Doing the work

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

The short answer

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, your way

3 hand-picked resources, 2 India-specific, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

📰 Newsletter
✓ Link checked Freemium Intermediate

Why we picked it Puts numbers on where self-serve users really come from (about 40 percent organic search, 16 percent product virality) and then names the four patterns that produce the search half: sidecar tools, templates, programmatic pages and product education.

Product-led marketing

From Lenny's Newsletter by Kyle Poyar long read

Open lennysnewsletter.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked India Free Intermediate

Why we picked it 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

Open seedtoscale.com →

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 3 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? 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 3 resources → I write blog posts and nothing happens. What am I doing wrong? Usually one of three things. You are writing for a persona you invented instead of a real person you have spoken to, so the piece is generically co... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → How do I decide what to write about so it brings in buyers and not just traffic? Sort every topic idea by how close it sits to a purchase. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, integration pages and "how do I do X with Y" pages ... Doing the work 3 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 → I run demand gen for an Indian SaaS selling globally. Does the US content playbook work here? Partly. If you sell to the US and Europe, the standard playbook applies because you are competing in the same search results as everyone else, and ... 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 →

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