AMA: Pomerium Head of Marketing, Nikhil Balaraman on Self-Serve Product Marketing

In a lot of cases, they’re the same customer, they just want to buy differently. For example, an individual user who may end up being your internal champion wants to try the product for a personal use case. Great, go and self serve, get familiar with us! Our touch in that use case is much lighter, no overt sales touch, mostly just ensuring that there are no roadblocks to product adoption. However, if that were to come in as strictly an enterprise deal, the user probably doesn’t have the ability ...Read More

Lol. They spend their time getting to know their audience. Self-serve product marketers are their own sales enablement team. Selling a dev product? Do you understand what is going to get you to the top page of hacker news, or organic traction on reddit? Ok great, now go and create that content. Now do you understand where you LLM traffic is coming from? What questions people are asking to find you online? What about once a user signs up? What are the key activation points? How do we help people ...Read More

The major difference is that you’re not trying to convince someone upfront to sign a contract and then try the product. You are basically putting a minimal amount of friction (e.g., email signup/maybe small trial fee) and saying hey, try this and I bet you’ll like it. It really means that the product and all product activation touchpoints (email, in product messaging, support, etc.) all have to be aligned and in service of getting the user to recognize value as quickly as possible so that they’l ...Read More

I look for full funnel ownership. Have you built a strategy, then had to carry thru on execution. And once launched, how do you both optimize your acquisition and onboarding funnel, while driving customer engagement and product usage. What metrics are you using? For B2B products, I want to see revenue as that’s what is going to matter to the business as the ultimate metric, but perhaps that PLG product is in service of a bigger goal (upselling to multi-product/larger enterprise platform, etc etc ...Read More

I have found it depends on the size of the company. Early stage startup. PMM is content marketing and owns everything. A bit more mature, maybe you have an external or internal partner to help with content, but PMM is still responsible for driving strategy/editorial decision making and ensuring narrative alignment and product roadmap alignment. Fully scaled/mature org? Then perhaps you have a full content team with its own priorities and you can have some influence when it comes to which channel ...Read More

Honestly, community based content. When other people talk about what your product solve for them in earned media channels like reddit, social, hacker news, etc etc, this tends to be the most effective form. Also, at both Pomerium and Algolia actually we had a long lived (think 3+ years old) piece that was continually referenced as something that got people interested in us. And honestly, neither of those pieces was truly about the product, but instead was a piece that was just interesting to the ...Read More

Highly dependent on product, audience, price point, etc etc. But you can see, for example, with a lot of the vibe coding tools, they're almost entirely self-serve at the beginning of the customer journey because they're trying to show/prove value immediately...before getting you into a sales-assist funnel. However, a complex infrastructure product that needs to integrate with your entire infrastructure will likely need to be primarily sales-assisted, even if there is a self-serve/PLG mechanism a ...Read More

I think the “old” model of analytics tools like UTM trackers and attribution models might giving cloudy at best data due to things like “dark social” or just buyers doing tons of off-site research before finally deciding to enter the funnel. However, one nice thing is that in B2B, buyers and eventually customers do tend to still talk to us. So really, it’s just a shift to a new tool stack. For me, I gather all prospect and customer call transcripts into an NotebookLM project and use that to trac ...Read More