{"id":273276,"date":"2025-05-27T11:17:55","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T11:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/userpilot.com\/blog\/?post_type=pitt&p=273276"},"modified":"2025-05-27T11:17:55","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T11:17:55","slug":"common-product-led-mistakes-to-avoid","status":"publish","type":"pitt","link":"https:\/\/userpilot.com\/blog\/pitt\/common-product-led-mistakes-to-avoid\/","title":{"rendered":"Common Product-Led Mistakes to Avoid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Product-led growth is a new way of buying.<\/p>\n

When you think about the typical way of selling software, a lot of times that\u2019s about demos, where it\u2019s like, hey, let me show you exactly what this does. And that\u2019s common in a product-led motion<\/a>. It\u2019s all about, can I try before I buy? Can you show me the value? Whereas the sales-led model is all about telling people.<\/p>\n

Every single company in the world can be product-led. Now, different forms of product-led growth exist, so how this looks for your company might be completely different. For instance, what we\u2019re doing today with the blogs and the content game<\/a>\u00a0is a form of being product-led.<\/p>\n

Can we provide a ton of value to solve your big problems before you ever become a customer, to build trust, and to serve people before we sell them? Absolutely. Does it always have to be a free model<\/a>? No. But that\u2019s a great place to start, as your company embodies this across the entire business.<\/p>\n

Common mistakes companies make when growing product-led<\/h2>\n

I will share the number one mistake, along with a bit of my research.<\/p>\n

The biggest mistake a lot of people make is that they think of product-led growth as just the free model or transparent pricing<\/a>, overall experience, onboarding, and the like. That\u2019s actually what gets people in trouble, is that we think it\u2019s this mount PLG.<\/p>\n

\"Mount<\/a><\/p>\n

But you forget everything that supports PLG, such as everything below the surface:<\/p>\n

\"PLG<\/a><\/p>\n

When you implement PLG without proper planning, you lack the organizational foundation to support your efforts. You’re missing a clear strategy<\/strong> that defines where Product-Led Growth fits into your overall business model. And as a result, you end up without the right teams, capabilities, or data infrastructure necessary for success.<\/p>\n

You can’t see if users find your product valuable. You won’t be able to run great experiments<\/strong> to improve your Product-Led Growth approach. This is the biggest mistake most companies make with PLG.<\/p>\n

Examples of companies that have made these mistakes<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I\u2019ll share my own story for this one.<\/p>\n

So, when I was at Vidyard (video marketing tool), we decided to\u00a0launch a free trial<\/a>\u00a0since everybody else was doing it.<\/p>\n

\"Vidyard<\/a><\/p>\n

So we just looked and said, oh okay, our competitors are doing a 14-day free trial, let\u2019s do that too. And we simply slapped on a free trial.<\/p>\n

We got a lot more sign-ups, but then we were wondering why none of those\u00a0people were converting<\/a>. The only ones that did were the ones that sales had talked to. Surely, PLG doesn\u2019t work in this instance.<\/p>\n

And so, it really comes back to what I said before because we approached it very surface-level. We just slapped on PLG to our business, but we didn\u2019t have that PLO (product-led organization<\/a>) experience.<\/p>\n

Now, compare that to our second time when we realized that nobody was uploading videos in our free trial. So we asked them why, and they explained it\u2019s because we didn\u2019t really have a good video we could share.<\/p>\n

And so we decided, let\u2019s just make it free and make it easy for anybody to do that. We created a free Chrome extension, and because we did that, it made it so easy for people to have that experience<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Within the 1st 12 months, we had 100,000 people going through and using the product, and then there are millions of people today.<\/p>\n

That is still to this day, you start with Vidyard, and you create a video. It\u2019s easy. And that is exactly why it worked, because it solved a meaningful problem, and people were able to get access to that value in the product<\/a>\u00a0quickly.<\/p>\n

How can companies avoid falling into these PLG traps?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The main thing that companies can do to avoid falling into this trap is to start with a product-led organization.<\/p>\n

Your PLG motion will only become as strong as your\u00a0product-led organization<\/a>. And those product-led organizations are the company-focused backbone that makes PLG work. So that is how you avoid it.<\/p>\n

Signs of failure<\/strong><\/h2>\n

What are some signs that your PLG strategy is failing? There are several key indicators to watch:<\/p>\n