Build an AI‑native Version Before Competitors Outrun You
Right now, founders have two choices. One, they can pretend like they're living under a rock with their product, even if they have strong product-market fit right now. Or two, they can realize that product-market fit evolves faster than ever before with AI. Let’s say you’re running a $45M business. Growth is steady. Churn is manageable. Customers are happy. On paper, everything looks solid. But AI is compressing time. If someone enters your category and delivers the same outcome in a fraction of the time, the equation changes fast. The issue is → is your product still the fastest path to value? That’s where the hard decision shows up. Do you keep optimizing the current product? Or do you build the version that makes your current product feel slow? I’ll be direct: You should build the version that replaces you. Design the AI-native experience that gets users to value dramatically faster. Because if you don’t, someone else will. And when they do, growth shifts quickly. You’ll notice churn creeping up. You’ll run experiments. You’ll tweak onboarding. You’ll adjust pricing. But if the core workflow is slower, optimization won’t save you. So the choice becomes simple. Ultimately, these are the two choices you have to make: 1. Adapt or die: You must decide to disrupt yourself. 2. Be disrupted: Continue as you are and face the consequences. That’s the decision.
AI Era Redefines PMF: Speed to Value Wins
I spoke with a $50M ARR founder yesterday. He said something I haven’t stopped thinking about: “We have product-market fit right now. But that’s PMF pre-AI.” Let that sink in. Most users aren’t deeply loyal. They’re accepting the friction because...
Free Plans Must Prove Value, Not Just Claim It
Supercut is a really good product. That might be the problem. The video messaging market is brutal. Loom is good. Vidyard is good. A dozen others are good. When a market commoditizes, “good” disappears. You don’t win by being slightly...
Retention Beats Acquisition: Tight Onboarding Drives PLG Success
I sat down with Melissa Kwan, founder of eWebinar, and one line stuck with me: “Getting customers to sign up is the first date. Not the last day with you.” Melissa has built eWebinar to just under $2M ARR. No...
Warp-Speed Growth Demands Zero Friction to Value and Scale
Going from 0-100M in 5 years used to be called hypergrowth. In the AI era, that’s SLOW. The new standard is going from 0-100M in 12 months or less. I call this WARP speed. Companies that have scaled at WARP...
Winning Products Focus on the Critical Last 20%
We’re about to be flooded with: – average MVPs – look-alike products – tools with no point of view – software that works but doesn’t matter What actually wins now isn’t speed to “something.” Today, anyone can prompt their way...
AI Agents Let One Operator Replace Entire Growth Team
Jacob Bank runs Relay.app (growing 300%+ YoY) with a few employees and hundreds of AI agents. Most SaaS teams think Product-Led Growth requires: – a full growth squad – endless experiments – complex tooling – months of setup That used...
Hiring Senior PLG PM In‑House Can Cost More Than Expected
Our Senior ProductLed Implementer, Henrique Soares, just watched a SaaS company spend 5 months learning an expensive lesson about hiring for PLG. They needed a Senior Growth PM focused on product-led growth. They looked at the OTE and thought: "We'll...
Stop Settling: Build Fast, Solve Big Pain, Hire Sparingly
10 things I’d tell founders if I weren’t afraid of hurting their feelings 👇 1. "Slightly better" is a death sentence. You can grind your way to a decent business, but breakout growth is off the table. Users need to...
From User Guides to Agentic AI Onboarding
Over 500 registrations so far for tomorrow’s AI Onboarding webinar with Mickey Alon ! Every SaaS company these days is claiming they’re "AI-native," but very few actually are. Most are just taking old SaaS onboarding and bolting on a chatbot....
Product-Led Success Requires Human Support in Red Oceans
Being "Product-Led" does not mean being "Human-Free." This is especially true if you are building in a "Red Ocean" category with high switching costs. In these markets, you are fighting against Inertia. You can’t assume that if the product is...
Reset SaaS Conversion Benchmarks: Contribute Real Data
AI is messing with SaaS Conversion Benchmarks across the board. It’s time to reset expectations. We’re teaming up with Kyle Poyar @ Growth Unhinged and ChartMogul to build the 2026 SaaS Conversion Benchmarks. There’s too much anecdotal advice, and not...
Red Oceans Win: Leverage Existing Budgets Over Blue Ocean Education
Esben Friis-Jensen scaled Userflow to $4.6M ARR with just 3 people inside a bloody "Red Ocean" market. Most founders spend their lives looking for a "Blue Ocean." They want a market with zero competitors, wide open space, and the freedom...
When SaaS Needs Human Onboarding, Kill It
Vincent Jong literally wrote the book on Product-Led Sales and spent months building a SaaS product in that category. However, he ultimately killed the entire project before onboarding a single customer. Most founders would have launched it anyway. They would...
AI Destroys Per-Seat CRM Pricing, Shifts to Outcomes
The "per seat" business model is officially dead for CRMs. For the last 20 years, the logic of SaaS pricing was simple. You build a database, and you charge companies for every human who logs in to update it. The...
Sell to Executives, Not Middle Managers, Cut Churn
I was recently chatting with Dan Pfister (author of Million Dollar Winback) about the real reasons SaaS companies lose customers. He shared a story of how one SaaS company dropped churn from 18% to 3% by changing who they sold...
Aligning Incentives to Secure Stable Income for PLG Talent
One of my big goals for 2026 is to build the ultimate home for PLG talent. We have assembled a team of world-class implementers who are hands-down the best in the industry at solving activation problems. But to be fully...
Skip Early Coding, Prioritize Customer Interviews for Success
Patrick Thompson sold his startup to Amplitude for tens of millions of dollars just one year after launching it. But the most impressive part of the story isn't the exit. It is that for the first six months of the...
From Double Revenue to Predictable, Sustainable Growth
We grew over 100% in 2025. But honestly, It was the hardest year we've ever had. On paper, the numbers were great. Our revenue doubled year-over-year, and our new implementation program exploded. We validated that we are solving a massive,...
Product-Led Growth Now Essential for Rapid Scale
Big news. I have officially started rewriting the OG Product-Led Growth Book with Laura Kluz . It has been 6 years since I wrote the original. In tech years, that is a lifetime. Back then, PLG was a choice. You...
Win‑back Customers Deliver Higher Lifetime Value than New Ones
A second-time customer is actually worth more than a first-time customer. We tend to look at churned users as "dead leads," but the data proves otherwise. I was catching up with Dan Pfister recently, and he pointed to a Harvard...
From Bottleneck to Irrelevance: Building Self‑Sustaining Teams
My biggest achievement in 2025 was making myself irrelevant. At the start of the year, I was the biggest bottleneck of the company. I was simultaneously acting as the Head of Implementation, Head of Growth, and Head of Ops -...
Build Moats, Not Features, to Win in 2026
Stop competing on features in 2026. Start building moats. Achieving feature parity is tablestakes these days. The ONLY way you get a chance in the playing field (and more importantly to stay there) is through building hard-to-copy moats. Here are...
Master Full-Stack PLG with Proven $1B System
In the last 9 years, I've helped companies like GrooveHQ, Boomi, Microsoft, Keap and 400+ others generate over $1B in self-serve revenue. Through that work, I noticed something interesting: Most PLG operators (myself included early on) only knew pieces of...
Fix Activation Now or Sink Your Business Economics
The cost of bad activation is WAY more than most founders realize. It’s easy to write off a few drop-offs as a "UX issue." In reality, friction compounds across your entire business model. 1. Higher Acquisition Costs If your signup...
2026 Roadmap Locked: Doubling Down on Winners
2026 planning is officially done. Last weekend, we locked in the roadmap for the next 12 months. We made some hard decisions. We killed some legacy projects. We doubled down on what’s actually working. (And yes, we managed to break...
Document Your ICP to Drive Focused Growth
Every SaaS founder thinks they know their ICP. But very few actually take the time to sit down and document it. Mikael Dia shared this page from my book, The Product-Led Playbook, where he mapped out his ICP and clarified...
Binary Enemy Narrative Limits Growth; Embrace Both PLG and Sales
I picked the wrong enemy. When I started ProductLed , I studied how great categories were built. - Inbound Marketers declared war on Outbound. - CROs fought against "gut-feeling" updates. - Content Marketers hated pure advertising. The pattern was clear:...
Product‑Led Growth Needs a Team, Not One Unicorn
One of the most expensive mistakes SaaS founders make is hunting for a product/ growth unicorn. I see this happen constantly. A founder decides to go product-led. They open a job req for a "Head of Growth." They write a...
Use a Tough GPT to Sharpen Your 2026 Strategy
I built a custom GPT to help you pressure-test and refine your 2026 business strategy. Crafting a sound growth strategy is hard, and takes time, but you don’t need a 2-day offsite or a pricey consultant to start sharpening your...
Revenue per Employee Beats Headcount as Growth Metric
We need to stop celebrating headcount growth. For the last decade of easy money, "We just doubled the team" was code for "We are successful." Founders felt insignificant if they didn't have a massive org chart to manage. But the...
Onboarding Should Deliver Value, Not Endless Feature Tours
Hot take: User onboarding is not about education. Most onboarding flows try to teach users about different product features. They shouldn't. Instead, they should get users to experience value as fast as possible. Here's what happens in most cases: You...
Meet Rodrigo: PLG’s Tactical Expert Scaling $1.5M ARR
I get a lot of credit for ProductLed , but I want to introduce you to the man who is actually in the trenches. Meet Rodrigo F. , our Chief ProductLed Implementer. He is the architect behind our Implementation Program...
Balance Growth and Profitability with the Rule of 40
Tim Schumacher has a portfolio of 25 SaaS companies generating $80M ARR. He steers every single one using the same formula: The Rule of 40. Here's how it works 👇 The Rule of 40 says your growth rate + profit...
AI Free Users Cost More Than Traditional SaaS
ChatGPT was rumored to cost ~$700,000 PER DAY to operate at scale early on. According to Google, an AI-powered search query can be up to 10x more costly than a standard keyword search. The reason I share these stats is...
Business Model Shift Ends Advisor Role, Not Performance
Today was a tough founder decision. We simplified our sales motion at ProductLed, which meant the Advisor role we'd been testing came to an end. And with that shift, Matthew Baker is now back on the market. Matthew stepped into...
AI Is the Rocket, PLG Is the Fuel
There’s ZERO chance companies like Cursor, Lovable or any AI-native SaaS can scale at this lightning pace without PLG. You can’t scale with AI alone. You need a strong product-led motion to power it. Without a self-serve product experience and...
Microsoft Clarity: Free, Faster Alternative to Hotjar
If you’re a B2B SaaS debating which user recording tool to use, just go for Microsoft Clarity. It does everything Hotjar does, but better - and it's completely free. That sounds too good to be true, but after working with...
Get Personalized PLG Advice at Scale via SuperMe
You can get PLG advice from me anytime now…WITHOUT spending thousands of dollars on consulting fee or waiting to find a virtual coffee spot on my calendar. People want to learn from practitioners - the ones actually doing the work....
Stop Over‑Giving Free: Tie Upgrades to Desired Outcomes
I've watched dozens of SaaS companies kill their freemium motion in the past year. They wonder why conversion rates are stuck at 2% and users ghost them after signup. Our ProductLed Implementer 🔥 Anastasia Kudrow recently helped a client fix...
AI Accelerates PLG Activation, Redefines Pricing Models
AI is changing PLG in ways most companies haven't figured out yet. Aakash Gupta and I just spent an hour mapping out the specifics - what's actually changing and what to do about it. Look, the PLG fundamentals haven't changed....
Early Usage Signals Reveal Hidden Churn Before It Happens
“Churn is killing us. Customers disappear after the first month." I've heard this from dozens of B2B SaaS CEOs over the past few years. But here's what we discovered after analyzing hundreds of these "churn problems": your customers aren't disappearing...
Prep Your Team First to Preserve Initiative Momentum
The fastest way to kill momentum on a new initiative is to launch it without preparing your team first. The best founders set the stage before launching one. They make sure everyone has the context they need and create an...
Scaling SaaS: $1‑3M Is the Critical Growth
Only 1 in 10 SaaS companies ever make it to $10M ARR. And for the ones that do, it takes an average of 5-7 years from when they first start generating revenue. This comes from Kyle Poyar ’s analysis of...
Build Elite Teams That Generate $1M+ Per Employee
Hiring should be your last resort as a product-led company. But when you do hire, you need to build an elite team. Elite teams hit $1M+ revenue per employee, improve every month, and execute without constant oversight. Building that kind...
Zero‑Friction Product Experience Doubles ARR in One Year
Tally just doubled their ARR from $2M to $4M in less than a year. I interviewed their founder Marie Martens back in February when they were at ~$2M ARR. Their new article breaks down the entire journey, but one section...
Follow a 14‑Day PLG Roadmap to $10M ARR
Most product-led companies will never get to $10M+ ARR. But the ones that do have one thing in common. Their products sell themselves. Their conversion rates are dialed in. Their growth compounds month after month. Most importantly, they’re the obvious...
Specific Upgrade Messaging Drives Conversions for B2B Marketplace
Our ProductLed Implementer 🔥 Anastasia Kudrow has been CRUSHING it for a new client we onboarded in August. They're a B2B marketplace helping people find and buy small businesses. Think: executives looking to escape the 9-5 grind and become financially...
Blurred Dashboard Boosts Conversions by 8% via Curiosity Gap
PromoTix saw an 8% increase in conversions by leveraging the “Promised Land” effect. The win didn't come from blind faith in best practices. Will Royall , the founder, has a simple rule: test everything. Even when something's proven to work,...
Free Trials Fail when They Solve Advanced, Not Basic Problems
Your free product is probably solving the wrong problem. I've seen this kill conversion at hundreds of product-led companies. You build something technically impressive with unique features and powerful capabilities. But free-to-paid conversion stays under 3%. The problem is you're...