Imagine this: You send a thousand outbound emails, book demos, enter a long sales process for months, and then... nothing. :( The user tells you they're going to use a different product, or worse, just ghosts you.

Lou's co-founder, Rachel Pardue was faced with a similar challenge. They would have users sign up, spend weeks testing the product, and slip into the sales-cyclesss oblivion. This is when they decided to pivot (for good, despite the very existential, runway risks) to a freemium-led self-serve model — a decision that helped them find their first 1000 customers within exactly 6 months.

We sat down for this conversation with Rachel where she delved deeper into the intricacies of their journey, spelling out how they built a fool-proof self-serve engine by:

• redesigning their product to be fully self-serve,
• adding in-app guidance to make onboarding to Lou seamless,
• building up-sells into the user journey,
• and automating milestone tracking for personalised follow-ups (she has even shared a screenshot of the flow).