Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged

Slack, circa 2016: “I think we can get away without having a sales team in any kind of traditional way probably forever.” Slack, circa 2023: 900+ people in sales. Well, that took a turn… Gone are the days when it was PLG versus sales. Also gone are the days when PLG companies (over)hired sellers with a growth-at-all-costs mindset. You might not realize that PLG companies actually outspent their traditional SaaS peers on sales & marketing as a percentage of revenue as of July 2022.

Enterprise marketing is broken. It’s broken because the way buyers discover products no longer matches up with how we’re trying to reach them. Buyers are everyday people, increasingly younger people like Gen Zers and millennials (although do we still count as young? 😬).

Readers: what a week. Is it only Wednesday? šŸ¤£ The one-and-only Lenny (of Lennyā€™s Newsletter) asked me contribute aguest post on product-led marketing, a topic Iā€™m passionate about. This one expanded upon an earlier edition in Growth Unhinged, which has become the #1 most read newsletter to date. I hope yā€™all enjoy it šŸ™ OpenView announced a new $570 million fund to back expansion stage software founders. Weā€™re all excited to get to work šŸŽ‰ Iā€™ll turn 35 on Saturday.

Microsoft – which generates more than $200 billion in annual revenue – looms large over SaaS startups. The behemoth has near-monopoly power in enterprise software and has been known to use the power of bundling to win categories like messaging, video conferencing, and low-code app building. We’ve all seen the notorious Microsoft Teams vs. Slack adoption chart, haven’t we? Going head-on against Microsoft rarely works.

Readers, I’m excited about today’s newsletter—yes, more so than usual. It’s about the PLG story of Deputy, an OpenView portfolio company I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside since January 2017.

What if I told you that my next guest reached $100k in ARR without a website or an app – just 100% community hand-raisers? Or that they grew a newsletter audience from zero to 14,000+ in less than 18 months without paid ad spend? You’d probably think I was lying. But this story is 100% true. It’s about Adam Schoenfeld, founder of PeerSignal (the niche media company) and Keyplay.io (the seed-funded platform for building your ideal account list).

The data is increasingly clear: it’s not PLG versus sales, it’s PLG AND sales. Today’s go-to-market playbook embraces product-led sales, which reduces friction in the sales cycle and converts users into revenue by pairing product usage with personalized assistance. Recent survey data from 200+ companies shows that product-led sales now accounts for nearly as much revenue as self-service for the average PLG business.

This startup has gone from creator economy pioneer to the poster child of a successful bootstrapped product-led SaaS business. I’m talking about Uscreen, which helps video-based entrepreneurs and creators monetize their content. You might not have heard of Uscreen, although the odds are high that you’ve interacted with its products in some way, shape or form.

Welcome back to the sixth edition (!) of The Gist by Growth Unhinged, real-world growth tactics you can actually use. So far you’ve 😍 editions about free-to-paid conversion including: Usage paywalls for your free and/or paid plans Smart trials to drive free-to-paid conversion at scale This time let’s take a (baby) step back. How do you design, test, and launch free plans in the first place?

Whether you’re implementing a PLG strategy for the first time or optimizing from a strong foundation, odds are you’re thinking about product-led onboarding. You might have questions like: How do you get new users to see value as fast as possible? How do you enable users to try and buy via self-service rather than through a rep? Which experiments should you run to improve product activation and conversion? You’ve come to the right place.