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Product-Led Growth That Actually Converts
The product-led growth lessons that doubled our pipeline.
Dear Growth Designers,
Most companies I hear going PLG make it sound like turning on a light switch. You flip on a 14-day trial, and suddenly, congrats - you’re product-led.
But last year, when we introduced a freemium motion at Navattic, we realized a lot more goes into it than simply adding a trial countdown or a way to self-serve an in-app upgrade.
So upcoming, I’ll cover 3 main takeaways from our transition to PLG (and they’ll apply to anyone thinking of making the leap).
Let’s go make some changes,
Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth, Navattic
Tip 1: Test before mass rollout
When we introduced freemium, there was a lot of internal concern around cannibalizing our existing sales-led motion. Here's how we mitigated that risk while achieving 33% activation rates. We treated the rollout like a UX experiment. We first tested a $50 per month plan to see if users could self-serve and see value. We chose $50 to add meaningful friction to signing up, figuring they'd be more invested to get set up. If we couldn't get someone who paid money to successfully onboard, we'd have a lot more trouble with someone signing up for free.
We used Mutiny website personalization to show that $50 offer to only a small percentage of website traffic and slowly increased the percentage over the next few months.
Our first users shared harsh feedback, but that gave us a direction to start making improvements before a public launch. Once we made those fixes, it also gave our team confidence that users could see value and upgrade on their own, easing the fear of cannibalization.
Our activation rate, which we defined as “demo published” climbed from 5% to 33% by making improvements to the first user experience like a guided onboarding and checklist.
The lesson: Run controlled experiments where you can test self-service before going live to all of your users or website traffic.
Tip 2: Anchor users in your product
Our main product activation moment is when a user successfully builds an interactive demo. Without a sales rep or CSM to guide them, it became crystal clear that the UI alone wasn't guiding users to the steps they needed to get there.
We conducted user research, ran in-app surveys, and watched PostHog recordings of onboarding sessions. Users often mentioned they didn't know what to do next, and during recordings, we saw them literally rage-clicking around the product.
We responded with a simple design change.
On login, users saw a pop-up that laid out exactly what to do first. We also added a setup guide that users could access at any point, which anchored them to the four steps needed to build a demo.
In the past month, we took this a step further by adding an AI copilot into our product, which actually goes through 3 of the 4 steps for the user. All the user needs to do is install the Chrome Extension and click around their product, and then the AI will complete the following steps of assembling, writing, and publishing a first demo draft. This change has gotten our activation rate up to 47%.
A new set-up guide to clearly anchor users on what their next action should be in the product.
The lesson: Make onboarding explicit by spelling out the steps required for success, even if it feels like overkill. Remember, free users often have little context about how your product works.
Tip 3: Build a Product Qualified Lead system
If you have a sales-assist motion, it can be tempting to reach out to every new user right after they sign up. But most free users want time to explore on their own — it's why they chose self-serve instead of booking a demo.
Our sales team shifted their focus from contacting every new user to the ones most active or showing the highest intent. This is essentially a Product-Qualified Lead (PQL) approach: using in-product behavior to identify users ready for sales conversations.
We tracked specific PQL signals such as viewing the pricing page, exploring upsell features, hitting usage limits, or showing high engagement patterns. Those signals went into a Slack channel for each rep, so they could see user behavior and reach out at the right moment with contextual, consultative outreach.
We added contextual upgrade prompts like this upgrade button to allow for self-serve checkout and create signals for the sales team that users were interacting with paid features.
The lesson: Build a PQL scoring system that identifies users showing genuine purchase intent through their product behavior, rather than overwhelming all free users with generic sales outreach.
Conclusion
When designing for PLG, let go of what worked in a sales-led world and rethink the first-time experience.
Over the past 9 months, our freemium leads now account for 37% of our inbound pipeline and 50% of our closed-won inbound revenue—with our overall inbound pipeline increasing by 2x and closed-won revenue by 1.8x.
Three key takeaways if you're adding PLG:
Start small and test before going wide
Guide new users to their next step explicitly
Give sales clear upsell indicators instead of overwhelming free users
Natalie Marcotullio is the Head of Growth at Navattic, an interactive demo platform. There she focuses on helping SaaS companies give their prospects a better buying experience.
Natalie is a 2x solo marketing leader for SaaS startups - covering everything from GTM strategy, positioning, and messaging, to full-funnel marketing.
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