We are sales-led today and I want to add a self-serve motion. What order do I build it in?
Backwards from where you already have proof. You already know which customers succeed and what they did in week one, so start by instrumenting that as an activation event and measuring it on your existing base before you build any signup flow. Then open a narrow self-serve path for one segment you currently turn away as too small, with pricing published, and let it run ugly for a quarter. The instinct to launch a full freemium tier and rebuild the website first is the expensive version of this, and it fails because you learn nothing until real strangers pay. Expect internal resistance from sales the moment the first self-serve deal lands in a named territory, and settle that rule before it happens, not after.
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Kazanjy is blunt that almost every bottom-up company eventually adds sales, so the only questions are when and how. He covers the sequencing, the data plumbing, and the mistakes, including delegating the first sales conversations too early.
Hila Qu added the self-serve motion at GitLab, a sales-led company, and this episode is the step by step order she would do it in again, plus the pitfalls of layering PLG on top of an existing sales team.
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 later chapter of the same story: how Postman layered enterprise sales onto a developer flywheel without breaking it. This is the transition most Indian PLG companies get wrong.
