How Modern Products Grow.

It started in a cold, gusty winter in Waterloo, Ontario. Inside a cozy loft, more than 50 of us were plugging away on our laptops side-by-side on long plywood tables. We were building Vidyard, a video hosting company, and investors were pouring money into video companies to ride the wave of demand.

Since capital wasn’t a problem, the team was "blessed" with the opportunity to put serious marketing firepower behind the product. I was one of those marketers. I spent a small fortune on countless acquisition channels. I was laser-focused on generating leads. But after spending a stupid amount of cash, I began asking some hard "Whys" about customer acquisition. Like, why did I spend $300,000 on lead generation that never converted?

Obviously, the outcome was to generate leads for a hungry sales team. We were using the same-old marketing playbook that everyone else did: create content, use landing pages to capture leads, and nurture those leads with automated emails until, one day, they converted into paying customers (or unsubscribed). Sound familiar?

Around the same time, we decided to try a free trial. We created a landing page, funneled visitors to it, and gave them access to the product. Months went by. Not a single user upgraded without talking to sales. So we killed it.

But then we tried something different. We launched a Chrome extension that let anyone record and share a video in seconds. No setup, training or salesperson required. It soared to more than 100,000 users in less than a year and has been used by millions since.

Same company, but with completely different outcomes. The free trial failed because we gave people access but didn’t make it easy to record and upload a video to get analytics on it. The Chrome extension worked because people experienced real value the first time they used it. They could record a video in less than three clicks.

That was the moment I started to understand something that would take me years to fully grasp. A product sells itself when the user reaches value fast enough to believe in it. When someone experiences meaningful progress on their own, they don’t need to be convinced. The product is just the vehicle that made it happen fast enough to matter.

I spent the next few years studying every product-led company I could find, breaking down what separated the companies that scaled with PLG from the ones that bolted on a free trial and watched it fail. I eventually left to start ProductLed, where I could focus on this full-time. In 2019, I wrote Product-Led Growth—the book I wish I’d had when I was sitting in that Waterloo loft.

I didn’t expect what came next.

Since then, more than 150,000 people have read the first edition of this book, and my team has worked with more than 430 product-led companies across dozens of industries. I’ve published two more books on the topic: Product-Led Onboarding with Ramli John and The Product-Led Playbook. I’ve seen what works, what doesn’t, and where most teams get stuck.

And I’ve watched the market shift faster than anyone expected.

PLG is no longer an edge.

It’s table stakes.

The 50 fastest-growing companies right now? According to Brex’s latest data, all of them are product-led.¹ Not most of them. All of them.

And the gap is accelerating.

Lovable went from $0 to $200M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in under a year.² Genspark reached $200M in ARR in just 9 months.³ Cursor hit $1B in ARR in 24 months.⁴

These companies built something valuable, let people use it immediately, and allowed the product to do the selling.

There is no world in which they could have scaled this fast with a traditional sales-led motion.

History tells us that how you sell is just as important as what you sell. The best product doesn’t win. The product that earns trust the fastest does. And the fastest way to earn trust is to let someone experience value before you ask for anything in return. When a user gets to their first win quickly, they don’t need a sales pitch. They’ve already decided.

What PLG Actually Does

But here’s what most people miss about PLG. It’s not just a better way to sell. It’s gives people superpowers.

Before Canva, designing anything professional required hiring a designer or years of Photoshop training. Now you can just drag and drop. Before Lovable, building a working prototype took months and a development team. Now you write a prompt. Before Gamma, a polished presentation meant days of outlining, designing, and revising. Now you describe what you want, and it’s done.

Each of these companies took something that used to require expertise, money, or months of effort and made it available to everyone. That’s what product-led companies do at their best. They don’t just sell software. They give people superpowers they never thought they’d have.

None of that happens if the product is locked behind a demo request or if users have to sit through a 30-minute sales call before they can see what the product does. The superpowers only spread when people can experience them immediately.

The knowledge worker of 2036 will look back at 2026 and wonder how we spent so much time on busy work we didn’t even recognize as busy work. The tools are already enabling us to do more than we ever thought possible, and it’s accelerating. Every product-led company that leads with generosity is contributing to that shift.

This is my life’s work. Not building these products, but helping the founders who believe their industry should work better for everyone. The founders who want to be the most generous player in their market, not because it sounds noble, but because they’ve seen that it wins. The founders who understand that when you give people real value upfront, they don’t just become customers. They become advocates.

That’s the promise of PLG. Not that your product magically sells itself. But that when you build something genuinely valuable and let people experience it, they make the decision for you.

The Evolution of Product-Led Growth

Most people don’t realize that the PLG that worked in 2019 isn’t the same PLG that’s winning today.

Shutterstock had PLG figured out for 15 years.

Users could browse millions of images, filter by keyword, preview in high resolution, license with one click, and download instantly. They stripped friction out of every step.

For 15 years, their PLG motion printed money.

Then AI image generators showed up. Users stopped browsing entirely. They typed what they wanted and got it.

Shutterstock didn’t fail at execution. The entire category was disrupted.

They’re not alone. Google Slides gives you a clean canvas to build presentations, while Gamma gives you a finished deck from a single prompt.

Stack Overflow was the fastest way to find coding solutions. Now, Cursor writes the code before you’ve finished describing the problem. Westlaw helped lawyers search case law faster. Now Harvey AI drafts the legal brief.

Every one of those old-guard companies had great PLG. Frictionless signups, smooth onboarding, and clean user flows. None of that mattered when a competitor showed up and eliminated the need for a flow in the first place.

PLG is evolving, and like any software, it has versions. Where your company sits on that curve determines whether you’re leading your market or about to be left behind.

Take Claude Code. It’s not a better coding tool for developers. That’s just a Builder tool competing for the same builder market share. Instead, it turns anyone who can describe what they want into someone who ships software. The TAM isn’t "developers." It’s "everyone with a software problem." That’s a fundamentally different market size on the same infrastructure.

That’s why PLG 2.0 companies are growing faster than anything we’ve seen. They’re not just getting more customers. They’re reaching people who never could have used the product before.

That’s how they’re growing their TAM.

PLG 1.0: The User Experience Era

The goal of PLG 1.0 is to shorten the path from signup to value. Companies do this with better onboarding, fewer clicks, and guided activation.

This spawned an entire ecosystem of tools, including Pendo, Appcues, UserGuiding, Userflow, and WalkMe. All are built to guide users through the dozens of steps from signing up to getting value. They all focused on user adoption because adoption was the bottleneck.

It’s genuinely valuable work. But fundamentally, it’s a Band-Aid. The user still had to do all the work. The tools just made the work less confusing.

Your users are Builders. They need domain expertise to get value. They need to learn your interface, configure their setup, and actively create the output. That caps your TAM at people with the skill and patience to build.

There is nothing wrong with being here if you’re in an industry that is typically a technology laggard (i.e., healthcare, government, etc).

PLG 1.0 fundamentals still matter. But if you’re in a fast-moving industry, most of tech is already implementing PLG 2.0, and if you don’t update your approach, you’re toast.

PLG 2.0: The Output Experience Era

PLG 2.0 is where AI performs most of the work, and the user’s role shifts from building to editing.

Instead of guiding users through steps to reach value, the product leads with an AI-generated output that the user refines.

PLG 2.0 doesn’t ask "how do we reduce the steps to value." It asks, "How do we collapse a user’s time to value?"

AI-native products start with an output and ask the user to refine it. The value isn’t at the end of the onboarding flow. You often get to value in 60 seconds or less.

But let me be precise.

PLG 2.0 doesn’t eliminate the user. It shifts their role from Builder to Editor. You still describe what you want, review the output, refine it, and verify it. With Gamma, you still outline what you want to communicate and review the presentation. With Cursor, you still describe the feature and review the code. The heavy lifting of creation, technical execution, and domain expertise is handled by AI. Your job moves from construction to curation.

Why does this drive such extreme growth? Because there are 10x as many Editors as Builders. A founder who can’t code can describe an app to Lovable and ship it with no developer needed. They went from "I have an idea" to "I have a product." That person was completely locked out before. Now they’re a user.

PLG 2.0 unlocks an entirely new TAM who couldn’t use the old tools.

None of these are flukes. They share one pattern: winning preference.

What Winning Preference Is

Winning Preference is the moment a user experiences a product and immediately knows the old way of doing things is obsolete. It is not a gradual comparison. It is an instant, irreversible shift in the user’s perception of every competing product.

Once someone touches a PLG 2.0 product, they don’t run a feature comparison or negotiate pricing. They just can’t go back. The old way feels outdated.

I started using Gamma, and within five minutes, I knew I was never opening Google Slides again. It wasn’t a decision. The old way felt broken the moment I experienced the new way.

That instant shift in preference is what separates steady growth from breakout growth. It’s not just product-market fit. It’s product-market lock-in at first touch.

The Biggest Mistake

Founders see this and think, "We need to add AI." So they slap a chatbot in the sidebar. An "AI assistant" that auto-completes a single field.

That’s not PLG 2.0. That’s PLG 1.0 with a chatbot stapled to it. The user still does 90% of the work. The workflow didn’t change.

For PLG 2.0, the output must be good enough to win preference on first touch. The way companies do that? The homepage is the product itself.

Look at how ChatGPT, Claude, and Lovable open. The product is right there. You can start getting value before you’ve created an account. Activation isn’t step five of the onboarding. Activation is the first touchpoint.

That’s the fundamental shift. In PLG 1.0, you design the journey with signup flows, onboarding steps, and activation sequences. In PLG 2.0, you design the outcome. The journey disappears. All that matters is whether the first output is good enough for the user to never look back.

PLG 3.0: The Agent Experience Era

The biggest difference between PLG 2.0 and 3.0 is one question: who is the orchestrator?

In PLG 2.0, you are. You can use a dozen AI tools (Cursor for code, Gamma for decks, Harvey for legal), but you’re the one deciding which tool to open, what to ask for, and how to connect the pieces. You’re driving with autopilot. The car is smart, but you’re still picking the route.

In PLG 3.0, the agent is the orchestrator. You just tell it where you want to end up. It figures out the fastest route, picks the tools, does the work across your entire stack, and hands you the result. It’s fully autonomous.

This is already starting. Right now, tools like MCP connectors let you use Claude to work across products in a single conversation. But you’re still initiating. That’s advanced autopilot, and you’re the orchestrator with better tools. The line into PLG 3.0 is crossed when the agent takes over that role entirely. The majority of new signups on Netlify’s platform are now agents, not humans. They didn’t hear about Netlify from a friend. The agent evaluated it and chose it.

So, three versions of PLG, three types of users, three different eras. What’s the one thing driving all of them?

Time-to-Value.

Every version exists because the previous one was too slow. PLG 1.0 shortened the path from signup to value. PLG 2.0 collapsed the path entirely by handing users an AI-generated output. PLG 3.0 eliminates the path entirely.

The value shows up before you even ask for it.

What Changed in This Edition

This edition is shorter and more focused. The first edition was written for SaaS companies. This one is for any business where people can experience value before they pay.

This version focuses ruthlessly on three questions:

• What is PLG?
• Is it right for your business?
• How do you get started?

And it has more stories, because PLG has moved well past Slack and Calendly as the only poster children for what success looks like.

In true product-led fashion, I’ve put together a free set of bonus resources to help you apply what you’re learning as you read. It includes the audiobook, a short quiz to help you choose between a free trial and freemium, as well as a quiz to check how ready you are to implement PLG. You can access everything at productled.com/book/tools.

As every industry evolves, I believe there will be two types of companies:

1. Sales-led companies represent the old way. It’s complex, unnecessary, expensive, and all about telling consumers how the product will benefit them. These companies want to take you from Point A to Point B in their sales cycle.
2. Product-led companies flip the traditional sales model on its head. Instead of helping buyers go through a long, drawn-out sales cycle, they give the buyer the "keys" to their product. The company, in turn, focuses on helping the buyer become so successful using the product that upgrading to a paid plan becomes a no-brainer.

Today, a strong brand and social proof are no longer enough to build trust with the modern buyer. You need to let people try before they buy.

Who Should Read This

This book is for anyone trying to understand what PLG is and whether it’s right for their business. PLG is a team effort. It only works when everyone understands it. So whether you’re the founder making the call or the person who has to execute it, this book gives you a common language and a clear framework.

The market has changed. The companies winning today are built differently from the ground up. They give away more, move faster, and scale in ways traditional businesses cannot match.

This book helps you understand that difference.

And whether you’re ready to build this way.

Notes

1. Sumeet Marwaha, The 50 Fastest-Growing Software Vendors of 2025, Brex Journal, December 2025, https://www.brex.com/journal/brex-benchmark-december-2025 ↩︎
2. Rebecca Szkutak, As Lovable Hits $200M ARR, Its CEO Credits Staying in Europe for Its Success, TechCrunch, November 19, 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/19/as-lovable-hits-200m-arr-its-ceo-credits-staying-in-europe-for-its-success/. ↩︎
3. Genspark, We hit $100M ARR in just 9 months!, LinkedIn, accessed April 10, 2026, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/we-hit-100m-arr-annual-run-rate-in-just-share-7416765532131139584-joP3/. ↩︎
4. Jason Lemkin, Cursor Hit $1B ARR in 24 Months: The Fastest Scaling SaaS Ever?, SaaStr, accessed April 10, 2026, https://www.saastr.com/cursor-hit-1b-arr-in-17-months-the-fastest-b2b-to-scale-ever-and-its-not-even-close/ ↩︎