Wes Bush on Why Most SaaS Companies Build Watered-Down Gatorade

The Real Problem Isn't Your Product—It's Your Go-to-Market

Building products has never been easier. Growing them? That's where most SaaS companies die.

Wes Bush has helped 324 companies drive over $1 billion in sales by helping them flip the script. Instead of treating product as something marketing talks about, he's built a system where product is the marketing. But after working with hundreds of founders, he's noticed a pattern: most companies are creating what he calls "watered-down Gatorade."

If you're not clear on who that is, then you're usually going to create what I call watered-down Gatorade. Nobody likes it. You might drink it. You're like, ah, yeah, it's okay. But as soon as you get the real thing, you're like, I want that more than this because it's way better.

— Wes Bush

The culprit? Trying to serve everyone means your ads don't hit, your offer doesn't land, and you can't articulate core value. The companies winning with product-led growth get ruthlessly specific about who they serve and what outcome they deliver.

Red Ocean vs. Blue Ocean: When PLG Actually Works

Not every company should go product-led. Bush is blunt about this. The decision comes down to two criteria: market maturity and problem complexity.

If you're in a red ocean—a well-defined category where competitors already exist—you need a product-led motion to compete. Your competitors will undercut you on price and value if you're burning cash on sales while they're letting product do the work.

But if you're VMware, running infrastructure that could take down an entire business if it fails? That's not a "try it free for 7 days" situation. Complex, mission-critical problems with high lifetime value still need humans in the loop.

Bush's rule of thumb: single point solutions solving simple problems thrive with PLG. If you're solving for simplicity in a competitive market, product-led is your advantage. If you're deep in enterprise complexity, sales-led still wins.

The First Strike: Cut 40% of Your Onboarding Steps

Most onboarding flows are bloated. Bush's "straight line to value" exercise has cut 20-40% of steps for clients—and boosted MRR by as much as 20% for some.

Here's how it works: identify your first strike—the moment a user realizes your product is incredible. For ChatGPT, it's seeing a surprisingly good answer to your first prompt. For YouTube, it's finding that first engaging video. For Vidyard, it was sending a video and seeing who watched 50% of it.

Then map every step from homepage to first strike. You'll end up with 50-70 steps. Now ruthlessly categorize them: must-have, advanced (delay these), and kill-it-now. Cut the red, delay the yellow, keep only what's essential.

You're tasked with finding the fastest way to do that in the product. You start from the homepage, work all the way into getting to that first strike, and what you're often left with is like 50, 70 steps. You basically just kill those red ones and then eventually delay some of those yellow ones, introduce them later on, and you're left with your straight line.

— Wes Bush

The result? A frictionless path to value that doesn't ask users to care about features they don't need yet.

Give Away the Beginner Outcome for Free

Founders overthink freemium vs. free trial. Bush's framework is simpler: map your user's journey from beginner to intermediate to advanced. Then give away everything in the beginner outcome for free.

At Vidyard, the beginner problem was creating a video. If users couldn't do that, they'd never experience the magic of seeing who watched. So everything required to send that first video—templates, script generators, hosting—was free.

The intermediate problem? Getting the whole sales team using video. That's where pricing kicks in. This approach ensures users experience your core value prop before you ask for a credit card.

The worst freemium models ask users to "click around and see for yourself." The best ones architect a guaranteed win in the free tier.

Value Metrics Beat Per-Seat Pricing Every Time

Most self-serve pricing fails because it uses per-user pricing when value has nothing to do with seat count. If someone gets massive value with just two users, your pricing model is broken.

Bush's fix: value metrics. Tie pricing to the unit that actually correlates with value. For email marketing tools, that's contacts. For cloud security audit tools like Cloudle, it might be servers scanned. For productivity tools, it could be projects or workflows.

Every product has a value metric. We gotta define what that is and then actually do some pricing study on like, what is the value per unit? That'll actually help us craft pricing that is simple but powerful because somebody could start with a small plan and then expand naturally as they use the product more and more.

— Wes Bush

The result? Users start small and expand as they get more value. They're not penalized for team size when team size isn't the driver of value. And your revenue scales with actual product usage, not arbitrary seat counts.

The Product-Led Scorecard You Actually Need

Bush's data framework focuses on six metrics: visits, signups, successful setup, first strike achieved, key usage indicator (repeating the first strike 2-3 times), and upgrades minus churn.

For most product-led companies, the drop-off happens between setup and first strike. That's your biggest opportunity. Track these weekly. When a number falls, you know exactly where your funnel is broken.

The companies that win treat their product like Jason Fried described to Bush: your product should be your best salesperson, your best marketer, and your best customer success manager. But that only works if you measure whether it's actually doing those jobs.