product-led growth

“Higher multiples. Enterprise value per revenue is 10 X. These are actual numbers you can dig into. I think they're actually higher now if you go look at the updated index. Which means your company's worth about two times more.”

“OpenView actually coined the phrase way before I was there.”

“Faster growth rates. 35% versus 25% in SAS.”

“If you're trying to build a product-led growth company, and there's not at least something to give away for free that's a full-featured product, it's not gonna grow.”

“And I think the product team is the whole funnel in the future.”

“If you're selling a product that sells online, a product that growth-esque business, it's freemium, then I mean, you're hiring product first and then people to help promote the product online. So more so marketing. On the flip side, if you're dealing with like…”

“He was doing product-led growth in 2003. So like literally like you download MySQL and then they sell you an enterprise version. Yeah. So I, you know, we haven't really changed that much in 18 years collectively as an industry.”

“You can't have product-led growth Isn't actionable unless you have instrumentation around it, right? What is actionable, right? What is the difference between product-led growth and classic freemium self-service viral word of mouth, which we've been doing for …”

“In a sales model, and I started my career as an enterprise salesperson in accounts where I had to sell internet infrastructure to more, for more than a million dollars for client or something, so I was doing like large account management. There has to be a met…”

“I think it's super critical for PLG Motions to work, to have a shared metric across both your product And your growth team, if that growth team sits in marketing, wherever it sits.”

“There is an argument to be had to say the ones that are actually really hot and growing fast are the ones that you should not be putting your expensive salespeople on. Let those go and convert.”

“I think there are a lot of people think of PLG and virality as It's not synonymous, but they're not. I think you can still have a purebred PLG model where it sells itself because the buyer can get right into the product, and they can actually even use it in a …”

“It was easier to start with product-led growth and layer on sales than to go the other way.”

“For product-led growth to work, you do need a somewhat similar set of best practices and needs by your customer.”

“But you don't get from 20 to a hundred on PLG because, you know, to get from 20 to a hundred, you're probably doing bigger deals, and you're doing bigger deals at bigger companies, and so PLG makes for a great meeting, and you know, I think in a hundred, if yo…”

“When you decide to, you know, hire someone in sales, hire someone in product, hire someone in marketing, if they come from a non-PLG company, they might not have the right cultural intuitions to fit into this model, and we had to, you know, kind of bake that i…”

“If any of you here has a, you know, if you're a PLG company and you're not sure about doing a personal demo, start with a weekly live demo, and, ah, and then that can help, help you learn and see if there's appetite for something a little bit more custom.”

“So we've actually hired, ah, a team, a group of individuals who are going to be just focused on that as an experiment, and boxed into that for a while, in a fun way.”

“The way I think about PLG is look at a product's website. Does it say try it, or does it say talk to someone? Get a demo or try for free. That's usually what you see, and that, ah, that sort of distinguishes a bottom-up PLG company from, A, ABM account based m…”

“I used to work at Yammer. The sales team would often complain that their biggest competitor was a free version of Yammer. So you introduce that competitor, which is yourself.”

“On the left you can just see the number of PLG IPOs since 2012. It's been hockey sticking. Similarly the performance of these stocks Relative to NASDAQ index or just general tech stocks, PLG seems to see some outperformance.”

“And it is a business application. So there is no really bottoms up motion there. We had to have a product that could get the frontline licensing. I'm interested and excited, but they aren't in control of You know, buying new software. They go through procureme…”

“That is the beauty of sort of product-led growth, which is in many different cases, you'll find a lot of different teams that are using your product all within the same domain. Frankly, that sometimes places where the conversation can actually help because som…”

“Because it's really hard, just like it was hard to be an on-premise software company and move to SaaS, it's really hard to be a non-PLG sales led growth, growth company, and move to PLG.”

“The growth rate of your growth funnel, whether you measure that as users or M or MAUs or PQLs, product qualified leads, that has to grow faster than your sales headcount.”

“We are still paying our salespeople more for the first revenue from a company and less or nothing at all for expansion revenue. Beautiful comp plan design for the 19 seventies. Terrible comp plan design for PLG.”

“I might argue that if you can get people to stick and continue to use your product, you will figure out the scalable user acquisition model, and you will figure out the monetization model.”

“A lot of these startups I see in PLG, almost all of them actually, put their growth teams in marketing, and I think that's an opportunity because all of the best-in-class ones put their growth team in product.”

“I personally like putting it here if we can. Because the end user is not going to care if the executives have to pay to make this secure, or to get the dashboard that they, so they can know more about their business, or to integrate it with their tech stack. I…”

“And I'm a big believer that many companies, if not most offerings can be suited to both. And the trick is to think about, okay, who are the personas that we're serving and might one model or the other be a better fit for that specific persona?”

“In fact, if you try to jackhammer your own product to become a PLG product, it could take you quarters or years. You may never get there. In fact, maybe you shouldn't ever get there. Not all companies were designed to be PLG companies.”

“I think that model is going to become increasingly, you know maybe not obsolete, but just It's gonna be increasingly outdated relative to this new you know, product-led approach”

“It's probably harder to retrofit, you know, delightful, you know, bottoms up adoptable or PLG you know, adoptable product. You know, after the fact than it is to figure out how to start with self-serve adoption, PLG, and then layer in enterprise sales.”

“PLG can solve for a whole raft of use cases, but for the large enterprise opportunities, it's gonna be really tough to work with PLG. So pure PLG is not realistic in those scenarios.”

“The belief that SaaS is cheap and cheerful and something that's 29 dollars a credit card is being challenged, that now, like, SaaS can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And at that point, a CFO does want to get involved, and that's not something that co…”

“Cause everyone talks about product-led growth, sales-led growth. Like, I believe like you gotta have a marriage between the two, like very few products can exceptionally execute. Like PLG well, but like if you have the two that are married, like some buyers, l…”

“Every company that started with PLG or inbound, at some point of time, you can see they will overlay a field sales motion.”

“PLG is like cloud. It's actually nothing. It is an amorphous term that properly used describes a set of actions and motions that is helpful. Improperly used makes no sense. There are no cloud magicians. If you don't, you can't hire someone to magically cloudif…”

“The question is who's doing the qualification? Who's bearing the cost? And then in the PLG outbound model, the user is bearing the cost, right? And in the sales that model, like you, the company is bearing the cost, which is why we're all seeing this shift fro…”

“Most companies become product-led growth because they think it's gonna be cheap, and they think it's gonna be just self-service. But the reality is that most companies that do product-led growth are not self-service. Because in the end, they need to get to ent…”

“Honestly, you should start somewhere, not on both sides, is my opinion. And so PLG four cells led, PLG two cells led, is probably the new thing we're seeing right now. I think that's the major shift we're seeing right now with AI empowered outbound.”

“If you look at our rubric, even as we're hiring for sales, It has a little bit of that support and customer success mentality behind it. Partially because the nature of our product and the PLG motion where like customers have started already experiencing the p…”

“What makes it so hard is it's highly cross-organizational, right? And most companies we've all worked at are not good at cross-organizational in a single go-to-market mode. And here you have to be good at cross-organizational in three go-to-market modes, right…”

“If you're trying to accelerate people or mine too aggressively for, convert them too aggressively from free until paid, and you don't have that engagement, you're going to pay for it on the other side and quality and retention and those things.”

“If your sales led motion slows down, I will tell you the simple answer. And this is so important. You have fallen out of product market fit.”

“If you don't architect around this in the beginning, it's almost impossible to add it later.”

“Magically bolting on a PLG motion to a sales led thing is not an instant solution to marketing. It's I see so many folks that they're struggling. What are you going to do? Our product's 60,000 dollars a year. Oh, we're going to go PLG. What does that mean? We'…”

“First of all, if you don't start with a self onboarding, self-procuring service, it's wildly difficult to start later, which we talked about.”

“I think my big learning from this is not everything needs to be a PLG product. And if I could go give myself advice three years ago, it would be go figure out a way to sell more million ARR repeatable deals. And that's your path to efficiency, as opposed to tr…”

“I don't think there's a PLG motion to magically adopt at zero dollars in revenue.”

“If you can get thousands of people using your product for 10 K a month or 10 K a year or more, go sell it. If you can get millions of people using your products so that a few percent can convert, go build Canva. But don't be in the middle. Don't be a small num…”

“I think AI in sales, I have a slide later we probably won't get to, is going to lead to a big renaissance in self-serve and PLG. Because if you want an AI to close a deal, it can't be a three-year contract arguing over discounts and terms. The AI has to be abl…”

“We all know it's a lot easier to go from PLG to SLG than to go from SLG to PLG.”

“Many of you might work in organizations where you have a customer success team. That's like the high touch customer success team. And then oftentimes what happens is there's a marketing organization or a product organization that is doing customer touches to y…”

“I find almost every founder gets the ratio of enterprise to bolt on wrong, right?”

“From, I would say maybe from twenty-twenty to, twenty-twenty onwards, we made that asymmetric, so we allocated a lot more to that enterprise. Then we did PLG.”