PLG strategies that were a game changer for Awari

What is Awari?

Awari is a YC-backed EdTech that teaches people tech skills in Latam. I was their 7th employee and 1st marketing hire, scaling the team to 4 people and around ~40 employees.

Context

Awari had an over-reliance on paid media for distribution channels. While we saw good traction with occasional press releases and SEO, we knew we needed a scalable channel capable of yielding short-term results.

What I did

I started exploring what PLG initiatives could look like in an EdTech scenario with synchronous classes and 1-1 mentorship sessions.

After user interviews and some light prototyping, we decided to follow through with free 1 week courses with platform access, custom content, assignment and optional (paid) mentorship sessions

Results

More than 20,000 people signed up for the course with less than $300 dollars spent on distribution. Even only considering people that completed the course (around ~500), our acquisition costs were 5x cheaper and we had 3x more leads in that month.

Free courses became a regular thing, and the platform built for them + the recordings were repurposed as sales materials that became part of 40% of all subscriptions sold.