I want to keep bringing you new faces and new angles on making your products successful with Product Marketing.

And because I love clever ways of building products, this time it’s all about:

Plugin as a Product

Since the abbreviation PaaP is taken for Platform as a Product, let me coin this as PlaaP. I hope you appreciate this important moment in history 🙂

I chatted with Chris Handy, the VP of Product Marketing at Law Insider. Here’s how he grew Law Insider’s new product as a plugin:

Watch the shortened 6-minute video interview

Here are my thoughts and learnings from the chat:

Your product is your baby, but it’s not about you
When a product is like your baby, having it as a beautiful platform just feels good. How hard it must be, especially for startup founders, to decide that instead, their product will “only” be a plugin in somebody else’s environment. This may be hard for the ego of the product creator, but a plugin is all about the users after all.

Law Insider started as a website, then offered a plugin
Law Insider is a tool that helps lawyers by proposing clauses to use in their legal documents. Lately, they built a plugin for Word, to meet lawyers in the environment where they spend most of the time.

Why build your Product as a Plugin? Is it cheaper?
I thought that building on somebody else’s marketplace must be cheaper. But Chris didn’t agree with me. For example, when you build an app, you are on the App Store and competing with many other apps, which are often free. You need to pay for ads and do marketing like any other app–same for plugins out there. Building a product as a plugin allows you to get momentum, however.

It’s all about meeting your users where they are
Chris shared an example of a “human plugin” – consultant companies who send their coworkers to work in the office of the client. It’s all about meeting your users where they are, so you remove the friction of accessing your product’s core utility.

And yet, many plugins get it all wrong
This was my biggest learning from the conversation. A plugin is all about the utility to users and meeting them where they are, but many companies, when they introduce their product as a plugin, don’t offer the core functionality in that environment. Often it all ends with notifications. It seems to me as if their goal was not the utility to users, but “stealing” users to spend time in their product environment instead.