FREEMIUM Table of Contents
Full book due out from Stanford University Press August, 2025
Hello, lovelies! I am excited to release the contents of Freemium one chapter at a time here, until the book is in the wild.
XOXO,
-db
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
How Freemium Became Product-led Growth
GLOSSARY OF KEY CONCEPTS
Product-Led Growth “Defined Terms”
PART ONE: HOW BILLION-DOLLAR COMPANIES ARE BUILT USING PRODUCT-LED GROWTH (PLG)
CHAPTER 1: Why Freemium is a Powerful Strategy for Every Company with Digital Products
Or, “What is Product-led Growth and Why Should I Care?”
Freemium Forces You to Know Your Customers Better
Current Generations Prefer Not to Buy from Salespeople
Case Study: How Zoom Beat Webex and GoToMeeting
Freemium’s Flipped Model: “Seek First to Create Value, then to Extract Value”
How Large Companies Leverage PLG for Hypergrowth
Can Freemium Apply to Non-digital Products?
How to Read this Book if You Are a CEO or General Manager
How to Read this Book if You Are in Product, Marketing, or Engineering
CHAPTER 2: The Paradigm-Shifting Cost Savings and Customer Experience of PLG
How Digital Products Now Seamlessly Do the Work of Marketing, Sales, Onboarding, and Customer Success
Case Study: How Atlassian Built a $3 Billion Company with No Sales Force
How PLG Became the Dominant Go-to-Market (GTM) Model for Emerging Software Companies
Why PLG is Software’s Industrial Revolution
CHAPTER 3: First Principles of Product-Led Growth: Empathy, Generosity, and Metrics
How Freemium products are built differently than typical enterprise software
Why Freemium Products are Built for the End User, Not the Buyer
Empathy–Who Is My User, What Does She Care About, and How Does She Measure Progress?
Generosity–Leveraging “Free” to Build Momentum
Metrics–The Criticality of Instrumentation and Metrics in Building and Scaling PLG
CHAPTER 4: PLG Is a Long-term Growth Strategy, not a Short-term Sales Tactic
Securing Top Management Support for a 1-to-3-year PLG Roadmap, Plus Leading Indicators to Track Success Along the Way
Gaining Executive Alignment Via a PLG Business Case
The CFO’s Model for Investing in Innovation
The Resourcing Required for a PLG Initiative
The Only Three Big Decisions You Must Make to Launch a Credible PLG Initiative
Does it Really Take 1-3 Years to Build PLG?
PLG Strategy Considerations for Founders: How and When to Choose PLG as Your Initial GTM Motion
PLG Strategy Considerations for Executives: How to Think About the Investments, Returns, and Strategic Implications of Launching PLG
The PLGTM Cheat Code: How to Get PLG Results in Half the Time
Mindset: The PLG Mindset Required for Success
Talent: How to Identify the Right Talent for the PLG Team
Timeline: What to Measure When, and How to Know When PLG is Working
PLGTM Cheat Code Reprise
PART TWO: PRODUCT-LED GROWTH IMPLEMENTATION AND TACTICS
CHAPTER 5: Creating and Managing Growth Teams (with Ben Williams)
The Internal Politics and Realities of Launching PLG
What is a Growth Team and Why Do We Need Them?
The Internal Politics of Assembling Growth Teams
The Product Growth Model–North Star for All Growth Efforts
How to Structure Growth Teams at Scale
Case Study: How Snyk Growth Teams Work Across All Surfaces
Experimentation is the Core Work of Growth Teams
Weekly Growth Team Meeting Agenda (Example)
Impact and Learnings Reviews for Companies with Multiple Growth Teams
CHAPTER 6: Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for Freemium Adoption
Stripping Down to a Single Use Case to Match Job To Be Done (JTBD)
How to Identify the Single Problem Your Product Solves
Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Getting to Know Your User, the Human
“Just Enough and Not More”--How to Build a Minimum Viable Product
The “First Impact Success Rate”--Quantifying PMF (Product-Market Fit) with an MVP
Common Pitfalls with MVP Development, and How to Avoid Them
CHAPTER 7: Filling the Marketing Funnel: How to Acquire Self-service Customers
Making Your Product Easy to Find and Adopt
Why “Bookings” is No Longer the Primary Metric for Recurring-Revenue Businesses
How the Traditional Sales Funnel Shortchanges Recurring-Revenue Businesses
The Recurring-Revenue Bowtie as a Modernization of the Sales & Marketing Funnel
In PLG, Customers Are Invited to Experience the Product Before Purchasing
The Updated PLG Bowtie Reorders and Reprioritizes Customer Actions
How to Think About Product-Led User Acquisition Conversion Metrics
Where Is Sales in Product-Led User Acquisition? Nowhere.
Case Study: How Figma’s Acquisition Marketing and Product Teams Worked Together to Gain Four Million Users
Product’s Role–Working with Marketing–in New User Acquisition
Why Unit Economics for Acquisition Matter Less at Launch
Why Unit Economics for Acquisition Are Everything During Scaling
The Holy Grail of “Acquisition Loops”: Getting One User to Invite Another User
CHAPTER 8: Building Self-service Onboarding into Your Freemium Product
How to Make Your Product Easy to Start Using
How Product (Not Sales) Takes the Handoff from Marketing
The #1 Critical Event that Drives that Drives All Compound Growth: First Impact
I Understand What an Acquisition Team Does; What’s an Activation Team?
Case Study: Miro Onboarding: Fail Once, Twice, Three Times? No Problem
CHAPTER 9: How to Convert Free Users into Large, Paying Contracts
The Four Major Types of PLG Monetization
How to Tell a PLG Company from a Sales-Led Company
Why PLG Companies Are Not Afraid of “Free”
How PLG Companies Make Money: The Four PLG Monetization Models
Freemium Monetization for PLG Products
Free Trial: The Most Popular PLG Monetization Model
Reverse Trial: Combining the Best of Freemium and Free Trial
Product-Led Sales (PLS): PLG Monetization for Enterprise Contracts
How to Choose Your GTM Motion
CHAPTER 10: Pricing Strategy for Enterprise-level PLG
Charging for What the Customer Cares About: Impact
For Products with Product-Market Fit (PMF), Pricing Is the Highest-Leverage Decision
How to Choose a Pricing Metric
Case Study: Lucid’s Prices Range from $7.95 / Month to $1M+ / Year
Pricing Simplicity–the Single Metric Rule
PLG Pricing Tiers–Get This Right and Unlock Tremendous Value
Enterprise Pricing: How to Charge Millions of Dollars for a “Free” Product
Above All, Keep Pricing Simple
CHAPTER 11: Customer Success Without a Customer Success Department
How a Well-designed Product Keeps Usage and Retention Rates High
Why Usage Retention is More Important than Dollar Retention
How to measure Usage Retention: Daily, Weekly and Monthly Active Users (DAU, WAU, MAU)
Inviting the User to Return Again and Again
Case Study: How Duolingo Doubled, and Then Doubled Again
Using Cohort Analysis to Optimize Retention Over Time via Experimental Product Enhancements
Case Study: How Snyk Increased Usage Retention 15x
How to Use Correlation to Target Retention Experiments
CHAPTER 12: Shifting From Marketing Funnels to Product Loops
The More Customers Use the Product, the More Sales Grows
How to use Growth Loops to Pull More Users into the Product More Often
Case Study: How Pledge.to Leverages Charitable Giving to Create Growth Loops
How to Architect Loops into a PLG product for Marginal Gains that Drive Compound Growth
Mathematical Explanation of How Non-Linear Growth is Built Via Incremental Improvements
PART THREE: PRODUCT-LED GROWTH WITHIN LARGE ENTERPRISES
CHAPTER 13: The Enterprise Sales Inflection Point
When and How to Add Sales to Product-led GTM Motions
Why all Recurring-Revenue Growth Follows an S-curve
The Most Common Mistake Scaleup CEOs Make in the Name of Growth
Run Your Multi-GTM Business Like a Lean Revenue Factory
When to Add Sales to PLG
What is the Best Next GTM After PLG? Or, The Second Most Common Growth Mistake
CHAPTER 14: Crossing the Chasm from Pure PLG to PLG + Sales
How to Use Product-Led Sales to Reach Large Enterprise Customers
Why Every Successful PLG Company Also Has a Sales Team
Case Study: How Lucid Went from Freemium to $30K Deals in One Phone Call
What’s The Difference Between a Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL) and a Product-Qualified Account (PQA)?
Effective Product-Led Sales (PLS) Depends on the “Self-Service Happy Path”
Product-Led Sales is Driven by Signal-Based Plays
In Product-Led Sales, Never Confuse the User with the Buyer
How to Use Jobs to be Done (JTBD) Effectively in Product-Led Sales
Please Don’t Add Sales Capacity Too Early; It Messes Everything Up
When and How to Run Multiple GTM Motions in Parallel
Case Study: How Figma Deploys Sales within a Product-Led Environment
CHAPTER 15: Selling Tactics for Product-generated Leads and Product-Led Sales
What’s Different Tactically in Product-Led Sales?
In Product-Led Sales, the Product Does the Qualification
The Basic Product-Led Sales Playbook: How Sales Engages Product-Qualified Accounts
Advanced Product-Led Sales
Case Study: How Miro Manages Sales Within an Install Base of 50M+ Users
CHAPTER 16: Lessons from Building PLG Within Large, Established Companies
Three Companies who Succeeded at Adding PLG After Already Achieving Greater than $100M in Sales-led, Recurring Revenue
When and Why to Add PLG to an Existing, Successful Sales-led Company
Product-led GTM Options for a Large Company
Potential Mental Barriers to Adding PLG When Your Business Is Already at Scale
The Investments Required to Build PLG from Scratch, and How to Justify Them
The Single, Make-or-Break Factor of Successful PLG Pursuits: Growth Teams
Why You Must Down-Scope Your Product for PLG, and How to Do It
The Biggest Trap for Established Companies Wanting to Launch PLG
Three Case Studies of Companies Who Added PLG After Already Achieving $100M+ in Sales-led Revenue
Case Study 1: MongoDB–$0-20M PLG Revenue in 18 Months; Over 50% of Total Revenue in Seven Years
Case Study 2: Unity Software–$0-$100M Self-service Revenue in 4 Years
Case Study 3: HubSpot–$0-10M PLG Revenue via a PLG ‘Carveout’
PART FOUR: THE NEXT GENERATION OF PRODUCT-LED GROWTH
CHAPTER 17: Can PLG Work at a Company Like Mine?
How to Apply Product-led Tactics in Any Business
PLG to Date has Been Software-Centric, but It’s Underpinned by Core Principles That Can Apply More Broadly
If Conditions in Your Market are Favorable for PLG, then Establishing a PLG Strategy is Imperative
If Conditions in Your Market Are Not Favorable for PLG, You Have Options
Product-led Strategies for When Conditions are not Perfect for PLG
Case Study: How Carta Used an Interactive Demo to Demystify a Complex Product
Case Study: How SAP Made the Most Complex Software Category Self-Service Accessible
When Your Core Product is Not PLG-Ready → Sidecar Products
Case Study: How HubSpot’s Website Grader Became Wildly Effective as a Pipeline Builder
Case Study: How MuleSoft’s DataLoader Unlocked Pent-up Demand for Data Automation Tools
CHAPTER 18: PLG Beyond Software
How PLG is Extending to Unexpected Places
How Embedded Software and “Smart Products” Make PLG Possible Everywhere
How Product Can Participate in Its Own Go-to-Market
Six Key Hallmarks of Product-led Growth
Self-Service: How Self-Service Shows Up in Non-Software GTM
Case Study: How Oak Wood Fire Kitchen Uses “Free” to Optimize for the Return Visit
User-centric: How Modern Product Companies Circumvent Traditional Purchasing Using User-Centric Design and Marketing
Case Study: How Stryker Corporation Works Directly with End Users to Disrupt Traditional Hospital Purchasing
Product-Driven: How “Smart Products” Participate Directly in Product-led Growth
Instrumented: How “Smart Products” are Instrumented for Signal-Based Commerce
Self-Propagating: How Loops Are Built into Product and Services of All Kinds
Three Case Studies of Non-Software Companies Actively Using Product-led Principles to Drive Growth
Case Study: How Kiln Uses Community Plus an App to Aim a Real Estate Company at Product-led Growth
Case Study: John Deere Is Betting Its Future Growth on Converting From “Big Iron” to “Smart Iron”
Case Study: How a Physical Photobook Company Built Its Entire Business Around Social Growth Loops
CHAPTER 19: The Role of Humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Product-Led Growth
Go-to-Market Automation Is Becoming the Norm; AI Will Blend with PLG to Accelerate the Trend
Will AI Replace All Humans in Sales and Marketing?
How GTM De-laboring Has Progressed from Freemium to PLG to Automated GTM
With Smart Products and AI, What’s Next in the GTM De-laboring Trend?
Buyer Preferences: Buyers Prefer Human Assistance in Some Instances and Computer Assistance in Others
Technical Capabilities: The Technical Capabilities of a Human-Machine “GTM “Stack”
Human Realm vs. Compute Realm in the GTM Stack
How to Program the Human-Machine GTM Stack
Growth Architects Needed to Unlock the GTM Stack’s Full Potential
And Along Comes AI: How AI Helps Execute a Well-Defined Strategy
A View Into the Future of PLG