How to Get Product-Led Growth for your SAAS Startup

Most SAAS companies have a landing page with product features, pricing, success stories and CTA buttons to get in touch. The users contact the company and a demo is arranged to explain the use cases and how to use the product. After the demo, the sales team need to follow up multiple times to convince, negotiate, and close the deal. How do great SAAS products like Jira, and Zoho avoid this manual and operationally heavy work and scale easily? They have built products based on Product Led Growth strategy.  

Product-led growth describes a business strategy that places a company’s product at the core of the buying journey—and often at the centre of the broader customer experience. In this model, the entire process from product discovery, trial, user onboarding, product usage, and payment all happens online without any need for the sales or customer support team to manually guide the user. 

Here are some of the best PLG-driven SAAS products we use at Zartek:

1. Pipedrive (Sales CRM)

2. Fireflies (Meeting note transcription)

3. Teachable (Online course creation)

4. Figma (UI design)

5. Balsamiq (Wireframing)

6. Jira (Project Management)

7. Wati (Whatsapp Bot Automation)

8. Zoho Books (Accounting)

9. Semrush (SEO)

10. Typeform (Lead Collection)

11. Collect chat (Chatbot)

12. Buffer (Social Media Management)

As startups grow and the amount of users and leads they engage with expands, a 1:1 human-to-human support and sales model becomes less sustainable and less scalable. Product-led growth helps companies continue to scale and grow efficiently by automating key areas including onboarding, support, sales, and marketing functions and letting customers and prospects engage with them in the application itself. 

The landing page is the first impression for a potential customer and it should convey the value proposition in simple terms. The Click To Action button should also be highlighted in the home page to drive the users to experience the product immediately. 

Fireflies explains the product feature in four words making it very clear for the user what the product use case is.

The onboarding should be done with very little effort without having to fill in too much data. The user should be able to experience the product and the core features as quickly as possible. 

Users can easily create an account in Semrush by either signing up with their Google account or using Email and password.

Most users would be comparing multiple products before arriving at a purchasing decision. The user must be able to try the product for free for a 14-day or 30-day trial without having to commit to purchasing the product. 

Pipedrive’s CTA advocates for users to try it for free without forcing any product limitation or having to add a credit card.

Once the user creates an account and starts using the product, add coach marks and video explainers to make it easier for them to understand each feature. If your product features integration with other tools like Jira or Zapier, provide clear integration guidelines. 

Buffer makes initial setup easy with clear instructions and a progress bar.

The cost of adding other members and users to the application should be shown very clearly with estimates for the upcoming billing cycle. Integration of subscription-supported payment gateways like Stripe allows users to pay online. Tools like Chargebee can also be used for easier subscription management. 

The multiple pricing plans for Pipedrive along with features and benefits for each is clearly mentioned under Billing.

Most of the queries of the users can be answered by a smart chatbot like Intercom which can answer based on the topic. If user needs queries which cannot be answered by the chatbot, a ticketing system can be added to connect to a live agent.

Razorpay’s chatbot answers most of the queries immediately related to merchant onboarding or settlements.

At Zartek, we have built multiple SAAS products in Fintech, HRMS, Edtech and other domains. We adopt a product-led growth strategy in a user-focused, scalable, and data-driven approach that can lead to faster scaling and a more efficient and cost-effective business model.