My Fears leading PLG

Taking on the PLG Role

Back in 2022, I started leading PLG at my company. PLG was becoming a significant trend in the tech industry. Venture capital was pouring into PLG strategies due to their potential for rapid growth in SaaS tools. I believe I'd be a good fit because of my experience in founding my own SaaS back in 2016 and my consumer viral growth skills. But I soon realized there was still much to learn.

My Biggest Worry: Hitting Sales Targets

One of my main concerns was meeting our PLG revenue goals. Our objective was to make the PLG motion self-sustainable. Our sales team is moving upmarket towards bigger enterprise customers, so PLG is helping disrupt the market, generate brand awareness, and create some buzz against the incumbent.

Hitting sales numbers can be tricky, especially when you're giving away your tool for free at first. We had to figure out the whole journey for customers using our compliance automation tool. Teaching customers about compliance is already hard, and we had to guide them through the various paywalls, advanced use-cases, and pitch the sell to them as well.

Dealing with Challenges

Getting the team on board with this uncertain journey was tough too. We had to learn as we went, which can be uncomfortable for people who are used to knowing exactly what to do.

I started talking directly to our customers to deal with these fears and worries of leading. I used the Superhuman onboarding process, which gave my team and I more confidence.

By talking to customers, we learned a lot. I took what I learned back to our team and executive leaders. We improved the product, improved our selling, and fixed our pricing. Soon, we started to see some progress.

Things Got Better

As we kept working, we started to see tractions. More people were buying, and others were telling their friends about us. These onboarding calls helped alleviate our anxiety and uncertainties.

Lessons Learned

1. Learn Quickly: PLG often requires a willingness to learn and adapt quickly.

2. Focus on customer engagement: Direct interaction with customers provides invaluable insights and builds confidence.

3. Iterate rapidly: Use customer feedback to continuously improve your product and strategies.

4. Communicate openly: Share learnings and challenges with your team and leadership to foster alignment and support.

By facing my fears head-on and focusing on customer engagement and continuous improvement, we were able to build confidence in our PLG strategy and ultimately drive success for our team and company.

In the end, doing things that didn't always seem efficient at first, like talking to many customers one-on-one, gave me and my team the confidence to overcome our fears. We learned that it's okay to be unsure at first, and that by working closely with customers, we could figure things out and reach our goals.

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