How do I know whether my product can even work self-serve?
Three things have to be true at once. A single person has to get real value on their own, without their IT team, their manager, or a data migration. The problem has to be one people already know they have, so they arrive searching rather than needing to be educated. And the price of being wrong has to be low enough that nobody needs a procurement process to try it. If your product only makes sense after you have configured it against someone's messy existing systems, self-serve will not save you, and the fix is to carve out a narrow slice of the product that stands alone rather than to build a signup flow for the whole thing. Indian founders selling to Indian SMBs often find the first test fails not on product but on trust, which is a different problem.
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The MOAT framework here is a genuinely useful way to decide between freemium, free trial and demo, and it is written for Indian founders selling globally rather than for a US audience.
The counterweight: the POSist co-founder on what to do when your product genuinely cannot be self-serve, including pricing onboarding and support as part of the product rather than giving them away.
Hila Qu built PLG at GitLab and scaled Acorns, and this is the rare free piece that maps the sales-led funnel against the product-led one side by side so you can see exactly which stage you are actually changing.
The counterweight if you have decided Indian customers will not pay: Unicommerce runs 10,000 to 12,000 dollar contracts with enterprise customers, has been profitable since FY18, and IPO'd. Useful when you are setting India pricing.
