Welcome folks! 👋

This edition of The Product-Led Geek will take 8 minutes to read and you’ll learn:

• Why PLG endures as a fundamental force as permanent as gravity in software adoption.

• How to apply the infectiousness test to evaluate if your product has genuine product-led potential or requires artificial growth support.

• How your early growth decisions permanently shape your company's culture, cost structure and operational focus.

Let’s go!

TOGETHER WITH SQUAD AI

Building a start-up? Let Squad AI be your product co-founder. Drop in your idea, and in minutes, you'll get personas, MVP scope, and a developer-ready roadmap. Less guesswork, more growth.

Please support our sponsors!

GEEK LINKS

GEEK OUT

Why PLG Will Never Die

Every so often someone declares Product-Led Growth dead.

Usually they say this right after they’ve failed to pull it off.

Sales is back, they tell us, or brand, or - more recently - AI-generated funnels.

Yet the companies that matter still start the same way: they make something users like so much that word of it outruns any ad budget or cold-email cadence.

Why does this keep happening?

Every era has its fashionable excuses for why the product doesn’t have to pull its own weight.

None last.

They can’t.

The forces that make product-led growth work are as permanent as the ones that make water run downhill.

PLG is not a tactic.

It’s gravity.

The Default Slope of Demand

Imagine trying to sell umbrellas in a rainstorm.

You can stand behind a table and let people come to you, or you can run around waving umbrellas over your head and shouting prices.

Inbound vs outbound.

Either will work, but the table scales and the shouting doesn’t.

This doesn't mean you never shout.

Early on, founders have to do whatever works - demos, cold calls, midnight deployment sessions.

But you're doing these things to learn what makes the umbrella compelling, not to prove shouting is a strategy.

What product-led growth does is arrange things so it’s always raining: once users feel the problem and notice that your product solves it cleanly, demand acquires its own gradient.

You still have to keep the table stocked, but you don’t have to chase anyone.

Startups that miss this point end up fighting gravity.

They hire SDRs before they’ve nailed the use case, spend their seed round on ads that produce curious clicks but not conviction, and explain flat curves to investors with phrases like “long enterprise cycle.”

That’s a polite way of saying the umbrella only works when the founder is holding it.

The Infectiousness Test

Here’s the quick test:

"If you turned off all marketing tomorrow, would your growth continue?"

Most answer no.

But the rare yes answers come from companies that feel curiously inevitable when you zoom out - Stripe, Figma, Notion, Slack, Canva, Linear, and so on.

In each case the early users did the alarming kind of evangelism: unpaid, unprompted, and impossible to shut off.

They wrote guides, recorded videos, dragged coworkers in by the collar.

That behaviour isn’t an accident; it’s literally the signal that your product is tilting the ground under the market.

Cost Structures Have Memories

A company is like a tree: whatever shape the branches take, the rings remember the first season.

If the founding team learns to grow by delighting users directly, they will keep squeezing surfaces to reduce friction long after they can afford frictions.

If instead they learn to grow by cutting discounts and signing annual contracts, they will keep hiring people whose job is to negotiate friction.

Both strategies can generate revenue, but only the first compounds R&D.

In the long run it’s not the same contest; it’s two different games played on the same scoreboard.

The Ratchet of Expectations

One surprising advantage of PLG is that it terrifies you early.

When your only funnel is the product, you fix every splinter you can feel because every splinter costs a user.

By the time you decide to layer on marketing - or succumb to a board member’s spreadsheet - you’re selling something that can already stand on its own.

Companies that start with sales acquire the opposite ratchet: you don’t have to fix the rough edge this quarter, because the quota was met anyway.

By the fifth quarter the rough edge is part of the culture.

By the fiftieth it’s part of the org chart.

PLG Limits

Sure, some domains resist product-led growth, and some products legitimately need different models.

If you're selling multi-million dollar defence contracts or building specialised hardware for regulated industries, your growth will probably never be product-led in the pure sense.

If your buyer is a procurement officer who will be retired before the system goes live, forget viral loops.

But in every field where end users have autonomy and urgent, measurable pain points, the quickest route to adoption still runs through the people who feel that pain directly.

When decision-making is decentralised and value is immediate and visible, bottom-up adoption cuts through bureaucracy and drives rapid growth.

The pattern repeats so often it’s hard to remember how young the phrase “Product-Led Growth” is.

We had to coin a term for something that had been happening since arcades discovered that better games outsold better neon.

How to Lean In

The practical advice is boring but unforgiving:

1. Ship as soon as a user can win with it. Not win a trophy - just win a tiny argument with their problem.

2. Sit next to them while they do. Count the clicks, watch the face. Every grimace is a feature request.

3. Refuse to “unblock yourself” with hacks that don’t scale. The hacks will grow roots and charge you rent.

4. Wait to hire sales until the desk is starting to be buried in inbound. If no one is banging on the door, you’re too early or too wrong.

Nothing about that list is novel.

That’s the point.

The mistake is believing rules so old can somehow expire.

The Asymmetry That Lasts

The deepest reason PLG stays relevant is that humans stay lazy.

We like telling friends about things that remove effort from our lives, because recommending such things makes us look competent at being alive.

Software that grants superpowers will therefore spread until something better appears or the problem evaporates.

Founders who bet against that principle are betting against self-interest.

It’s a long bet, but the odds are printed on every successful company’s origin story.

So the next time someone announces that PLG is dead, ask yourself which is more likely: that gravity stopped working, or that someone is trying to sell you a helicopter because their product can’t glide on its own.

THAT’S A WRAP

Before you go, here are 3 ways I can help:

Take the FREE Learning Velocity Index assessment - Discover how your team's ability to learn and leverage learnings stacks up in the product-led world. Takes 2 minutes and you get free advice.

Book a free 1:1 consultation call with me - I keep a handful of slots open each week for founders and product growth leaders to explore working together and get some free advice along the way. Book a call.

Sponsor this newsletter - Reach over 7600 founders, leaders and operators working in product and growth at some of the world’s best tech companies including Paypal, Adobe, Canva, Miro, Amplitude, Google, Meta, Tailscale, Twilio and Salesforce.

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!

And if you enjoyed this post, consider upgrading to a VIG Membership to get the full Product-Led Geek experience and access to every post in the archive including all guides.

Until next time!

— Ben

PS: Thanks again to our sponsor: Squad AI