PLG Company: OpenPhone

How OpenPhone, an AI business phone system, uses product-led growth (PLG) with instant setup, a collaborative workspace, bottom-up adoption, and a hybrid sales motion to reach 60,000+ businesses and close $56M+ in funding.

Author

Gary Chan
September 03, 2025

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

Company and Product

OpenPhone – Collaborative Cloud Phone System XXX

Founded: 2018 by Mahyar Raissi and Daryna Kulya, San Francisco, CA

Team: 51–200 employees

Funding: $56M+

Competitors: Dialpad, RingCentral, Google Voice

Industry/Category

VoIP / Unified Communications

Target User Persona

  • Primary: SMBs want a flexible, affordable business phone system and better ways to collaborate

  • Secondary: Remote teams, support desks, call centers, and businesses replacing old-school desk phones

  • Specific: Low-tech teams who need a business phone number and want calls, texts, and team chat in one easy platform

PLG Model Used

Free Trial + Bottom-Up + Product Led Sales

  • Start with a 7-day free trial, pick a business phone number

  • Messaging and seeing transcripts of the call summary make it stickier

  • Invite teammates, set business hours, and connect OpenPhone to other tools, all inside the app, no technical skills required

  • Sales-assisted upsell for larger accounts or with unique needs and setup

  • Product-qualified leads (PQLs) are surfaced to the sales team with customer signals such as team invites and integrations, not just hand-raisers

Learn more about setting up product led sales:

Product Led Sales close more deals: Tips, How-to, Examples (2025)

Product-Led Sales centers around offering a self-serve experience that allows customers to gain value and generate usage signals that can leverage for sales.

growthwithgary.com/p/product-led-sales

Time to Value (TTV)

Immediate (in minutes):

  • Sign up, pick a number, text/call

  • Invite teammates and assign shared numbers

  • Templates, setup wizards, and in-app docs speed up activation

Customer Success

If your PLG motion does not have a Customer Success team, you are doing it wrong. I share my customer success experience driving upsells and growth.

growthwithgary.com/p/plg-customer-success

Onboarding Experience

  • Low techies can set up, pick, or port a number, and go live fast

  • Advanced settings for inviting teammates, setting business hours, custom voicemail, and integrating with other tools

  • Easy guidance, tutorials, helpful articles, and in-app guides make onboarding painless

  • Live help if needed, leading to customer success qualified leads

Make the experience so dummy proof so low-tech to high-tech users can use it and create the word of mouth. See my post on 30min Onboarding Call to continuosly streamline your SaaS onboarding and activation.

Gary Yau Chan

Key Growth Loops / Virality

  • Team Expansion Loop: Early adopters invite more team members for shared inbox and group messaging, triggering Product Qualified Leads sales signals

  • Branded Viral Loop: Clients, leads, and vendors see caller/contact info as “powered by OpenPhone”

  • Integrations Loop: Connecting OpenPhone to tools like Slack and HubSpot gets more embedded into the daily workflow

  • Word of Mouth Referral Loop: Partners and users share OpenPhone through referral programs and review sites

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

Product Led Sales tips over when teams are using advanced settings, adding teammates, and adding phone numbers. Self serve customers are not just hand raising but also the users product habit are telling you that they are ready to buy.

Gary Yau Chan

PLG Compounding Strategy

Every user gets value quickly by using a new phone number, which allows them to text and call within minutes directly from the browser. They can also access additional AI features such as transcripts and AI summaries.

Inviting more teammates to join creates a shared inbox for better collaboration, so the whole business can stay on the same page. The more calls and texts the team handles through their OpenPhone number, the more it becomes a knowledge hub and evolves into a daily business communication tool.

This increases user engagement and adoption. Integration with other tools like CRMs and Slack embeds OpenPhone into the organization’s workflow. Advanced features and more teammates signal to the OpenPhone sales team to pursue top-down sales, because the customer is involved not only in the qualification process but also in customer success qualification.

The key is to create stickiness with the product. Once you achieve that, you can generate external virality through word of mouth, as well as internal virality by getting other people in the company to choose the product.

Gary Yau Chan

Read about other PLG Company Highlights:

Product-Led Growth Examples: 9 AI SaaS Companies That Cracked the Code (2025)

Here are 6 real-world product-led growth (PLG) examples from leading AI and SaaS startups. Learn they use common characteristics (instant value, viral loops, and user-focused strategies) to drive rapid, sustainable growth.

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

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- 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.