PLG is hard. Very few companies can actually do it well. It demands an excellent product bar, compounding growth and both of those teams actually work with each other instead of against.

Series A starts the treadmill. Now you have compounding growth requirements and you can’t afford to retool product when things slow down.

So you shut down onboarding because conversion rates are always better when users are being handheld and that doesn’t break product.

That logic stacks as you scale and the pressure from VC’s mount.

FWIW, I run a competing company in the space and we skipped the Series A specifically because we have gone down this path before. That doesn’t mean we have a better product by default but we don’t have those same pressures and we can just retool things when needed. Almost 5 years in and we don’t even offer annual plans unless someone really twists our arm, our time is focused on product vs revenue growth.

That is a hard line to walk if you’re on the VC climb.

yeah, i guess the treadmill of growth expectations just climbs so much that it doesn't even make sense to think about the small fish coming in from freemium.

it's just odd to me because it should take 0 effort to manage a freemium pipeline as there's no human in the loop. but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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