data.ai Product-led Growth

Introduction

At data.ai, our core product, Intelligence, is a web-based SaaS platform that delivers AI driven estimates for the global mobile app market. The company itself and its product growth is primarily sales led. Intelligence, has both a free offering meant to introduce potential leads to the breadth and depth of data.ai’s mobile market metrics estimates for both app usage and app store rankings, monetization and more.

The CEO, CROand CPO challenged me to lead a small group within the product team to drive more down market inbound leads using a free 10-day trial. The team included my dedicated Growth PM, two of my senior designers, and shared engineering resources led by a TPM from our engineering teams.

As Senior Director of Product Design & Growth, reporting to the CPO, I was responsible for the strategy, week to week efforts; directly managing our PM of growth and collaborating with my colleagues in sales and marketing to realize 2 key business outcomes; 1. Better qualified leads for inbound sales and 2. Increased engagement from our free accounts.

Challenges

Challenge 1: Mismatch of Web Visitors and Core ICP

The marketing site did well in attracting a lot of traffic; 900,000 avg unique visitors per month, primarily driven through search to individual app performance summary pages. Of these visitors, approximately 9k-15k new accounts were created per week, but only about 16% of those new users remained active. It was clear that we had a mismatch between the users visiting our marketing pages and those that were creating accounts indication a mismatch. The users that created new accounts were clearly not in our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Challenge 2: Internal Organizational Resistance

With sales-led organization, quotas and financial compensation tied to those quotas were key motivators to realize new revenue. Aligning executive leadership and a growth strategy that enhanced the sales cycle without cannibalizing it would be key factors to the success of the project.

Analysis

With the challenges clearly understood, I first wanted to get a clear landscape of the current trial efforts that were launched. There was a legacy trial experience currently reaching about 15% of all new free users. This was a full UI overlay tailored to specific user personas that provided video tutorials for our most popular Intelligence reports. This was a full screen modal that presented a list of short videos that were linked directly to the reports.

As I met with the squad, we analyzed the current performance of the existing trial and learned that less than 4% of all new users were watching the videos. We then discussed how we could get to the desired outcomes.

My Growth PM set our current baseline and built out the metric analysis. It was clear that a trial was a popular option, with most users activating their 10-day trial within 3 days of signup. Those that activated the 10-day had twice the overall engagement during and after the trial’s 10-day window. It became clear that our goal was to increase trial activation in the first 2 days of signing up and to increase trial user engagement during the 10-day trial.

The team also benchmarked and researched analogous trial experiences from competitors, best in class B2B SaaS platforms and others. This research enabled us to set expectations of the best possible outcomes from a PLG trial offering. With our baseline and our KPIs set, I laid out our strategy along with the KPI targets we would be tracking.

Strategy

The strategy focused on optimizing three key conversion points:

1. Increasing qualified website traffic through SEO-optimized landing pages
2. Streamlining the signup-to-trial activation journey through simplified onboarding
3. Maximizing trial engagement through targeted email nurture flows

By removing friction in the user journey and providing contextual value demonstrations at critical moments, the approach aimed to generate higher-quality inbound leads while supporting, rather than competing with, the existing sales-led motion.

The implementation leveraged no-code tools and rapid experimentation to validate assumptions before making substantial product changes, allowing for quick iterations and learning. Success metrics were closely tied to both user engagement (trial activation, feature usage) and business outcomes (qualified leads, sales pipeline) to ensure alignment with overall company goals.

Strategic Focus Areas

Trial Activation and Engagement

• Target: Increase trial activation from 12% to 25%
• Key initiatives: Optimize onboarding flow, implement targeted activation prompts, develop value-focused email nurture program

Qualified Lead Generation

• Target: 15% increase in qualified signups
• Key initiatives: SEO optimization of landing pages, implement targeted conversion paths, enhance trial-focused messaging

Execution

The execution followed three distinct phases, starting with rapid experimentation using no-code tools before moving to product changes. Initial efforts focused on testing assumptions through a no-code onboarding tool, email nurture flows, and gated premium features. We segmented analytics between our baseline group (using video-based onboarding) and test group (using in-context guides) to measure impact.

Weekly reviews with CPO and cross-functional leaders tracked progress against key metrics. Early results showed improved product engagement but lower-than-expected onboarding completion. A quick pivot to streamline onboarding around two primary navigation items - App search and Top Apps report suite - yielded immediate results. Completion rates jumped from 24% to 80%, with users showing 2x higher 30-day retention and 4x higher 60-day activity rates.

With initial targets met, we expanded trial access from 15% to 50% of users. The next phase focused on email optimization, where analysis revealed existing nurture flows emphasized event marketing over product value. A revised email strategy highlighted core product use cases and Intelligence platform features, resulting in 25% increased platform traffic and 8% higher 30-day trial activation.

This momentum was challenged by an unexpected search algorithm change that reduced marketing page traffic by 70%. I quickly mobilized with marketing leadership to redesign pages around market-leading product features. Working with engineering, I collaborated with engineering to open new API endpoints to surface proprietary AI estimates previously restricted to paid accounts. Within two months, the redesigned pages not only recovered lost traffic but achieved a 20% increase in SEO traffic and 22% higher new user signup rates.

Based on these sustained improvements, I presented outcomes to the CMO, CRO, and CPO, securing approval for full release of the product-led trial to all new users and those who hadn’t activated their trial.

Results and Impact

The implementation of our product-led growth strategy delivered measurable improvements across our key focus areas:

1. Trial Activation and Engagement:
   • Trial activation increased from 16% to 36%, exceeding B2B SaaS benchmarks
   • User activity during and after trial increased 4x
   • Feature activation on locked screens increased 640%
2. Lead Generation and Sales Impact:
   • SEO-driven inbound leads grew by 20%
   • Sales pipeline from trial users increased 3x
   • Paid conversion from trial users grew from 4% to 18%

Conclusion

The successful implementation of product-led growth within data.ai’s sales-led environment demonstrated that enhancing the trial experience could significantly impact both user engagement and sales pipeline quality. By focusing on streamlined onboarding, contextual feature discovery, and targeted content, we achieved a 36% trial activation rate while supporting our sales team’s objectives.

Critical to this success was maintaining alignment with sales leadership through weekly progress reviews and shared KPIs that demonstrated how the trial experience enhanced rather than replaced the sales process. The 3x increase in sales pipeline from trial users provided concrete evidence that product-led and sales-led motions could work in harmony, leading to better qualified leads and increased user engagement from our free tier.