Best Practices for Developer-First PLG Growth
- Product, Pricing, & Packaging
- Obviously, start with a great product that serves a compelling need and is well differentiated – great UI/UX, powerful APIs/SDKs, etc.
- Integrate seamlessly with popular development tools, frameworks, and platforms
- Engineer in-product implementation/onboarding to accelerate time-to-value
- Price moderately high at the beginning albeit low enough that developers can pay via credit card. It is much easier to reduce price than to raise it.
- Apply a free-trail and/or freemium model
- Ensure your free version offers high value to drive adoption while also encouraging upgrades; Can your free version provide access to all functionality albeit with capacity limitations?
- Pricing should be ultra-transparent
- Mostly likely couple PLG with usage-based pricing.
- As you mature, evolve to also offer preferential pricing in exchange for minimum annual commitments
- If suitable, make your solution open-source
- Though often complex (ex. for security products which function as ‘insurance’), strive to build value/ROI measurement into your product
- Marketing, Partnership, & Support
- Make initial sign-up as frictionless as possible
- Create robust documentation (knowledge base) with tutorials, guides, and videos
- Build and hyper-actively manage a community-led
- Deploy adequate capacity to monitor and immediately respond to support questions that come in via forums or live chat. Developers have less patience for traditional support ticketing systems.
- Offer incentives, rewards (ex: cool, premium branded swag), and recognition to your developer advocates
- Engage developers on their preferred 3rd party communities such as Hacker News, Stack Overflow, DEV.to, etc.
- Invest in live- and virtual- event marketing
- Invest in content marketing and promote via SEM/paid/social
- Your goals here are #1 drive developers to try your product and #2 build brand
- Some experts recommend making all content ungated (no forms) such that the only signup is to access your product
- Contrary to general marketing guidelines, developers care much more about features than benefits
- Partner with fellow, preferably more powerful, DevOps vendors
- Sponsor hackathons and meetups
- Build relationships with influential developers, influencers, and thought leaders in your target market
- Spotlight the ‘hero-moment’ that using your product creates for development
- Operate product marketing as ‘growth marketing’ that works in concert with a Growth Engineering team to educate users and drive usage/value
- Regularly share additional use cases and case studies; ensure technical depth of such communications to ensure these are valuable to your developer audience
- Sales / Sales-assisted PLG
- Sell on major cloud marketplaces – AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP
- Tactfully encourage in-product upgrades
- Use data to determine the best moment to engage users (generate PQLs) if your price-point warrants a sales-assisted PLG motion
- If you have a critical mass of developers inside a company, have sellers engage higher in the organization with personas who will value upgrading to gain access to enterprise features
- The role of sales in PLG companies is less hunter and more farmer focused on upsell and cross-sell.
- Don’t get wrapped around the axle trying to disentangle what part of growth in an account was due to sales vs. organic. Simply set quotes in such a way (high enough) so that you are paying reps for their skill and effort.
- Other
- Staff a Growth Engineering team who uses data to optimize acquisition, activation, and monetization cross-functionally
- Remember, PLG is suitable for products that serve many developers at a relatively low price point. SLG is superior otherwise.
- Note to self: consider restructuring this as acquisition, activation, and monetization
- Good online resources
PLG Funnel Benchmarks
Note: (1) Freemium = feature or usage limited but not time limited (2) Free Trial = time limited but usually liberal in access to features & usage
- Web visit to unpaid user (by entitlement type)
- time-limited: 9%
- usage-limited: 8%
- feature-limited: 7%
- Web visit to unpaid user (by trial type)
- Freemium:
- 9% [2% to 15%] (source)
- 12% (source: ProductLed)
- Free trial:
- 5% [2%-15%] (source)
- 5% (source: ProductLed)
- Freemium:
- Web visit to unpaid user (by source)
- Organic: 32%
- Sales: 32%
- Paid: 17%
- Partners: 11%
- Product: 5%
- Marketplace: 3%
- Activation Rate (unpaid user to first value)
- 20% to 40% (source)
- 37.5% (source: UserPilot 2024)
- Month 1 retention rate (continue to use 1 month after sign-up)
- 46.9% (source: UserPilot 2024)
- Free to paid conversion rate (by tactic)
- sales outreach & digital nurture: 15%
- sales outreach only: 10%
- digital nurture only: 9%
- neither: 1%
- Free to paid conversion
PLG Infrastructure Providers
(*) = Recommended
- Amplitude (Analytics)
- Appcues (in-product)
- Bliinx
- Breyta
- Calixa (Sales Tech)
- Census (Customer Data Mgmt.)
- chameleon (in-product)
- Clearbit
- correlated (Sales Tech)
- (*) Endgame (Sales Tech)
- Freshpaint (Customer Data Mgmt.)
- Gainsight
- Groundswell
- HeadsUp (Sales Tech)
- Heap (Analytics)
- Hightouch (Customer Data Mgmt.)
- Hubspot (Marketing)
- Indicative (Analytics)
- Inflection (Marketing)
- Innertrends (Analytics)
- MadKudu (Marketing)
- Marketo (Marketing)
- mixpanel (Analytics)
- mParticle (customer data mgmt.)
- Mutiny (Marketing)
- Pace
- Pendo (in-product)
- planhat
- Pocus (Sales Tech)
- Reprise (Sales Tech)
- Ripe
- Rudderstack (Customer Data Mgmt.)
- Segment (Customer Data Mgmt.)
- Sherlock
- Toplyne (Sales Tech)
- userflow (in-product)
- Variance
- Vitally