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PLG Company: GMass

PLG Company: GMass

How GMass, a Gmail-integrated mass email and mail merge tool, uses product-led growth with frictionless onboarding, a viral 'power user' loop, and seamless Google Sheets integration to drive $8.6M+ ARR and 1M+ global users.

Gary Chan
October 07, 2025

Every week, I will feature a PLG company and break down how they win.

Company and Product

GMass – Gmail Native Email Marketing & Automation

Founded: 2014, Chicago, by Ajay Goel

Team: 2–10 employees

Funding: Bootstrapped, profitability-focused

Revenue & Users: $8.6M ARR (2024), 1M+ users globally

Competitors: YAMM, Instantly.ai, Lemlist, Quickmail, Mailshake, Mixmax

Industry/Category

Email Marketing / Cold Email / Sales Automation

Target User Persona

Primary: JTBD via Marketers, sales teams, founders, recruiters, and small businesses running outreach or newsletter campaigns
Secondary: Low technical organizations like agencies, consultants, educators, nonprofits, SMBs, product and support teams needing personalized or automated emails at scale
Specific: Anyone who wants to send mass emails, track results, and break Gmail’s send limits, without the complications of using another tool

Gmail has been around so long that it has captured anyone who needs to send out a message.

Gary Yau Chan

2016 YouTube videos

PLG Model Used

Freemium + Easy to Install Chrome Extension + Self-Serve Onboarding

7 Day trial: Send up to 50 emails/day in Gmail, access basic mail merge & reporting
Paid plans: “Unlimited” emails via SMTP (based on limitation of Google), advanced reporting, follow-up sequences, API access, A/B testing, priority support
Install in 30 seconds. Chrome extension leads to instant product experience, nothing new platform to learn
Upgrade triggers: Feature limits, campaign volume, team size, premium integrations

The biggest aspect is that there's nothing to learn, and for a lot of workers, they just want a very simple platform so they can send a few emails a day and maybe request the decision-maker to upgrade. This product-led growth, bottoms-up approach ensures that it's quick to deliver value and easy to use, which will simplify the process of getting the company to buy.

Gary Yau Chan

Time to Value (TTV)

Immediate (minutes):

Install the Chrome extension, connect to Gmail, and start sending your first campaign with a few clicks
Mail merge from Google Sheets and set up personalization instantly
Send and track a test campaign within your inbox in minutes

SaaS products are expected to be easy to use. Uncover how you can improve your activation by running 30min onboarding calls:

30min PLG Onboarding Call

The best learning you ever get

growthwithgary.com/p/30min-plg-onboarding-call

Onboarding Experience

Step-by-step onboarding: Users are guided to set up a real Gmail campaign with working test emails (proven to remove friction)
Contextual help, docs, and support for first campaign setup, Google Sheets integration, and deliverability tools
No registration outside Gmail; no CSV files required

Led your users to the core action and aha moment with product led growth bumpers:

Product Led Growth Bumper: Turn your SaaS into a Growth Engine

PLG bumpers guide free users throughout the product journey, helping them activate, retain, and upgrade into paid customers.

growthwithgary.com/p/product-led-growth-bumper

Key Growth Loops/Virality

Power User Word of Mouth: Over the years, top users share tactics, results, and templates in forums, communities, and reviews (over 1,000 public reviews cited)
Workflow Stickiness: Users use the workflow, and it works, and there is not need to switch for future operations
Recipient Loop: Recipients receive a templated response

Check out more on SaaS PLG Virality and 40% of our sign-ups of Word of Mouth:

SaaS Product Virality using Product-Led Growth

How to create internal virality bottom-up from selling to one individual user then upselling the whole customer's organization. And learn how to create external virality that compounds and drives growth.

growthwithgary.com/p/saas-virality

40% of PLG Sign-Ups came from Word of Mouth! 🗣️

Our PLG motion sign-ups came from 45% from Paid Growth, 15% from Organic Search and 40% from Word of Mouth

growthwithgary.com/p/word-of-mouth

These products—people are not trying to love the product. They just want to make sure that it accomplishes their jobs to be done. Did it accomplish their task? If it did, that's it, and there aren't a lot of opinions about it. Did it work? Did it not work?

In today's SaaS PLG world, did you help the user get value or not in the first one or two minutes?

We always joke in the compliance world that no one woke up thinking about compliance. Our job is to make it easier for them to get through it.

Gary Yau Chan

PLG Compounding Strategy

Just help users get value right away by sending a personalized email campaign directly from Gmail. There's a very minimal learning curve, it's easy to set up, and activation is immediate.

That's it! That's product-led growth. As more users accomplish this, they'll get decision-makers to purchase, add seats, and add access. That's how momentum continues to build from the bottom up to decision-makers.

It's all about building a go-to solution that's fast and easy. Over the years, this approach just compounds growth.

Read about other PLG Company Highlights: