Product-led growth is one of the most exciting strategies for businesses in 2024. As the name suggests, it centres marketing efforts around the product to attract new subscribers. The idea is that by letting customers get hands-on with your product from the beginning, they’ll use it to the point where it becomes a key part of their day-to-day activities.
Product-led growth is a highly effective strategy and it’s essential for businesses wishing to succeed in the SaaS space. Be sure to check out our previous blog post to learn more about how product-led growth works.
In this post, we’re going to look at some product-led growth companies that have thrived after implementing PLG.
5 successful SaaS product-led growth companies to inspire you
Here’s a few PLG companies that are great examples to learn from:
Calendly is a great example of product-led growth. The platform’s very nature lends itself to virality — users share the platform whenever they invite someone to confirm a meeting or event. Once someone has been sent an event invitation, Calendly offers an ‘always free’ tier, which allows new users to join the platform without committing to a subscription fee. This is incredibly smart because new users can experience the platform themselves. Plus, knowing their peers are already using it gives them extra incentive to adopt it.
Of course, none of this would matter if Calendly wasn’t also a fantastic scheduling platform. It’s highly intuitive, user-friendly, and genuinely addresses the pain points users face on other scheduling platforms.
Grammarly is one of the most popular writing assistants on the market right now and a great example for PLG companies. It’s a highly user-friendly tool which offers a simple way for users to improve their writing. Grammarly integrates seamlessly with all writing tools, allowing users to get started with minimal effort. It has recently added AI to the platform, offering further value to users with personalised suggestions to tailor your writing to your desired style and audience.
Grammarly’s product really shines on its own, leaving their sales teams to simply reiterate its value to secure new customers.
In fact, a large part of Grammarly’s success is their focus on customer success and foolproof onboarding. The free tier offers more than enough functionality to keep users satisfied, and the perks of upgrading to a paid plan are simply nice-to-have features for professional writers.
Like Calendly, Slack has an advantage over other PLG companies thanks to its inherent virality.
Slack’s mission was to reinvent workplace communication by offering a simple, organised, and centralised application for messaging, file sharing, and real-time collaboration. Not only did they succeed in that challenge, but they also created an incredibly smooth onboarding process that helped users quickly get to grips with the platform.
As with many successful product-led growth companies in the SaaS space, Slack’s freemium model unlocked rapid growth. Streamlined communication only works if everyone is signed up to the same platform, so Slack offers a free tier so everyone within a business could have their own account without any limitations that would disrupt their experience.
Another feather in Slack’s cap was its compatibility with almost everything. From integrations to mobile applications, Slack can be easily used by anyone, anywhere. Paid tiers offer valuable upgrades to the core functionality and are priced reasonably, which is sure to convince businesses with additional needs to upgrade.
Figma’s rise to popularity has been incredible and a perfect example of a product-led growth success story. As the way we work continues to change, more and more businesses are desperate for a way to share and collaborate on design projects remotely. This can often be irritating because communication delays can derail schedules and cost businesses serious money.
Figma is a cloud-based design tool that aims to streamline collaboration and simplify sharing design projects. This mission allows them to instantly deliver value to users. They make things easy with a fast onboarding process that caters to professionals and beginners.
Not willing to rest on their laurels, Figma takes the product-led growth strategy one step further by actively engaging and listening to its users about their pain points and desired improvements. Every new feature or upgrade is fuelled by real user feedback to ensure it caters to their needs. This approach has earned the company a tremendous amount of goodwill and lets users feel actively involved in developing a platform they know and love. In turn, users actively promote the platform to friends and colleagues, helping to grow its user base.
PLG companies are known for packing lots of value into a free product and enticing users to upgrade with additional functionality. There are few better examples of this than Canva.
Canva has revolutionised marketing for many small businesses and is a valuable tool for students, social media users, and more. It’s an incredibly easy-to-use design tool that allows anyone to make professional-looking graphics from a wide range of templates and drag-and-drop functionality. Canva has recently expanded its platform with AI-powered tools, including image, text, and video generation, animation, resizing and formatting for different platforms, word art, and much more.
The massive amount of value Canva offers is staggering, especially when much of that functionality is free. It has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for those looking to create engaging content and allowed small businesses to slash their marketing budgets.
With that much value on offer, it is easy to see why Canva has taken off so well. Paid tiers offer even more value with access to even more templates, stock images, additional cloud storage, and more, making it super useful to those looking to upgrade.
Learn how Limio can help you become a successful SaaS PLG company
These product-led growth companies all have one thing in common: they put the customer experience first. SaaS companies looking to adopt product-led growth strategies need to ensure they’re addressing key pain points in order to convince users to switch from other products. A strong freemium model is the key to success so long as the free version offers enough functionality to assist with the user’s day to day activities.
At Limio, we believe you should invest in your product, not in your commerce operations. Do you want to expert in your area or a shopping cart expert? Do you want to lead your industry or be a payment/billing/checkout/tax expert? Do you want your developer to spend 100% of their time improving your application or 75% of their time on it, due to ecommerce and integration issues? If the answers is three Yes, then get in touch with Limio so we can take care of the selling part and you can focus on what you do best. Contact us today to see how we can help.