Identifying where you land on the product-led spectrum

Pure-Play PLG is rarely ever the only growth motion.

The reason?

Your product doesn’t fully meet the criteria to sustain a self-serve PLG motion.
You have reached the limits of what your self-serve PLG motion can do on its own, and you need sales to help you move upmarket.

This is why we view PLG companies on more of a spectrum, the choice between sales-led, PLG, and PLS is rarely binary and evolves overtime.

Here are the characteristics we use to grade companies and categorize where they fit on the spectrum.

1️⃣ Natural virality or network effects.

This is really a core tenet of PLG - natural virality. It’s a product that is shareable with your team, the service gets better when more of your team joins, it’s so good you want to tell your friends and colleagues.

2️⃣ End-users as the buyers.

For pure-play PLG this is a must. Your end user must be able to swipe a credit card to get started quickly with your product. If the end user always has to pull in an authority with buying power, PLG may not work.

3️⃣ End user-focused onboarding.

The product is inherently single-player and doesn’t require multiple personas for onboarding and getting to value quickly. This does not mean it is forever single-player. Many single-player products have network effects that make the product more valuable as more team members join. The difference is those team members joining is not required for a single user to get value.

4️⃣ Frictionless experiences.

PLG products are successful because of their emphasis on frictionless experiences, especially when it comes to onboarding & implementation. If getting to experience value requires calling IT to connect a tool - pure play PLG is out of the question. This extends to everything from the support process to payments and billing.

5️⃣ Product-centric go-to-market strategy.

Go-to-market is built around the product's ability to acquire, retain and expand customers. This means self-serve onboarding, product usage metrics that inform both product and GTM teams, and the ability to run experiments.

6️⃣ Average contract value.

When costs are low, it’s very easy to swipe a credit card and self-serve onto a product. As your ACV gets higher or you move upmarket into the enterprise, customers are less willing to take a purely PLG route, they almost always need to speak to a salesperson and involve finance or procurement.