This is going to make all the PLG fan boys & girls angry...Today we talk about why Romanticizing PLG is dangerous.With AI companies hitting $50M ARR overnight (amazing product, credit cards, and a golden retriever named Kevin), a dangerous myth is spreading:š āYou donāt need a sales team. The product sells itself.āWrong. That was the dream of PLG. Now itās become the CFOās favorite excuse to avoid hiring reps. But romanticizing PLG as a cost-saving silver bullet? Thatās corporate delusion.Some inconvenient truths:1ļøā£ You cap your upside. Big logos donāt swipe the corporate Amex for $2M+ contracts. They send you to procurement purgatory. Hope you packed a snack.2ļøā£ Credit card fees quietly bleed your margins. At $10M ARR, you could be giving $270K to Stripe instead of hiring 4 support reps.3ļøā£ You stop talking to customers. Self-serve is great until you realize your roadmap is built on "watching" your customers from afar, and not feedback.4ļøā£ Even Slack hired salespeople. So did Atlassian. So does every PLG darling with a pulse and a 10-Q.5ļøā£ That āself-serve wedge into a $1B logoā slide? Iāve made that slide. Iāve been that guy. Truth is, itās the law of large numbersāa narrative that is retroactively form fitted to the story you want to tell.PLG is a starting point. Not the whole playbook. If you want to scale past $25M ARR and sell to real enterprises, you need a sales team. You need relationships. You need to show up.Self-serve is a channel. Not an all encompassing strategy.PLG isnāt dead. But Santa PLG never existed.And if I had to bet, those founders and Kevin already hired a recruiter to staff up their CRO search.
Letās dig in.
Get full access to Mostly metrics at
www.mostlymetrics.com/subscribe