Why Product-Led Growth isn't right for your startup

What it actually means to do things that don't scale

Did you know that Lovable launched 3 times before PLG worked?

Success stories of product-led growth like Lovable, Slack, and Notion make it seem like the obvious path forward for any SaaS startup. But the reality is often that they didn’t start that way.

You might be fooled into thinking that the right go-to-market strategy for you is PLG. But the truth is that PLG is probably not the right approach for your early-stage startup. And the reason is pretty straightforward – it’s just really hard to automate something you don’t fully understand yet.

And no, you might think you understand it, but I’ll be bold here and promise that you don’t yet. Bear with me, I’ll explain.

The core problem with early PLG

The main issue with jumping into PLG too early is that you’re trying to automate a process before you’ve actually learned what that process should be.

Think about it this way: PLG means your product needs to sell itself. Users should be able to sign up, understand the value, onboard themselves, and eventually upgrade to paid plans. All without talking to anyone from your team.

That sounds efficient, but it requires a level of product polish and user experience design that most early-stage startups simply don’t have yet. More importantly, it requires deep knowledge about your users’ journey that you can only get through direct interaction.

The value of doing things manually first

You need to manually onboard customers at least 100 times before you really understand how to automate the process.

Why 100 times? Because that’s roughly when you start seeing patterns. That’s when you’ve encountered most of the common questions, identified the typical stumbling blocks, and understand what actually drives someone from curiosity to becoming a paying customer.

During these manual onboarding sessions, you’ll discover things like:

• Which features users actually care about (versus what you thought they’d care about)

• Where people get confused in your product flow

• What objections prevent people from upgrading

This information is gold. It tells you exactly what needs to be automated, what needs to be explained better in your product, and what features might need rethinking entirely.

Why PLG requires product maturity

PLG works well for products that have reached a certain level of maturity. The product needs to be intuitive enough that someone can figure it out on their own, valuable enough that they’ll invest time in learning it, and polished enough that they don’t hit frustrating bugs or confusing flows.

Getting to that level of product maturity takes time and iterations. It requires incorporating feedback from many users, refining your interface, improving your documentation, and smoothing out the rough edges.

The hidden costs of PLG

Building for PLG also requires significant upfront investment that early-stage startups often can’t afford:

You need comprehensive analytics to understand user behavior at every step. You need sophisticated onboarding flows that account for different user types and use cases. You need extensive self-service documentation and help resources. You need a product that’s significantly more polished than a typical MVP.

All of this takes time and resources that could be better spent on other priorities when you’re still finding product-market fit.

If you invest time and money in setting all this up, but then some small things in your user flow might be off, then you just won’t convert users to customers. Around that time, your runway is probably done. And you can’t raise any more money because your numbers look like sh*t. So many startups have taken this route to their death. You should not be one of them.

What works better for early-stage startups

Instead of PLG, focus on high-touch sales and onboarding. Get on calls with every early customer. Walk them through your product personally. Answer their questions in real-time.

Yes, this approach doesn’t scale. That’s the point. You’re not trying to scale yet – you’re trying to learn.

This manual approach offers several advantages:

You’ll close more deals. Your conversion rate from demo to customer will be higher than any automated flow could achieve at this stage. You’ll learn faster. Every conversation teaches you something. Record all the sessions and give them to an AI to help you make better product decisions. You’ll build relationships. These early customers often become your best advocates.

When to Consider PLG

PLG becomes a viable strategy when you’ve reached certain milestones.

You’ve done enough manual onboarding to deeply understand your user journey. In every manual onboarding, you feel like a broken recorder as you can predict every word your customer will say. You have clear signs of product-market fit, and you see consistent growth.

Until then, the manual approach will serve you better.

The path forward

Here’s what I’d recommend:

Start with completely manual sales and onboarding. Book calls with prospects, do personalized demos, and guide them through their first experiences with your product. Document everything you learn.

After you’ve done this 50-100 times, you’ll start to see clear patterns. That’s when you can begin to automate the parts of the process that are well-understood and repeatable.

Maybe you’ll create a video that answers the three most common questions. Maybe you’ll add an in-app tutorial for the feature where people get stuck most often. Maybe you’ll develop email templates for common objections.

But you’ll be automating from a place of knowledge, not guesswork. You’ll be building on a foundation of real customer interactions and learnings.

Final thoughts

PLG has become somewhat of a buzzword, and it’s easy to feel like you’re missing out if you’re not doing it. But the reality is that most successful PLG companies spent years doing things manually before they achieved that smooth, automated experience. Just like Lovable, which launched 3 times before taking off.

Don’t skip the manual phase. It might feel inefficient, but it’s actually the most efficient way to learn what your customers really need. The automation can come later, once you truly understand the process you’re automating.

Focus on making your first 100 customers successful through personal attention and direct interaction. That knowledge will be invaluable when you’re eventually ready to scale.

Now stop reading about growth strategies and go talk to a customer!