Experimenting with Product-Led Growth
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In this series, we dive into product-led growth (PLG) and share insights from across General Catalyst’s network. Our first article offers an introduction to PLG for early-stage founders. Here, we highlight a wide range of PLG experiments and strategies from experts who represent a range of SaaS companies and experience:
- Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Chief Business Officer at Stripe and former sales director at Google,
- Caroline Mack, COO at Spline and former product leader at Canva,
- Lauryn Motamedi, Head of Product Growth at Notion,
- Bryan Ng, Product Manager - Monetization, Pricing & Packaging at Notion,
- Hila Qu, growth advisor and former Head of Growth at GitLab.
We believe experimentation is key to driving product-led growth at all stages of company maturity. We think it’s especially important in the early stages, when you aren’t yet sure how well a product-led motion will work. You’re likely making various product changes to enable a self-serve motion; at the same time, you might be bootstrapping the company’s growth with sales efforts. We believe constant iteration is the best way to learn what works and refine your strategy. As Hila Qu, growth advisor and former Head of Growth at GitLab, puts it: “PLG takes a lot of trial and error—testing and validating the best interaction between the product and user.”
I learned this lesson firsthand while leading product growth at Amplitude, and before that, as an early employee at Lime, where I brought the product to new markets. It was invaluable to speak with other operators and exchange insights from real-life PLG experiments.
In my current role, I have the privilege of connecting with a broad range of experts across General Catalyst’s network. When we speak about growth strategies, I make a point of asking these experts about the most impactful experiments they’ve run. I’ve rounded up some of the most compelling experiments below, along with advice for founders who are looking to encourage PLG innovation on their teams.
PLG experiments to try
In the world of growth, a tactic that works well for another company may or may not work for you. The experiments below represent a broad variety of approaches, and not all of them will be relevant to your business and GTM strategy. Think of them as inspiration rather than a prescription for PLG success.
Shorten your trial time.
Free trials don’t need to be 30 days—the ideal time frame corresponds with the average time to value, which can be quantitatively measured or qualitatively gleaned from customer research. Jeanne DeWitt Grosser shares an example from Google, where she previously owned SMB and mid-market sales for the Apps product (now known as Workspace). When Jeanne was working on the product, the trial period was 30 days. Ultimately, her team found that a 30-day trial was too long, and most users had made a call by day three.
If reducing your trial period proves to not hurt your conversion rate, this change can also help your team accelerate testing cycles. “Many practitioners underestimate the downside of elongated trial windows,” Jeanne says. The longer the trial period is, the longer it takes to see results.
Optimize your signup flow.
Experiments and optimizations in the signup flow can make a big impact. At Notion, Head of Product Growth Lauryn Motamedi and her team saw a 2.5X lift in conversions by changing the signup button for Notion’s website product. “With the website builder, you can stand up websites that look like a Notion doc, and we felt that the existing signup button didn’t explain the connection between a site and Notion’s product,” Lauryn says. “We made it more contextual (‘Built with Notion’) and simplified choices that may cause cognitive overhead or friction.”
Remind customers what they’re paying for.
Once paid users are enjoying their subscription, they’re likely to take premium features for granted. When she was leading product work at Canva, Caroline Mack and her team discovered this dynamic—premium users would unsubscribe, then re-subscribe when they hit the paywall. The team ran a simple experiment to highlight gated features. When a user would unlock a premium feature, the symbol would change color and become animated. That change drove a 20+% improvement in retention.
Create a path toward multi-player use.
Packaging changes can help you convert single-player users into multi-player teams. Lauryn and Bryan’s team at Notion offer an example based on an early version of the product. Previously, Notion had a free SKU with a strict one-member limit. This single-player version of Notion was very popular, yet it limited users’ understanding of what the product could do. Bryan’s team experimented with lifting the one-member restriction with the goal of introducing free users to collaborative features. The new packaging more than doubled the number of workspaces that used Notion as a collaborative product. New paid workspaces increased by double digits.
Test your pricing model.
A/B and holdout tests can help you identify the best pricing model for customers who are on the fence about converting. Jeanne and her team at Google tested different pricing models within the bucket of users who were neither the most likely nor the least likely to convert. After doing A/B tests and holdout tests, they changed annual pricing to monthly, paid after the free trial period.
At Amplitude, I led the early experimentation for the product’s first self-serve paid plan. We wanted to create a paid offering at a much lower price point than our existing paid plans. We created a plan focused on SMB, and explicitly differentiated from our offerings for growth-stage and enterprise customers. We proposed the new plan, called “Plus,” after conducting a lot of competitive research, leveraging customer insights from the CS, sales, and product teams, and quantitatively analyzing product feature usage across our existing plans. The GA release happened after my time at Amplitude, and it drove a significant increase in SMB paying customers.
Tailor the onboarding experience.
Adjust the onboarding flow based on what you learn about your users. “Collect data during the onboarding process to get a better picture of who your user is and what they’re trying to achieve,” Hila advises. At GitLab, Hila and her team looked at the activation funnel and found that some users were creating empty projects and doing nothing with them. Later on, those users would find an existing project to join: “We realized that we were forcing everyone to go through the same onboarding flow and create a new project, but for some users, that’s not their goal—a segment of users are signing up to find their team.”
Putting experimentation into practice
The experiments you choose will depend on the stage of your company and the growth goals you’re trying to achieve. In the very early stages, you might place your bets on launching a self-serve product, working on a new pricing and packaging strategy, or building viral sharing mechanisms for the first time. It’s unlikely that you’ll prioritize experiments like optimizing the signup and onboarding flow or building paid feature awareness in the product. That work should come later.
Big changes become harder to make as companies mature and scale, due to organizational complexity and inertia. But experimentation shouldn’t wind down just because you’ve reached product-market fit or a particular stage of growth. Push your team to take the big swings that have the potential to create step changes for your business.
I hope these examples offer inspiration and a sense of what’s been successful at different companies. Sometimes seemingly small changes can drive a meaningful impact, which is why having an experimentation mindset matters.
Follow our experts on social:
- Jeanne DeWitt Grosser: LinkedIn, X
- Caroline Mack: LinkedIn, X
- Lauryn Motamedi: LinkedIn, X
- Bryan Ng: LinkedIn
- Hila Qu: LinkedIn, X
- Andrea Wang: LinkedIn, X
Explore our PLG series:
- The Early-Stage Founder’s Guide to Product-Led Growth
- Experimenting with Product-Led Growth
- Sales-Led vs. Product-Led Growth
In this series, we dive into product-led growth (PLG) and share insights from across General Catalyst’s network. Our first article offers an introduction to PLG for early-stage founders. Here, we highlight a wide range of PLG experiments and strategies from experts who represent a range of SaaS companies and experience:
- Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Chief Business Officer at Stripe and former sales director at Google,
- Caroline Mack, COO at Spline and former product leader at Canva,
- Lauryn Motamedi, Head of Product Growth at Notion,
- Bryan Ng, Product Manager - Monetization, Pricing & Packaging at Notion,
- Hila Qu, growth advisor and former Head of Growth at GitLab.
We believe experimentation is key to driving product-led growth at all stages of company maturity. We think it’s especially important in the early stages, when you aren’t yet sure how well a product-led motion will work. You’re likely making various product changes to enable a self-serve motion; at the same time, you might be bootstrapping the company’s growth with sales efforts. We believe constant iteration is the best way to learn what works and refine your strategy. As Hila Qu, growth advisor and former Head of Growth at GitLab, puts it: “PLG takes a lot of trial and error—testing and validating the best interaction between the product and user.”
I learned this lesson firsthand while leading product growth at Amplitude, and before that, as an early employee at Lime, where I brought the product to new markets. It was invaluable to speak with other operators and exchange insights from real-life PLG experiments.
In my current role, I have the privilege of connecting with a broad range of experts across General Catalyst’s network. When we speak about growth strategies, I make a point of asking these experts about the most impactful experiments they’ve run. I’ve rounded up some of the most compelling experiments below, along with advice for founders who are looking to encourage PLG innovation on their teams.
PLG experiments to try
In the world of growth, a tactic that works well for another company may or may not work for you. The experiments below represent a broad variety of approaches, and not all of them will be relevant to your business and GTM strategy. Think of them as inspiration rather than a prescription for PLG success.
Shorten your trial time.
Free trials don’t need to be 30 days—the ideal time frame corresponds with the average time to value, which can be quantitatively measured or qualitatively gleaned from customer research. Jeanne DeWitt Grosser shares an example from Google, where she previously owned SMB and mid-market sales for the Apps product (now known as Workspace). When Jeanne was working on the product, the trial period was 30 days. Ultimately, her team found that a 30-day trial was too long, and most users had made a call by day three.
If reducing your trial period proves to not hurt your conversion rate, this change can also help your team accelerate testing cycles. “Many practitioners underestimate the downside of elongated trial windows,” Jeanne says. The longer the trial period is, the longer it takes to see results.
Optimize your signup flow.
Experiments and optimizations in the signup flow can make a big impact. At Notion, Head of Product Growth Lauryn Motamedi and her team saw a 2.5X lift in conversions by changing the signup button for Notion’s website product. “With the website builder, you can stand up websites that look like a Notion doc, and we felt that the existing signup button didn’t explain the connection between a site and Notion’s product,” Lauryn says. “We made it more contextual (‘Built with Notion’) and simplified choices that may cause cognitive overhead or friction.”
Remind customers what they’re paying for.
Once paid users are enjoying their subscription, they’re likely to take premium features for granted. When she was leading product work at Canva, Caroline Mack and her team discovered this dynamic—premium users would unsubscribe, then re-subscribe when they hit the paywall. The team ran a simple experiment to highlight gated features. When a user would unlock a premium feature, the symbol would change color and become animated. That change drove a 20+% improvement in retention.
Create a path toward multi-player use.
Packaging changes can help you convert single-player users into multi-player teams. Lauryn and Bryan’s team at Notion offer an example based on an early version of the product. Previously, Notion had a free SKU with a strict one-member limit. This single-player version of Notion was very popular, yet it limited users’ understanding of what the product could do. Bryan’s team experimented with lifting the one-member restriction with the goal of introducing free users to collaborative features. The new packaging more than doubled the number of workspaces that used Notion as a collaborative product. New paid workspaces increased by double digits.
Test your pricing model.
A/B and holdout tests can help you identify the best pricing model for customers who are on the fence about converting. Jeanne and her team at Google tested different pricing models within the bucket of users who were neither the most likely nor the least likely to convert. After doing A/B tests and holdout tests, they changed annual pricing to monthly, paid after the free trial period.
At Amplitude, I led the early experimentation for the product’s first self-serve paid plan. We wanted to create a paid offering at a much lower price point than our existing paid plans. We created a plan focused on SMB, and explicitly differentiated from our offerings for growth-stage and enterprise customers. We proposed the new plan, called “Plus,” after conducting a lot of competitive research, leveraging customer insights from the CS, sales, and product teams, and quantitatively analyzing product feature usage across our existing plans. The GA release happened after my time at Amplitude, and it drove a significant increase in SMB paying customers.
Tailor the onboarding experience.
Adjust the onboarding flow based on what you learn about your users. “Collect data during the onboarding process to get a better picture of who your user is and what they’re trying to achieve,” Hila advises. At GitLab, Hila and her team looked at the activation funnel and found that some users were creating empty projects and doing nothing with them. Later on, those users would find an existing project to join: “We realized that we were forcing everyone to go through the same onboarding flow and create a new project, but for some users, that’s not their goal—a segment of users are signing up to find their team.”
Putting experimentation into practice
The experiments you choose will depend on the stage of your company and the growth goals you’re trying to achieve. In the very early stages, you might place your bets on launching a self-serve product, working on a new pricing and packaging strategy, or building viral sharing mechanisms for the first time. It’s unlikely that you’ll prioritize experiments like optimizing the signup and onboarding flow or building paid feature awareness in the product. That work should come later.
Big changes become harder to make as companies mature and scale, due to organizational complexity and inertia. But experimentation shouldn’t wind down just because you’ve reached product-market fit or a particular stage of growth. Push your team to take the big swings that have the potential to create step changes for your business.
I hope these examples offer inspiration and a sense of what’s been successful at different companies. Sometimes seemingly small changes can drive a meaningful impact, which is why having an experimentation mindset matters.
Follow our experts on social:
- Jeanne DeWitt Grosser: LinkedIn, X
- Caroline Mack: LinkedIn, X
- Lauryn Motamedi: LinkedIn, X
- Bryan Ng: LinkedIn
- Hila Qu: LinkedIn, X
- Andrea Wang: LinkedIn, X
Explore our PLG series:
- The Early-Stage Founder’s Guide to Product-Led Growth
- Experimenting with Product-Led Growth
- Sales-Led vs. Product-Led Growth
