Build Community to Fail Your Own Metrics
Kyle Poyar has watched hundreds of software companies try to engineer community like a growth lever. They fail almost every time. His diagnosis is blunt: "Folks shouldn't build community on the basis of what KPIs it's going to improve for you. You need to build a community with and for your users or your audience. And so if it's really explicitly about your own objectives, the kind of counterintuitive finding is that you're probably never actually going to meet your objectives because it needs to be actually community-driven."
This isn't soft advice. Poyar, an operating partner at OpenView who coined the term "product-led growth" alongside his colleague Blake Bartlett six years ago, has seen the pattern repeat: companies launch Slack groups, host webinars, measure MQLs, and wonder why engagement flatlines. The problem isn't tactics. It's that they're building for themselves, not the community.
When Poyar started the UBP Mastermind Group—a private community for executives scaling usage-based pricing models—he began with a "no, maybe, yes" framework. His default was don't do it. "Plenty of other things on my plate," he says. He only moved forward after 80% of 25 executives responded within hours, begging to start. Even then, he resisted creating a Slack channel. Members pulled him into it. "Folks kept asking, hey, actually, like, we want to meet outside of sessions and want to send a quick note that gets faster answers." The community dictated its own shape.
It cannot be top-down. It's not my voice. It's not me trying to say, hey, from above, here's the best practice or here's what you should do. It's really giving people the chance to partner with one another, find people that are passionate about this, find their tribe, and get better at their job and what they're trying to do as a company.
— Kyle Poyar
Poyar's model inverts the standard playbook. Most companies ask: what will community do for our funnel? Poyar asks: what do these people need that doesn't exist yet? For usage-based pricing, the answer wasn't content or frameworks. People wanted to commiserate, to talk through A versus B decisions with peers who'd lived it. The UBP Mastermind is invite-only, private, and deliberately small. No website. No brand play. Just high-quality people solving real problems together.
When Sales Calls Every Free User, You've Already Lost
Poyar has seen this movie too many times: a company with strong self-service adoption hires a CRO and two sales reps. Within weeks, reps are calling every free trial user, regardless of what they do in the product. Conversion rates don't budge. CAC explodes. Sales complains about lead quality. The product-led motion becomes window dressing.
He points to Deputy, an OpenView portfolio company in workforce management, as a case study in breaking the pattern. Deputy started with a 14-day free trial and saw 50%+ conversion when users requested demos in-app. Naturally, they layered sales onto everything. "Adding more and more sales touchpoints or sales outreach onto their free accounts seemed like a really great strategy for driving better conversion," Poyar explains. It worked—until COVID hit and their Main Street customers shut down.
The crisis forced Deputy to audit the economics. They discovered that owner-operated businesses with five employees demanded as much rep time as mid-market customers, but generated a fraction of the LTV. Deputy tested a threshold: businesses under 10 employees got pushed to self-service unless they proactively requested help. Conversion stayed flat. Sales reps freed up time to focus on mid-market accounts. Today, 70% of Deputy's conversions happen self-service, and reps hit quota more consistently.
Everyone wants a certain amount of lead volume, right? It's seen as, well, the more leads that we get, the more folks we can call on, the more conversions we can happen. And so there's some fear there that having leads taken away from them makes it so that it's harder and harder for them to hit their quota.
— Kyle Poyar
The shift required change management: quarterly quotas instead of monthly, more mid-market marketing spend, training on outbound. Deputy even paid reps commission on self-service deals during the transition to keep them bought in. The lesson isn't "sales is bad." It's that sales should add incremental value, not replace what the product already delivers. Poyar's default: "Make sure that you have a self-service mindset as an organization. Customers should be able to self-serve on all the key things they need with the product." Sales becomes the exception for complex integrations, procurement, or multi-location rollouts—not the rule.
Pricing for PLG Means Killing Discretion
Poyar spent six years at Simon-Kucher before OpenView, consulting Fortune 500 tech companies on pricing. He's watched enterprise sales teams treat pricing like a negotiation sport—discretion, custom deals, "value-based" hand-waving. None of that survives contact with product-led growth. "A lot of companies give some discretion to sales to figure out pricing on a specific deal," he says. "That type of model doesn't work so well in a product-led growth environment."
PLG demands transparency. If users think there's sticker shock, they won't invest the sweat equity to set up the product. Poyar advocates for usage-based models because they solve the entry-point problem: "You can really grow with the customer as they grow their usage. Having a lightweight or affordable entry point is really just meaning you're offering less usage in terms of the initial commitment." Seat-based subscription models, by contrast, force companies to either overprice small teams or cannibalize enterprise deals.
The fear of cannibalization paralyzes companies. Poyar's take: most companies water down their free tier so much it only attracts prosumers and personal users who'll never convert. "I often find that ends up being an excuse for watering down the free version so much so that it's not actually usable for the high value customers you're trying to attract." The result is a support burden with no revenue upside. Better to offer real value and trust that expansion will follow.
Ideally, it could impact just about every metric and function in a business, although I think a caveat that I'll just share is that folks shouldn't build community on the basis of what KPIs it's going to improve for you.
— Kyle Poyar
He also pushes companies to test before they commit. Start with a "request a free trial" button that triggers a person-assisted setup call. See if it increases qualified pipeline without cannibalizing demo requests. Try interactive demos on the website to let users experience value before talking to sales. Layer in self-service proof-of-concepts for enterprise buyers. Each step de-risks the shift without requiring a full pricing overhaul. Only when data proves demand at a lower price point should companies introduce a new entry-level package.
Product-Led Sales Fails When You Sell to Users, Not Buyers
Poyar has identified a second PLG pitfall that's subtler and more dangerous: companies nail the product-led motion, flood the top of funnel with end users, then watch sales stall because reps only call product-qualified leads. "That user is often not the buyer," Poyar warns. "They're not the budget holder, they're not the executive." Sales treats PQLs as the starting and ending point, never bridging to the economic buyer. Expansion dies.
The trap is structural. PLG targets end users—the sales rep who hates CRM data entry, not the CRO who wants predictable revenue. Freemium and free trials reach thousands of users for every buyer. Those users love the product, share it with their teams, and spread it bottom-up. But when it's time to sell a $100K enterprise contract, the user can't sign the deal. "The pain points that are motivating the end user are often different from the executive buyer," Poyar explains. "You have to keep that in mind."
He's seen companies add entire PLG teams—engineers, product managers, marketers—alongside a traditional sales org, treating it as a side project. When funding tightened in 2022, those companies cut PLG because it never delivered core revenue. The survivors? Companies that measured product-influenced revenue: how much net new ARR starts with a meaningful product interaction before sales gets involved. OpenView's SaaS benchmark survey found freemium companies range from 25% to 100% product-influenced revenue. Just having freemium doesn't mean the product is doing the work.
If you're selling to a very small business audience, your deal sizes are usually small, maybe it's a couple hundred dollars a month, you don't have a lot of ability to invest in a high-touch sales motion. The CAC payback just can't support as high-touch of a sales motion as in an enterprise setting.
— Kyle Poyar
Poyar's fix: design the sales motion around the buyer, not the user. Train reps to identify and reach the economic buyer early. Shift comp plans from monthly to quarterly to support longer mid-market cycles. Invest in outbound to target accounts where product usage signals intent. The product gets users in the door; sales closes the executive. Treating them as separate motions kills deals.
Why SEO Won't Save PLG Anymore
For years, SEO was the secret weapon of PLG companies. Notion templates, Webflow showcases, Airtable setups—user-generated content that ranked organically and drove thousands of signups at near-zero CAC. Poyar calls it out explicitly: "One of the key channels that has worked for many of the PLG companies that are great today is SEO." But he's bearish on its future as a reliable, scalable acquisition channel.
The math is straightforward. PLG requires reaching thousands of end users daily to fill the top of a high-drop-off funnel. Most visitors won't sign up. Most signups won't activate. Most activations won't convert. Most conversions won't expand. You need volume. SEO delivered that for Airtable, Notion, and others because Google rewarded user-generated content and long-tail searches. But the landscape is shifting—AI-generated content, zero-click search results, and platform algorithm changes are eroding organic reach.
Poyar doesn't offer a silver bullet replacement. He points to the broader challenge: PLG companies need "low-cost scalable ways of acquiring users," and the channels that worked in 2018 won't work in 2024. Community can help—users recruiting users, sharing setups, building templates—but only if it's genuine, not a lead-gen Trojan horse. The implication: companies betting on PLG need to diversify acquisition early, before SEO dependency becomes existential.
We're in a new era of product-led growth. Product-led growth was coined about 6 years ago by my colleague Blake, Blake Bartlett. And it's this idea of building products for the end user, really leading with self-service experiences, allowing folks to try before they buy, and then expand from the bottom up.
— Kyle Poyar
He's also pragmatic about who PLG works for. OpenView's benchmark survey found 15-20% PLG adoption among companies selling to enterprises with 1,000+ employees, versus near-universal adoption for developer tools and infrastructure software. Legal tech, finance software, and vertical SaaS lag because buyers aren't tech-savvy or don't want self-service. "Make sure that you're focusing on an industry where the way people actually want to buy your software is aligned with PLG," Poyar advises. If your buyers expect consultative sales, forcing them through a free trial is friction, not value.
The Dimmer Switch, Not the Light Switch
Poyar rejects the binary framing of PLG versus sales-led. "Product-led growth is about using your product as this means of acquisition, conversion, retention," he says. "That means it's more of a dimmer switch than an on or off switch." Ramp uses the product for lead gen, then hands off to sales. Other companies offer free trials of new features to existing customers. Interactive demos qualify inbound leads. There's a spectrum.
The companies that thrive treat PLG as a philosophy, not a department. They align marketing, sales, and product around product-influenced revenue. They test incrementally—add a free trial CTA, measure impact, iterate. They resist the urge to bolt on a Slack community or freemium tier because competitors did. Poyar's advice loops back to his community mantra: start with user needs, not your goals. Listen. Build with them, not for them. Prove demand before scaling.
He's also blunt about the companies that should quit. If PLG was a 2021 side hustle funded by cheap capital, and it's not driving core revenue, cut it. "I've noticed people are investing in PLG. They're trying to double down on what they know works, focus on the core, build a more efficient business." The trend he's seeing: fewer casual experiments, more companies where PLG is existential. That's a feature, not a bug. The survivors will be the ones who treated PLG as a bet-the-company move from day one, not a marketing experiment.