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 doing the work

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.

   Our self-serve funnel converts at about 2 percent from signup to paid. Where do I even start looking?

   The gist Do not touch the pricing page yet. Split the funnel into visit to signup, signup to activated, activated to paid, and look at which of the three is furthest below benchmark, because the fix for each is completely different. Nine times out of ten the leak is activation, not conversion: people signed up, never got to the thing that makes the product useful, and quietly left, so the 2 percent is a symptom rather than the disease. Get the activated to paid number in isolation, and if activated users convert respectably then every hour you spend on onboarding pays back more than any pricing change would. Only when activated users are converting well and the number is still low should you go looking at packaging.

   📰 Your guide to PLG benchmarks Poyar replaces the sales funnel with a five stage new user journey (discover, start, activate, convert, scale) and attaches benchmark ranges to eac... 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.

   How do I pick one activation metric when the product supports five very different use cases?

   The gist Do not force one event. Model activation in three stages instead, setup, aha and habit, and let the aha event differ by use case while setup and habit stay common. Then report a single blended activation rate for the company and the per-use-case breakdown for the teams doing the work, so leadership gets one number and the people fixing things get a usable one. Resist the urge to pick the event that is easiest to instrument, and resist the urge to change the definition next quarter, because a metric that keeps moving teaches the organisation to ignore it. If two use cases turn out to have wildly different activation rates, that is not a measurement problem, that is your roadmap.

   📄 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.

   How do I design tiers so buyers pick the right plan and grow into the next one?

   The gist Good, better, best works for about two thirds of SaaS companies because it makes the choice easy, so start there unless you have a strong reason not to. Give every tier a job: one to acquire, one to be the obvious default, one to capture the buyers with budget and requirements. Make it instantly clear who each plan is for, because buyers default to the middle tier when they are confused and you lose money on both ends. Sell a feature as an add-on when it is polarising, appeals to a different buyer, or taps a different budget, and resist gating anything that drives engagement. Map the tiers to the real user journey (individual, team, organisation) rather than to a feature list you invented.

   📰 Your guide to SaaS packaging 201 Answers the two packaging questions that actually come up: when to bundle a new feature into a tier and when to sell it as an add-on, and how to gi... 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 spot which accounts are actually ready to expand?

   The gist Look for accounts that are pressing against a limit and accounts that are spreading sideways. Hitting a usage ceiling, adding users faster than they bought seats, or a second team quietly showing up in the logs are all better signals than a good NPS score. Then profile your last twenty expansions and find what they had in common before they bought more: a usage threshold, a tenure, an industry, a team size. That pattern becomes your list. Expansion outreach that lands is timely and specific to what the customer just did. Generic upgrade emails to the whole base mostly teach people to ignore you.

   📄 Expansion MRR: Definition, Formula, and Impact on SaaS Growth The cleanest definition of expansion MRR with the formula and the benchmark that matters: top companies get up to 40 percent of new ARR from existi... 4 questions on expansion, upsell and churn →