Ben Williams

The Product-Led Geek

The Product-Led Geek: PLG and product led sales for companies selling to developers

Why they're worth your time

Developer tools break most generic PLG advice, and he is the person who works through what changes: how a free tier maps to a security or infrastructure buyer, and when a bottom up signal is worth a sales conversation. His writing is unusually operational, closer to a checklist than a think piece.

Background

Ben Williams was VP of Product at Snyk during the years it built one of the best known developer product led growth motions, and held product leadership roles at CloudBees and IBM before that. He now advises B2B startups selling to developers and writes The Product-Led Geek, a weekly newsletter on product led growth and product led sales with thousands of subscribers. He has walked through the Snyk growth model publicly, including on Lenny's Podcast.

Known for

PLG Sales process Retention & expansion

Where they're public

Their own channels. Read the work first.

LinkedIn X Newsletter Website

Others on the same ground

April Dunford Toronto
The person most B2B teams learn positioning from, and the author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch She turns positioning from a vague branding exercise into a repeatable exercise: list your true competitive alternatives, isolate the features only you have, work out the value those unlock, and name the market segment that cares most. Her Sales Pitch work is the rare material that connects that positioning to the actual words a rep says on a call. PositioningICPSales processCategory design
Pete Kazanjy Atrium · San Francisco
Author of Founding Sales, the handbook that popularised founder led sales Founding Sales is the most concrete text available on the exact stretch most founders get wrong: your first 10 customers, your first rep, and the handoff between the two. He is unusually specific about call structure, discovery questions, and what a founder should measure before hiring anyone into sales. Sales processOutboundGTM hiringEnterprise sales
Jason Lemkin SaaStr · San Francisco
Founder of SaaStr, the largest body of public writing on scaling B2B SaaS revenue He answers the operational questions almost nobody publishes numbers for: when to hire your first VP of Sales, what a rep should actually close, how long ramp really takes, and why most VP hires fail in the first 90 days. Read him for benchmarks and hiring sequencing rather than for strategy. GTM hiringEnterprise salesSales processPricing
Kyle Poyar Growth Unhinged · Boston
Writes Growth Unhinged, the working reference on product led growth, pricing and packaging He publishes the actual benchmarks and teardowns behind PLG rather than the theory: free to paid conversion rates by category, what usage based pricing does to net revenue retention, and how specific companies structured their packaging. His pricing work is the strongest public material on changing a price without breaking your funnel. PLGPricingInbound & contentRetention & expansion

Listed here and would rather not be, or something is wrong? Email [email protected] and we'll fix or remove it.

eChai Partner Brands