Welcome folks! 👋

This edition of The Product-Led Geek will take 7 minutes to read and you’ll learn:

• Why PLG requires serving three competing masters simultaneously

• How successful PLG companies like Slack and Figma balance free value with compelling reasons to pay.

• The real reason that PLG doesn’t work

Let’s go!

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Why Product-Led Growth Is Harder Than It Looks

My friend CJ Gustafson recently published a thoughtful piece titled "Why Romanticizing PLG is Dangerous."

He's right about many things - PLG isn't a magical solution that eliminates the need for sales teams.

CJ knows this well having seen the benefits and limitations at scale while we worked together at Snyk.

But I think the piece is missing something crucial.

PLG is a fundamentally different approach that's much harder to execute than either the romantics or the critics understand.

The idea seems perfect, and simple: create something so good that users naturally share it, upgrade to paid plans, and drive your customer acquisition for you.

No expensive sales team.

No marketing budget black holes.

Just pure product efficiency.

But make no mistake, PLG is really hard.

The debate about PLG usually focuses on whether it can replace sales teams (it can't, at least not beyond a certain ceiling) or whether it's more efficient (sometimes).

But these arguments miss the deeper challenge.

PLG forces you to serve three competing masters simultaneously.

The Three Masters

Each of these masters demands different things from your product, often pulling it in opposing directions:

1. Acquire users effectively (traditionally marketing's job)

2. Deliver immediate value (traditionally product's job)

3. Create reasons to pay (traditionally sales' job)

In a sales-led company, these functions are separate departments with their own goals and metrics.

In PLG, your product must perform all three jobs at once.

And that's where things get messy.

Let's look at how these competing demands create specific tensions that every PLG company must navigate:

Acquisition vs. Value

Features that make your product shareable often aren't the same ones that deliver core value.

Dropbox's referral program was brilliant for growth, but it wasn't why people used Dropbox.

Most products aren't naturally viral.

Adding viral mechanics often makes the product worse for actual use.

Those "invite friends" popups that growth hackers love?

For the most part, users hate them.

Value vs. Monetisation

The second tension is even trickier.

Your free product must be good enough that people want to use it, but incomplete enough that they'll pay for more.

Set the free-to-paid line too generously, and you'll have happy users who never convert.

Set it too stingily, and users leave before experiencing value.

The value vs monetisation challenge becomes even more complex in hybrid PLG models, where product and sales teams must work in lockstep.

Success requires:

• Aligned definitions around what constitutes qualified usage

• Shared vocabulary and data that both teams trust and understand

• Clear playbooks for when and how sales engages

• Aligned incentives

Getting the technology right is hard, but getting the people and processes aligned is often harder.

Product teams naturally want to give users more value, while sales teams need clear conversion paths.

Bridging this gap requires careful orchestration, thoughtful communication, and constant collaboration.

This human element explains why even companies with strong PLG foundations struggle to execute hybrid motions effectively.

The Hidden Organisational Challenge

Yes, external factors like enterprise procurement and credit card fees are challenges in PLG models.

They are real issues for sure.

But they're not what makes PLG truly difficult.

The harder challenge is internal: PLG requires a fundamentally different organisational structure and mindset.

When your product must simultaneously acquire, deliver value, and convert, traditional department boundaries break down.

Product teams must understand acquisition metrics traditionally owned by marketing. Marketing needs to deeply understand product value, not just messaging. And everyone needs to think about conversion paths typically owned by sales.

This is why we see those employee percentages CJ cited.

It's not that PLG companies secretly abandoned their principles by hiring sales teams.

It's that they discovered PLG is a starting point, not a complete go-to-market strategy.

The Essential Foundation

PLG will be dead in the water if you don’t focus maniacally on the specific problems your users are willing to pay to solve.

Most product-led failures happen because the companies optimise for broad appeal rather than deep value.

They chase user counts instead of solving expensive problems.

Successful product-led companies like Figma didn't win by being everything to everyone.

They won by solving one critical problem better than anyone else, then expanding from that position of strength.

Product-led growth works best when:

1. Your core problem is painful enough that users will endure friction to solve it

2. The solution demonstrably saves money or makes money

3. The user who experiences the value can make or influence the buying decision

Without these elements, you'll likely end up with lots of free users and disappointing conversion rates.

The Right Path For Most

For most companies, the answer isn't to abandon PLG or to double down on it exclusively.

It's to recognise that product-led growth works best as the foundation of a hybrid approach.

The most successful scaled PLG companies use their product as a powerful acquisition and qualification engine, then layer in human-led processes where they add the most value:

1. Use PLG to let users experience value immediately and qualify themselves

2. Apply sales resources selectively to accounts showing the right signals

3. Build expansion paths that combine self-serve and sales-assisted motions

They use product as the foot in the door, not the entire strategy.

That hybrid approach is less elegant than the pure product-led dream.

But it's what actually works at scale.

Solving for the Three Masters Problem

The key lies in finding creative ways to make these competing demands work together:

• Turning acquisition into value (like Calendly, where sharing is the product)

• Making value drive acquisition (like Figma, where collaboration naturally spreads usage)

• Aligning monetisation with value delivery (like Slack, where paying reflects proven utility)

But all of these companies also discovered they couldn't rely on product alone.

They built organisations specifically designed to support these delicate balances:

• Product teams that optimise for both growth and core value

• Marketing that shapes product strategy, not just messaging

• Sales that amplifies product-led motion rather than fighting it

• Leadership that understands when to let the product lead and when to bring in human touch

That's why product-led growth is harder than it looks.

The real challenge isn't building a great product or creating efficient distribution - though they are essential ingredients.

It's building an entire company around the reality of serving three masters at once.

So the question isn't whether PLG works.

It's whether you're prepared (and committed) to rebuild your company around its fundamental tensions.

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

PS: Thanks again to our sponsor: Inflection.io