PLG company: Tana.inc

Discover how Tana, an AI workspace, use product-led growth (PLG) strategy with personalize onboarding, and community-led growth user-generated content (UGC) to drive growth loop.

Author

Gary Chan
June 10, 2025

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

Company and Product

Tana - AI knowledge management

Founded in 2021: Built up 30,000+ beta testers, 160,000+ waitlist signups, 24,000+ active Slack community

June 2024: Exited Early Access, launched paid plans and open beta5

February 2025: Raised $14 million Series A, total funding $25M, $100M valuation

Industry/Category

Knowledge management software / AI productivity tools / B2B SaaS collaboration

Target User Persona

  • Primary: Knowledge workers, researchers, solo entrepreneurs, and productivity enthusiasts managing complex information

  • Secondary: Teams and organizations seeking collaborative, customizable knowledge management

  • Specific: Users who need advanced workflows, data modeling, and AI-powered automation beyond what Notion or Roam provide

PLG Model Used

Freemium with Community and Template Network Effects

  • Free tier: Note-taking, basic tagging, limited storage

  • Paid tiers:

    • Tana Plus ($10/mo): Google Calendar integration, AI chat, voice recording tools

    • Tana Pro ($18/mo): API access, Unlimited storage

  • Community-led growth: Slack community, template sharing, and public knowledge bases

  • Waitlist and early adopter pricing

Learn more about product-led marketing:

Product-Led Marketing: 2025 Guide to Grow With the Product

Help SaaS teams grow using the product as the funnel to drive acquisition, activation, and retention, without big ad budgets or a giant sales team.

growthwithgary.com/p/product-led-marketing-2025-guide-to-grow-with-the-product

Time to Value (TTV)

  • Immediate (5–30 minutes):

    • Pre-configured templates, tags, and “pages” for common workflows

    • AI-powered voice capture and autofill for quick setup

Onboarding Experience

  • Guided onboarding with pre-built workflows and product-led growth bumpers

  • Progressive discovery of advanced features as users grow

  • Active Slack community and YouTube tutorials

Learn how to build discovery into your product, and improve retention and upsell:

Want Upsell? Improve Retention

Improve Retention

growthwithgary.com/p/upsell-improve-retention

Key Growth Loops/Virality

  • Community Loop: 24,000+ Slack users share templates, workflows, and support

  • Content Loop: YouTube creators and productivity influencers showcase advanced use cases

  • Template Loop: Shared templates help organic discovery

  • Waitlist Loop: Scarcity and FOMO grew waitlist signups

PLG Compounding Strategy

  • Each user gets a personalized onboarding experience, with pre-set templates.

  • The community helps with beta testing, rapid experimentation, and pricing testing.

  • The more the community shares more templates (user-generated content), the more the community engages, and creates word of mouth.

  • More templates, better and better onboarding experience.

Are you using Tana.inc? What do you think? Love to hear your experience.

Read about other PLG Company Highlights:

PLG company: Shortwave

Discover how Shortwave, an AI-powered email client leverages a product-led growth (PLG) strategy with instant onboarding, advanced collaboration, and viral team features to transform email productivity.

growthwithgary.com/p/shortwave

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: share my PLG experience
- Tuesday: spotlight a lesser-known PLG company
- 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.