Why Product-Led Growth Is Eating The Legacy SaaS…. Alive ?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your users don’t care about your buyer committee, your glossy sales deck, or your endless outbound campaigns.
The consumerization of IT changed everything. Today’s B2B users expect their work tools to feel like the apps on their phone—instant, intuitive, and actually enjoyable to use.
And here’s the kicker: the power shifted from the buyer to the user. If your product doesn’t delight, adoption dies, and the deal is dead—no matter how many signatures you chase.
The Old Playbook Is Broken
Most SaaS companies still cling to the enterprise playbook:
Long sales cycles.
Clunky onboarding.
Products designed for admins, not end users.
That worked a decade ago. But in today’s market, it’s a liability. Users don’t tolerate friction anymore. They have options—and they’ll walk.
The New Playbook: Product-Led Growth
Look at Slack, Expensify, and Dropbox. They didn’t win because they had bigger sales teams or better golf outings with CIOs.
They won because:
1. The product was addictive.
2. Users loved it enough to pull it into their teams without waiting for IT. Legacy systems didn’t stand a chance. Outdated, clunky software wasn’t just ignored—it was actively replaced.
3. Product became the GTM. Adoption drove acquisition, expansion, and retention—no seven-figure marketing spend required.
These companies understood one thing most founders ignore: a product that spreads itself is the most capital-efficient growth model in SaaS.
Why This Matters Now ?
When your product drives growth, you’re no longer burning millions on sales and marketing just to stand still. Instead, you’re scaling through:
1. User pull, not push. The product creates its own demand.
2. Self-replicating adoption. One happy user drags in their entire team.
3. Built-in expansion. Usage unlocks upsell without a single cold call.
This is Product-Led Growth—and it’s not optional anymore. It’s the reason some SaaS companies scale fast while others stall out and drown in CAC.
The Bottom Line
If you’re still betting on old-school sales motions while your competitors are building viral, user-loved products, you’re already behind.
The winners in SaaS aren’t just shipping features. They’re shipping experiences so good they sell themselves.
In this guide, I will walk you through the most common characteristics that unite product-led growth companies.
I’ll also provide advice for how PLG businesses can optimize their product, marketing, pricing and sales to scale effectively.
And if you’re a traditional sales-led business, I’ll provide key insights into how you too can incorporate product-led strategies to turn your existing business into a more efficient growth engine.
The Defining Characteristics for Product Led Growth
There are primarily eight characteristics that product-led growth companies embody.
Without following at least some of these eight qualities, it is extremely difficult to make a PLG strategy work for your current product or company.
These eight characteristics are:
1. The product market conditions are right for the strategy. When it comes to implementing a product-led growth strategy, the right market conditions are imperative. The market enables product-led growth when:
1.1 Marginal costs of serving each user are low
1.2 The user plays the additional role of being the buyer, or one of the buyers, of the product, or the users have reasonable influence over the buyer(s)
1.3 The known solutions in the market are inadequate for user needs
2. The value of the product is perceived by the user as being a unique “highest-value-product” that they want to use regularly.
2.1 The product allows the user to achieve their daily tasks with more efficiency
2.2 The experience can be personalized for the individual user
3. The user realizes significant ongoing value quickly and easily with little-to-no help from company personnel.
3.1 The product integrates easily into other products in the user’s product ecosystem
3.2 It is very clear what the product does and requires little explanation
3.3 Users can use the product without creating an account
3.4 The initial value is real, not a “demo account” with “dummy data”
4. The product “paywalls” follow, rather than lead, the actual value that the user receives and pricing scales as usage increases and more value is delivered.
4.1/ A free product is offered to show value and build credibility as part of the sales process
4.2/ As user needs become more sophisticated, customer success and direct sales are deployed to complement the sales process
5. The product has features that allow the product to market, sell and onboard new users.
5.1 Users have a strong incentive to invite others to use the product and the user of the product can easily invite other users to use the product (viral potential)
5.2 The product automatically communicates through non- product communication channels (for example email, push notifications, text, etc.) to deliver additional value and bring the user back into the product
5.3 The product monitors user behavior and makes ongoing recommendations to the user to provide additional value
5.4 Users can connect with other users to exchange ideas from within the product
6. Marketing aims to engage users with the product rather than engaging buyers with a sales team.
6.1 Users often discover the product when looking to solve a problem
6.2 Users have great places to learn and exchange ideas with other users and potential users (for example through content marketing, online forums, Meetups, online training and so forth)
7. The product has a built-in network effect.
7.1 The more people using the product in a network or company, the more valuable it becomes
7.2 If it’s a platform, the more services you connect to it, the stronger the value
8. There is a strong product champion within companies using the product to drive greater adoption.
8.1 If your company embodies the above eight characteristics, you should be using a product-led growth strategy to grow product adoption.
In fact, a PLG strategy can impact how you think about marketing, product optimization, pricing and sales.
Solve Real Pain or Die Trying
Here’s the hard truth: your product doesn’t deserve to grow unless it solves real, painful problems.
The team behind Figma didn’t set out to build a design tool empire. They were just frustrated with the status quo: clunky, single-player design software that slowed collaboration to a crawl.
The pain was so real that they bet on a contrarian idea—design should be multiplayer.
Instead of pitching features, they built what they needed: real-time collaboration. Multiple users editing the same file. Instant sharing. No downloads, no blockers.
What started as an internal need became the foundation of one of the fastest-scaling SaaS companies of the decade.
The lesson?
Figma didn’t start with “what’s a cool feature we can sell?” They started with “what sucks for us, and how do we fix it?”
The Pain That Powers Growth
Grammarly did the same with writing. Nobody was asking for “AI grammar correction.” What people hated—universally—was making mistakes that made them look unprofessional. Grammarly solved that pain in the simplest, most obvious way: install a plugin, start typing, see your errors disappear in real time.
It wasn’t about building “the world’s most advanced NLP platform.” It was about fixing the embarrassment and inefficiency of bad writing. The problem was so painful, the adoption was inevitable.
That’s why Grammarly didn’t need huge ad budgets—the product spread because the pain it solved was universal.
The Founder’s Litmus Test
Here’s the question every SaaS founder needs to ask before obsessing over onboarding flows, pricing models, or retention curves:
“What is the pain so strong that my users will Google their way to me?”
Because if your product isn’t solving a clear, urgent problem—like Figma killing design silos, or Grammarly killing bad writing—everything else is lipstick on a pig.
You can’t optimize your way out of irrelevance.
Solve real pain first.
No hacks, no growth loops, no PLG tricks will save a product built on weak pain.
Start with necessity, not vanity.
The best products are born out of real frustration, not market trends.
Your product should feel inevitable. Users should say, “Finally, this fixes what’s been killing me.”
Until you have that, stop optimizing. Stop adding features. Go back and find the pain that makes growth inevitable.
You’re not in the business of shipping features. You’re in the business of designing a product users actually want to use—and love enough to pull into their daily workflow.
That means cutting out complexity, stripping away bloat, and staying maniacally focused on solving the pain that matters.
It also means saying no to the endless list of one-off buyer requests. Because what delights one deal can clutter the experience for everyone else.
Strip Out the Noise
Keyhole learned this lesson the hard way. For years they chased feature requests from enterprise buyers. More analytics, more dashboards, more bells and whistles.
The result? Confused users, slower onboarding, higher support tickets.
When they switched to Product-Led Growth, they made a controversial decision: simplify.
Analytics were slimmed down, onboarding became frictionless, and the product itself guided users to value.
Instead of bloated enterprise software, Keyhole delivered clarity. And ARR jumped 25%.
Deliver Value Immediately
Great PLG companies obsess over one thing: how fast users hit the Aha! moment.
Grammarly is the perfect example. Install the plugin and in five minutes you’re seeing your writing errors underlined. No demos. No setup marathons. Just instant payoff.
That’s why they grew to 30M+ users. Because once someone experiences value that quickly, they’re hooked—and the upsell becomes effortless.
Figma did the same with collaboration. No downloads, no barriers. You open a file, invite a teammate, and you’re in.
The product doesn’t explain value—it shows it.
Every shared file becomes a distribution point. Every invite, a new user.
Make It Stick
Onboarding is just the start. The real game is embedding your product into the user’s daily workflow.
That’s where Navattic nailed it.
By shifting from sales-led demos to interactive, self-serve product experiences, they didn’t just activate more users (activation jumped from 5% to 33%).
They created habits. Once users started building interactive demos themselves, they kept coming back.
PLG leaders know usage is the canary in the coal mine. More usage predicts expansion, retention, and upsell. Less usage signals churn before it hits.
That’s why companies like Navattic and Figma obsess over activation loops and engagement triggers. They know retention isn’t a marketing campaign—it’s built into product behavior.
The Discipline That Separates Winners
This all sounds obvious on paper: keep it simple, deliver value fast, drive daily usage. But the hard part is the discipline.
Saying no to noisy buyer requests.
Designing for users, not committees.
Measuring what matters—activation, retention, usage.
The SaaS companies that scale (Keyhole, Navattic, Figma, Grammarly) didn’t outspend competitors. They out-producted them.
[CASE STUDY] How Keyhole Turned a Sales Bottleneck into a Product-Led Engine
“The typical sales conversation in social analytics used to be painful,” says one of Keyhole’s early team members. “We’d spend time walking prospects through dashboards, drafting custom tracking plans, and promising ROI after implementation.
The irony? By the time customers saw any value, half of them had already lost interest.”
This was the problem Keyhole set out to solve. Instead of dragging prospects through a traditional sales-led motion—long demos, custom pitches, and delayed value—they rebuilt the journey so that users experienced insights instantly.
That shift became the cornerstone of their Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy.
Cutting Out the Sales Middleman
Keyhole’s product automatically tracks hashtags, campaign performance, and influencer data across platforms. Instead of needing a sales rep to explain functionality, new users could simply sign up, type in a keyword, and see analytics in real time.
“In the past, onboarding was a drag. People had to sit through a call before they could even see how tracking worked,” the team recalls. “Now, they get results in minutes. The product sells itself.”
By shortening time-to-value, Keyhole flipped the buyer journey. Prospects didn’t commit money first and wait for ROI later. They got proof up front—and were far more likely to convert.
A Product That Became the Sales Process
The impact was immediate:
25% increase in ARR after shifting from sales-led to product-led.
Trial-to-paid conversions spiked, since users didn’t need hand-holding to see value.
SMBs suddenly became profitable customers, not just large enterprises.
“All of our go-to-market positioning now stems from what the product can do for the end user,” the team explains. “By the time someone talks to sales, they’ve already experienced value. It feels less like selling and more like helping them expand what’s working.”
In other words, sales turned into customer success consulting—helping clients interpret insights rather than convincing them to sign.
Growth Engineering, Not Just Growth Marketing
Behind the scenes, Keyhole’s approach to PLG looks a lot like agile growth engineering. Every new feature is judged by its impact on activation, retention, and ARR.
“If we can’t tie a feature to a real problem in the funnel, we don’t build it,” the team says. “We expose new features early, measure usage, track whether it improves conversion or reduces churn, and cut anything that doesn’t move the needle.”
This discipline—build, measure, cut fast—keeps the product lean and valuable, not bloated with one-off requests.
Knowing the Core User
Keyhole also honed in on a clear persona. Their best-fit users weren’t executives chasing vanity dashboards, but marketers and brand managers who needed fast, actionable campaign data.
By serving that core persona with intuitive self-serve analytics, while still offering APIs and documentation for power users, Keyhole managed to keep both ends of the market happy.
Lessons for SaaS Founders
Keyhole’s journey shows what it takes to make PLG real:
1. Shorten time-to-value. Users shouldn’t need a demo to see the product work.
2. Use the product as marketing. If people get insights in trial, they’ll pre-sell themselves.
3. Be ruthless with features. Build only what drives activation and retention.
4. Sell through usage, not promises. By the time sales steps in, the user should already believe it.
The result?
A product that doesn’t just support growth — it is the growth strategy.
Product-Led Growth Marketing: Why Your Product Alone Won’t Save You
Founders love to believe the myth: “If the product is good enough, growth will take care of itself.”
It sounds nice. Build something magical, sit back, and watch virality do the work.
But here’s the reality: if you rely solely on product and word of mouth, you’re leaving the door wide open for competitors. Great products that aren’t marketed die quietly while louder, scrappier rivals take the market.
At the same time, you can’t afford to drown your business in expensive campaigns. Spray-and-pray demand generation isn’t just wasteful—it’s fundamentally at odds with a capital-efficient, product-led model.
The truth is, PLG isn’t a replacement for marketing—it redefines it. Done right, your product and your marketing become inseparable.
Done wrong, you’ll have a brilliant product with no adoption curve.
This is where product-led marketing comes in: a discipline built on simplicity, end-user obsession, and capital efficiency.
And if you don’t build it into your PLG playbook, someone else will.
Speak to Users, Not Buyers
Traditional SaaS marketing worships the buyer. Decks built for CFOs. ROI calculators for budget holders. Long sales cycles where the actual end-user is an afterthought. That’s the sales-led playbook.
But in PLG, users are the buyers.
Look at Keyhole. When they ran a sales-led motion, they catered to enterprise buyers—long demos, overloaded analytics, expensive custom work. It didn’t scale.
When they flipped to PLG, they stripped out complexity, focused on what the user needed—real-time campaign insights—and conversions took off.
ARR grew 25% without adding sales headcount.
If your messaging speaks to economic buyers first, you’re fighting the wrong battle. End-users outnumber buyers 100:1.
They’re the ones who spread your product inside an organization. Ignore them, and your competitor who speaks their language will win.
Navattic proves the same point. Their growth inflection came not from chasing execs but by redesigning onboarding so that users could self-activate.
Activation jumped from 5% to 33%. Why? Because the messaging and the product spoke directly to the practitioner, not the budget holder.
Rule for founders: if your positioning wouldn’t excite a frontline user to adopt your product tomorrow, it won’t scale.
Build a Brand Users Trust (and Love)
Winning users isn’t just about functionality. It’s about building a brand that feels like it’s on their side.
Take Figma.
They didn’t market to CIOs with talk of “cost savings in design workflows.” They built a brand that resonated with designers—open, collaborative, even fun. From the real-time multiplayer experience to the viral invites baked into every file, Figma created the sense that the product was designed for the user, not the boss.
Contrast that with clunky incumbents like Adobe pre-Figma. They built for procurement teams and IT buyers, not the people actually doing the work. And that’s why they got blindsided.
Founders often underestimate this: your brand voice is as much a growth lever as your feature set. Users don’t want jargon. They want products—and brands—that feel like trusted allies.
Grammarly nailed this by making its entire experience approachable and helpful, not intimidating. That’s why 30 million people use it daily, from students to professionals.
If your brand doesn’t feel relatable to the user in the trenches, you’ve already lost.
Measure What Actually Matters
Here’s where most SaaS founders get it wrong: they obsess over the wrong metrics. Lead volume. Top-of-funnel traffic. MQLs that don’t convert.
It’s the old marketing playbook, and in PLG it’s useless.
PLG marketing lives and dies by end-to-end user experience. Not “did they sign up,” but “did they adopt and recommend.”
That’s why Grammarly’s success isn’t measured by downloads—it’s measured by how quickly users hit their “Aha!” moment. Within five minutes of installing, users see their writing errors disappear.
That instant value drives retention and word-of-mouth.
It’s also why Slack (a PLG icon) is obsessed over Net Promoter Score.
Bill Macaitis, their former CMO, put it simply: “The gold standard isn’t whether customers bought—it’s whether they recommended.” That’s a fundamentally different bar.
The key for founders: define your gold standard metric and align everyone around it.
For PLG companies, that usually means activation, retention, or NPS. If your marketing isn’t moving those, it isn’t marketing—it’s noise.
Bake Marketing Into the Product
Here’s the contrarian truth most founders don’t realize: your product is your most important marketing channel.
Look at Figma again. Every file shared was distribution. Every invite brought in new users. Virality wasn’t a campaign—it was baked into the product.
Grammarly? Same story. Every corrected email, blog post, or LinkedIn update became an invisible referral. Users didn’t need a referral bonus—they spread the product because it made them look smarter.
Even Keyhole’s PLG pivot doubled as marketing. By making the free trial instantly valuable, users themselves became case studies. Instead of ads shouting promises, Keyhole let the product deliver proof in minutes.
The Takeaway
Don’t just build a product that solves problems. Build one that spreads itself. If your product doesn’t naturally generate referrals and sharing, you’re going to bleed cash trying to force adoption.
Content Isn’t King—Quality Is
Of course, PLG marketing doesn’t stop inside the product. You still need to show up where users are searching. But here’s the mistake: chasing quantity over quality.
Most teams churn out 20 shallow blog posts a month that nobody reads. What works? A few epic, authoritative pieces that users actually share.
This is how PLG leaders dominate organic search. They don’t hide content behind lead forms. They educate freely, build trust, and position themselves as the go-to advisor. When users search for answers, they find you—not a gated PDF.
The same principle applies to community building. Slack and Figma didn’t just sell software—they built movements. Communities, forums, templates, even playful brand touches created environments where users felt part of something bigger.
That’s marketing no budget can buy.
The User-First Playbook
If you strip everything else away, PLG marketing comes down to one rule: user-first or die.
That means:
1. Messaging that resonates with the user, not the buyer. Keyhole’s pivot proved that.
2. A brand that feels like an ally. Figma and Grammarly showed how relatability drives virality.
3. Metrics that matter. Focus on activation, retention, recommendation—not vanity funnel numbers.
4. Product-as-marketing. Virality and advocacy must be built into the experience, not bolted on later.
5. Content that teaches, not sells. Educate and build trust, don’t gate and frustrate.
The companies that get this right don’t just save on marketing spend. They build compounding growth loops where every new user fuels the next.
The Founder’s Dilemma
Here’s the uncomfortable truth for founders: your product isn’t enough. Not anymore.
Keyhole had a strong product before PLG—but until they rebuilt their marketing to focus on user-first messaging and instant value, growth stalled.
Navattic had a great tool—but until they rethought onboarding as a marketing function, activation was stuck at 5%.
Grammarly didn’t grow to 30M users because it was technically brilliant. It grew because the first five minutes were life-changing for the user.
The winners are those who stop thinking of marketing as separate from product and start treating every user interaction—every signup, every invite, every correction, every shared file—as marketing.
If you’re still running a marketing playbook built for buyers, you’re already behind. Your competitors aren’t pitching harder—they’re building products that market themselves.
And when they do, they won’t just steal your users. They’ll steal your market.
Scaling Growth the Grammarly Way: Lessons in Product-Led Growth
Founders love to say growth starts with segmentation: define your ideal customer, target their use case, tailor messaging, and watch MRR pile up. Easy to say, nearly impossible to do.
But what happens when your product is universal—something that could be used by anyone, anywhere?
Segmentation suddenly becomes a trap. Too narrow, and you alienate potential users. Too broad, and your message becomes meaningless.
This is the challenge Grammarly faced. What began as a niche tool for grammar correction evolved into a mass-market platform used by students, professionals, teams, and enterprises worldwide.
Today, more than 30 million people use Grammarly daily. Their journey reveals how to scale a growth engine when your product solves a universal pain point—and why most SaaS companies underestimate what “product-led growth” actually demands.
The Messaging Challenge: Speak to Pain, Not Personas
Grammarly never tried to build a marketing message around buyers. They didn’t pitch CFOs on productivity gains or CTOs on “AI-powered writing assistance.” Instead, they went straight to the pain point every single user could relate to: the fear of making mistakes.
That fear transcended roles, industries, and geographies. Students worried about grades. Professionals worried about credibility. Teams worried about external communications. By focusing on the pain, not the persona, Grammarly’s messaging avoided the trap of segmentation paralysis.
The result was a brand that felt universal but specific.
“Write with confidence.” “Clear, mistake-free communication.” The product didn’t need a jargon-heavy pitch deck. The messaging was obvious the first time a red underline appeared on screen.
Lesson for founders
If your product has broad applicability, stop agonizing over personas. Anchor your messaging to the single pain point that every user feels viscerally. Solve that pain relentlessly. Everything else is noise.
Virality Without Bribes: Product as Distribution
Here’s the contrarian truth: real virality doesn’t come from referral programs. It comes from products that spread themselves.
Dropbox gave away storage for invites. Slack used team-based workflows to pull in users.
Grammarly didn’t need either. Every email corrected, every LinkedIn post polished, every resume refined became a silent advertisement for Grammarly. Users didn’t just recommend it—they demonstrated its value every time they communicated more clearly.
This is the kind of virality that can’t be bought. It’s not transactional. It’s not gamified. It’s intrinsic to the product experience.
And that’s the key: Grammarly didn’t treat virality as a marketing channel bolted on top of the product. Virality was the product.
Lesson for founders
If you’re still bribing users with discounts to spread your product, you’ve already lost. The most scalable distribution is invisible, baked into usage itself. If your product doesn’t naturally create moments worth sharing, it’s not viral—it’s just wishful thinking.
Delivering Value Instantly: The Five-Minute Rule
Most SaaS onboarding is broken. Users sign up, get lost in endless setup, and churn before they hit value.
Founders overestimate how much patience users have.
The truth? If you don’t deliver value in five minutes, you’ve lost them.
Grammarly understood this perfectly. Install the extension, start typing, and within minutes users see their errors underlined. The Aha! moment is immediate.
That instant payoff is why adoption snowballed across millions of users without massive ad budgets.
Compare this with companies like Navattic, which had to rebuild their entire onboarding flow to boost activation from 5% to 33%.
Grammarly didn’t need to retrofit onboarding later—it was designed from day one to show value instantly.
Lesson for founders
Onboarding is not a tutorial—it’s your GTM. If users aren’t hooked in five minutes, they won’t stick around for feature depth. Build for speed to value, or prepare to bleed acquisition dollars endlessly.
Pricing: When Free Works—and When It Doesn’t
Every PLG discussion eventually turns to pricing. Should you go freemium? Free trial? Hybrid?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most SaaS founders copycat pricing models without understanding why they work for certain products.
Grammarly’s freemium model worked because the free tier solved the pain—but only partially. You could fix typos and grammar for free. But clarity, tone, and advanced writing suggestions lived behind the paywall.
Once users trusted the free version, the upsell was natural. They didn’t feel manipulated; they felt invested. But the freemium trap is real. Companies like Dialpad admitted their free product was “too good,” making upsell almost impossible.
Freemium only works when the free tier solves enough pain to build habit, but leaves enough room for users to want more.
Slack got this balance right by capping free message history at 10,000. Users didn’t feel cheated—they felt compelled to unlock the archive once their team was hooked.
Lesson for founders
Free isn’t a growth hack. It’s a bet. If your free tier doesn’t build habit and gently push users toward paid, you’ll end up subsidizing freeloaders. Price with discipline, or you’ll compete against yourself.
Monetizing Usage: Land and Expand Done Right
Grammarly’s monetization playbook is simple but deadly effective:
Start with individuals. Free adoption creates trust and habit.
Expand to teams. As writing becomes collaborative—sales teams, marketing teams, support teams—the case for Grammarly Business becomes obvious.
Upsell with value metrics. Advanced features, integrations, and analytics scale as usage scales.
This land-and-expand strategy is classic PLG.
Keyhole did it by opening up to SMBs once their product was self-serve. Figma did it by letting individuals invite entire teams into shared files.
Grammarly did it by moving from personal writing correction to enterprise-wide communication standards.
The thread is the same: monetization happens after adoption, not before. Traditional SaaS tries to extract value upfront. PLG companies let users fall in love first, then scale revenue as usage deepens.
Lesson for founders
If you’re trying to monetize before users are hooked, you’re burning trust. Hook first, monetize later. That’s the only sustainable way to grow in PLG.
The Human Brand Behind the Tool
One overlooked piece of Grammarly’s success is brand.
Grammar correction could easily feel cold, robotic, or even condescending. Grammarly flipped it into something approachable, helpful, even empowering.
The product’s tone doesn’t scold—it suggests. The copy feels like a coach, not a critic. Even the color palette reinforces positivity rather than punishment. This “human” brand voice made the product lovable, not just useful.
Contrast this with legacy enterprise software, which often feels designed for procurement teams, not humans. The difference isn’t cosmetic—it’s existential. A cold product doesn’t spread. A human product does.
Lesson for founders
Brand isn’t fluff. In PLG, it’s survival. If your product doesn’t feel like a trusted ally, users won’t evangelize it. And without evangelism, your growth engine stalls.
The Founder’s FOMO
Grammarly’s rise is not an accident—it’s the result of ruthless focus on user pain, instant value, intrinsic virality, disciplined pricing, and a human brand. They built a product that solved a universal problem so well it marketed itself.
But here’s the hard truth: most founders won’t get this right. They’ll overbuild features, underinvest in onboarding, confuse buyers with vague messaging, and sabotage themselves with sloppy pricing.
They’ll believe their product is “good enough” to spread without realizing that virality has to be engineered, not wished into existence.
Grammarly didn’t wait for the market to figure out its value. It delivered that value in minutes, made it visible in every communication, and built a brand users wanted to champion.
That’s why it scaled to tens of millions of users without traditional enterprise muscle.
If your SaaS isn’t doing the same, you’re vulnerable. Someone else will build the product that’s faster to value, easier to spread, and harder to ignore.
And when they do, they won’t just win your customers. They’ll redefine your category.
[Case Study] How Meetup Cracked Pricing with Product-Led Growth
Founders love to think pricing is a boardroom decision. Run surveys, copy competitors, throw up a paywall, and hope revenue follows. But Meetup’s story shows the opposite: pricing success comes from the product, not the spreadsheet.
Meetup’s early attempts at B2B failed miserably—corporate sponsorships, perks, branded programs. Nothing stuck. Yet under the surface, something interesting was happening: companies like Google Developer Groups were already hacking the platform to run hundreds of groups across the globe.
They needed scale. Meetup wasn’t offering it—so businesses found workarounds.
That’s the first lesson: real demand hides in user behavior, not your pitch deck.
From Skepticism to Strategy
When Brian Lafayette, VP of Revenue, revisited the idea of a business product, his leadership team was skeptical. Why try again after so many failures? Lafayette knew the only way to win support was with data.
So he built a hard financial model:
1. Minimum goal of $10M in five years.
2. Exact customer mix needed.
3. Number of groups per customer.
4. Pricing tiers to support it.
This wasn’t just theory. It was a filter. If inputs didn’t hit targets, the project would die. No wasted time, no endless debates.
Lesson for founders: Pricing without clear financial guardrails is just guessing.
Research That Exposed the Real Problem
Past failures taught Meetup a brutal truth: their B2B experiments failed because they didn’t leverage the core product.
Meetup’s core was always about local groups run by local people. Their sponsorship models tried to centralize control—and it broke the user experience.
The insight: if your paid product doesn’t strengthen your core product, it will collapse.
With this clarity, the team interviewed businesses already using the “hacked” version.
They asked:
1. What features mattered?
2. What pricing felt reasonable?
3. How were they using Meetup today?
4. The answers gave them direction: build on top of what works, don’t reinvent it.
Test First, Build Later
Here’s the contrarian move: before building the full product, they launched a fake product.
A landing page for “Meetup Pro.”
Two simple features: a map showing all groups in one network and an admin tool for messaging members.
Tiered pricing aimed at three segments: big businesses, small businesses, and nonprofits.
This MVP validated demand and pricing before the product even existed.
Lesson for founders: Don’t build until you know someone will pay.
Removing Friction = Printing Revenue
Meetup’s first sales attempts flopped. Cold outreach to new companies didn’t convert. The breakthrough came when they targeted existing customers already running groups. Those users understood Meetup’s value—the upgrade was obvious.
From there, small in-product tweaks unlocked growth:
1. Route anyone trying to create a fourth group directly to sales.
2. Highlight Meetup Pro in the help center.
3. Allow credit card payments instead of mailed checks.
4. Remove the need for complex legal agreements.
5. Add a simple sign-up form instead of requiring calls with sales.
Individually, these changes looked trivial. Together, they turned a clunky upsell into a self-serve growth engine.
Lesson for founders:
1. Friction is the silent killer of revenue. Remove it, and users will pay themselves.
2. Even “no” can be monetized if you build smart fallback options.
The Results
Within 7 months: 200 organizations running 5,000+ groups.
Retention: 100%.
A clever down-sell: businesses unwilling to pay for Pro could still run unlimited groups with fewer features, keeping them on the platform instead of churning. That down-sell now projects to account for 30% of future revenue.
The Founder’s Takeaway
1. Find hidden demand in user behavior.
2. Set financial guardrails before building.
3. Strengthen your core product, don’t distract from it.
4. Test demand with a fake product before building the real one.
5. Eliminate friction so users upgrade themselves.
6. Monetize even the no’s.
The bold lesson for founders: pricing is not a finance exercise. It’s a product strategy. If your pricing doesn’t feel like a natural extension of your product’s value, it will fail.
Why Product-Led Companies Still Need Sales
You’ve built a product people love. Everyone’s using it—friends, colleagues, entire teams. You’ve done the hard part: created something that delights. You’ve also built your company around a contrarian belief: you don’t want to be another boiler-room sales culture, chasing quotas and forcing contracts down prospects’ throats.
So you make the classic founder mistake: you assume sales has no place in a product-led company.
That’s dangerous thinking.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: sales is not a dirty word.
The Myth: PLG Means “No Sales”
Founders often fall into the trap of thinking product-led growth replaces sales. After all, the whole point is that the product sells itself, right?
Wrong.
A sales team—whether you call it “sales,” “customer success,” or “growth”—is still a group of people focused on one thing: acquiring and accelerating new revenue. If you ignore that, you’re slowing yourself down.
Look at Keyhole. Once they shifted to PLG, their trial-to-paid conversions soared. But the biggest deals didn’t close themselves. Sales reps still played a role—just not in the traditional way.
They weren’t pushing contracts; they were acting as consultants, helping companies scale what was already working.
Look at Figma.
Their product spread virally through teams. But when entire enterprises wanted to standardize on Figma, did the CIO just swipe a credit card? No.
Human sales stepped in to guide procurement, security reviews, and large-scale rollout. Without sales, Figma wouldn’t have landed enterprise-wide contracts.
Lesson for founders: PLG reduces friction—but it doesn’t remove the need for humans.
The New Role of Sales in PLG
The fundamentals of sales haven’t changed. It’s still about engaging the right person, at the right time, with the right context. What’s changed is who, when, and how.
Who: In sales-led models, you target buyers first—CFOs, VPs, committees. In PLG, you start with users. Sales enters later, to accelerate deals once users are already hooked.
When: Instead of spending months educating cold prospects, sales engages when product usage signals are clear. Think Grammarly: when an individual upgrades to Grammarly Business, it’s because a team has already built a habit. Sales doesn’t have to convince them of value—the product already did that.
How: Sales is no longer about hard closes. It’s about removing friction. In Navattic’s case, that meant simplifying onboarding and guiding users who were already experimenting with demos. In Meetup’s case study, it meant removing MSAs, allowing credit card payments, and helping admins upgrade seamlessly.
Sales in PLG is consultative, not coercive.
Why Founders Can’t Ignore This
Here’s where the FOMO kicks in: if you’re running a PLG business and think you can ignore sales, you’re leaving money—and growth—on the table.
Big deals need humans. No procurement team in a Fortune 500 is signing off without conversations.
Expansion is unlocked by sales. Usage signals tell you where the upsell opportunity is, but it still takes a human to guide enterprise rollout.
Retention improves with sales. Customer success, renewals, and expansions don’t happen in a vacuum.
This isn’t theory—it’s what the best PLG companies already do. Slack. Figma. Grammarly. Keyhole. All product-led. All with strong sales overlays.
The Founder’s Playbook for Sales in PLG
If you want sales to accelerate your PLG engine—not break it—here’s the playbook:
1. Hire differently. Don’t hire quota crushers. Hire consultants who understand your product and can talk like a power user.
2. Use product signals. Stop cold calling. Let product usage tell you who’s ready for outreach.
3. Redefine success. Your sales team’s job isn’t “get the signature.” It’s “expand adoption.”
4. Align incentives. Compensate on expansion and retention, not just new logos.
Keep it user-first. Sales shouldn’t override product experience; it should amplify it.
The Bottom Line
Product-led growth doesn’t eliminate sales—it transforms it.
The question isn’t whether you need sales. The question is whether you’ll design sales to fit your product-led DNA, or cling to outdated models that alienate your users.
If you don’t adapt, here’s what happens: your product will win individual users, but your competitors—with smarter sales overlays—will win the enterprises, the expansions, the retention. They’ll capture the market you thought you owned.
So repeat this until it sticks: sales in PLG isn’t dirty. It’s your growth multiplier.
[CASE STUDY] How Slack Converted 30% of it’s Free Users to Paid
They have 1.25+ million paid users. Their trial to paid conversion rate is sitting at 30%.
There’s just no better way to put it: Slack is absolutely kickin’ ass in the SaaS world.
But they don’t need me to tell the world how well they’re doing. Just look at their stats:
They are the fastest growing SaaS company. Of all time.
1. They have gone from being valued at $0 to $4 BILLION. In just 4 years.
2. They are adding $1 million in new contracts. Every. 11 Days.
3. They have 77% of the Fortune 100 using their software.
4. They have 4 million active daily users.
Oh, and did I mention they did ALL of this without a million – dollar marketing technique, a fancy email strategy, or a pushy outbound sales team?
Actually, it wasn’t not after 3-4 years that Slack even bothered hiring salespeople and they managed to become a $1.1 billion company before bringing on a CMO.
There’s a lot that Slack has done right with its marketing to get to 4 million active daily users.
But perhaps more impressive is Slack’s conversion rate. While other SaaS companies hope and pray to convert up to 10% of free users to paid, Slack converts a whopping 30%.
So, how did Slack do it? Let’s find out.
The first thing to look at is the layout of Slack’s freemium model.
Slack’s “free” plan still comes with a bunch of good benefits and is perfectly usable on its own.
So, to see how Slack really won over those paid users, I signed up for a free account to see how they’d try to convert me. Here are the three big things that jumped out during my experiment:
1. Slack has an excellent onboarding process.
2. Slack isn’t salesy in the slightest.
3. Slack puts customer success at the core of all they do, motivated by their innovative
“Fair Billing” pricing model.
Let’s analyze the first item: Slack’s excellent onboarding process.
Part of what holds other companies back from converting their freemium users is that these customers often don’t completely understand how to use the product or they don’t truly realize all the product’s benefits and applications.
But Slack has an extra challenge in overcoming this. Slack isn’t a product that’s sold to a single person – but one sold to a team. Which means they have a lot of people to convince.
Slack responding to a Medium comment as an “extension” of their customer onboarding
So what they do is simple, yet brilliant: they provide all the training, tutorials, and resources the customer needs to get the rest of his or her team on board.
That way, the customer isn’t stuck with the burden of training and Slack can ensure that the information they put out shows Slack in its best light possible.
Slack’s Help Center is also very well laid-out, showing new customers exactly what steps they need to take next. Plus, they also have a ton of helpful info on their YouTube channel and in their Medium publication.
Now onto the second item: Slack’s non-salesy sales process.
When I went through the process of a free sign-up, here’s what I discovered: I never, at any point, actually felt like I was being “sold to.”
First of all, if we look at Slack’s homepage again, you won’t even find an option to sign up for the paid plan. And after clicking that green “Get Started” button, you are automatically taken through the process to become a free user…without encountering a single message about the paid plan the entire time.
Even if you don’t go through and click that “Get Started” button here or on another page, you won’t find any sort of lead gen elsewhere on the website asking for your name, title, phone, company or website.
In other words, Slack doesn’t seem to have any sort of process in place to gather full lead data or contact info (they only ever ask for your email address). Yet another way Slack avoids that salesperson persona.
Now, after I signed up, I kept waiting for some sort of email autoresponder campaign aimed at getting me to convert to a paid user.
But yet…there was nothing. Not a single email was sent to me with a mention of upgrading to the paid plan.
Is Slack missing out on conversions by not trying to upsell its free users? Maybe.
But it’s obviously not bothering them enough to change it. So, for now, at least, Slack will remain true to their “not a salesperson” voice.
The third item ties the first and second together: Slack puts customer success at the core of all they do.
Though Slack’s first step with any new customer is an easy onboarding process, that alone is not enough…they also need to keep their customers actually using the product by offering genuine, non-salesy help.
And Slack has no better motivation for this than their innovative “Fair Billing Policy.”
In simple terms, here’s how their policy works: if a Slack user stop using the software for 14 days, Slack will give you your money back through prorated credit.
Slack’s user consumption model forces Slack’s growth to correlate with their customers’ growth, otherwise this happens:
The email Slack send you when you get credit back
This “Fair Billing” model keeps Slack’s whole team ultra- accountable to providing awesome onboarding and a comfortable user experience so they can onboard as many active users as possible. Sales people can’t just sell an account and then move on.
For this reason, Slack MUST make sure their product is fully integrated into their users’ day-to-day work…or they won’t get paid.
Instead of pushing the customer toward the paid plan, they just set usage limits after a high level of user consumption has taken place.
Limits like this:
1. Chat history that stops after 10,000 messages
2. File storage that stops after 5GB
3. App integrations that stop after 10 apps
Slack then uses very strategic in-app messaging (that triggers based on usage limits) to convert freemium users into paid customers, like this:
In-app messages above prompt users to upgrade to a paid plan (but are only shown to the user once Slack has been fully integrated into their day-to-day work). This prompts the customer when they are likely to be most receptive to Slack’s sales message.
Most enterprise software pricing is designed to charge you per user upfront regardless of how many people on your team are actively using the software (for example, if you buy 1,000 seats but only use 100, you still get charged for 1,000).
But as you can see, Slack’s untraditional pricing model is wholly at odds with what most enterprise companies do.
Yet, it’s working. The proof is in the data: Slack has converted 1.25M+ of their 4M+ users into paid users.
Closing
A product-led growth strategy can be an efficient and effective way to grow your customer base, win loyalty and scale your business.
But, by its very nature, a product-led strategy is only ever as successful as the underlying product.
Product-led companies aim to build truly stellar products that put the user, not the buyer, front and center. They avoid jargon in their marketing, instead preferring a more casual, colloquial approach.
And most importantly, PLG companies simplify and streamline everything from the actual product to its marketing, sales and pricing all in an effort to make onboarding new users as clear and as seamless as possible.
I hope that this post inspires you to explore how implementing a PLG strategy could positively impact your bottom line, lead to happier customers and revamp your business for the better.
As with all things, PLG is an evolving philosophy. I look forward to introducing new components of this strategy and learning from SaaS operators like you who implement and iterate as you learn and grow.
