Unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now you will have heard about PLG. It’s literally everywhere on B2Tech Twitter, it’s the hottest topic of the moment when it comes to SaaS companies.
It stands for Product-Led Growth, of course… you might have heard about Product-Led Sales or Product-Led Revenue, slightly different flavors for essentially the same concept.
Tom Tunguz from Redpoint Ventures has a great high-level description of it here. The overarching narrative being that every company should be/become a PLG company and that if you don’t have a PLG motion you’re just doing it wrong, full stop.
I won’t bury the lede here: I disagree.
So, if it’s not 100% of the companies that will exist in the next 3-5 years, what would be a ballpark percentage that would make sense? Is it 15%? More like 30%? Maybe 50%? Or 65%?
Fact is: to me, this is the wrong type of mental model.
A better type of mental model, rather than which share of companies are Product-Led, is which share of revenue for any given company is.
In this sense you could definitely argue that every company should have a *portion* of their business coming from PQLs (Product Qualified Leads), but also some coming from MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and some from SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads).
How much? It depends on the type of customers, the maturity of the company, and its ability to flywheel customers up.