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Earlier this week I came across a thread on X from Chris Orlob.

Chris helped grow Gong from $200k to $200M ARR. This thread was describing 9 lessons about running SaaS demos that closed over $100M in revenue while at Gong.

His thread and the lessons it contains are aimed at salespeople. Humans on a Zoom call, clicking through features, reading body language, steering a conversation toward a close.

But in a PLG company, there's no salesperson on the call.

Your product is the demo. Your onboarding flow is the pitch. Your first-time user experience is the discovery meeting, the feature walkthrough, and the close, all compressed into a few minutes of someone's Tuesday afternoon.

Sadly it’s still true that most PLG teams design onboarding like a product tour. Step 1, step 2, step 3, here's your dashboard, good luck.

In a demo that would be a salesperson opening a screen share, clicking through every menu item, then getting up and walking out.

Sellers like that don’t do well. And products that act that way will struggle too.

This feels like useful framing to me, so I’m borrowing Chris’s thread to look at it through a product lens.

Chris's advice: don't build up. Don't ramp. Show the killer feature immediately and let the buyer's head spin. Unpack from there.

Most onboarding flows do the opposite. They start with profile setup, workspace naming, team invitations, integrations. By the time the user reaches the thing that actually matters, there’s a real risk they’ve already decided this feels like homework.

Canva gets this right. You pick a template and you're editing within seconds. The power of the tool, visual design without design skills, is the first thing you touch.

Your onboarding should answer one question as fast as possible: what does this product make possible that wasn't possible before?

Everything else can wait.

Caveat: Setup still matters, but defer as much as you can get away with.

Chris warns against the "We can also..." reflex. Showing everything overwhelms buyers and slows decisions.

In PLG, this is the feature zoo problem. New users land on a dashboard with twelve tabs, a sidebar full of options, and a getting started checklist with nine items. The product is trying to prove how much it can do. The user just wants one thing solved.

Scope the first session to one workflow and one outcome. Give people a reason to come back, not a reason to feel lost.

Chris is rightly blunt: the point of a demo isn't to educate. It's to get someone to make a decision. Agree on what that decision is beforehand, then demo in the context of helping them make it.

Don’t treat activation like a learning objective. "The user should understand how to create a project." That's education. The real goal is a decision: will I use this tomorrow?

Every step in your first-time UX should push toward a commitment. Connect a data source. Invite one colleague. Set up a notification. Micro-bets that make leaving harder and staying easier.

The question isn't "did the user complete onboarding?". It's "did the user make a bet on this product?"

Chris says: summarise the buyer's challenge and its impact before you start the demo. Then validate it. Let the buyer know they're in the right place.

In product, this means your first screen shouldn't be your first feature. Instead, show them their own reflection.

A short problem statement before the first interaction shifts the user from "I'm evaluating a tool" to "I'm solving my problem." That reframe matters.

IMHO this is Chris's most overlooked lesson. He says most buyers are three minutes into a SaaS demo thinking "WTF am I looking at?" His fix: before you click around, explain what they're seeing.

In PLG, nobody is there to narrate. So the interface has to do the orienting itself.

This is where so many products fail. They drop a new user onto a complex dashboard and expect them to figure out what matters. The user doesn't know what the panels mean, where to start, or what they should click first.

Good onboarding gives you a focal point. Notion does this with its blank page plus menu approach. The screen isn't cluttered. There's one clear starting point: just start typing, or pick a template. You know what you're looking at immediately.

Empty states are your biggest orientation tool. A blank table that says "No pipelines yet, create your first one" does more than any tooltip tour.

Chris says: before you show any feature, spend ten seconds framing the specific pain it solves. "Earlier you said X is a headache. Here's how we solve that."

In-product, this is contextual microcopy. The tooltip that says "Tired of manually tagging leads? Set up auto-rules here." The empty state that says "Your team spends 4 hours a week on status updates. Here's a better way."

Wherever you label features, think about how you can instead label problems.

There's a real difference between the user thinking "oh, that's what this does" and "oh, this fixes the thing that's been annoying me."

Chris advises salespeople to drop in a short customer story after each feature: "Here's how X customer is using that workflow to solve Y pain." People remember stories. People forget click paths.

In product, these are social proof touchpoints embedded in the experience.

Slack does (or did - it’s been a while) this during onboarding with usage stats. "Teams that use channels instead of group DMs see 25% fewer messages." It's not a testimonial in the traditional sense. More like a story compressed into a data point.

You can do this with case study snippets in empty states, "how others use this" tooltips, or aggregate usage patterns shown at the right moment. Stories stick, feature lists don't.

After showing a feature, Chris says to stop and have a conversation. How does that compare to how you solve this today? To what extent does this resonate?

In PLG, you can't literally stop the user and ask. Well, you can, but most will skip it. What you can do is create moments where the user pauses and connects what they've just seen to their own situation.

After a user creates their first design, don’t just say "nice work." Show them what's possible next: prototyping, sharing, commenting. Each option should be a question in disguise. What do you want to do with this?

Let the user connect the dots. That's more powerful than spelling it out for them.

Chris closes demos by asking what resonated. This gets the buyer to articulate value in their own words, which is far more persuasive than the seller repeating it.

In PLG, this is your post-onboarding moment. Most products waste it with "Setup complete! Go to your dashboard."

Try instead: "You've connected your data and created your first report. What do you want to do next?"

Or even simpler: a quick one-question survey. "What's the main thing you're hoping to accomplish with [product]?" The answer is useful for personalisation, obviously. But the act of writing it down also reinforces the user's own commitment. They've told you, and themselves, why they're here.

Good salespeople sell a lot of product by facilitating a conversation where the buyer talks themselves into it.

PLG onboarding should the same thing, silently.

Your product needs to lead with its strongest capability, frame problems before solutions, push for commitments instead of comprehension, and let the user articulate why they care.

These techniques have been validated across thousands of sales calls. The question for PLG teams is whether the product can execute them without a human in the room.

Be honest - is your onboarding a growth engine or a feature tour?

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.

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