Newsletter · 10 min read

Your guide to PLG benchmarks

Kyle Poyar · Growth Unhinged Freemium Intermediate

Poyar replaces the sales funnel with a five stage new user journey (discover, start, activate, convert, scale) and attaches benchmark ranges to each. It is how you find out which stage is actually broken.

  • Gartner data cited: only 5 to 6 percent of buying activity is spent meeting a vendor's reps.
  • Product-led companies were 55 percent of respondents, up from 48 percent in 2020.
  • Benchmarks drawn from 450+ software companies, from under $1M to $100M+ ARR.
Open on growthunhinged.com ↗

It answers 9 questions

  1. Our self-serve funnel converts at about 2 percent from signup to paid. Where do I even start looking?
  2. How do I decide what goes in the free tier and what sits behind the paywall?
  3. How do I run a pricing or packaging experiment on a live self-serve funnel without blowing up revenue?
  4. Activation has been flat for three quarters despite a lot of experiments. How do I diagnose that as a leader?
  5. How do I set an activation target the whole company will actually rally behind?
  6. What should I actually report to the board for a PLG business, given pipeline coverage means nothing here?
  7. What separates a top-quartile self-serve funnel from an average one, stage by stage?
  8. How do the best teams run activation as a continuous programme rather than a one-off project?
  9. How do the very best companies use pricing itself as the growth engine rather than a checkout screen?

Read with it

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  2. Benchmarks from 500 plus products: 34 percent average, 36 percent for SaaS. If you have ever wondered whether your number is... Lenny's Newsletter Article · 12 min read What is a good activation rate Lenny Rachitsky and Yuriy Timen
  3. A short, specific list of what to instrument on a self-serve funnel, including time to activation and time to convert, which... Amplitude Article · 12 min read Top 10 Metrics to Measure Freemium and Free Trial Performance Carmen DeCouto
  4. Seven hybrid pricing patterns with named companies (GitHub, Shopify, Intercom, Zapier), plus Poyar's point that the enemy is... Growth Unhinged Newsletter · 12 min read The state of usage-based pricing in SaaS Kyle Poyar
  5. Goes past the single aha metric to a three stage model (setup, aha, habit) with Apollo.io and Appcues case studies, plus the... Product Growth Article · 25 min read How to Measure Onboarding: Advanced Topics in Activation Metrics Aakash Gupta and Ramli John
  6. It settles the freemium versus trial argument with numbers from 150 plus companies rather than opinion: freemium brings 33... OpenView Article · 10 min read Freemium vs. Free Trial: How to Know Which One to Pick for Your SaaS Startup Kristin Hillery
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