How to Drive Product-Led Growth
Product-led growth makes your product the primary driver of customer acquisition, activation, and expansion. Instead of relying solely on sales and marketing, PLG companies let the product experience sell itself.
Enable self-service signup
Remove all barriers to trying your product. Free trials or freemium tiers let users experience value before talking to sales.
Build frictionless onboarding
Create product tours and checklists that guide users to value in under 10 minutes. Time-to-value is the most critical PLG metric.
Instrument product-qualified leads
Define actions that indicate a user is ready to buy. Alert sales when users hit these triggers for perfectly timed outreach.
Enable in-product expansion
Use announcements and smart tips to surface premium features. Let users discover upgrade value organically through usage.
Build viral loops
Design features that naturally invite other users, like shared workspaces, collaboration features, or public-facing outputs.
Measure PLG metrics
Track natural rate of growth, product-qualified leads, time-to-value, and expansion revenue. These metrics tell you if your PLG engine is working.
Pro Tips
- The best PLG companies align pricing with value: users pay when they get value, not before.
- Self-serve onboarding does not mean no human touch; layer in sales at the right moments.
- Use NPS and feedback to continuously improve the self-service experience.
- PLG requires cross-functional alignment between product, marketing, sales, and success.
Conclusion
Product-led growth is not a tactic; it is a company strategy. By investing in the product experience as your primary growth engine, you create a scalable, efficient, and defensible competitive advantage. Start by optimizing time-to-value and build from there.
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