People pay for your product. Growth still waits on a sales call.

Why growth stalls after product-market fit

The shape is familiar: customers renew, revenue grows, and every new deal still runs through a demo, a quote, and someone's calendar. Self-serve was tried once — a free tier that attracted the wrong users and converted almost none of them.

• Pricing was set before usage patterns were known, so seats and credits no longer match how customers get value.
• There is no working definition of a product-qualified lead, so sales chases every signup — or none of them.
• Analytics answer engineering questions, not growth ones. Nobody can say where activation drops off.
• A trial exists, but nobody owns the path from signup to first value.

None of this is a marketing problem. It is a systems problem — pricing, billing, instrumentation, and qualification working together — and it is very fixable.

How a PLG motion actually gets built

Not with a free tier and a launch post. Four systems, built in order, each one measurable before the next starts.

1. 01

   Packaging

   Price the value metric. For AI products that usually means usage and credits, priced so the bill tracks the value delivered — not a seat count borrowed from 2015.

2. 02

   Activation

   Design the path from signup to first value, then instrument it. Most products lose more revenue here than anywhere else in the funnel.

3. 03

   Product-qualified leads

   Define the usage signals that mean “ready to buy more,” then route them deliberately — to self-serve expansion or to a human.

4. 04

   Sales-assist

   Self-serve does not replace sales; it qualifies for it. The motion is finished when sales spends its time on accounts the product has already warmed up.

Strategy and execution are the same engagement. We write the code, wire the billing, and stay until the motion produces revenue.

Proven at Spellbook

TryItFree is built on the motion behind Spellbook's product-led growth: self-serve and sales-assist, credits and usage billing, activation and experimentation — designed, built, and operated end to end, from the first funnel to sales training.

Outcome

$2.5M ARR

Starting from

$0

Time

8 months

The track record runs deeper: self-serve onboarding at Qualio, two products taken to paying customers as a founder at Huckleberry, and onboarding shipped to 200,000+ users at Anytype. More on the about page.

Two engagements. Every one starts with the diagnostic.

The diagnostic produces the system design. The build makes it real. Fixed price, fixed scope, no retainers.

Where we do our best work

AI SaaS companies with paying customers and real growth, where the founder wants the product to carry more of the selling. If revenue is climbing and every deal still needs a demo, the diagnostic will pay for itself.