Product-led growth still needs sales

Never mistake your lead gen for your business. People paying 19 bucks a month is really great, but getting to a $50,000 or a $100,000 or a $250,000 contract, that's where big ARR numbers start racking up, and organizations want to talk to a human in order to navigate that.

I think that product led growth is a misnomer. I think people will do anything they can possibly do not call marketing marketing. I think we always see this. And so I think that product led growth really means not as much sales, which means product plus marketing.

Product-led sales assumes that there is a migration from an individual use case that you acquired an end user with and an escalation into an enterprise-level solution that solves enterprise-level problems.

Whether you thought about it consciously or not, you have already decided whether it is going to be product-led or sales-led. If it is the type of a solution that you need buy-in from the head of HR to use because you need to integrate with systems that have a lot of PII in them and no IC has the keys to that system at any size of a company, boom, you know have a sales-led motion.

If you have a product that even if it's for a specific function but anyone at any seniority level in that function could pick it up to use it, so DevTools are probably the most successful product-led growth companies that we don't talk about being product-led, but that's totally how they grow.

"Product-led in one direction" refers to acquiring users through the product itself, while "product-led back out" refers to users leaving or churning through product experience alone.

The other one that I don't hear people talk about very often is whether there's really day zero value in the tool. That is not something that is valuable if they've been using it for months. It is not something that can be product-led because there's product-led in one direction, there's product-led back out in that same direction.