The document discusses how product-led growth (PLG) has evolved since early companies like WebEx. It outlines lessons learned by Universal from 2004 to 2021 as it grew from a small startup utilizing PLG to a large enterprise company. Key lessons include needing sales to continue growing, the importance of virality, having the right go-to-market strategy, and recognizing when the buyer profile changes. While PLG is effective initially, the document argues that as companies scale, they must adopt additional functions like sales and can still maintain a product-led approach.

1. From New Relic to Salesforce to Calendly:
What’s Changed in Product-led Growth
Patrick Moran
CMO
Calendly
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2. Patrick Moran
CMO
Calendly
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3. Free trial
End-user
Freemium
Online buy
SMB
PLG Attributes
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Low price
Adoptable
Viral spread
Instant value
SaaS

4. Free trial
End-user
Freemium
Online buy
SMB
Early and Current SaaS Attributes
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Low price
Adoptable
Viral spread
Instant value
SaaS

5. Freemium
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SaaS
PLG
ASP
Cloud
What’s
next?!
Early and Current SaaS Attributes

6. Fundamentals don’t change: Solve Problems.
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“Users don’t care about
your underlying tech
choices, only how well
you solve the problem for
them. And whoever
solves the problem best
wins.”

7. WHO IS THE
OG PLG CO?
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8. Do not place text, or graphics
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9. WebEx: The OG PLG company
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Free trial
End-user
Freemium
Online buy
SMB
Low price
Adoptable
Viral spread
Instant value
SaaS

10. SCALE.
So what’s new?
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11. LESSONS
BY COMPANY
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12. Universal: The predictable founder…
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“I will never
hire sales
people”
“See! We’ve got
$1M in sales.
PLG will take us
to the moon”
“Ok, we’ll hire a
few transactional
reps but we’ll
never hire
enterprise reps”
“How quickly can
we hire a massive
enterprise sales
team?”
YEAR 1 YEAR 2 YEAR 5 YEAR 7

13. 2004 Lesson:
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GotoMeeting initially caught us off guard by being more
PLG-y than we were. Without competition, we had a
tendency to lean toward a sales-touch model to maximize
deal value. WebEx innovated quickly and we had multiple
routes to revenue as a result.
Learning: Scrappier PLG Co’s can disrupt you

14. 2012 Lesson:
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Developers helped us spread like wildfire; but at $100M we
needed I.T. to continue growing. And to win I.T., we
needed the big guns in sales.
Learning: You may grow out of your initial buyer in favor of another

15. 2016 Lesson:
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We had over 2 Million mobile registered users that had
favorable things to say, but <$1M of ARR. Lesson: Big
numbers don’t mean big business opportunity. You need
GTM strategy.
Learning: Big numbers don’t translate to huge opportunity

16. 2018 Lesson:
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Enterprises want to buy the way that Salesforce sells. They
are not a PLG company, even when you change the “P” to
platform. They are, however, a customers-led and
founder-led company.
Learning: Salesforce is a platform-led, sales-led, customer-led machine.

17. 2021 Lesson:
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The perfect storm of goodness: Virality, Ubiquity, Ease of
use. Transitioning to Enterprise happening faster than
anyone anticipated. Scale + Customer Love + GTM
investment = winning.
Learning: See the next horizon before you get there. For us, it was the
enterprise opportunity.

18. A few more things…
IT is not the enemy.
$100M = gravity
Count the right things; ignore vanity
Product Led doesn’t mean
you can skip GTM
functions (Sales and
Marketing)
Virality is the X factor and
not mentioned enough.
Sales isn’t the enemy; it’s
a maximizer; It can still be
“product-led”

19. Let’s chat!
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