4 Tools To Help You Grow Your SaaS Business

Selecting the right tools to enable your SaaS PLG growth strategy can be challenging. There are hundreds of tools out there and they all claim to be the magic wand you need to understand your users and drive growth.

In this article I outline the top 4 tools to enable product led growth and give you the information you need to understand the features and benefits each has to offer.

1. Google Analytics

This one is obvious. Google Analytics has been the go to source for web analytics for 20+ years now. It’s free, easy to use, and provides a wealth of information for websites and apps.

Key Features:

1. Free – Not much more to say. You get access to comprehensive web analytics, for free.
   
2. Ease of use – Just create an account and add a simple JS Snippet to your website and you’ll start collecting usage data.
   
3. Tons of free help online – You can pretty much google anything you’re trying to do in google analytics and you’ll find someone has published a tutorial explaining it.
   
4. Robust ecosystem – Because Google Analytics is so widely used there is a robust ecosystem of integration partners.

How Google Analytics Enables Product Led Growth:

In order to successfully implement a Product Led Growth model you need to attract people to your website, and get them excited about your product. Google Analytics provides visibility into a ton of information that can help you optimize the top of funnel, understand acquisition channels and user behavior, measure key events, and more.

When to Add Google Analytics to Your Product Led Growth Stack:

Don’t waste any time adding Google Analytics to your website and app. The sooner you start collecting usage data the sooner you can start improving your user experience.

2. MixPanel

MixPanel is a customer experience platform that is useful in understanding how your users are interacting with you app, or website. With MixPanel you instrument events that are important to your user experience, and then use this data to improve your user experience. MixPanel enables more advanced analysis and segmentation, and the ability to send messages and run experiments targeting specific segments of users.

Key Features:

1. Behavior Analytics – MixPanel makes it easy to gain access to and analyze user behavior.
   
2. Cohort Analysis – Conduct analysis on different groups of users that are important to your business.
   
3. Event Tracking – Instrument events for key feature usage, and/or engagements points.
   
4. Alerts – Setup alerts and be notified when key metrics change suddenly.
   
5. Free Version – a free version of the tool makes it easy to get started.

How MixPanel Enables Product Led Growth:

MixPanel enable you to continuously improve your user experience, which is a critical component to achieving product led growth.

When to Add MixPanel to Your Product Led Growth Stack:

Add MixPanel to your app as soon as you start testing your product with real users.

3. HotJar

HotJar is a suite of tools that offers a number of different growth capabilities. You can use HotJar for everything from heat maps and funnel visualization to onsite polls and surveys. Because this tool includes features that impact every stage of the funnel it makes it ideal for early stage businesses, and for those looking to minimize the number of tools that need to be managed.

Key Features:

1. Heat Maps – generate heat maps for key landing pages.
   
2. Surveys and Polls – present surveys and/or polls to users that visit your website or app.
   
3. Funnels – build out and visualize funnels.
   
4. Forms – build forms and embed them on your website to collect feedback and leads
   
5. Many Tools, One Subscription – having all of these capabilities in a single subscription is perhaps the HotJars most valuable feature.
   
6. Free Version – a free version of the tool makes it easy to get started.

How HotJar Enables Product Led Growth:

HotJar contains tools to help you optimize your digital properties, conduct research, generate leads, and visualize funnels.

When to Add HotJar to Your Product Led Growth Stack:

Add HotJar to your website right away. The free tier allows you to gain access to a lot of functionality that can help you learn and iterate more quickly.

4. AppCues

Appcues presents themselves as the product led growth platform. And there is some truth to that statement. They have created a very powerful tool that can help you both understand and impact user behavior.

Key Features:

1. On-boarding – create personalized onboarding experiences to help deliver positive experiences that lead to more engaged users.
   
2. Collect In-app feedback – collect user data in app while they are “in the moment”.
   
3. In-app Announcements – deliver timely, in-app announcements to users.

How Appcues Enables Product Led Growth:

Appcues can help improve onboarding and feature adoption, this is the products core value. They are focused on helping businesses improve product experience to drive growth.

When to Add Appcues to Your Product Led Growth Stack:

Appcues can be expensive depending on how many monthly active users you have, and it requires upfront investment and ongoing management, so be sure you are ready to leverage the platform before jumping in. That said … onboarding, activating, and getting new users to value is critical so get this up and running as soon as you have an internal champion to own it.

Are There Other Tools?

Of course there are other tools. Some compete directly with the tools listed above and others are focused on completely different areas. I believe in a minimalist approach to data collection, and tooling. Have too much of either of these can be more paralyzing than having none at all.

My advice … check out these tools and if you don’t like them, try their competitors until you find a set of tools to do the things YOU believe will enable you to consistently deliver amazing customer experiences.

Learn about driving product led growth for your SaaS business, read The Beginners Guide to Product Led Growth.

Previously published at https://saasplg.com/4-tools-grow-your-saas-business/