The meteoric rise of Product-Led Growth, or PLG, has transformed business within the world of technology. One sector in particular has found incredibly fertile ground, that being, API-driven companies. This is in part because API-driven companies offer an easy-to-adopt platform that is highly customizable. Top product led growth companies Twilio and Stripe are often listed as the luminaries in the API space, because of their disruptive approach and their wildly high valuations.

Core to these companies' growth strategies is customer API usage. It’s driving all levels of business, from acquisition and retention, to expansion. In a Product Led Growth model, customers can try the product for free and realize the value themselves without being locked into the sales cycle. It’s a simple concept, but it’s one that has flipped traditional enterprise sales on its head.

With the rise of Product Led Growth strategies, business teams are reimagining their growth frameworks and looking for new tooling that will allow them to better support and develop their customers. The goal is to create a pipeline of free customer sign-ups and then flip them into high-paying customers.

To properly operationalize a Product Led Growth model, innovative teams look to Moesif to gain powerful business insights into how their customers are interacting with their API platform. Moesif’s platform enables business teams to gain customer-driven insights into API usage by allowing business teams to help more active users, expand customer revenue, and thwart customer churn.

A great place to start with Moesif and your Product Led Growth strategy is monitoring your company's free trial. Typically, free-trial customers pass through a series of product usage milestones. These milestones often indicate that a customer has reached a new value point, such as 1 API call or 1,000 API calls. Once your customer reaches a defined product milestone, Moesif can notify your sales team with an automated alert, letting the team know that there is a great prospect to engage with. This allows your sales team to reach your free-trial customers at the right time to convert them into paying customers.

From there, Moesif will be able to help you detect which accounts are about to hit their plan’s usage caps. Typically, Product Led Growth companies have a tiered pricing model, such as a “Grow-Pro-Enterprise” plan. Monitoring your customers’ account usage will enable you to identify companies that are growing quickly and ripe for expansion.

For example, it would be wise to reach out to a “Grow Customer” who has blown through their monthly credit within the first week. Armed with the necessary API usage metrics, your business team can provide your customers with the right contextual information that will help guide them towards an upsell.

Moesif’s identification of a short-term spike can also be another key signal that your customers have hit a new product milestone. For example, spikes in usage can indicate that a customer has just released a new feature, onboarded a ton of new customers of their own, or is simply using your platform in a different way. It’s critical to get alerts when there has been a dramatic change in customer behavior and API usage. This will help your business team reach your customers at a critical juncture of their lifecycle, enabling your team to make opportune product recommendations that drive revenue expansion.

Finally, Product-Led Organizations need to monitor customer API usage to help prevent customer churn. Business teams need to be aware when the “hockey stick” growth flips downward, as this sends important signals that your customer's sense of value has diminished, or that they have run into an unexpected roadblock. In either case, your business team must intervene before your customer jumps ship. For instance, it would be beneficial to your business team to reach out to a customer who has seen a 2x drop in API usage. This will position your business team as a trusted consultant that is bringing relevant account-level information to the table, which can ultimately help prevent customer churn.

With PLG transforming how API-driven companies conduct business, API platform teams are quickly trying to adapt and modernize their growth strategies. Fortunately, Moesif can help fill in the gaps with powerful customer API usage insights to help accelerate customer activation, expand customer revenue, and prevent customer churn. If you are looking to implement an API Product Led Growth strategy, you can sign up for a free trial today with Moesif.

This article was written for the Moesif blog, by Oliver Burt, Customer Success.