🚀 How to start product-led growth (PLG)?

3 tactics to start product-led growth (PLG)

🧪 Pass the litmus test

• Litmus test: If I drop someone cold into the product and they use this feature, would they come back tomorrow? 

• Focus on the question: “What’s the one use case that changes the user’s life in under 5 minutes?”

• Check that you have:

  • 5–10 real users

  • Solved one urgent problem (painkiller use case)

  • A tight loop between observation and iteration 

  • One clear activation event to watch (activation is not “signed up”; it’s “hit a moment of undeniable value”)

  • Delivered the value without explanation

• Product led growth = product-market fit in real time; if your product can’t drive repeat, self-serve usage in a narrow use case, you have a product-market fit problem

📐 Pick a wedge use case

• Use a 5-part framework to define a single, undeniable use case that lets your product lead the motion

• Problem severity: Is this a top-3 pain for your user right now?

  • Bad: “We streamline internal communications with AI.”

  • Better: “You waste 3 hours/day checking 5 Slack channels. We eliminate that.”

  • Focus on chronic pains, not occasional annoyances

• Job-to-be-done clarity: Can you describe the task being automated in plain English, in one sentence?

  • Bad: “Automates contextual reasoning across semantic layers.”

  • Better: “Summarizes customer support tickets and drafts responses automatically.”

  • If you can’t explain the job, your user won’t understand the value

• Time-to-value (TTV): Can a user experience a meaningful result within 5 minutes?

  • Bad: “Connect your CRM, upload 100MB of data, and wait for fine-tuning.” 

  • Better: “Paste an email thread. Get a reply draft instantly.” 

  • Fast TTV is the #1 indicator of a PLG-worthy use case

• Quantifiable outcome: Does your product prove its value with a clear before/after state?

  • “Takes 30 minutes to do → now takes 3.” 

  • “Used to cost $500/month in manual review → now it’s automated.” 

  • Users need a scoreboard, not a vibe

• Repeatability: Can the same user get value again and again? 

  • Bad: “Cool one-off chatbot you try once.” 

  • Better: “A daily assistant that preps your calendar and draft comms.” 

  • One-hit wonders don’t build compounding usage or retention

🔍 Start narrow, then expand

• Self-serve onboarding: Remove every barrier to the wedge. No fluff, no explainer videos

• Product qualified lead (PQL) definition: Track when someone hits the activation threshold (e.g., 3 AI summaries generated, 5 workflows completed). These are your highest-leverage sales targets

• Viral hook: If the wedge creates value, how do you turn it into distribution? Think: shared outputs, embeds, “built with” links, etc

• Usage expansion: What’s the second job to solve? Don’t jump too early; make the first use case bulletproof first

• Start narrow, then expand (after users built a habit)

  • Notion didn’t start as “everything workspace.” It started with “better docs, beautifully simple”

  • Otter.ai focused on “record and transcribe meetings instantly”, not some amorphous “AI voice intelligence”

  • ChatGPT nailed “ask anything, get an answer instantly” before becoming an agent platform

2 traps to avoid

🚨 Being too flexible

• Do not market your product as "useful in lots of ways". Early users don't want a Swiss Army knife; they want a "painkiller" for a Top-3 problem

• Offering too much choice during onboarding leads to decision paralysis and churn

🚨 Being a one-hit wonder

• Avoid building features that are "cool" but not repeatable. If a user tries your AI chatbot once but has no reason to return tomorrow, you cannot build compounding retention

• PLG requires a use case that integrates into a daily or weekly "job-to-be-done"

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice on starting product-led growth

• Aim for 65%+ activation rate within 7 days

• Avoid PLG for these:

  • Complex products (e.g. requiring weeks of training, extensive configuration or integration)

  • High-touch customers (e.g. contract value > $100K, 6-12 months sales cycles, consultative selling)

  • Niche markets (e.g. TAM < 50K potential users, specific use cases or industries)

  • Regulatory/compliance heavy products (e.g. sensitive data, requires compliance reviews, security approvals, audit trails, and certifications)

• Leverage tools like PostHog to monitor activation events and understand user behavior

Bonus: 1 trend to spark startup ideas

📈 The internet becomes the bank

• The rise of agent-centric commerce: As AI agents begin transacting autonomously based on intent rather than manual clicks, the movement of value must evolve to travel as fast and freely as digital information.

• Programmable and reactive settlement: Emerging primitives (like x402 protocol) are moving beyond simple global transfers toward "reactive" settlement. This allows agents to pay for data, GPU time, or API calls instantly and permissionlessly without the need for manual invoicing or batching.

• Decoupling from legacy banking: We are entering an era where software can be shipped with built-in payment rules, limits, and audit trails. This removes the need for traditional merchant onboarding, fiat integrations, or centralized banking intermediaries.

• Self-settling market infrastructures: Prediction markets and exchanges are shifting toward real-time, self-settling models. In these systems, odds update and payouts clear globally in seconds without the oversight of a custodian or exchange.

• Payments as a network behavior: Once value moves natively on-chain, the "payment flow" ceases to be a separate operational burden. Instead, it becomes a basic network behavior, similar to how the internet routes data packets today.

• The internet as the financial system: In this new paradigm, banks and assets are transformed into the "plumbing" of the web. The internet doesn't just support the financial system; it effectively becomes the financial system