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Doing the work

Our product is self-serve. How do we get users without a sales team?

Product-led companies get most of their new users from two places: organic search (about forty percent) and product virality (about sixteen percent), so build for those two deliberately. On search, the winning patterns are free sidecar tools, template libraries and programmatic pages built from your own data, which is how Zapier, Airtable and Snyk got their reach. On virality, reduce friction on sharing and inviting until it is a single click, and make the artefact your user creates something they want to send to someone else. Pick product activation as your north star, not signups, because a signup that never reaches value costs you money. Postman is the Indian example worth studying: distribution through the tool developers already used, not a sales team.

Go deeper

4 resources, 3 India-specific, 4 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Concrete plays with named examples: Zapier's 70,000 programmatic pages, Airtable's template library, Figma's free editor. This is what marketing looks like when the product is the channel.

Product-Led Marketing: How to get traffic and users for your product at a near-$0 CAC

From Lenny's Newsletter by Kyle Poyar 20 min read

  • CAC needs to stay under about $1 per unique visitor for the PLG math to work.
  • Organic search drives roughly 40 percent of new users, product virality another 16 percent.
  • Zapier built more than 70,000 programmatic 'connect x + y' landing pages.
  • Make activated signups your north star metric, not traffic or raw signups.
Open lennysnewsletter.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked India Free Intermediate

Uses the same frequency and importance graph as the pricing piece to work out which product behaviours to build growth around, with BrowserStack and Freshworks alongside HubSpot and Mailchimp. Practical for Indian teams selling self-serve to a global market.

Product-led Growth for SaaS Companies

From SeedToScale by Accel by Dr. Ajay Sethi long read

  • Only four value creation mechanisms exist: scale, habit, brand, and network effects.
  • Map them on frequency by importance: high frequency and low importance builds scale, high and high builds network effects.
  • HubSpot's free email signature generator alone brings about 50,000 leads a month, roughly 25 percent of all leads.
  • Big B2B brands like Cisco and Oracle score over 50 percent emotional connect, above most B2C brands.
Open seedtoscale.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked India Free Beginner

The reference account of India's biggest product-led company: a Chrome extension that reached 20 million developers with no outbound engine, then converted that into enterprise revenue. Useful counterweight when everyone tells you to hire SDRs.

Emerging Indian SaaS Leaders: Postman's Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti and Abhijit Kane

From Forbes India by Harichandan Arakali long read

  • Postman reached 20 million developers and a 5.6 billion dollar valuation in 2021, up from 2 billion a year earlier.
  • Users made 855 million API requests in twelve months, a 56 percent jump year on year.
  • Sign-ins came from 234 countries, a developer-led distribution built without a traditional sales motion.
  • The company raised over 430 million dollars across four rounds while based in India.
Open forbesindia.com →

Browse all 796 resources →

The same ground, at another level

How inbound, content and demand gen reads from a different seat.

Everyone says do content. What does inbound actually mean for a startup with no audience? Inbound means someone with the problem finds you while they are looking for an answer, and leaves you a way to follow up. For a startup with no aud... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How much of my pipeline should come from inbound versus outbound, and when do I add the second channel? Early on almost every B2B company grows through one dominant channel, so the wrong move is to run four at half strength. Name your primary channel,... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → What do the companies with genuinely great inbound do differently? They pick one content strategy and commit to it for years instead of sampling five. Lenny's breakdown of content-driven growth is a useful map: edi... How the best do it 4 resources →

Terms in this answer

Virality

People also ask

Everyone says do content. What does inbound actually mean for a startup with no audience? 4 → I write blog posts and nothing happens. What am I doing wrong? 4 → How do I decide what to write about so it brings in buyers and not just traffic? 4 → How much of my pipeline should come from inbound versus outbound, and when do I add the second channel? 4 → I run demand gen for an Indian SaaS selling globally. Does the US content playbook work here? 5 → What do the companies with genuinely great inbound do differently? 4 →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Get your first customers, our Starting Up track.

How do I actually get my first 10 customers when nobody has heard of me? 19 → When is my product 'ready' to launch? 20 →

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Grow organically & retain, our D2C track.

How do I build a referral program that people actually use, not one that just sits unused in my Shopify admin? 4 → Should I be on Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and Pinterest, or just pick one? Where do I actually put my limited time? 4 →
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