Alyona Mysko

Product led growth is having a well deserved moment. But SaaS companies have been running this playbook for years.
 
 It just didn’t have a recognized name until OpenView defined the category. Before then, we just called it "growth" (and sometimes "ecommerce for saas.")
 
 Mailchimp is a great example. They launched their free forever plan and grew to 1.2 million back in 2012. 
 
 They didn't call it product-led growth." They were just inspired by the idea of using their product, to market itself. And they were excited about the low CAC.
 
 I also lived this first hand at Wistia. Back in 2012, they launched their Free Plan.
 
 It allowed them to capitalize on the virality of the product (being embedded all across the internet) & helped them acquire hundreds of thousands of free users.
 
 They convert thousands of those free users into paying customers without any sales folks, until 2016.
 
 SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Dropbox, DocuSign, and Slack all had similar versions of this go to market model in the early 2010s.
 
 So even though PLG is having it's moment, SaaS brands have been refining this playbook for a while. We just didn't know how to explain it to our families.