Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series.
Hila Qu has been the Head of Growth or VP of Growth at a number of different companies and startups, most notably Acorns and GitLab. Currently she's Executive in Residence with Reforge and advising other companies. Hila is a mentor with Mucker Capital.
Are there types of companies, market segments, industries, or business models where PLG does not make sense?
Hila Qu: That's a fantastic first question to think about. “This is awesome, but is this a fit for me?” If you go back to thinking about what kind of company is a great fit for PLG, there are two important criteria:
The first one is your target segment, your customer size. If you're primarily targeting very large enterprise companies, it's very hard usually to use PLG as the only way to sell to those companies. But if you target SMBs or consumers, PLG is a fantastic way, and you have a very large user base to reach out to as well.
The other dimension you need to think about is the product complexity. If you have a very complicated product–for example you sell AWS or you sell Snowflake–those are infrastructure products. It's very hard for PLG to be the only or main motion with infrastructure products because it's not something one engineer will just test and buy. Or if you have products that require some configuration–think about Salesforce, Segment, things like that–someone needs to set it up. That is a natural hurdle for PLG motion. Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. So those are things to think about.
Another dimension I would think about is whether your product has an individual use case or if it's only used by a company (for example Okta). As an individual user, I have absolutely no interest in using this product myself or testing it out. So this type of product is a little bit harder to build a PLG motion based on the freemium user base.
If you're generating something that's brand new, like a brand new category, nobody understands about it. Today, a lot of the PLG SaaS tools require sales motion upfront because nobody understands those tools. You need a lot of education. Those types of tools actually require work in the initial days of the sales motion. But take a step back: I think it's all relevant. Whether it's a fit or not, it's not absolutely yes or no. This is a spectrum. Even though you have a complex product like Salesforce or Segment, you may be able to build some premium features or PLG use cases that allow any user to try it. So the ideal scenario is you can layer in both.
What should an early-stage startup founder focus on if they want to implement PLG? What should the founder avoid if they want to implement PLG?
Hila Qu: The first step is determining the fit. We talk about using the product complexity, your target customer size, your contract value, and whether there's individual use case–those four things--to help you decide if PLG is a fit. But for early stage founders, I think there are two particular scenarios where PLG can be really helpful.
The first one I call “category disrupter.” In this scenario, there is an existing, very dominant player already in this category. Think about Adobe. Adobe Photoshop has dominated the professional picture editing space for so many years. It's so powerful, but Figma is able to disrupt Adobe. There are many reasons, but a few are actually PLG related. Figma made the product SaaS-based. They built the collaboration very easily into the product itself. It became a collaboration tool. That really empowered a lot of growth loops of Figma and helped them disrupt the space. So if you are building a product that has a lot of incumbents that are very established, thinking about PLG may be one of the ways to disrupt that market.
The other thing is called the “PLG native.” Those products are built for prosumers. They really have their point of view in terms of what's the best way to do this. What's the best way to do design? What's the best way to do a kind of documentation? Think Notion, Canva, Slack, all of those products. They've have that expertise and vision to build those PLG native products and to use PLG to take it as long as possible before layering on the sales motion, etc.
So for early-stage founders, those are the two scenarios where PLG might be a great fit. From there, I would say put some conviction first before committing. You may just do some research, test out some kind of early free trial, or just test this thing small to build yourself enough conviction. Everyone wants to do PLG now, but the reality is many people started for just one month, it didn’t work, and they gave up. That will never work. PLG is not like that. You need to commit to this growth motion. You need to invest at least a year or even two years. You want to build some conviction and then make a commitment, rather than just casually get this started, realize how much work there is, and give up too prematurely.
From there, there are basically two steps to building PLG. The first one is to build a foundation. The success of the foundation is can you get to the first PLG conversion and actually have a user or prospective customer without talking to sales? Can they go to your website, sign up, try the product, and checkout themselves? That’s the success. In order to make that happen, you need to have those foundation components. You need to have the free trial freemium. You need to track the usage data and understand how they use the free product and how to trigger them to convert to paid. You need to build the checkout flow, all of that. That's the foundation. Then the second step is just experiment like crazy on that entire funnel to maximize that.
What should an early-stage company (past the MVP stage, with a free trial or freemium launched) focus on right now? What should they avoid? Should they focus on the setup, the onboarding flow, the free user experience? Should they focus on collaboration that promotes getting additional users on the platform?
Hila Qu: In this situation, the entrepreneurs have the basic build out already and it’s working, but where do they focus first to make it better and more effective? My observation in working with many of my advisory clients is that onboarding and activation are usually areas where I see a lot of low hanging fruit and opportunity. A lot of times as founders–especially technical founders, engineers, product people–believe if we build this awesome feature that solves your pain point, you should come and use it. That’s never happened. First, they don’t come. Secondly, more importantly, they don't use it.
In my past roles at ACORN, GitLab, whenever I started as a head of growth, one of the data points I will look into is what's the percentage of new users coming back the second day or coming back second month? You see a pretty low percentage even for pretty mature products. That is the nature of this thing. You engage the marketing team and you do a lot of acquisition and people are coming. They sign up for a free trial. But even the second day, most people don't come back. There's a lot to be done there, usually. For PLG product like how do we hook them? How do you get them to try out the most important feature in that first session? How to help them see the value in there?
That's usually a really important focus area because it essentially is really about product usage. You gave away the access to your product in exchange of their usage, with a goal that the usage will qualify them. The usage will nurture them. The usage will build their habits and retain them. The usage will ultimately convert them. The usage is a great first focus area.
The second one is the self service checkout experience. There is usually a lot of low hanging fruits in the self service checkout experience. If you work in B2C or e-commerce, you optimize that Add to Cart flow like crazy because that is your revenue. It’s actually similar in PLG SaaS, but we don't do that well usually. The pricing for SaaS is much more complicated. So there are usually a lot of opportunities there as well.
What do you feel like early stage startup founders should focus on first? What categories or areas (activation, onboarding, monetization, potential stages of the funnel, etc.) should you be focusing on first?
Hila Qu: There's no perfect answer or a standard answer. It's very different for different situations.
If you're really starting from scratch, do the product. Do a bunch of change and even pivot to get to product market fit in that stage. Growth is not really secondary. You want to have some users, some customers to help you validate whether your product is solving their problem. You're really getting enough early users to help you validate to achieve a certain level of retention rate. That's a quantitative measure to know that you built something people use every day or they will use continuously rather than just abandon. Because that (abandonment) wouldn’t be a solid foundation to acquire more new users.
Once you have that, you can begin to acquire some new users. You can begin to work on position a little bit, but the early acquisitions are there to give you more users to work on to continue to build out the product.
Before you scale the acquisition like crazy, really figure out how to activate new users, how to convert them. Figure out the foundational things. And then as you do that, you can really pour gas on the fire because you're very confident you can activate a new user, you can convert them, you can retain them. Then, any marketing budget or any acquisition effort you do at large scale is not wasted.
In reality, sometimes you need to do those things and then you have to repeat them again. You do a little bit of acquisition and then you have users to work with on retention, activation, monetization, etc. Then you have a foundation and you do a little bit, then you do another push for acquisition. You may do those in waves or it may happen in parallel, but in general, you need to have that framework of “let's figure out the foundation and then pour more gas on the fire.”
Tony Yang: I totally agree. I learned this the hard way. I’ve been in situations where we focused a lot on acquisition and got a lot of user signups. But we didn't focus or think much about onboarding and activation. We did talk about monetization, but not about that middle part where we saw a lot of people sign up, but they didn't really do anything. I've learned from my mistakes that focusing on acquisition too much, too early just ends up being a waste of resources and time.
Do you have to have a free trial or a free version of your product in order to be called a PLG motion or implement PLG?
Hila Qu: I think in order to have a product to lead your growth, you need to have a product. The product here is not your regular product. It's something you can give away, right? It's a vehicle. You're giving away this product, you’re removing all the hurdles to access the product. So free trial and free version are the two most common vehicles for PLG.
There are some other ways you can go about it. For example, Amplitude is a product analytics software. They have a hurdle because it usually requires an engineer to set it up and then you can use it. But they built a very realistic simulation demo. So it's not a video, it’s something you can play with. It's not your own data. It is fake data, but at least you can use that to play with the tool and that doesn't require any setting up or require any configuration to try.
So that's one way around a freemium or free trial, if you cannot do that. For GitLab, we had an open source version of the product. For many developer tools that is actually one potential vehicle for PLG. There’s also the concept of a sidecar product. Basically, it's not directly giving away a free version of your product, but you build something closely related and make that free. For example, HubSpot has this very famous website grader. With that, you attract the same audience (in this case, marketers) as your main product, but this thing is free. Or there is a developer product put out by a company that builds a kind of a security vulnerability product. They have a free vulnerability scanner thing on their own website. You can use it for free and it becomes a little bit of a vehicle for PLG. But again, free trial and freemium are the most obvious.
How do you decide what PLG motion to use?
Hila Qu: I think that's a that's a great question. Usually freemium can give you a bigger user base but your immediate conversion rate is lower. Free trial doesn't give you as many free users in the base but the immediate conversion rate is higher. I have a chart that shows this difference. This is research from Openview. So basically, you can say that with free trials, the free to paid conversion rate is almost double that of freemium. But does that mean free trial is better? No, not necessarily. Freemium has a lot of advantage longer term, especially if your product has a network effect. You can really grab market share, you can really become very defensible. Free trial is a better strategy for quicker conversion. It’s a little bit more of a constrained experience: you want to give away, but you don't want to give too much. You still have a revenue goal to hit this quarter, something like that. Some companies actually combine those two and have something called reverse trial. Tools like AirTable and many other products actually do that today. When you come in, I give you freemium by default. I give you a free trial by default. And after 14 days or 30 days, you have a choice to make: you can either upgrade to paid, or if you don't, you can downgrade to free, and the freemium is forever. That's the one way to combine those two.
Tony Yang: I want to offer some of my insights or experience regarding the premium versus free trial. I think reverse freemium addresses some of the pros and cons for both types of models by themselves. In my past life as a growth marketer, we did a lot of testing. I tested freemium versus free trial. From my experience, what I've learned is that when we're offering a free trial, the benefits are that the user gets access to premium level features that's not available in freemium, but you get access to it for a limited time.
But that limited time is oftentimes artificial timeframe that someone on the product team decides: 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, what have you. And there's no real reason behind that time period. From a user perspective, sometimes there's are psychological factors at play. If I know it's a very short trial–say 7 day trial–I would put off signing up until I have time and I'm ready to start, ready to dedicate 7 days to actually hunkering down and trying the product, assuming it’s an intensive type of product. So I learned from that experience: if it's a short trial, I might not see as many people. And then when they do actually sign up, it's up to me or the product team to make sure that within that time period, they're activated and they are finding usage, right? We're driving towards usage. Is 7 days enough? Is 30 days enough? That's hard. It's different for every single company.
So the downside I found with free trial is that you're introducing an artificial limitation in terms of a timeframe for how much you can use the product and for how long. That really means you’ve got to get really good with your onboarding and your activation.
How do you think about about Proof of Concepts (POCs) as typical of enterprise offerings, in light of the PLG conversation? Are POCs part of the PLG play? Are POCs completely separate from the PLG play?
Hila Qu: For PLG, a lot of time is targeting the end user. Or if this product just has an individual use case or is relatively simple. In order to sell to enterprise, you still need maybe a POC combining with this end user. The end user can experience the value via using a free product and they can become the champion. That happens a lot. For example, you might experience this with GitLab. They use it for their personal project and they become so convinced that the next time their company is considering this, they raise GitLab as a possibility.
But a lot of times in order to sell to those enterprise accounts, you still need to go through that process. POC is too appealing to the buyer or to the decision maker to talk about the business use case. POC alone is obviously very different from PLG, but in order to be successful in this segment, you probably need both.
Can you see POC operating in conjunction with a freemium or free trial PLG motion for a particular company?
Hila Qu: I saw that all the time at GitLab. We did research among our sales team and our paid customers. They found sometimes a sales rep would say “I'm most happy when a deal falls in my lap.” That would happen when a company had some employees using GitLab in their prior job or for a personal project. That’s a PLG motion, right? They used it for free. They became a kind of user on their own. They already adopted all the features and they already know how to use everything. And then, when this company is ready to make a purchase decision and evaluating different tools, they use the free trial of GitLab to do that POC internally. They’ve already done the entire setup and had multiple people try it during the trial period. Then they go to this sales rep basically say “Hey, can I buy this?” And they already know the software so you just need to negotiate price.
When setting up PLG, what are some ways to identify the most optimal user journey?
Hila Qu: I love when people think about the user journey because sometimes it's not thought about enough in B2B because it’s complicated. I would say there are two parts. The first part is to think about the entire user experience from a new users perspective. I do that a lot. Whenever I work with an advisory client or in my past roles, I pretend I'm a new user. I go through the entire journey from the website, to the signup, to use it in a trial or use it as a free user. Then try to pretend I want to buy it and I and try to find the billing option and understand the pricing rate with each tier and I try to check out When I do that, there are usually so many opportunities for improvement or frictions that can be removed. I call it the PLG new user funnel audit. Each of the major blocks– the marketing site, sign up, onboarding, self service purchase flow–are the components of a new user journey. You want to make sure this is frictionless. That it is compelling. That it is easy to understand.
The second big part I would zoom in on is the onboarding part. Again, go back to what we said right? Onboarding and activation can be areas people don't pay enough attention to. They just want a lot of signups, a lot of visitors, then a lot of revenue. They ignore that someone has to use the product to see the value to then become revenue and/or to sign a contract.
I recently wrote a blog post about PLG published on Lenny's Newsletter. This is a framework I use. I actually think there are four “aha!” moments you need to drive: First of all, you need to drive me–like Hila–to my “aha!” moment. If I'm trying out GitLab, for example, you want to get me to realize “Oh, this is so easy to use and I love it. I can use it in my for my personal website, or I can use it for this app and build it in my personal time. I really like it.” From there you also want to get me to be confident and comfortable to invite my coworker–say, Tony–another developer to join me and say “Hey, we may be able to use this in our job as well. It will make our day so much easier.” Right? So then we may collaborate in a certain workflow in there. So that's the team “aha!” moment.
From there, you will also want to enable me and Tony, once we are so convinced, to easily have a conversation with the our CTO or our Chief Financial Officer when there's opportunity to buy new developer software. Maybe you gave us some documentation or some tool we can use easily. That's the buyer “aha!” moment. Finally, when my company has paid for this piece of software, my company need to be convinced of the ROI as well. That’s the company’s “aha!” moment. When I think about the user journey, the first step is looking those big blocks, and then the second is zooming into the onboarding piece to drive usage and drive adoption.
Tony Yang: This is this is a fantastic framework. I really like this a lot because having spent time in a lot of enterprise SaaS companies, the notion of the buying committee is a very common concept, meaning if you're trying to sell to like a Fortune 500 company, you're not just going to be interacting with one person. You're interacting with a lot of people. Yes, there might be a sales-led motion where a sales rep is trying to engage with the buying committee, but in this PLG type of scenario, you still need to satisfy the needs or get to the “aha!” moments of each of these key stakeholders.
In more traditional enterprise type sales motions, the buyer, the person who signs the contract–may not be always be the person who is using the product, but getting that buyer to the “aha!” moment is still very important. In a PLG environment, does the buyer need to experience that “aha!” moment within the product? Or can that be experienced outside of the product?
Hila Qu: Excellent question! That tells me you know the complexity of this. For some of my clients, we’ve faced this problem. Basically, we saw that an account has high usage, there are many very active users. But when we look at the titles of the users, the user is a manager or is analyst–not the decision maker. In those cases, there are a couple of ways to approach things.
First of all, you still want to reach out to the buyer. A lot of times what works is you layer on some sort of outreach ABM, kind of a traditional marketing sales approach, to find this buyer quickly. Because the fact that his team is actively using this product is a very important thing you can utilize to establish a relationship with this buyer and convince him. It's much better. Instead of you making a cold call by yourself saying “Hey,” you’re making a call saying “Hey, your team has 10 people actually using my product every month. Are you interested in learning how I can help you set a better compliance?” or something like that. There's a lot there to be done.
Sometimes you can try to encourage the user to invite more people into the product and maybe the buyer is one of them. That's great. Sometimes the buyer is just too busy. They’re the CEO, they’re the CTO, they never are interested in testing out the product as well. That's okay. That's why sometimes that “aha!” moment may be outside the product. Maybe you enable the user to prepare some document or demo, something so easy, so compelling that they can convince the buyer.
What are the KPIs you should be measuring in Product Led Growth?
Hila Qu: When you don't have anything and you don't have this motion set up, your first success metric is to get to the first self service conversion or generate the first PQL. Just get it to work. That's the first step.
Once you have this established, you basically should still measure top of the PLG funnel traffic: free signups, visitors to the website. That is still important because without that, there is no source of user. But one very important difference between PLG and a regular sales funnel or marketing funnel is that you really need to measure product usage very closely. By product usage I mean you can measure things like new user to activation conversion rate. If you define activation as “my user needs to use my feature ABC in the first seven days,” I want to know that percentage. For example, at GitLab we measure within the first 14 days what's the percentage of a new team using two features and having two people involved. We make it very specific. That's what we call activation success. We measure that and we improve that every day through our work.
Then you want to measure the monetization piece. What is the free to paid conversion rate? What is the activation to conversion rate? You may also measure the PQL–product qualified leads–you're able to generate from that product usage. Those are potentially two paths. Maybe some customers convert on their own. Maybe some potential customers don't convert but they use your product so much and they are certain size and a certain segment. You can capture them as a potential leads for your sales team, reach out to them, and convert them. And ultimately, you capture the KPI of the revenue coming from the PLG funnel.
Who should own PLG? How would you structure a team for PLG?
Hila Qu: First of all, if this is a strategic growth motion, the CEO absolutely should be the sponsor making this type of strategic decision. It’s not a decision that your head of growth makes. You as CEO need to make that decision. You find a head of growth that then works in this motion. That's the first thing. Then for a typical PLG organization, you need to have a head of growth be in charge of that motion. That person usually sits in the product organization, but that person also needs to have a counterpart on the marketing team like the head of growth marketing, and on the sales team like the head of product-led sales or online sales or SMB sales. Then they are responsible for the different parts of the funnel as we just discussed. Marketing is responsible for the top of funnel, the signups. The product team does a lot around activation, conversion, and things like that. Then the sales team works on the PQL to convert them and turn them into revenue.
Once the growth product team becomes a little bit bigger, you can begin to have those smaller sub teams under it. At GitLab, I had a team dedicated to conversion. I had teams dedicated to activation. You may have teams working on the foundation, data collection, experimentation, platform billing, etc. All of that can be expanded in the scope of PLG as well.
Is the head of growth product the same role or same person as a product manager?
Hila Qu: Usually this person has a product manager background, but usually has something called a growth PM background. Product managers begin to develop many specializations. There is the core PM, the feature PM. There are more traditional PMs developing features, solving customer pain points, etc. Growth PMs and head of growth product managers usually have all those skills, but they focus a lot more on data and experimentation. Their KPIs are not “I shipped those features solving pain points,” instead it’s “how do I improve activation rate? How do I improve conversion rate?” Their methodology is similar to a core PM, but their KPIs and their specialty are a little bit different.
Can you grow a B2B company utilizing PLG without ever having the need for a sales team?
Hila Qu: I call this genre of thinking the PLG purist. It's possible, but if you have opportunity to make it even bigger by adding a sales team, why not? A very interesting example is Atlassian. Atlassian started as a PLG purist kind of team. Their founders were really like “we don't want to have a sales team. We want to build a product that’s so awesome, everyone will come use it. We want to make the price low, so that there's no hurdle and that the product is our growth flywheel.” That actually worked, right? That worked well for them. They were able to grow the product even after their IPO or maybe close to their IPO. They didn’t have a sales team. They were purely online kind of sales, a self-service type of business. And they were able to do it to $200 million ARR.
But when they become so big that they begin to sell to bigger customers, the PLG purist approach doesn't work. You need to convince the buyer. You need to address the compliance problem or the security problem. The enterprise might require a POC or require ROI analysis. Right? So they added sales team. Canva had a very similar story. They grew so much on this B2C concept, but then a few years ago, they hired a sales team and this year they begin to hire more.
You don't have to be so purist. It's practical selection. You want to do this practically. The best companies actually are both. For most companies, you may choose one to start and use that to get to revenue. There's nothing wrong of having a sales team if that works for you product to get a lot of revenue. You can add a PLG motion a little bit later on. If it's a good fit, maybe start with PLG. But I don’t necessarily think you should constrain yourself to just one or the other.
Tony Yang: I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think this question is related to one of the earlier questions we talked about around what market you’re trying to sell into. If you’re trying to sell an enterprise level offering, let's just say a million dollar contract, you're not going to get that motion from pure PLG to signing that contract. No one's going to put in their company credit card for a million dollars that way. It just doesn't work that way.
Some simple buying behaviors and the ability to purchase certain level types of offerings requires, like in the case of enterprise, the main decision maker or economic buyer to actually sign off. You also alluded to all the other parts of the human process, which is security reviews, legal review of documents, and even the procurement process. Maybe there are ways to automate some of that in a product lead growth motion, but, high level, when you're trying to sell enterprise offerings if you do decide to move up market more and more, it's going to require humans in the loop. It’s going to require sales people, relationships, etc.
But having both motions at the same time, and doing it well, and having those work together–assuming that you're targeting a market that facilitates both of these types of motions–creates a lot of great synergies to help scale your growth.
How do early-stage startups transition from a purely sales-led motion (often founder-led) to a PLG motion? And when is a good time to start doing that?
Hila Qu: I feel like “transition” may not be the right word. It might be how do you “layer” in PLG. You don't need to give up the sales motion if it's working.
In reality, many companies build a foundation in sales first because if you can find some big customers to begin with, why not? Right? You can build that revenue foundation. So make that work to a certain extent. You don't want to get started with a sales motion, just to abandon it the next month and transition to PLG, then work on that for another month and then go back to the sales motion. You want to build some foundation there.
Then you can add PLG like we talked about. Then you can think about how to find an individual use case that is your target customer. Build a free version, build a freemium version to allow those free users to use the product. They don't need to get approval from their boss, they don't need to pay anything in their personal credit card, they can already see the value of this product.
And then from there, you can begin to build the PLG funnel. It takes time to perfect a motion, whether it's a sales motion or a product-led motion.
In reality what I see companies do is they will make a sales motion work and then they will build the components on PLG. They optimize it to a certain degree. They may then intensively work on sales a little bit because they're like “oh, we have some potential PLG customers, we need to make it work.” There's a bit of working on both, but prioritize them one at a time.
Question from the audience: we invested in PLG early and made it easy to play with and convert paying customers. How do we then merge this with the sales motion? Do we book demos? Do we navigate customers through onboarding and self guided onboarding?
Tony Yang: Let me give my experience with past companies where we had both motions going at the same time and had done it well. At the very minimum, what made it work well is when the sales team, sales leaders (could be SDRs or BDRs depending on how the sales org is structured or even from marketing) had visibility. Having visibility into product usage and signups and all that stuff in the systems that sales or go to market teams usually work out of (like CRM, like marketing automation, like sales engagement), provides a lot of insight that they could ideally be trained to utilize.
As an example, drawing from my past experience, I worked for companies where we had a free version and we had an enterprise sales team that adopted an Account Based Marketing Strategy (ABM) which was focused on top tier accounts worth potentially high ACB values. If we were able to provide the sales rep who is working on this one particular enterprise account with information like “Hey, did you know that we just got 10 new signups from the end users at this particular company within the last two weeks?” that gives a lot of ammo or insight for the sales rep to do outbound outreach to the key decision maker. They are then able to start a conversation and say “Look, we're already seeing some adoption at the user level from your company. There are 10 users. Looks like you guys are trying to solve for this particular challenge or issue. Do you think it makes sense for us to talk about some sort of enterprise or at least group-wide type of account or some sort of engagement?”
At a minimum, that gives the salespeople visibility because if sales teams and marketing teams and product growth teams are all working in silos, you end up stepping on each other's toes. If sales reps are trying to cold call and then it turns out that through the product-led growth motion 20 people have already signed up to use product and have self served themselves into guying a small group plan without ever having to talk to a person, then you just made yourself look like you have no idea what's going on. The right hand is not talking to the left hand. You want to avoid those types of situations.
At the very minimum, being able to surface product, sign up, and usage level data into the systems that the growth marketing teams are working on provides a lot of insights and guidance. There are other things worth having those teams work together, but at a minimum, just having that visibility is very important.
Hila Qu: You can do something called product-led sales, which is utilizing the usage to qualify future leads, to generate leads for your sales team. It might be helpful for you to define thresholds of customer size in the very beginning. For example, with HubSpot, there is this self checkout funnel that's working, but the sales team is also involved. It doesn't make sense for sales to talk to every person using the product. So they make a threshold like if a team is bigger than 10 people, we’ll follow them through the product-led sales funnel and give them more human touches. The sales team is more involved. If they are under 10, the sales team will leave them alone. They are too small for sales, but we’ll serve them using product led growth motion or the automated emails, etc.
Tony Yang: Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and insight around PLG with us.
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