PLG company: Granola.ai

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

Company and Product

Granola – AI-powered notepad and meeting recorder

Founded in March 2023

May 2023: Raised $4.25M Seed

October 2024: Raised $20M Series A

May 2025: Raised $43M Series B at $250M valuation

Competitors: Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Supernormal, Notion, Fellow

Industry/Category

AI productivity software / Conversations intelligence

Target User Persona

• Primary: Professionals and executives with large meeting volumes (example: VCs, founders, sales, product managers, customer success, recruiters)

• Secondary: Teams who need to record, search, and share knowledge from meetings

• Specific: Users frustrated by meeting bots, seeking privacy, control, and actionable insights from conversations

PLG Model Used

Freemium with Viral Team and Enterprise Expansion

• Free tier: 25 meetings free, then paid plans

• Paid tiers:

  • Individual: $18/user/month

  • Business: $14/user/month (land-and-expand, encourages team adoption)

  • Enterprise: $35/user/month (advanced security, compliance)

• Bottom-up adoption: Individual users invite teammates via shared notes, folders, and Slack integration

• Viral growth: Sharing notes and “chat with this meeting” links exposes non-users to product value

Time to Value (TTV)

• Immediate (after 1st meeting):

  • Install native app

  • Connect calendar, Granola auto-detects meetings

  • Instant transcription and note enhancement after first meeting

  • Users see value after their very first call

Onboarding Experience

• Quick install and calendar connection

• No meeting bots was the unique value prop

• AI summariesand action items after each meeting

• Progressive discovery: Templates, Slack integration, shared folders

• One-click sharing and team invites

Improving onboarding experience, improves activation and retention, heres how to improve retention using PLG:

Key Growth Loops/Virality

• Team Collaboration Growth Loop: Shared folders, notes, and links drive team engagement and network effects

• Slack Integration Loop: Automatic posting meeting summaries into Slack channels gets more users

• Top Down Champion Loop: VCs and executives are drive top down adoption for their company

Internal Advocacy: You don't win champions with marketing. "I tried it. I like it. Let's go ahead, use it, and adopt it to our operational process. It will be helpful."

PLG Compounding Strategy

• Each user gets instant value through AI-enhanced meeting notes and summaries after their very first meeting.

• Team members are naturally invited as users share notes, folders, and “chat with this meeting” links, creating a viral onboarding loop.

• More users join, collaborate and share notes, and the organization’s knowledge base grows.

• It drives perpetual engagement, retention, and stickiness.

• It eventually becomes hard to switch out, thus the PLG flywheel happens (from both bottom-up and top-down adoption).

Read about other PLG Company Highlights:

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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

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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.