Product Led Growth & Beyond with AI

The Hype is Simmering Down

I think there was a big hype in product-led growth in 2021, 2022, 2023, and even 2024. I think that buzz is starting to simmer down. A large part of it is that AI is dominating the news feed in B2B and SaaS news; that's 100%. 

Another factor is that product-led growth has become so intertwined with SaaS that it's no longer a strategy, but more of an operating principle. There will still be very large, sales-led companies considering moving downmarket to sell to smaller clients, and they will still need help with product-led growth consultation. 

PLG is not the differientator anymore

For SaaS tools built today, every founder and operator is using the product-led growth option.

This mix is product-led growth. We embed it into our marketing strategy, pricing strategy, sales strategies, and self-serve user experience.

Product-led growth might not be the differentiator in the SaaS industry anymore when everyone has a great self-service experience, excellent product, and strong viral growth. It's becoming increasingly difficult to compete.

For your industry, there are already multiple free options. Now you're going around begging customers to try the product, even for free. So the marketing strategy still holds true because it's better than the sales-led strategy of hiring a large sales team.

PLG with AI = More Competition = Crazier Speed

However, I envision that there will be even more competition with the use of AI in marketing. AI enables scalable outbound, scalable inbound, scalable self-serve documentation, scalable customer support, and scalable product development and creation. This means something is going to evolve here.

If we keep going down this path, we will find that things will be AI-powered, but the core of the growth will still be this community. Tapping into that and creating tactical growth hacks to enable the community to generate faster word of mouth is going to drive that exponential growth.

Idea 1: AI-support Beta-Invite Community

Use AI to support you in nurturing your beta community. That means creating case studies, promoting members to be champions, and using tools to stay on top of these beta customers. This would mean that we're always available 24/7, not just with AI, but with AI supporting us to maintain constant engagement. It's a bit of a nightmare, but the unique value would probably still be the human relationships, using every AI hack to build those bridges.

Idea 2: AI-powered One-to-Many Sales

I don't know enough about this, but there's going to be some sort of AI webinar. Imagine having AI support you in a one-on-one sale. How can AI support the speaker in one-to-many sales and one-to-many marketing?

For example, AI could identify participants in the webinar who are less active and engage with them through polls, based on their activity and chat participation.

Another scenario could involve AI providing awareness of people who are actively paying attention on their video screens versus those who are multitasking, and alerting you to the most active webinar viewers.

Idea 3: Vibe Marketing

Vibe marketing is going to be huge. It's a super fast way to create marketing assets. It's a growth hacker's and a growth marketer's dream, especially for those who don't have a way for assets to be created or to ensure alignment with brand guidelines. All of that will be automated, checked, and done in just 15 minutes, allowing the growth marketer to double down on distribution, automated scheduling, and social media scheduling to maximize views.

Then all that data will probably be aggregated to find hotspots, similar to Reddit's hot-level filter on comments, identifying which ones are generating the most hits as quickly as possible. That's how a lot of algorithms work nowadays—if a post is picking up speed very quickly, it's something to push to an even larger audience.

Love to hear what you all think.

Is it going to go faster? Do you feel like you're able to keep up? How are you and your company thinking about this when ChatGPT could kill companies like Gong in just one launch?

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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.