Product led growth is a recurring theme amongst some of the most known brands in the market today. B2B Saas is driven by this growing tribe of products and companies like Slack, Dropbox, Twilio and Shopify. OpenView Partners have been focused on this and have backed a bunch of ventures which, as it turns out, had PLG (product led growth) in their DNA.
After MQL (Marketing qualified lead) we got to the rise of Inside sales and that gave us SQL (Sales qualified lead) and as we saw the rise of products with unbuilt network effect – Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail – product virality pushing growth has been in the making for a while. This era essentially led to PQL(product qualified lead) -which was an outcome of the Try and Buy era or the GTM strategies driven by Freemium access to products. With rise of saas and wide variety of softwares being adapted at all levels of work and life, the rise of the gig economy – there by the need of individual workers to provide outcomes – leading to the need of enterprise class platforms and softwares which are easy to adapt and buy. All of these created the environment where the product itself became the vehicle of conversion, ergo growth.
Blake Bartlett has written about the PLG market map Openview created last October and now is 250 strong with many known names and some rising stars like Lucidchart, Calendly and Mixmax. They also now have products listed that are providing the shovels for this new phenomena – enabling products to leverage their own product led growth strategies. The market map is an interesting study and I would like to see some more trends reflected in future versions, for example, those that enable the gig economy and other such tends we notice growing in the periphery.
Link to the full article and map below:
THE PRODUCT LED GROWTH MARKET MAP https://openviewpartners.com/blog/the-product-led-growth-market-map
