Earlier this year Monotype was having a difficult time introducing our enterprise font platform, Mosaic into agencies. I worked alongside my research champions in product marketing to help them penetrate the agency market. The plan: Give our product away for free.

The value wasn’t in the product itself, but in its ability to give users easy access to Monotype’s vast font library. We thought that agencies would be more likely to license our fonts for their clients if we made it easier for them to do so. We were surprised by the response. In the first 6 months, our agency partner program generated $1 million in unanticipated revenue. The response resulted in the creation of an official agency partnership team and an avenue for the product team to generate product insights from an otherwise elusive group of users. Pretty cool.