Welcome folks! 👋

This edition of The Product-Led Geek is authored by Matt Henderson (Director of Growth at Sentry) and it’s an absolute banger.

It will take 8 minutes to read and you’ll learn:

• About the shift coming for users to convert on your PLG apps in LLMs rather than your web funnel

• How chat is now a platform - a colossal shift for how we view websites

• Why most web transactions are bots but sites haven’t yet adapted

• The steps we can all take to unlock growth by improving our app’s accessibility to LLM/agent workflows.

As usual with guest posts here it’s injected with my commentary throughout.

Let’s go!

GEEK OUT

When the PLG Funnel Shifts Into LLMs

OpenAI recently announced that they are partnering with ecommerce sites to offer native chat checkout, meaning users can buy something straight from their chatGPT conversation.

They followed that up with announcing an apps platform, which involves them suggesting apps when they’re relevant to the conversation and then running an app from your chat.

Picture this conversation:

You can feel this coming right?

B2B always comes with compliance, security, governance, enterprise-concerns and can be harder than buying some shoes or a hat online, but for PLG, this seems almost inevitable.

It would be even easier for companies that offer usage-based or per credit pricing.

“G” at Hypergrowth Partners puts it clearly in his post

You can now already have ChatGPT open Zillow in-chat (after you’ve signed up and integrated it) and have it find you a specific home.

Right now it’s just for consumer apps like Spotify, Alltrails, Open Table, Target, and others coming, but with Microsoft pulling strings behind the scenes of OpenAI, we know the focus will eventually include the enterprise.

Here’s the thing -> we are already halfway to this exact workflow applying to PLG.

We have the Model Context Protocol.

MCP is just the rails or the bridge between agent and system, but how close are we really to an agent or LLM doing the provisioning of a user with their identity and the user skipping a website entirely?

Your web funnel would be drastically different or might completely evaporate.

This all begs the questions:

1. When will it be standard for agents and LLMs to be doing the conversion piece for B2B (especially PLG)?

2. How will your website and app capitalize on Chat as a new growth platform beyond referral traffic?

Chat as a platform will lead to agentic conversion

To understand what this might look like for B2B, we can simply look at what they are doing with ecom.

OpenAI introduced “Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)” which is just a fancy way to say a way for apps to natively integrate into ChatGPT for payments, product feeds, etc.

On their site it says ACP “enables a conversation between buyers, their AI agents, and businesses to complete a purchase“, so why wouldn’t that eventually apply for Product-led growth applications?

What’s really shifting is that chat is becoming a platform that is and will likely be embedded into all OS’s (see Meta’s glasses, Gemini in Pixel phones, Apple AI, etc.).

This is a tacit shift away from a search on a browser as the starting place for digital transactions.

Look no further than Atlas, OpenAI’s new browser as evidence.

It’s a step towards an agent/chat as the foundation for everything. Just as the browser with web apps was a shift away from opening your desktop and having everything you needed in the 2000s/2010s.

Microsoft no doubt has learned from Chrome’s dominance and seems to be behind doubling down on chat being a platform.

It looks to be a blue ocean opportunity for growth teams.

This is the shift: A b2b buyer wouldn’t buy directly from the SERP in Google, but they would buy after an aided conversation with chat.

1 out of every 3 consumers already would allow agents to make purchases and 48% of buyers last year used AI tools to research software.

This is without a doubt heading towards 100% adoption.

Overall this means that rather than your SaaS website looking like, let’s say, a shoe storefront, it will likely look more like a shoe fulfillment center.

Growth lever: turning your website into a fulfillment center

51% of traffic on the internet is bots now.

And we are JUST on the precipice of crawlers and agents hockeysticking that number to the moon in the next few years, especially with AI embedded browsers.

So the question becomes: how accessible is your website and digital properties for AI?

If your website is like a storefront made for humans, and the majority of interactions with your store are bots or agents, you have a misalignment.

Here are a few ways of thinking about the shift using the analogy:

Potential ways to optimize your channels for conversion:

Here are a few things I will certainly be looking out for to put on the roadmap:

Be known for what you do:

• Explain specific solutions tailored to what your product does for different spaces, industries, etc. This could look like solutions pages, template galleries, recipes, integrations pages, etc.

  • ex: Railway template gallary & Common Room playbooks

• Make your website accessible to bots/agents first, then humans. Focus on great documentation of how your product works technically.

  • ex: Sentry Docs

Make it easy to be adopted by this new workflow

• Integrate your app with chat (at least ChatGPT as they open up apps platform out “later this year”) - they launched with only a handful of apps, but this is a complete greenfield and they will almost certainly recommend your product over anyone else’s if it’s in their platform.

• Consider the future of optimizing your devtool for AI-first discovery and adoption with tools like DevTune.

Deliver a bomb experience once buyers land in your product

• Revisit your onboarding and first 30 day experience because it might be the first place a user lands rather than your website where they can see/learn about other features and products.

One clarification on all of this is that I’m not saying that brand feel and taste doesn’t matter and that everything should be built for bots.

I actually think this matters more than ever, because you have less touches with a prospect before they choose a product, and you need to make an impression (not only this but brand matters increasingly so for optimizing your website for discoverability).

People will still come to your website, experience your advertising, etc.

And those emotional interactions matter so much more now.

Evidenced by impressions until the first website visit increasing from 723 to 894 (23% increase) last year i.e. less heading to a website, more brand exposure off site.

But what will this all look like in a few years?

My wager would be that PLG is condensing to artful and authentic brand touches + a product experience that lines up the new ecosystem.

THAT’S A WRAP

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That’s all for today,

If there are any product, growth or leadership topics that you’d like me to write about, just hit reply to this email or leave a comment and let me know!

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Until next time!

— Ben