The G in PLG

G is for Gary! 😜

Gary Chan
January 30, 2025

The G in PLG: Driving Growth Through Product-Led

Choosing Your Go-to-Market Strategy

What is your company’s strength?

Deciding on the go-to-market strategy really depends on how you want to grow and where your strength as a company lies. For us, we saw an opportunity in a white space where more and more startups and SMBs need compliance and SOC 2, but just don't have the funds to get it done so they can sell to enterprise customers.

We recognized an opportunity to adopt a product-led growth motion to reach these folks. It was a form of acquisition strategy to drive growth using the product. We also recognized our strength in user experience and product, which I'll talk more about in a bit.

Why Product-Led Growth?

Traditionally, getting in front of startups and SMBs requires a large sales force, a big outbound motion, and a lot of hand-holding. Without enough capital and with small average deal sizes, it's often not worth it in the end. So, we came up with a strategy to scale acquisition and drive growth through the product itself.

Perfecting the Product Experience: Learning and Iterating

In my previous post, I talked about what "product" means and what leading with the product entails. A large part of it is automating and scaling all the touchpoints we imagined having with these startup and SMB customers.

In the beginning, we just didn't know much. If you're at the start of your PLG journey, you probably don't know anything either. I highly recommend checking out my other posts about Superhuman onboarding and using that as a learning flywheel.

Through this learning flywheel, we quickly identified:

Frequently asked questions
Common objections
Levers to sell and package around pricing
Ways to maximize deal size
Challenges with product user experience and navigation

Every Superhuman onboarding call, we started implementing Improvements. We kept at it despite how difficult it was initially.

Based on what we learned, we:

Worked with engineers and designers to smooth out the onboarding and activation experience
Created self-serve documentation
Created a community
Developed interactive videos
Iterated on our sales pitch and onboarding calls

Everything to get the customers and end-users to trust us and feel reassured.

Signs of Growth

We knew growth was happening when:

Customers were using the product (for real!)
They were inviting colleagues and employees to use it (internal networking effect!)
They were hitting paywalls and buying (revenue!)
They were letting others in their network know about us, signifying virality and word-of-mouth growth (external networking effect!)

After six to nine months of iteration, experimentation, and improvement, we finally figured it out, and growth signals started coming in. We took time to create a polish Product experience.

Scaling and Optimizing Growth

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned that 40% of our landing page signups came from word-of-mouth marketing. People were hearing about us from other customers, seeing our "Powered by" branding, or being recommended our product as an accessible alternative in various communities.

All this growth coming in the door helps improve your brand, lower acquisition costs, and scale with a high volume of startup and SMB customers. Now we have:

A refined product experience that handles objections
Low-touch support (with premium support for those willing to invest more)
A clear funnel: signups, activation, onboarding, upsell
The ability to do growth accounting, activation analysis, and funnel optimization
Opportunities to create beachhead strategies for different verticals and industries
The ability to test packaging and pricing and increase our product line offering

That's growth.

That's product-led growth.