product-led growth

“A good seller within a PLG company is kind of like an extroverted user researcher. So they may have talked to 10 different users on the front lines who are effusive about the product, and then they're synthesizing those user interviews, putting those into some…”

“Expansion dictates most of the sales driven revenue, which means the sales and success need to work in lockstep with one another, which means you need to build customer relationships for the long run and figure out how to engage exact sponsors, even if a custo…”

“Specifically in PLG, product is the most important component of the top of the funnel.”

“Then I personally would sequence product-led growth and nail that because you will always be able to layer in a sales motion on top of a product-led growth engine because the DNA of product-led growth ends up being a lot harder to sort of rewire in later becau…”

“So at Stripe, as an example, product-led growth, sort of like the online self-search channel was awesome for, let's call it a series A, series B company. The minute you get past that, it doesn't work anymore. You're not like, if you build it, they will come. P…”

“PLG is on the rise. You want this, I want this person to convey this passion and this love for the product to their customers, as opposed to just following some playbook.”

“If what you mean by going outbound is you're just going to get some salespeople to go buy some lists and just start cold emailing, LinkedIn bombing people. It won't gonna work because your entire conversion process is designed around a different buyer, articul…”

“For outbound to be successful, generally speaking, you're selling to a different buyer. Probably a more senior persona. You're probably selling a different value. And so therefore you need different messaging. In terms of the sales process, absolutely, you'll …”

“If your PLG motion is figured out, but the PLG, if you miss it, and if you build the sales teams too early, it's very hard to build later.”

“I would argue actually that companies like Asana or Dropbox were a little too late into enabling the enterprise motion on top of PLG.”

“Enterprise takes multiple years to build. So even if you start today, it's not going to be until, you know, maybe three years, four years from now that you really figured out how to be a PLG plus enterprise company.”

“I refer to our early sales team as workflow therapists. Like, lay on the couch. Tell me all your problems. Like, let's understand, like, there has to be an innate reason of why has someone individually gone and signed up for your product and inserted it into t…”

“We really underestimated the change in team structure going from a traditional SaaS BDB company to like a PLG company”

“The sort of PLG motion, which, you know, in a lot of ways is really just a self-service motion, can get you into the several hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue scale. But typically the ACV is really low, or the account value of those users, and so just…”

“I think that great marketing of PLG products is not actually about product marketing. It's about the actual product itself.”

“It's actually a lot easier to nail the sort of bottoms up motion first and layer on top of that more of a direct selling motion, I think than it is to come down market.”

“It's a risk because you create complexity when you create both and you have to do it for a reason. So you, it comes back to what's the problem you're trying to solve. What's the hypothesis you're testing. Don't go out and just hire 10 or 15 reps. Hire one, hir…”

“That like top-down sales combined with product-led growth is how you truly drive momentum.”

“You can, but I would caution you against trying to do both right away. I think in the early days of sales, you have to be very, very clear on what is the value prop for the customer and what is that experience. And when you try to combine PLG and a sales motio…”

“But if you're trying to sell into an enterprise, I am Pro-PLG in the enterprise, but you've got to have some sales folks to back it up as well because they always have needs that cannot be automated away.”

“If you want to build a product-led growth company, and all of the feedback you get is from a dozen design partners that you work with in a top-down fashion with sort of the CTO, then, you know, you will optimize for something, but it's unlikely that you would …”

“I see as a massive mistake people doing PLG and enterprise at the same time. They're almost too nervous to do one and commit and burn the boats on PLG or just be a top-down enterprise org. For me, I think that's a big mistake.”

“I also think it's because it's the product and growth mindset that's inherent within a PLG-led org where it's product first. And it's so difficult to imbue that in an enterprise org. Oh. And actually tacking on enterprise sales into a PLG motion, not as hard a…”

“If I'm running a PLG, like, don't waste your time getting into these cycles of, like, discounting and not, but if I'm running, like, an enterprise sale, I like to hold a high list and then figure out how I need to discount to still protect the premium and get …”

“I think you can, but I think it's extremely difficult. I think Slack was able to do it. I think they nailed PLG first, and then enterprise, but they always had an eye towards enterprise. The reason why I say it's extremely difficult is to capture the end user'…”

“Well, I think at first the sales team is, is obviously there for revenue growth, but almost even more importantly, providing customer feedback into the product group, giving the product team that they're working with a sense for why do these people gravitate t…”

“So I will say that for an early stage business, just finding its footing, developing product market fit, monetizing customers for the first time or in those early chapters of monetization, picking one motion makes sense.”

“I actually think there's a really cool space emerging in PLG around developer tools. There is a lot of interesting Stuff, ideas new strategies for how to garner developer interest and bring developers into your product more product led that to me feels emergin…”

“At some point, the two motions will compete. So a dollar earned through a freemium or self-serve motion from PLG may be a trade-off against two or five dollars earned through closing a contract in a sales assisted motion. And it's very important to be explicit…”

“Something that I think we did really well at Airtable is thinking of PLG, or that product-led motion, and the sales-led motion or sales-assisted motion as being part of one engine. For the business. I find that commonly businesses will say, well, I need to pic…”

“Everything about enterprise versus product led is different. Language is different. Messaging is different. Positioning is different. Customers are different. Product is different. Pricing is different. It really is a very different business.”

“It's companies that are enterprise first with the entire, like, cost structure and product structure of an enterprise software, and then want to open a PLG and go, hey, let's let people, like, sign up on their own. And like nothing works. Like the acquisition …”

“Even the people I love and care about, you think of, like, something like a ramp, I love them to death. Amazing company. Do you think there's PRG? Do you think CFOs randomly invite other CFOs to use Ramp? Hell no. It doesn't happen like that. It doesn't work l…”

“What we typically do is we start at the bottom of the market with product led growth on those products. And so there is actually no like sales and very little marketing. We use that to prove the business case to the sales team. And we continue iterating on the…”

“Because when you think about marketing, What marketing is doing on their website is they are promising what your product will be about. Then because there's no sales, people will click on sign up and then they will use and try your product. That means that the…”

“Another one is, for example, you get them to implement features That you want them to use because they are the ones that are going to pay the most, but you get them to implement them too early before they re-understand the product. And you have to slowly get t…”

“The world where we're moving to with a, with more product growth, with more bottoms up, with more people trying new things. I think the links that are the most important right now are marketing and products together, not sales and marketing.”

“And the ACV is a 10 K and it's like, ah, and they're like, ah, but it'll scale. It'll scale, Sam. It rarely scales. And so we're layering on this enterprise cost base for this very SMB PLG revenue base, which has really been born out of the PLG motion. And I'm…”

“If you are doing PLG and you're doing paid acquisition, sub a hundred million in revenue, I'm not sure you're really PLG.”

“PLG is not for everybody, and PLG is not a go-to-market motion. PLG is a business model.”

“My rule of thumb there is you only get to have one of those until at least ten million, if not further.”

“This is where PLG goes south, is when you don't have the clarity in how you run the business of, this is our self-serve product, and this is our self-serve business, and this is how it works. And this is our sales-led business, and this is its value propositio…”

“It can be the other way of companies going trying to, you know, go into PLG from enterprise, which is a much harder path to go.”

“PLG is just freemium with better analytics.”

“If you're pursuing like PLG or land and expand, the sales compensation plan can really F that up, right? Because most sales compensation plans put most of the payment, the commission on the first ACV from the customer and have very little, if any, on expansion…”

“A lot of people think if I nail PLG, then I'll nail enterprise. You can nail PLG and enterprise. I just would argue that nailing one does not necessarily make you more likely To nail the other. So if you can do both, but You gotta, in my opinion, you gotta sta…”

“It's only possible if you have a dialed in CEO Or kind of a C-suite who really gets it. If not, do not do it. You need a singular person who understands the emotion. If not, I wouldn't do it.”

“Marketing and sales have less of a role in this new economy than they did before, and that these products in many ways are selling themselves, and product-led growth and innovation is the unlock for This, you know, supernova and shooting star aspirational grow…”

“You can nail PLG and enterprise. I just would argue that nailing one does not necessarily make you more likely to nail the other. So if you can do both, but you got to, in my opinion, you got to start with direct sales and then let the product get to where the…”

“Now we've moved to, not so much the PLG world, but really to consumption software. So now, basically I might have a week. You might turn it on with PLG, you might turn it on because I gave you the ability to download it, and you start to consume, and now maybe…”

“You can't sell, every product can't be sold through PLG. One's had a really complex and need, like, multiple stakeholders from multiple departments to buy into.”

“Nobody's gonna buy software for the entire organization based on purely PLG play, and the way they're gonna adopt, they wanna be handheld especially if you wanna use the software across the organization.”

“I don't think it ever hurts to do it a little earlier than a little later, because I think what we do still find is we think it's the right time based on our formulas. You still have to convince someone that that's the case. And that might take a couple of go-…”

“I don't even look at the PLG numbers. I don't. I don't care about those ones. I look at, like, what are the enterprises? What are the companies in the market? How is my portfolio construction in that market? And how can I close some of those numbers, some of t…”

“And that's actually how I think PLG businesses do really, really well, right? Someone comes in, they, you know, they're dabbling in the product, right? And you as a seller, you're like, I'm going to go market that internally at that account to all of the other…”

“If we can build outbound sales organizations, sale-led growth engines and then you can pile in PLG on top of it, you have best of both worlds.”

“Paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG, that you have a product that can scale in any way, shape or form, right? Like there, there's a ton of narrative that like focus on brand, go organic content, build all that base. That just takes too much t…”

“So the best companies in PLG focus right now will also be best positioned, in my opinion, for the agentic layer of essentially decisions being made without that human in the loop when tools are being selected for certain tasks.”