Let the product sell

A self-serve motion that works, and an onboarding that turns a signup into a habit.

What founders use for let the product sell, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

  1. Benchmarks from 500 plus products: 34 percent average, 36 percent for SaaS. If you have ever wondered whether your number is... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 12 min read What is a good activation rate Lenny Rachitsky and Yuriy Timen In 9 answers
  2. Poyar replaces the sales funnel with a five stage new user journey (discover, start, activate, convert, scale) and attaches... Growth Unhinged Newsletter · 10 min read Your guide to PLG benchmarks Kyle Poyar In 9 answers
  3. A short, specific list of what to instrument on a self-serve funnel, including time to activation and time to convert, which... Amplitude Article · 12 min read Top 10 Metrics to Measure Freemium and Free Trial Performance Carmen DeCouto In 9 answers
  4. A full 0 to 100M ARR guide from an Indian company that lived it, covering acquisition, activation, retention, monetisation and... Chargebee Report · 45 min read The Revenue Growth Guide for Self-Serve SaaS Businesses Chargebee In 7 answers
  5. Goes past the single aha metric to a three stage model (setup, aha, habit) with Apollo.io and Appcues case studies, plus the... Product Growth Article · 25 min read How to Measure Onboarding: Advanced Topics in Activation Metrics Aakash Gupta and Ramli John In 7 answers
  6. Hila Qu built PLG at GitLab and scaled Acorns, and this is the rare free piece that maps the sales-led funnel against the... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 20 min read Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion Hila Qu In 6 answers
  7. It defines time to value precisely enough to instrument: a start event, a value event, and the gap between them. The insistence... Amplitude Article · 12 min read What Is TTV: A Complete Guide to Time to Value Amplitude In 6 answers
  8. The practical build guide: welcome screens, checklists, contextual tooltips, and where each one actually belongs. It also gives... Appcues Article · 15 min read In-app onboarding: A step-by-step guide for 2026 Jared DeLuca In 6 answers
  9. The clearest breakdown of the three PQL types (hand-raiser, usage-based, needs-help) and the playbook each one deserves, which... OpenView Article · 15 min read Your Guide to Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) Kyle Poyar In 5 answers
  10. Kazanjy is blunt that almost every bottom-up company eventually adds sales, so the only questions are when and how. He covers... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 25 min read The Transition: Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product Pete Kazanjy In 5 answers
  11. A three step method (brainstorm milestones, regress against retention, then experiment to prove causation) with worked examples... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 15 min read How to determine your activation metric Lenny Rachitsky In 5 answers
  12. Twenty onboarding flows torn apart by product category, so you can find the two or three closest to yours instead of copying... Appcues Article · 20 min read SaaS Onboarding Examples: Lessons from 20+ Top Products Sara Detrik In 5 answers
  13. It settles the freemium versus trial argument with numbers from 150 plus companies rather than opinion: freemium brings 33... OpenView Article · 10 min read Freemium vs. Free Trial: How to Know Which One to Pick for Your SaaS Startup Kristin Hillery In 4 answers
  14. Concrete plays with named examples: Zapier's 70,000 programmatic pages, Airtable's template library, Figma's free editor. This... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 20 min read Product-Led Marketing: How to get traffic and users for your product at a near-$0 CAC Kyle Poyar In 4 answers
  15. A six step onboarding playbook from a Bengaluru company whose entire business is digital adoption, with the distinction that... Whatfix Article · 20 min read Software User Onboarding: How to Cut Time-to-Proficiency Disha Gupta In 4 answers
  16. Verna lists the seven things founders wrongly believe PLG means, including that it replaces sales. Reading it early saves you... Elena's Growth Scoop Newsletter · 8 min read Product-led growth is many things. But here is what it's NOT. Elena Verna In 3 answers
  17. Seven hybrid pricing patterns with named companies (GitHub, Shopify, Intercom, Zapier), plus Poyar's point that the enemy is... Growth Unhinged Newsletter · 12 min read The state of usage-based pricing in SaaS Kyle Poyar In 3 answers
  18. Product leaders from Razorpay, Byju's, Swiggy, Flipkart and ShareChat on data-driven onboarding and growth team structure.... MoEngage Article · 10 min read Product-led Growth: Learnings From #GROWTH Product Summit 2020 Pulkit Jain In 3 answers
  19. A five step process for building your first PQL definition, and the advice to start in a spreadsheet with a 30 to 60 day test... Pocus Article · 15 min read The Definitive PQL Guide Part 1: How To Define and Identify Product Qualified Leads Alexa Grabell In 3 answers
  20. Screen by screen through the most copied onboarding flow in software, including the empty states and Slackbot conversation, and... UserGuiding Article · 15 min read Slack: an In-depth User Onboarding Teardown Serra Alban In 3 answers
  21. The book that gave most teams their shared vocabulary for this, and the PDF edition is cheap enough to be a rounding error.... ProductLed Book · Book, around 250 pages Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself (2nd Edition) Wes Bush In 2 answers
  22. Built from interviews with 12 growth leaders, and it argues hard against the thing most founders want to do, which is hire a... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 20 min read How to hire your first growth team Elena Verna and Andrea Wang In 2 answers
  23. The MOAT framework here is a genuinely useful way to decide between freemium, free trial and demo, and it is written for Indian... SaaSBoomi Article · 18 min read The Why, What, and How of Product-Led Growth Strategy: A Cheat Sheet Vishant Batta In 2 answers
  24. The counterweight: the POSist co-founder on what to do when your product genuinely cannot be self-serve, including pricing... SaaSBoomi Article · 12 min read AMA with Sakshi Tulsian: Growth strategies for your non-self-serve product Shweta Mishra In 2 answers

Show the next 24

The questions

Product-led growth 16

When the product does the selling: self-serve funnels, freemium versus free trial, and the point where you layer sales back on.

What does product-led growth actually mean, and how is it different from just having a free trial? 6 → We are about to launch. Should we go with freemium or a free trial? 5 → How do I know whether my product can even work self-serve? 4 → I just joined a PLG company as my first GTM job. What do I actually do all day if the product sells itself? 5 → Our self-serve funnel converts at about 2 percent from signup to paid. Where do I even start looking? 5 → All 16 questions in Product-led growth →
Activation and onboarding 16

Getting a stranger from signup to their first real win, fast enough that they come back tomorrow.

Everyone says find your aha moment. What is it actually, and how do I find ours? 5 → Our activation rate is 18 percent. Is that terrible, or is that just what it is? 5 → What should a brand new user see in the first minute after they sign up? 5 → Almost nobody finishes our onboarding flow. Is that an onboarding problem or a product problem? 5 → How do I pick one activation metric when the product supports five very different use cases? 5 → All 16 questions in Activation and onboarding →
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →