SLIPPERY related to PLG
The Product Company Gap was created to offer insights into the development of successful products, in a way that would contribute to building a sustainable company. It incorporated the notion of designing friction free products that would literally slip into market, hence the original SLIPPERY framework, now simplified to just SLIP. The framework provided an understanding of the fundamental elements needed to create products that delight users and drive sustainable growth for your startup. fv
Since this framework predates yet is relatable as a precursor to the now-popular Product Led Growth (PLG) approach, below is a table connecting the elements of SLIPPERY to PLG examining how each of its components relates to the modern principles of PLG
| SLIPPERY Framework | Related Product Led Growth (PLG) thinking… |
|---|---|
| Simple | • Intuitive UX/UI |
| • Streamlined design | |
| • Self-serve model | |
| Low to no initial cost | • Freemium models |
| • Low customer acquisition cost (CAC) | |
| • Sustainable growth | |
| Installs easily | • Seamless onboarding |
| • Quick start guide | |
| • Clear KPIs and metrics | |
| Proves value quickly | • Immediate value delivery |
| • Clear value proposition | |
| • Data-driven decision making | |
| Plays well with others* | • Integration capabilities |
| • Partner ecosystem | |
| • Expansion of product offerings | |
| Easy to use | • User-friendly interface |
| • Contextual help | |
| • User engagement & retention | |
| ROI is obvious | • Tangible business impact |
| • High customer lifetime value (CLTV) | |
| • Gamification and in-app feedback | |
| Yield-maximizing | • Upselling & cross-selling opportunities |
| • Indispensable product features | |
| • Viral loops & word-of-mouth marketing | |
| • Customer advocacy programs |
Ultimately, Startup Secrets emphasizes “no pride of authorship,” acting as a resource to support entrepreneurs in their journey. Rather than prescribing a specific approach, independent of source, we encourages you the entrepreneur to use your own judgment to develop unique, applicable solutions to your challenges. So in this case, the choice of frameworks or terms whether SLIPPERY or PLG is irrelevant. The key is understanding and mastering the concepts we hope will empower you to create exceptional products that genuinely resonate with your target audience.
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
Let me encapsulate the whole slippery framework and its relationship to product-led growth.
The idea of a slippery product, going back to the gain-pain ratio, is to take all the cost associated with a customer seeing, trying, buying, implementing, deploying, and owning your technology to basically zero, and take all the friction out. Imagine everyone else is running the track in shoes and you get your own lane of ice to skate on: you are going to kill everybody. That is the picture. The SLIP mnemonic (Simple to install and use, Low to no initial cost, Instant and ongoing value, Plays well in the ecosystem) is very similar to product-led growth, and you will see the similarities in the many books on PLG. It is not meant to replace PLG; it is a mnemonic that helps you think through the different components of product-led growth: install the product free, and as soon as people start using it, they upgrade for more seats and more capability, and the growth is driven by the product itself.
The fuller version, SLIPPERY, spells out more dimensions. Somewhere in here are gems that will help you move at breakneck pace as a skater. It should be simple. It should have low to no initial cost. It should install easily and integrate well. It should prove value quickly. It should play well with others. It should be easy to use. The ROI should be obvious. And your customers should be in a place where they cannot live without it, it is that sticky.
Two dimensions worth calling out on their own:
ROI should be obvious. In the consumer world, ROI is not that important; people spend to get something without formally calculating return. But in the enterprise it is totally critical. When somebody starts writing big checks, they will ask what the return on investment is going to be, and it should be increasing revenue, reducing costs, or, in very early stages where hard ROI is hard to show, at least driving competitive advantage (which is what visionaries look for in early markets). You can build on self-proving value, or do what one of my companies did and build a calculator that shows why what they do (desktop virtualization and its management) generates a return by reducing storage and making desktops easier to manage, giving an ROI right out of the box.
Sticky: customers cannot live without it. You want a product that is something your customers cannot live without, so it is not a question whether they get up the next morning and use it again; they have become completely dependent on it. Think of the iPad: how many people would be willing to give theirs up? Almost nobody. We have all become dependent on our phones and tablets as the means to do everything from communicate to entertain ourselves, so whether we call it critical or not, it certainly becomes sticky. Define products that fulfill a need customers fall in love with and do not want to give up.
The one idea, if you remember nothing else: disruptive innovation with non-disruptive adoption. What if you could build a truly disruptive innovation that was so exciting people had to have it, yet it had no disruption to adopt? A little company called VMware did exactly this: they found a way to take server utilization from the teens of percent up into the 80s or 90s without you changing your applications, your hardware, or anything, just by putting a layer in between that virtualized all those resources. That is disruptive innovation with non-disruptive adoption. If you can find products and services that do this, you are onto a winner, and it is worth spending real time thinking about how you could make that kind of impact.
A worked example: iPads in the enterprise (Estée Lauder and MobileIron). iPads are great, except when you take them to the enterprise. When you personally own the device, the last thing you want is to hand it over to the enterprise to control; you want to keep your photos, music, and personal stuff. But the enterprise wants to put an application on there so you can get access to email and so on. Estée Lauder wanted to use the iPad to sell their products, because it turned out to be a much easier way to sell than staffing counters (people trust iPads more than they trust sales reps when they make recommendations, which was driving revenue up 40%). But they had a hard time deploying and updating those applications and training people, until MobileIron came along and did it via the cloud: saved them two and a half million, helped them roll out 177,000 iPads worldwide with no IT touch. We gave them all the gain of rolling this out with no pain, all the traditional IT involvement and installation pain taken out and handled via the cloud. That is what building a slippery product looks like in practice.
In a nutshell: look for ways to build slippery products that embody all these capabilities. If you do, you will increase the gain your customers get, reduce the pain of acquiring you, and build some very interesting companies around it.