Product Led Growth Examples 2025: Six AI Startups Leading the Way

Product-led growth (PLG) is quickly becoming the default* go-to strategy for today’s fastest-growing SaaS companies. Compare product led growth vs. sales led growth and traditional marketing, PLG companies let their product attract, retain, and expand users naturally.

Fast onboarding, immediate value, and viral loops that turn happy customers into your biggest advocates. I highlight six real-world examples of AI product led growth examples using the PLG strategy to build momentum, drive adoption, and create lasting success, so you can see what commonalities and characteristics work and how to apply these strategies to your own SaaS.

What are the Characteristics of Product-Led Growth (PLG) Companies?

The most successful product-led growth companies share several key characteristics that enable them to create compounding growth loops:

1. Freemium strategy that allows many users to try.

2. Users see the product’s benefits and get value right away, often during their first use.

3. People can easily and intuitively self-serve using the product without needing much help.

4. User actions drive virality, and sharing helps users naturally spread product adoption.

5. Transparent product info, clear pricing & packaging, and open roadmaps build trust.

6. Teams quickly improve the product based on user feedback and product analytics.

7. Strong community-led growth drives word-of-mouth, stickiness, and product improvement

8. Product led marketing that uses word of mouth, SEO, and virality to generate the flywheel

Success Factors for PLG Companies

Product-led growth (PLG) strategy need to be aligned across teams. Leading PLG startups succeed by focusing on:

• Product metrics are closely connected to business sales outcomes and financial goals.

• Teams continuously test, measure, and improve the product to boost activation, retention, and growth.

• Every department: product, engineering, marketing, sales, and customer success are unified around a clear growth vision.

• The company fosters a healthy culture to prevent burnout and support long-term performance.

6 Product-Led Growth Examples

The AI startup examples featured below demonstrate how product-led growth strategies can deliver immediate value, create viral loops, and build self-sustaining growth engines that compound over time. I featured AI B2B SaaS tools to collaborative platforms. These examples showcase diverse approaches to product-led growth loops and bottom-up adoption:

1. Wispr Flow’s Viral Productivity via Word of Mouth

Category: Voice AI / Speech-to-text
Funding: $30M Series A from Menlo Ventures

PLG Strategy: Freemium with Viral Professional Network Effects

• Instant Value: OS-level integration delivers immediate productivity gains on all applications (email, docs, chat, code editors) with quick setup

• Viral Loop: Users showcase 3x faster workflows on LinkedIn, driving external virality

• Growth Mechanism: Show-off moments create word-of-mouth spread in professional networks

• Key Metric: 50% month-over-month growth with support for 104 languages

Read more about their Wispr Flow time to value and onboarding setup here:

2. MailMaestro’s Team Expansion Through Shared Templates

Category: AI Productivity
Scale: 55,000+ teams globally, including MIT and HP

PLG Strategy: Freemium Bottoms-Up with Viral Team Expansion

• Instant Value: Connect email/Teams accounts for immediate AI enhancement

• Viral Loop: Watermarked emails expose recipients to MailMaestro branding

• Growth Mechanism: Team collaboration features drive viral team expansion through shared templates

• Key Insight: Every AI-enhanced email creates exposure to new users while team features ensure organizational stickiness

See how MailMaestro layered on Word of Mouth, SEO, and internal & external virality:

3. Tally.so’s Freemium plan helps Catapult their Growth

Category: No-code SaaS
Scale: 500,000+ users, $2M ARR (bootstrapped)

PLG Strategy: Super Generous Freemium with Viral Branding

• Instant Value: No signup required to build forms with instant preview

• Viral Loop: "Made with Tally" badge on every free form drives organic discovery

• Growth Mechanism: Community advocacy through template sharing and build-in-public strategy

• Key Insight: Generous free tier combined with viral branding creates continuous exposure to new users

See how Tally’s generous free plan spread like wildfire:

4. Granola.ai’s Team Stickiness via Collaboration and Slack Virality

Category: AI Productivity / Meeting Intelligence
Scale: $250M valuation, $43M Series B

PLG Strategy: Freemium with Viral Team Collaboration

• Instant Value: Immediate transcription and note enhancement after first meeting

• Viral Loop: Shared folders and "chat with meeting" links drive team adoption

• Growth Mechanism: Slack integration auto-posts summaries, spreading across organization

• Key Insight: No meeting bots approach plus team sharing creates viral adoption within organizations

See how Granola enable team collaboration and knowledge hub:

5. Tana.inc’s Compound Adoption from Community-Led Growth and Template Sharing

Category: Knowledge Management
Scale: 30,000+ beta testers, $100M valuation

PLG Strategy: Community-Led Growth with Template Network Effects

• Instant Value: Pre-configured templates and AI-powered setup deliver immediate utility

• Viral Loop: 24,000+ Slack community users share templates and workflows

• Growth Mechanism: User-generated content and template sharing drive organic discovery

• Key Insight: Community flywheel creates compound growth through template sharing and user advocacy

See how Tana.inc use community-led growth to compound PLG:

6. Shortwave – AI Email Client

Category: Email Productivity
Scale: 20,000 monthly active users

PLG Strategy: Freemium with Team Network Effects

• Instant Value: Direct Gmail connection with automatic organization in under 5 minutes

• Viral Loop: Shared live threads and team collaboration create network effects

• Growth Mechanism: "Sent with Shortwave" signatures and thread sharing expose non-users

• Key Insight: Team channels require colleagues to join for full collaboration, driving viral team expansion

Shortwave uses internal virality and external virality to drive adoption and stickiness:

Conclusion: Why Product-Led Growth SaaS Works

Product-led growth (PLG) is all about letting your product do the selling. By making it easy for users to see value fast, encouraging sharing, and creating a great self-serve experience, PLG companies turn happy users into their best growth channel.

The startups above show that when you focus on instant value, simplicity, and user-driven discovery, growth takes care of itself. Teams that align across product, marketing, and customer success, and continuously listen to user feedback, build stronger, more viral products.

If you want fast, sustainable growth today, put your product (and your user) at the center. Make it easy, make it valuable, and your users will help you grow.

P.S. If you have 2 min, please take this three-questions survey about this newsletter for me @ https://tally.so/r/3EaPyl 

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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.