Part 3: 3 accounting technology trends to watch

Trend #3. Product-led growth

You may have heard the term product-led growth (PLG) but are unsure what it means.

It is a business strategy that places a software vendor’s product at the centre of initial contact to successful uptake and its use amongst consumers. The product’s features, performance, stickiness and virality do much of the selling.

Although product-led, the strategy involves consumers at its core – offering freemium to premium models, free trials, and opportunities to provide feedback and get involved in product development.

To help you better understand what product-led growth means, let’s look at our latest feature in XU Magazine, where we describe it as a shift in the market creating a new interplay between vendors and consumers, with the more innovative software vendors rightly responding.

Writing in XU Magazine, our Chief Commercial Officer, Paul Shipway, summarises these market shifts and software expectation changes. Today’s software offers:

› A consumer-grade experience you enjoy elsewhere – software that’s easy to implement, use and scale. Think plug and play.

› Added value realised early on – software that’s more intuitive, simpler, and quicker to adopt. But don’t mistake simpler for ‘basic’.

› A more meaningful relationship – opportunities to play your part in a product’s development. Vendors and consumers work together.

› Easy on the pocket pricing – means less of a vendor’s costs are included in the price you pay. Traditional sales layers stripped away.

Of course, what’s being described above is product-led growth.

What does product-led growth mean for you?

Let’s look at some Joiin examples to build on the above summary:

A user experience you enjoy elsewhere
Our consolidated reporting platform is designed to be easy to set up, implement and scale. Despite consolidations being a hugely complex task, the nuts and bolts of Joiin crunch your data to create great-looking consolidated group reports. For example, like the consumer writing assistant Grammarly makes grammar effortless, so Joiin simplifies consolidated reporting.

Added value realised early on
We prioritise ease of use as this makes adoption quicker and means your team can realise the value of our platform early on. With Joiin, our free trial enables you to test our platform to see if it meets your needs before subscribing to a paid plan. You also get in-app and in-person support with a wealth of on-demand onboarding videos and content designed to be used at your convenience.

A more meaningful relationship with your vendor
We work hard to improve our product based on highly valued customer feedback and insights, inevitably leading to an improved user experience overall. As a customer, you can expect to play your part in our platform’s development. To date, we’ve implemented 300+ platform updates based on our users’ suggestions. Our mutual gain is a better product.

This interplay between software vendors and consumers is what leads to more meaningful relationships in the market.

Pricing that’s easier on the pocket
We can offer a lower-priced product by focusing on the mutual goal of a simpler, easy-to-use product that incorporates user feedback and suggestions. Our product’s features, performance, stickiness and virality do much of the selling.

And because the primary focus is on the product being easy to use and intuitive anyway, we’ve found that we can operate successfully with much smaller sales, onboarding, and success teams (with fewer overheads to cover in our pricing).

“Product-led growth is a business strategy that places a software vendor’s product at the centre of initial contact to successful uptake and its use amongst consumers. The product’s features, performance, stickiness and virality do much of the selling.”

Is Joiin a product-led growth company?

Yes, we’re very open about our product-led growth strategy and why it is important to us. From our free trial and focus on continuous customer feedback to how we let our product do the talking, being product led is our ethos.

For us at Joiin, it’s about our entire company coming together to create a product that people want to buy in the first place and stick with.

With 32,000 entities across 103 countries relying on us, we’re dedicated to ensuring our product is easy to use, continuously improving and typically lower in price than our sales-led competitors.

About this blog series

In this blog series, we look at three accounting technology trends and, more importantly, what they mean for you. Part 1 looks at continued automation, part 2 covers greater data insights, and part 3 the benefits of product-led growth.

We hope the series will support your thinking around new technology and provide information that aids decision-making.

The series is for people looking to leap into new technology, considering what tech could be right for them, or those considering how to enhance their existing technology stack. We hope to support your thinking by examining the three trends and providing information that assists decision-making.

If you’ve enjoyed this blog series and are looking to get a reporting app for your business’s finance team, here are some handy tips on 5 big decisions to get the best finance app for your business ›

Perhaps you’re part of an accountancy firm? If so, here are tips for choosing a new accounting app ›

If you’d like to discuss the software market and product-led growth, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

To watch an on-demand demo or to sign up for a live demo, visit our demo page ›