VIDYARD

Running experiments to increase self-serve revenue by $1.5M/year

2023

How might we increase self-serve revenue for growth in a SaaS company?

Vidyard pricing page showcasing one of the experiments that turned into a bigger opportunity: Vidyard Plus, an enterprise-grade plan at a lower price

Vidyard is the leading asynchronous video messaging platform. Used by millions of sales professionals to connect with more prospects and generate more revenue.

My role as a Senior Product Designer contributed to leading end-to-end, from planning, strategy, research, design, and delivery.

I collaborated with a cross-functional group. Product Manager, Engineers, Product Marketing Manager, and many other talented members across Vidyard.

COVID-19 changed the way people work.

It also changed how sellers communicate with their leads and prospects. Gone are the days of sending mass emails. Vidyard makes it easy for anyone to send an async video and track viewer analytics.

Vidyard was ready to take on the world.

Being a key player in the market for almost a decade. It allowed Vidyard to build a product that people loved during this unprecedented time. Thankfully, Vidyard was ahead of the competition and that accelerated its growth during COVID-19 years.

But...it didn't last long.

Post-covid, people started going back to work in person, and people stopped using Vidyard as much. Self-serve revenue was starting to go down.

That's when I joined the monetization team to help increase self-serve revenue.

I got together with my cross-functional partners and made a plan for the year. What are things in our control that can increase the self-serve ARR (annual recurring revenue)?

Experiments to increase self-serve revenue

And created a few strategic experiments for the yearly roadmap:

Plus plan to tackle pricing & packaging gap
Salvage offers to prevent churn
Reverse trials to increase conversion to paid customers
Allow switching billing term after sign up to give users payment flexibility
Optimize checkout flows to reduce cognitive overload when purchasing a plan

first Experiment

Introducing Vidyard Plus

Before: Vidyard only offered 3 plans.

Vidyard's limited pricing & packaging was losing them business.

What was the problem with the plan offering?

HUGE pricing gap from Pro to Business. $228/year vs $5500/year.

From speaking with the sales team:

"Many small businesses say to us that our business plans are out of their budget and wish there was a more affordable plan for smaller teams."

The experimental plan banner

To validate the need, we launched an experiment with an “essentials plan” at a cheaper price which was entirely sales-led.

It helped us validate the need for an affordable self-serve plan with enterprise-grade features.

And it was a success: 50K revenue in just a few weeks.

We validated the need, and now needed to build a more robust, and flexible self-serve plan.

Systems flow mapping the Plus experience

It wasn't without challenges...

One is the main challenges I faced was due to our business constraint of 1 workspace per domain only. Since Vidyard Plus was built on workspace architecture, this meant the experience would be less than ideal for the initial release.

Many explorations later...

Designing the ideal experience.

The "shaping" phase for me is where I go in-depth into creating the best possible user experience. I reviewed competitors, gathered feedback from other team members, and conducted usability testing.

Final designs

Impact: $422K self-serve revenue in 4 months. Estimated $1.2M/year.

Not bad for something that started as an experiment.

Second Experiment

Salvage Offers

One of the three salvage offers when a user is canceling their subscription

Churn is the silent killer of any SaaS business.

And more than 58% of the customers cancelled Vidyard Pro after just 6 months.

Why?

We had a few hypotheses.

Firstly, users need more time to build a habit because 14-day trial or even a month isn’t enough to build a new habit to create videos as part of users workflow. What if we offer a free month?

Second, users might need extra support because there was no dedicated onboarding for Pro users. What if we let them chat with our support team?

Third, some users might not be using their subscription temporarily for various reasons. What if we let them pause their subscription temporarily?

Wireframe flows to help visualize the different salvage offers depending on the user needs and pains

But then, Vidyard decided to have a re-org.

It was the middle of 2023. I lost a few of my engineering friends on my team.

And now we didn’t have the resources that we needed to build this entirely new experience from scratch, so my PM and I had to think of another way.

Using the no-code platform, Candu, my PM and I put together a leaner MVP for this experiment

It wasn't perfect and had its limitations.

With this option, we were only able to offer 1 of 3 salvage offers to users. We chose to give a free month as the catch-all offer.

Luckily for us. It did the job.

A few weeks went by, and we analyzed the results...

Impact: 8% acceptance rate, with 75% of users keeping their subscription after the free month.

This is estimated to be $270K/year in saved revenue from churn.

Other Experiments

There were a lot more experiments I wanted to try, but...
I'll save the story for when we chat.

learnings & recommendations

Think strategy first, design second.

Solving the right problem is more important than a great design for the wrong problem.
Experiments are insanely fruitful. Do more of them.
Lean on no-code tools to experiment if there aren't enough developers on the team
And the most important lesson learned... find out when we chat because it's the most important one