Product-led growth has been booming in the B2B software universe, becoming the fashionable way to approach go-to-market in SaaS. I’m a believer in the philosophy, as we’ve seen companies grow to immense scales and valuations off of the economic efficiencies of this approach powered by better and better technology. People point to companies like Atlassian, Slack, or Figma as examples that grew enormously through pure self-service, freemium models. You hear a lot of “they got to $NN million in revenue with no salespeople.”

This binary mental model of either product-led or sales-led leads to a false dichotomy,...

In the wake of Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack, there’s been a flood of analysis on whether it was a sign of Slack’s success or failure to grow as a company. It’s funny that we live in a time when a $27bn acquisition of a 7-year-old company gets interpreted as a failure. I’d consider it validation for their business that a $200bn company like Salesforce makes their largest acquisition ever on you. Broadly, it’s a move to make Salesforce more competitive with Microsoft as an operating system for business productivity writ-large.

One likely driver of selling now...

A fun aspect of working on a business product with a product-led growth strategy that you get to use the your product for in your personal life. I’ve used Fulcrum for creating personal tracking databases, collecting video for OpenStreetMap, and even documenting my map collection.

There’s no better way to build an empathetic perspective of your customer’s life than to go and be one as often as you can.

Last week our team did an afternoon...