#266 - Jonathan Anderson, CEO Candu - on rethinking PLG software development

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that helps product & growth teams build product-led experiences, experiment, and validate results, fast. And my guest is Jonathan Anderson, Co-founder and CEO of Candu. Jonathan Anderson is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He loves tech but can’t write a line of code. He's passionate about product-led selling and has launched services, strategy, operations, and analytics teams at venture-backed SaaS startups, including InsightSquared and LaunchDarkly.  Prior to startups, Jonathan worked at Bain & Company and he has a B.S. and M.S.Eng from Stanford University.  In September 2018, he co-founded Candu - a no-code tool that allows teams to collaboratively build the UI components needed to encourage the adoption of features, onboard users, and announce product news on a day-to-day basis. It's not just for the pure-play product-led companies, like Atlassian, Notion, and Loom — it's for the 'strivers' who are trying to figure out how to adjust their go-to-market motion for this new world order.  And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jonathan to my podcast. We explore what's holding a lot of software vendors back from shipping products to market and achieving high adoption rates. Jonathan shares his vision of how he aims to change that for good. He elaborates on the challenges he had to overcome to build traction and what that took from a product investment perspective in terms of first principles, focus, and grid. Lastly, he shares a do and a don't for B2B SaaS CEOs based on his most powerful own learnings. Here's one of his quotes We're changing the way that a business thinks about building its product. A single person, a single growth PM, can actually define an experiment in their head, grab a template, customize it, inject it into an application, preview it, and QA it themselves. So it really collapses what is basically a growth team into a single person. That makes it radically less expensive and also much, much, much faster. During this interview, you will learn four things: His approach to convincing a user/ buyer Candu is exactly what they need  How to approach getting users to start using your product and become addicted Their approach to turn their user base into their best sales force What Candu did differently by giving their ideal customers a 'name' that makes them instantly recognize if it's for them or not  For more information about the guest from this week: Jonathan Anderson Website Candu Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it’s actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It’s short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices