 customers
[4:00] - The three founders of planable previously worked in advertising and created the product to solve their issues around collaboration. Xenia feels the first $1000 in MRR is the most difficult. They struggled a lot to get initial traction with the product. Launching on AppSumo had a sizeable impact on their early success.
[9:15] - The quality of signups from AppSumo were better than Xenia had expected.
[10:15] - Planable went from a free plan to a free trial and then back to a free plan. Xenia feels their first free plan was too generous, which impacted their upgrade rates. Their latest free plan does a better job of monetizing their product's core value.
[14:55] - Xenia talks about Planable's sales model
[16:45] - The Planable's sales team calls into warm leads, people who sign up for their content, blog, and from doing cold outreach via LinkedIn sales navigator.
[17:30] - Planable's ideal customer is social media managers, Xenia talks to the challenges of differentiating their product in such a crowded space. Planable differentiates themselves by talking about specific problems their persona have, that aren't often covered by other brands.
[20:45] - One of the most challenging problems Xeina has to solve as a CEO was building a product that fulfilled the founder's vision. You need to continue iterating on the product to meet your customers' needs and prioritize the correct features to build.
[25:00] - As a startup CEO Xenia obsesses about only a small number of metrics that matter - MRR, Churn, LTV, ACV.
[25:50] - On the free plan, Xeina looks at the number of free signups and the number of those who upgrade.
[26:35] - If Xeina had an unlimited budget, she would double down on content marketing.
[27:20] - The way you differentiate your content in a saturated market is to create content on topics that others aren't uncovering.
[28:40] - One of the things Xeina would have done differently is invested in content marketing earlier and invested more.
