Launch a self-serve motion

Let people buy without talking to anyone, and make the product do the selling.

4 steps, 16 questions underneath, read for breaking into gtm

1. 1
   Product-led growth

   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?

   The gist A free trial is a tactic. Product-led growth is a decision about who does the convincing. In a PLG business the product is the main way people find you, understand what you do, decide it is worth paying for, and pull in their colleagues, and sales exists to handle the deals that get too big or too complicated for that. Plenty of companies bolt a trial onto a sales-led funnel and call it PLG, then wonder why nothing changed: the trial is still just a stage a rep walks you through. The honest test is whether a stranger can go from landing page to paying you without talking to anyone, and whether that path is where most of your new revenue comes from.

   📄 Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion 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 s... 4 questions on product-led growth →
2. 2
   Activation and onboarding

   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?

   The gist It is the first moment a new user gets something real out of your product, and you find it by looking at what people who stuck around did in their first session that people who left did not. Pull your users into two groups, retained at day 30 and gone, then look for the action where the two groups diverge most sharply. It is usually smaller and earlier than you expect: not built a full workflow, but sent one message, imported one file, invited one colleague. Correlation is not enough on its own, so once you have a candidate, run an experiment that pushes more new users to do that thing and check whether retention actually moves. If it does not, you found a symptom of engaged users rather than a cause.

   📄 How to determine your activation metric A three step method (brainstorm milestones, regress against retention, then experiment to prove causation) with worked examples from six companies.... 4 questions on activation and onboarding →
3. 3
   Pricing and packaging

   What to charge, what to charge for, how to package it, and how to change it later without losing people.

   I have no idea what to charge. How do I pick a first price?

   The gist Find the right order of magnitude first and stop arguing about the exact number. Are you a ten dollar product, a hundred dollar product, a thousand dollar product or a hundred thousand dollar product? That decision follows from who buys, what budget it comes out of, and what they do today instead. Bound it from below by what it costs you to serve a customer and from above by what a heavy user is worth. Most early founders underprice badly, so if nobody has flinched at your price you are almost certainly too cheap. Announce pricing as late as you sensibly can, and build the product so pricing can change without an engineering project.

   ✍️ The Price Is Right: And for Early-Stage SaaS Companies, It Needs to Be The bounding method for a first price (cost to serve as the floor, cost of a heavy power user as the ceiling) plus the advice to keep pricing chang... 4 questions on pricing and packaging →
4. 4
   Expansion, upsell and churn

   Growing revenue inside accounts you already have, and stopping the leaks.

   What is net revenue retention and why does every investor keep asking me for it?

   The gist NRR is what happens to the revenue from one group of customers over a year, with no new logos counted: start with what they paid, subtract what churned, subtract downgrades, add upgrades and expansion. Above 100 percent means the customers you already have would grow your revenue even if you sold nothing new. That is why investors care. It is the single number that tells them whether your growth needs to be bought every year or whether it compounds. Enterprise SaaS is usually judged good around 110 percent, consumer SaaS much lower, so ask what benchmark you are being held to.

   📄 Net revenue retention (NRR): What is NRR and why does it matter for SaaS businesses? The formula written out term by term, with the three performance bands. The right first read if you have been nodding along in NRR conversations wi... 4 questions on expansion, upsell and churn →