Nowadays, it seems every new startup has a trust center and is SOC 2 compliant from day one (wink, wink Delve). What's truly happening is that AI unit economics are forcing companies to move upmarket much earlier than previous cloud and SaaS eras.<p>An enterprise customer will simply offer better margins compared to a self-serve one. So companies are recognizing PLG motion isn't a persistent revenue generating motion. Instead it exists more so as a product discovery and experimentation capacity with the aim to ramp you quickly towards enterprise negotiated deals.<p>The difficulty with this is simply unified revenue operations across blended PLG/SLG motions is complex to achieve if you did not build the commercial foundations early. The culprit varies:<p>1. Massive dearth of elite, world-class monetization engineers who remain in billing for the entirety of their careers; few engs stay in the billing space by choice<p>2. Starting with Stripe Billing (plans and subscriptions do not scale): in billing, exceptions are the rule not the exception<p>3. Commercial governance, command and control tooling for the fragmented revenue stack is nonexistent (it is not-uncommon to be using 8-9 platforms for your end-to-end catalog/pricing to contracting to metering to invoicing to collection to revenue recognition lifecycle)<p>Agents won't serve the Frankenstein mess. It is much better to have a single source of truth (i.e system of record) of commercial terms, guardrails, policies, workflows for agents to operate upon than trying to use agents as a drop in for the manual glue work monetization, billing and ops teams currently do.<p>I've seen this in my career at companies like Segment, Twilio, and Orb. Happy to chat more and learn about how your companies are dealing with supporting both self-serve and enterprise customers simultaneously. I don't believe any one does this superbly well!
Since I looked it up:<p>Product-Led Growth (PLG)<p>Sales-Led Growth (SLG)
PLG only worked when the product could sell itself to a team without procurement getting involved. That window is closing fast and everyone pretending otherwise is about to have a bad year.
I didn't realize how much I appreciated writing having a distinct voice until LLMs made everyone sound the same. This strikes me as extremely LLMy:<p>> SaaS era: ~decade to go upmarket. Cloud era: ~5 years. AI era: <2 years. The gap between 'developers love this' and 'enterprises are asking for SOC 2' has never been shorter.<p>No judgement if you want to write your articles with LLMs or whatnot, you do you, I've just discovered that their default style grates a bit. It's like when Bootstrap came out, initially it looked amazing but very quickly it became the "default site" look.
I agree with the headline, but find it ironic that there's no self-serve option
PLG. Any article I have to search for an acronym and don’t find it - nope.
Hard to tell if this is so hard to read because it is LLM generated, or because its is hollow "thought leadership" with no insight.<p>Unsure if there is no astroturfing rule for HN, but this is pretty blatant.