In the current startup landscape, the most successful founders aren’t chasing trends or outspending the competition. Instead, they’re building products that solve real problems with clarity and focus.
As traditional sales-led approaches struggle to cut through the noise, product-led growth (PLG) is gaining traction. The product itself becomes the clearest voice in the room. One that users trust, understand, and come back to.
This is no longer a niche strategy. It’s the norm. According to recent benchmarks, 91% of B2B SaaS companies plan to increase their investment in PLG initiatives this year.
Over the past five years, I’ve had the privilege of working in an environment surrounded by a slew of innovative founders. I’ve closely witnessed over 100 products come to life, from early sketches on whiteboards to successful launches and rapid scaling.
Through this experience, one thing has become abundantly clear: the founders who succeed are those who put their product front and centre, turning customers into their biggest advocates.
But if you’re building a startup in 2025, it can feel overwhelming to know where to focus first. Don’t worry, this article will walk you through exactly why product-led growth is working, how to embrace it early, and what steps you can take today to build a product users love. You don’t need to panic. You just need a plan, and that’s what you’ll find here.
Contents
What Makes Startups That Embrace Product-Led Growth So Successful?
1. Acquisition That Compounds – If You’ve Earned It
Product-led growth isn’t a quick hack, it’s a reward for founders who’ve done their homework. Many startups mistakenly believe that building a slick sign-up flow and offering a freemium plan will automatically attract waves of users. But here’s the reality check: none of that matters unless you’ve pinpointed a genuine, unmet need in your market.
However, when you do get it right, PLG becomes a powerful compounding force. Low-friction onboarding allows users to experience your product effortlessly, reaching meaningful value almost immediately. Because your product solves a real problem for them, users naturally share it within their networks, amplifying your reach through organic referrals and word-of-mouth.
The 2024 SaaS Benchmark Report backs this up, highlighting that product-led companies achieve significantly higher returns on marketing investment compared to their sales-led counterparts. Importantly, this isn’t just because they spend less, it’s because their products genuinely convert.
But don’t mistake ease of acquisition for ease of execution. True PLG efficiency comes from foundational work that too many founders overlook: deep problem discovery, rigorous user interviews, and disciplined validation before ever writing a line of code.
2. Retention Through Real Usage, Not Just UX Polish
Retention is the Achilles’ heel for many PLG strategies. Too often, founders obsess over onboarding tweaks and UI enhancements, believing these surface-level improvements will make users stick around. But the hard truth is, if users aren’t returning, the problem isn’t your flow – it’s your core value.
This is precisely why the Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) model outshines traditional MVP approaches. You’re not merely testing if a feature technically works; you’re validating whether users emotionally commit and continue coming back. We’ll explore the MVE approach in greater depth a little later.
The most effective early-stage products focus intensely on one core user journey: clearly identifying the problem, solving it swiftly, and proving beyond doubt that it’s worth repeated engagement. This level of retention isn’t achieved through endless A/B tests. It’s intentionally designed by starting small, obsessively refining, and ensuring your users genuinely care about what you’re offering.
3. Faster, Smarter Scaling: Self-Serve, Not Hands-Off
Self-serve onboarding has become a baseline expectation in 2025, but it’s also widely misunderstood. Many founders equate self-serve with minimal involvement, assuming users will independently discover and adopt their product. However, true product-led growth isn’t passive, it’s participatory.
Successful PLG startups embed guided onboarding, strategic nudges, and continuous feedback loops right into the user experience from day one. This approach doesn’t just allow efficient scaling – it actively drives user engagement and accelerates conversions.
Leading PLG companies leverage both quantitative data and qualitative insights to constantly refine their products. They closely monitor critical moments: where users drop off, when they convert, and what exactly constitutes the pivotal moment of value. This proactive, data-informed strategy helps startups scale rapidly and intelligently, significantly outperforming traditional, sales-driven growth models.
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Case Studies: Product-Led Growth in Action
Zoom
Zoom’s meteoric rise wasn’t powered by flashy marketing or massive enterprise contracts. Instead, it was driven by product simplicity.
At a time when people urgently needed a reliable way to communicate remotely, Zoom delivered a seamless experience: no downloads required, just a link to click and you were in.
That frictionless access made it incredibly easy for users to get started, making Zoom the default choice almost overnight.
In December 2019, Zoom had around 10 million daily meeting participants. By April 2020, that number had surged to 300 million. This explosive growth was fuelled entirely by users discovering and sharing the product, not through traditional top-down sales tactics.
It’s a textbook example of product-led growth: solve a real problem better than anyone else, and let the product do the talking.
Slack
Slack revolutionised internal communication not by selling to executives first, but by putting the product directly into the hands of users. From the start, teams could sign up and start collaborating. No sales call, no procurement, just instant value. This frictionless entry lowered the barrier for adoption and let teams experience the product firsthand.
Once a single department onboarded, Slack’s utility became obvious, and its real-time collaboration features, intuitive UX, and deep integrations made it sticky. Adoption then spread virally throughout companies, driven entirely by users, not top-down decisions. Their success became a playbook for product-led growth: empower teams to try it, love it, and champion it internally.
Expensify
They took one of the most tedious admin tasks in business, filing expenses, and made it nearly effortless.
Expensify’s slick, user-focused interface allowed users to snap receipts and generate reports with minimal friction.
Crucially, they embraced a self-serve onboarding model from day one. New users could experience the core value of the product (automated expense management) almost instantly, without complex setup or enterprise gatekeeping. This immediate value delivery helped them grow virally inside organisations, as individual users invited others and adoption spread team by team.
A 2025 Take: What’s New in PLG Right Now?
As we move deeper into 2025, product-led growth is evolving rapidly. This is driven largely by the rise of AI and innovative approaches to pricing and market penetration.
AI is quietly reinventing onboarding. New tools such as AI copilots, personalised onboarding flows, and adaptive, usage-based tips are removing friction in ways static interfaces never could. This dynamic, tailored approach ensures users encounter value quickly, dramatically enhancing user activation and retention. For instance, AI-driven onboarding has been shown to improve user adoption rates significantly.
Usage-based pricing models are also reshaping the landscape, aligning customer value directly with your revenue model. Rather than charging flat fees or per-seat prices, innovative founders are embracing pricing tied explicitly to real user engagement. This ensures your customers pay based on the genuine value they derive from your product, building deeper loyalty and more predictable growth. Companies adopting usage-based pricing have reported higher customer retention rates and increased revenue growth.
Perhaps most notably, product-led growth strategies are increasingly making their way into the enterprise sector. Smart startups are blending product-led growth tactics with strategic, enterprise-grade sales processes. They utilise the product itself to open doors, enabling sales teams to effectively implement land-and-expand strategies that leverage trust and early user satisfaction to drive wider adoption and larger deals.
Ultimately, building a startup today isn’t about choosing between product-led or sales-led methods. Instead, it’s about designing a product capable of scaling trust, activation, and insight, while empowering your go-to-market teams to succeed faster and smarter.
How Founders Can Embrace Product-Led Growth (PLG) Early
Adopting product-led growth from day one doesn’t require a massive team or years of experience. It requires clarity, focus, and foundational habits that compound over time.
1. Validate the Pain Before You Build
Skipping user interviews isn’t product-led, it’s guessing. Before writing a single line of code, deeply understand your target user’s pain points. According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail due to a lack of market need.
Interview potential users without pitching your product; instead, focus on uncovering problems, workflows, and frustrations. Use these insights to craft a tangible, focused value proposition. Conduct competitor benchmarks to understand why current solutions fall short and clearly articulate what makes your offering uniquely valuable.
2. Design an MVE, Not Just an MVP
Your goal isn’t merely to test if a feature works, but whether the overall experience resonates deeply with users. Identify a core user journey that quickly delivers genuine value, then design specifically around that journey.
Map out precisely what “value” means for your user. Build only what’s essential to deliver this value rapidly, wrapped in enough thoughtful design, usability, and branding to evoke a strong emotional response. The outcome is a lean yet compelling version of your product that users can immediately experience and provide feedback on.
Measure critical metrics such as Time to Value (TTV), adoption, and retention. Track closely whether users complete the key journey and return regularly. These insights shape your next iteration and ensure you’re genuinely meeting user needs.
3. Track Real Signals, Not Vanity Metrics
Avoid getting sidetracked by metrics that look good in pitch decks but don’t reflect actual user success. Focus on tracking metrics that matter: Time to Value, user retention, and completion rates for your core user journey. These data points clearly signal whether your product delivers genuine value and has sustainable growth potential.
4. Build Feedback Into the Experience
Great product-led startups don’t just rely on self-serve onboarding, they design proactive feedback loops. Use tools like Hotjar, Typeform, in-app surveys, session recordings, and regular user calls to capture insights frequently and early.
Also, closely track behavioural data to pinpoint precisely where users drop off or encounter friction. Rapidly iterate based on these insights. The quicker you complete this cycle (launch, observe, listen, improve), the stronger alignment you’ll achieve with actual user needs.
These aren’t one-off tasks but the foundations of a product-led growth culture that will sustainably scale your startup.
Where Product-Led-Growth Goes Wrong (And How to Get It Right)
Product-led growth isn’t a shortcut; it’s a strategic approach that frequently fails when misunderstood or poorly executed. Common pitfalls include creating clunky onboarding experiences, overwhelming users with unnecessary features, and neglecting direct user feedback due to discomfort.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that being product-led means you can ditch your marketing or sales teams. In reality, it’s the opposite. According to McKinsey, the highest-performing PLG companies actually invest about 10 percentage points more in marketing, sales, and R&D compared to their sales-led peers. This extra investment translates directly into faster ARR growth and significantly higher valuation multiples.
The lesson here is clear: the best PLG companies don’t sideline sales and marketing; they empower these teams. Marketing remains essential for crafting narratives, generating traffic, and converting interest into action. Sales continues to play a critical role in closing complex deals, expanding accounts, and helping customers unlock deeper value from the product.
Ultimately, PLG thrives when product, marketing, and sales operate as an integrated, unified growth engine, each reinforcing and amplifying the impact of the others.
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Final Thoughts: In 2025, “Product-Led” Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling
If you’re building a startup today, your product isn’t merely part of your company—it is your company. It shapes how users discover you, evaluate your offering, and ultimately buy from you.
The real question isn’t whether you should embrace product-led growth; it’s whether your product is clear, focused, and valuable enough to drive that growth. Being product-led means going beyond surface-level appeal and hype. It’s about intentionally crafting an experience so compelling and intuitive that adoption feels inevitable.
In 2025 and beyond, it won’t be the loudest startups that win—it’ll be those whose products speak most clearly, consistently delivering undeniable value. That’s the real work, and if that’s your approach, you’re already ahead of the curve.
