PLG company: Mintlify

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

Company and Product

Mintlify – AI-Powered Documentation Tool

Founded: 2022, San Francisco by ex-Google/YC alumni

Team: 20+ employees (growing from 11-18 throughout 2024)

Funding: $21.7M total raised (Pre-seed: $500K, Seed: $2.8M, Series A: $18.5M led by Andreessen Horowitz)

Revenue: $1M+ ARR (2024)

Competitors: GitBook, Document360, Confluence, ReadMe

Industry/Category

Developer Tools / Documentation Platforms

Target User Persona

• Primary: Developers, technical writers, and dev teams at SaaS companies

• Secondary: Enterprises wanting to reduce support load

• Specific: Teams looking for AI to scale documentation faster

PLG Model Used

Freemium with Developer-First Experience

• Free tier: Core documentation features, custom domain, basic collaboration

• Paid plans: Starting around $250/month for AI assistant and AI writer

• Reverse trial: First 14 days on sign-up is on the PRO plan, so you can try advanced features before you buy

• Self-serve onboarding by authenticating with GitHub

• Bottom-up adoption: Individual developers start, teams needs AI to scale and reduce support load

Read more about reverse trial:

Time to Value (TTV)

Immediate (minutes):

• Connect GitHub repo or start writing in Markdown

• Docs are auto-generated

• AI Assistant, Analytics, Slack Integrations

• Custom branding and domain setup

Onboarding Experience

• Easy signup with GitHub integration

• Pre-built templates and auto generated docs

• AI writing assistance and suggestions

Key Growth Loops/Virality

• Developer Experience Loop: Developer awareness and documentation use become viral

• GitHub Integration Loop: Building on top of GitHub create more visibility with the open source community

• AI-Generated Content Loop: AI writing assistance creates better docs, leading to more developer engagement

• Team Collaboration Loop: Individual developers invite teammates for collaborative editing and review workflows

Read more about virality in SaaS:

PLG Compounding Strategy

Every developer gets immediate value by creating professional documentation in minutes by syncing with GitHub and having AI writing help. Other developers visit these docs, see Mintlify's design and features, and create viral effects.

On sign-ups, users get the reverse trial access to the PRO plan for 14 days.

Teams naturally expand from individual usage as developers invite colleagues to collaborate on docs. Then upgrade to the PRO plan to get access to the AI assistant to reduce support load.

AI gets smarter from more content, templates improve from community contributions, and the platform becomes more valuable for everyone. Better docs drive more developer engagement, which leads to more Mintlify adoption, which creates even better tools and templates for the next wave of users.

Read about other PLG Company Highlights:

• Supabase

• RB2B

• Wispr Flow

• MailMaestro

• Tally.so

• Granola.ai

• Tana.inc

• Shortwave

Read what these PLG companies have in common:

P.S. If you have 2 min, please take this three-questions survey about this newsletter for me @ https://tally.so/r/3EaPyl 

New here? Here’s what to expect each week:
- Monday: spotlight a lesser-known PLG company
- Tuesday: my PLG experience
- Wednesday: Memes on product, AI, and marketing
- Thursday: tactical growth tips
- Friday: raw accounts of my startup journey

I write daily*** about my learning on launching and leading PLG. Feel free to subscribe.

I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. Building ClarityInbox. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.