Lessons From Chameleon’s Big Pivot from Product-Led to Sales-Led Growth

The Breakout Growth Podcast

Product-Led Growth is all the rage, but it wasn’t working

Today, things are looking good for Chameleon and its CEO, Pulkit Agrawal. Since we recorded this week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast with him, Chameleon announced a successful Series A. But in 2015 the company was heading towards the startup scrap heap.

That’s where co-hosts Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr pick up this conversation. Pulkit and his co-founders had built a product that offered simple tools to personalize customer experiences with product tours and tooltips. They were following the Product-Led playbook that was driving success for other startups in similar categories all around them.

The problem was they were running out of money. The business was not taking off even with an easy-to-use self-serve interface and low prices.

Pivoting to a Sales-Led Go-to-Market Strategy

If you listened to our previous conversation with the CEO of Fireflies, Krish Ramanelli, you will hear a story where PLG was exactly the right strategy. So why wasn’t it right for Pulkit and his team? And how did he figure it out?

Jump in and hear how focusing on the must-have experience helped Pulkit and his team regroup and reframe the business, why he doesn’t see the world as either Sales-Led or Product-Led and how the tough early journey informed his team’s growth approach.

The Breakout Growth Podcast is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-K_CY4-IrZ_auEIs0j97zA/featured

We discussed:

* Building a business to solve a personal pain point (03:59)

* Realizing the team had over-indexed on a self-serve model (06:08)

* Learning that intuition isn’t fact (12:48)

* Sales-Led & Product-Led; different learnings, different value (18:30)

* Thinking through customer motivations to drive growth (24:55)

* Building the culture to support Sales-Led growth (43:29)

And much, much, more . . .

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seanellis.substack.com