From Open Source to Enterprise: Product-led Growth to ABM Lessons from MuleSoft

This post by François Dufour is part of our series on Product-Led Growth Playbooks. There, we share insights and advice from leaders who have built successful PLG businesses that target developers and their teams.

Many product-led growth (PLG) companies that target developers begin with an open-source project. That is, developers get value for free while building a relationship with the company and the community behind the project. After that happens, developers and their teams can be upsold to extend their usage and get more value.

And that’s much easier said than done. Marketing to existing users, especially when they’re anonymous and already getting value from the open-source software, comes with challenges. Nima Asrar Haghighi, current VP of Marketing at Airtable and former VP of Marketing at MuleSoft, shared his experience and tips with me.

Key Takeaways

To market their enterprise solutions to companies using their open source software, MuleSoft:

• identified their open source users with IP lookup and collected information via gated content
• systematically nurtured users through emails, retargeting ads and other sales efforts
• promoted their enterprise on-prem and hybrid cloud products to software architects and other decision-makers, going beyond developers
• built their systems for scale and automated early

Identifying Users of Open Source Projects

When Nima first joined MuleSoft, the company was focused on Mule ESB, a lightweight enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration open source framework. Most of the revenue was made from services, which meant that the marketing and sales teams wanted to engage senior Java developers - who were really into the code and loved the open-source project already - and their managers.

As with the vast majority of open source downloads, MuleSoft didn’t have the names or email addresses of these Java developers. So Nima and his team found ways to identify who these users were and what companies they worked at

“We weren’t sure whether they had implemented our products, but it helped us understand who was interested enough in our product to visit the site.”

Identifying the IP address

The MuleSoft team built a tool to gain further visibility into the audience. Specifically, they conducted reverse IP lookups from the download pages to identify the user’s company name.

Gating sections of the docs

They even dared to gate the docs after roughly three page views for a short period of time as a test, which was controversial in the open-source community but did help them get started.

“The best touchpoint I had was our download pages. I could do a reverse IP lookup, get a sense of which companies were actually downloading the open source project, and then funnel this information to the sales team.”

Creating high-value content

When a user made it to page 2 or 3 of the documentation, they were presented with a pop-up that pointed them to additional educational content, such as a guide on implementation. In exchange for the guide, users offered their email addresses.  

“Some people wondered why we were asking for their information for an open source project. But once we had a better understanding of who our users were, we were able to remove the gates. And, we were able to think through what portion of the product should remain open source, and what should be reserved for enterprises.”

Directing Traffic to their commercial download

While MuleSoft never hid the links to download the open source projects, they designed the website to direct traffic to pages featuring their commercial package download and requested a corporate email address to access it.

Marketing and Selling to the Open Source User Base

Elevating discussions

The team also began changing their audience. Rather than talking directly to Java developers, they focused on software architects as they could drive more business conversations, rather than discussing functionality only. Based on what they learned from their audience, they also introduced a differentiated hybrid Cloud product.

Content for “Decisions Makers”

The MuleSoft team also created a number of assets, including thought leadership content on integrations and API management, and other educational ebooks, with the aim of capturing additional email addresses used for sales and retargeting efforts. They used implementation guides either for architects or developers during the sales cycle.

Nurturing and retargeting

With a database of prospects and users that was growing fast, the team developed more robust automated nurture email and retargeting programs, leveraging content, customer stories, and more. They also iterated on many versions of their landing pages.

Account-Based Ad Targeting

Executing on such an Account-based Marketing (ABM) playbook, the teams got better and better at targeting and selling. The strategy was to maximize exposure and impressions to a small set of accounts to come across bigger than they actually were.

“I was able to run lifecycle advertising programs, which targeted users with the right message at the right time based on where they were in the sales cycle. To do this, we integrated the information with our advertising platforms and our CRM.”

Nima’s Top 3 PLG Tips for Founders and Growth Teams

Capture a lot of info in the product

Nima recommends making sure that you capture a lot of information in the product, especially how each user is using it. This not only helps with improving the product, but also gives you access to a lot of data that you can use for sales and marketing.

“My suggestion is to not only capture the data, but also make sure that you’ve made the data available. We believed that everything we built needed an API so that data could be surfaced and used elsewhere. That’s the mindset we used for everything.”

At MuleSoft, Nima saw the value in having well-integrated systems. The marketing team used Marketo, and the team ensured that data was fed right in. This made it relatively easy to deploy marketing campaigns and lifecycle advertising programs.  

Build for scale and automate

When Nima was building out the marketing tech stack, ability to scale was always top of mind. He reminded his team that whatever they built would still be there after the company grew by 10x, so they needed to build it with the intention of scaling.

“Rather than building something to solve an immediate problem, we needed to think about if what we were building would still stand after 10 years or if we grew by 10x.”

For example, if you’re building out landing pages in Marketo, you need to step back and make sure that the process is scalable. Do you need to recreate a landing page every time, or is there a template or an automation that makes creating landing pages seamless and easy?  

Orchestrate tasks and move faster

Today’s companies have a variety of sophisticated technologies at their fingertips, but what sets great companies apart is their orchestration. For example, Nima recommends building a workflow for orchestrating processes, such as for when new product features roll out, using a platform such as Airtable of course. Each time, the team should know every single step that has to happen for that product to come to market and orchestrate accordingly and who was supposed to do what, when.

“When you release a new feature, you want to feel as though you’re part of a machine. Everyone knew the tasks that needed to happen for this asset to be released. Not only that, but they understand who the owners are and the sequence of events.”