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 leading a gtm team

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.

   We are sales-led today and I want to add a self-serve motion. What order do I build it in?

   The gist 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.

   📄 The Transition: Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product 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 d... 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.

   Activation has been flat for three quarters despite a lot of experiments. How do I diagnose that as a leader?

   The gist Flat activation with busy teams almost always means you are optimising the wrong half of the funnel, and the usual cause is upstream: the people arriving are not the people the product is for. Segment activation by acquisition source before you look at a single onboarding screen, because a channel bringing in the wrong audience will drag the blended number down no matter how good the flow gets. The second thing to check is whether the metric itself has quietly drifted, since a definition changed by an analyst nine months ago will hide real movement. If both check out, the honest conclusion is that the remaining gap is a product gap rather than an onboarding gap, and the fix belongs on the roadmap, not in the growth backlog.

   📄 How to Measure Onboarding: Advanced Topics in Activation Metrics Goes past the single aha metric to a three stage model (setup, aha, habit) with Apollo.io and Appcues case studies, plus the failure modes: no rete... 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.

   Should I price in rupees for India and dollars for everyone else?

   The gist If you sell to Indian SMEs, price in rupees, include GST in the displayed number, and support UPI and domestic cards, because dollar pricing on a card that fails on recurring charges kills conversion. If your buyer is an Indian enterprise with global operations, or your product is global first, dollars are usually fine. Expect India pricing to land meaningfully below your US list price, and think of that as segmentation rather than a discount. What you must avoid is a single global price that is simultaneously too high for Tier 2 India and too low for a US enterprise. Use geo-based pricing pages, set the expectation clearly, and make the India tier a real package rather than a cheaper version of the same thing.

   📄 SaaS Pricing in India: The Rupee vs Dollar Dilemma India Deals with the mechanics nobody else covers: UPI AutoPay versus international cards for recurring billing, GST and tax invoice differences, geo-IP ... 4 questions on pricing and packaging →
4. 4
   Expansion, upsell and churn

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

   How do I move net revenue retention from around 100 percent to 120 percent?

   The gist Do it in the right order. First stop the leak, because expansion built on a leaky base is exhausting: fix involuntary churn, then find the segment doing most of your gross churn and either serve it properly or stop selling to it. Only then build the expansion motion, and be specific about which of the three types you are pursuing (more seats, a second product to the same buyer, or the same product to a new department), because they need different plays and different people. Give someone the NRR number as their number. Diffuse ownership is why most companies stay parked at 100.

   📄 8 Things I Learned from Dave Kellogg About Net Dollar Retention The Gainsight CEO on why CS should own an NDR number rather than just a churn number, including the idea of giving every CSM their own book of MRR ... 4 questions on expansion, upsell and churn →