The narrative goes that developers want to get their hands on products, not talk to salespeople. This idea — plus low interest rate market dynamics for several years — created an entire generation of Product Led Growth (PLG) companies, from Stripe to Vercel, building entire businesses with just a signup form and a credit card swipe. No sales necessary, the story goes. 

However, in my decades of experience selling technical tools, I’ve learned that PLG is the wrong decision for most early-stage technical founders. In this post, I’ll try to explain the risks of PLG and why direct sales is the best path to product-market fit. 

Not all users are created equal

The main gist of my argument is that the value PLG can deliver is misaligned with what the goals of most early-stage startups should be.

The goal of most founders early on is to get users. Thus, PLG is tempting because it’s deceptively easy. Why not spin up a sign-up form and let potential users try and buy? Aren’t you leaving users (and money) on the table by creating friction? Well, yes – but early on, your company’s growth depends on friction. 

Not all users are created equal. You don’t want users for your product – you want useful users for your product, users who you can collaborate with so that you can learn if your product and your story are worth anything (and how much). A founder’s primary goal before they have product-market fit is feedback. 

At this point, friction is not the enemy. Frictionless signups mean frictionless exits. People can come and go as they please and say nothing to you – and they will likely say literally nothing to you, nor will they respond after they have already left to tell you why.

You need exactly the opposite — high-fidelity, carefully selected design partners who deeply experience the pain point your product solves and can tell you where it hurts. Feedback is worth much more than revenue or signups early on. Building meaningful relationships with these partners — not having them go through an automated purchasing process — is the way to get and maximize that feedback. I’ve seen founders doing a PLG motion go to painstaking lengths (automatic reach out, dead Slack channels, etc.) to get their early self-serve users to talk to them; why not just make that your goal in the first place?

PLG itself is not necessarily bad (although some companies should never do it) — it’s the timing that I see so many startups mess up. If you do PLG too early, you’ll never get the direct feedback you need to determine whether you really have something. And in an era where there seems to be a million developer tools, it has never been more important to get that feedback early and build your story.

In defense of getting people to use the product

If there’s something that the PLG wave taught us, it’s that buyers (especially technical ones) want the ability to try out a product before they get involved in sales discussions. When I work with companies, we try to figure out the best way to get the product into the hands of potential users, but within a framework that makes sense for where the company is at. 

What I’ve seen more companies do, in lieu of getting bad data from premature PLG, is create a publicly available product sandbox. The sandbox has little or no auth and lets prospective buyers poke around to see what your actual product looks like.

In many cases, sandboxes are even better than the PLG model of product fidelity because they don’t require the user to do anything. There’s no signup, no need to connect data (which, of course, would require permission from someone higher up), and no configuration – just the ability to poke around and explore. 

These sandboxes are standard in product categories where your users need to connect data to the platform. See, for example, one from a company I work with in observability.

Sandboxes aren’t the only way to do this, though. A free POC trial with all features enabled is another way to get your product into the hands of the practitioners who want to try it. Avoiding PLG does not mean that your product has to be some secretive thing locked in a safe. 

Why technical founders are allergic to sales

I believe that many technical founders overcorrect towards PLG because they have a deep-seated, intuitive distaste for the sales process. They don’t want to subject their future users to the same. 

“I believe that many technical founders overcorrect towards PLG because many of them have a deep-seated, intuitive distaste for the sales process.”

As someone who’s worked with many different sales teams, I can let you in on what’s really going on: technical founders experience a negative exposure bias when it comes to sales. Bad salespeople are everywhere, and in technical tools, the gap between good and bad is especially obvious. You do not want to buy a database from someone who doesn’t know the difference between OLAP and OLTP. 

But good salespeople are everywhere too. Some of the best sellers I worked with at AWS came from engineering backgrounds, kept up to date on what was going on, but most importantly, empathized with and understood what an engineer buying infrastructure needs most. They go beyond what an engineer can do, smoothly guiding buyers through a process and giving them the information they need to make a decision.

You can do sales, you can do it authentically to your product, and you don’t have to do anything slimy to succeed at it. And your customers will actually prefer it to the human-less PLG process. This is why my job at Amplify exists.

Credit cards and sellers: the Atlassian story

I’ll close with the Atlassian story, which has been repeated with PLG darlings across the board. Remember that for every company that has succeeded using PLG, there are many, many more that didn’t get off the ground, crashed soon after liftoff, or shifted stories without telling you.

There’s no better example of PLG in action than Atlassian. The company was founded in 2002 and eventually became one of the biggest and loudest examples of PLG (before the term really became a thing). 

Visit archived versions of their site, and you can see the PLG story over the years. Back in 2011, Atlassian bragged about not having a “pushy enterprise sales team.”

But in 2015, when the company went public, Atlassian was at a crossroads.

In its S-1 filing, the company wrote, “We founded our company on the premise that great products could sell themselves.” Later in the filing, “We focus on enabling a self-service, low-friction model that makes it easy for users to try, adopt, and use our products.” 

But in the same filing, the company admits, “Our viral marketing model may not continue to be as successful as we anticipate, and the absence of a direct sales function may impede our future growth.” 

They were right. 

If you look at Atlassian’s website now, enterprise sales is front and center (top-level nav, dedicated page, etc.). 

And you can see why: By 2020, enterprise sales were its fastest-growing segment. 

The vast majority of B2B SaaS businesses that have found venture-scale success have done so by creating as many high-value, recurring, annual contracts with medium / large-sized companies as possible – even the ones that proclaimed otherwise. 

Remember Stripe, arguably the canonical example of PLG in action for developers? Last time I visited their site, they were talking about Gartner front and center:

Look at their enterprise section:

Perhaps most importantly, check out the navbar CTA:

There’s obviously nothing wrong with any of this; it just goes to show you how rare lasting PLG-led businesses actually are. Do you really want to take that risk when you’re just starting out? Or find your first few customers, lock in your story, and then open up product access once you’re sure you’ve got something? 

In a sense, this is like raising a puppy (which my family has done 3 times now). Before you take your 12-week-old to the dog park and hope for the best, you train it. There are shots. There’s early socialization with older, well-trained dogs, potty training, recall, and leash-walking. All of that stuff gets your dog ready for primetime. 

PLG is similar. Many companies for sure benefit from a self-serve function, but adding it too early pushes the product out to the world before it’s ready. Focus on sales – the good kind – first.