Product-Led Growth Examples with Effective Elements and Good Applications

What Is A Product-led Growth (PLG) Strategy?

A product-led growth (PLG) strategy is a business approach where the product itself drives user acquisition, retention, expansion, and conversion. This strategy centers around delivering exceptional product experiences for your users.

PLG leverages the product as the main growth engine.

Users realize your product’s value through self-guided exploration and product usage, not through heavy sales efforts or marketing emails.

Users experience your product's value firsthand through self-guided exploration and usage rather than relying on a barrage of sales emails or traditional marketing campaigns. However, going product-led doesn’t mean abandoning your sales and marketing efforts entirely. 

Sales and marketing teams remain crucial players in PLG strategies. PLG is a holistic approach –the bigger picture, let’s say 🖼️– where all teams and strategies work in harmony to create a seamless and impactful user experience.

PLG calls for strategic updates and adaptations across various domains managed by different teams —marketing, sales, customer success teams, and beyond.

It’s a team sport where everyone brings something valuable to the table!!

📌 Popular strategies within a product-led growth approach include:

• Free Trial/ Freemium Models
• Social Proofs
• Product Education
• In-product Onboarding
• Self-Serve Help Centers/ Knowledge Bases
• Community Building

We’ll see each of these practices in action and analyze them one by one in just a moment 🔎

Looking for a guide on how to become product-led? Let’s take you here 👈🏻

7 Product-Led Growth Examples

Here are great real-life examples of successful product-led companies leaving the heavy lifting to their products to acquire customers –and also, retain customers! 

UserGuiding’s PLG Strategies 

UserGuiding is an all-in-one product adoption platform that allows you to create interactive and engaging product experiences for your users. It also offers standalone knowledge bases and AI-powered chatbots to elevate user education and support. 

Interactive User Onboarding Process

UserGuiding started as an onboarding solution and still has many features and capabilities for user onboarding purposes. So it’s only fair that they have a well-planned and structured interactive onboarding process, as well.

When you first sign in to the platform, you’re welcomed with a modal asking your use case 👇🏻

Depending on your answer and use case (guiding users, supporting users, informing users, or surveying users), UserGuiding triggers a different interactive guide and introduces you to a different feature.

Remember, UserGuiding is an all-in-one platform, so people come with different problems and desires. With this quick survey, UserGuiding ensures:

• ✅ They know their users (their pain points and goals).
• ✅ They recommend the most relevant feature/ capability to each user.

For example, if you want to survey your users and gather feedback, then you might like UserGuiding’s in-app surveys. So, that’s what they bring to your attention with an interactive in-app tutorial 👇🏻

The tutorial is short, with clear and to-the-point instructions.

Here, go to the feedback section. Create your in-app survey by choosing a template. Add your questions from here.

Straightforward. No fluff.

All the other details about customization, configuration, and triggering capabilities are summarized and shortly mentioned with a final modal 👇🏻

These parts of an in-app survey (triggering method, customization, and configuration) are more time-consuming than simply creating a survey and adding questions. However, they may not be as important for a first-time user to focus on. 

For most first-time users, seeing the core functionality is enough. Spending time adjusting button colors, sizes, placement, or setting up trigger timings can feel like a big commitment and unnecessary effort for trial users.

As long as you highlight what they can do (like UserGuiding does here), it's perfectly fine not to cover every detail in the tutorial. 

The quicker you demonstrate your product's value, the faster users will convert to paying customers.

AI Assistant

UserGuiding allows you to create an AI assistant that can help your users access information within your product through interactive communication. And they have their own AI assistant, too. 

Meet Dylan 👋🏻

The AI assistant pulls answers from your knowledge base and other enabled resources. This enables it to respond to both general questions, such as "What’s the best strategy to improve product adoption?" and product-specific queries like "How can I create a hotspot with UserGuiding?". 

When you ask a how-to question (let’s go with our “How can I create a hotspot with UserGuiding?” question), Dylan answers you with a step-by-step guide. 

While the more substantial steps are bolded and numbered, all the smaller steps you need to take to complete these bigger steps are listed and explained very clearly. Thanks to Dylan’s very detailed and structured guide, you do not need to leave the product to go hunt for information. 

📖 PLG heavily relies on user education.

Until your users can easily navigate your product, complete their tasks, feel they’re gaining value, and understand what they can do and how to do it, you can't truly become product-led.

An AI chatbot like Dylan can help you achieve many of these goals ☝🏻

Standalone Knowledge Base 

The truth is… 

You cannot answer all of your users’ questions right within your app. Mostly because the space is limited, and users expect quick, actionable answers when seeking help in an in-app resource center or interactive tutorial. 

But it doesn’t mean you cannot –or should not– create more detailed and technical articles.

You actually can, and you very much should.

Then, you need to gather them in one central hub and inform your users about this hub in case they ever need answers to more specific questions.

Create a knowledge base. 

Like UserGuiding’s here 👇🏻

In this knowledge base, UserGuiding offers a lot of valuable information about best practices, pro tips & tricks, feature capability limits… 

No matter how very new to the product or experienced with it you are, you can find answers to your questions. (Even knowing this, that you have access to information whenever you need it, makes you feel safe and supported, actually.)

The information is organized by product feature or capability, with beginner-friendly "Getting Started" tutorials grouped separately. This way, you don’t have to navigate through each feature category to find the 101 guides.

However, if you want to master a feature from start to finish and dive deep into all the available information, simply click on it and follow the sequence of articles.

UserGuiding organizes its articles in a way that guides you from your first encounter with a feature to its most advanced capabilities. This structure allows you to treat the articles as a detailed course on the feature you're interested in, or, if you're looking for a quick solution, you can easily scan the guides to find the specific step where you got stuck.

Neat, huh? 

Free Trial 

Product-led growth is all about you, the user, trying the product and deciding to buy it once it impresses you. As you might guess, it’s nearly impossible to achieve this without giving users free access to the product, even if it’s just for a limited time.

That’s why free trials and freemiums are the most popular PLG strategy, according to data 👇🏻

UserGuiding is one of the many product-led companies offering a free trial to their users.

And they make sure users notice it and take the opportunity to try it out:

On their home page, they have 2 “Start for Free” CTA buttons. One is right on the top and stays there even when you slide down the page. And the other one is the practically first CTA that welcomes you to the page.

But it doesn’t end there. There’s also a pulsating hotspot right on the corner of the blue “Start for Free” CTA.

When you click on the “See for Yourself” CTA on the hotspot, it triggers a demo tour right on the home page. You get to see what you can create with UserGuiding if you start your free trial (without actually putting in the time and effort to start it).

Here’s a tooltip from the demo tour:

And here’s an announcement modal:

As you can see, both the tooltips and the announcement modal not only introduce features but also communicate their value propositions to the user.

So, we can say UserGuiding offers a free trial even before offering a free trial. 

You can jump right in, no credit card needed, and start creating interactive product experiences. Or, if you're not sure about committing to a free trial just yet, you can experience an interactive PX first and decide later.

And we call this: Trial-ception!

Trust Badges and Testimonials

Trust Badges are visual symbols (like security seals or certifications) that reassure users your product or website is safe and reliable. Testimonials are positive reviews or endorsements from customers or experts, highlighting their satisfaction with your product.

Why are they important PLG strategies? 

Because they establish trust quickly and reduce friction for users, making them more likely to engage with and adopt the product. Trust badges and testimonials provide reassurance that your product delivers value, which is key to converting users into loyal customers.

UserGuiding proudly shows the G2 badges they acquired like this:

These badges ensure that the time and energy invested in UserGuiding is well-spent. And if these badges don’t provide enough motivation and assurance, there are data-backed success stories to further back up the value —just scroll down 👇🏻 

Seeing what others have achieved with UserGuiding gives you a glimpse of the potential future where you accomplish similar success. If they did it, you can too, right?

But wait, there’s one more powerful type of social proof up UserGuiding’s sleeve: testimonials.

Badges show that users love the product, and statistics prove its usefulness. But there’s something about reading positive commentaries from real people. 

Even though they convey the same message, hearing feedback from real individuals with photos, names, and professions similar to yours offers reassurance on a whole different level.

At least for some users, anyway. 

By leveraging various types of social proof —badges for visual learners, testimonials for verbal learners, and stats for data-driven minds— UserGuiding builds trust and assurance across all user preferences.

Slack’s PLG Strategies

Many companies adopt similar growth strategies, especially when operating within the same framework —whether it’s product-led, marketing-led, or sales-led growth. No one reinvents the lightbulb from scratch; instead, they make small tweaks and tailor the strategy to fit their product and user base.

So, get ready —we’ll explore strategies that may look alike across different companies throughout this article. 

But that’s a good thing. 

It just proves these are tried-and-true approaches that deliver results.

Now, back to Slack 👇🏻

Freemium Plan

Freemium is a business model where a product is offered for free with basic features, while advanced features, premium content, or additional functionality are available at a cost.

📌 In product-led growth, freemium is crucial because:

• it lowers the barrier to entry,
• builds trust and engagement, 
• allows users to experience the product’s value firsthand without any financial commitment,
• makes users more likely to upgrade to paid plans once they see the product’s full potential.

Slack is aware of all the advantages that come with a freemium plan, so they offer it!

Right on their homepage, in a bolded statement, it says:

“Slack is free to try as long as you’d like.”

Slack relies on the idea that users will recognize the potential of their product once they’ve spent enough time with it, though this timeline may vary from person to person. While some users will always stick to the freemium plan, others will eventually see the value in upgrading to a premium version.

Sometimes, the product’s full value becomes apparent only after extended use, and the need for a more premium experience arises later.

Freemium ensures users can stay engaged until they reach that point.

Social Proof and User Data

Slack leverages social proof and trust badges, much like UserGuiding. However, instead of testimonials, Slack highlights user study statistics to build credibility and trust.

Like this:

Slack takes a different approach by conducting user surveys to understand how people use the platform and whether it improves their efficiency. Instead of showcasing a single positive review, they emphasize that happiness, satisfaction, and productivity are consistent themes across their entire user base.

It’s not just a handful of users finding success. 

It’s hundreds of people backed by data from a large survey base.

Slack’s website features numerous statistics about product usage trends and user satisfaction levels. Each statistic is accompanied by a footnote referencing the specific study or survey it’s based on, ensuring transparency and clarity.

We also have G2’s badges, which are among the most popular and widely recognized trust badges in the SaaS industry, alongside data security badges.

Guided Setup

Slack offers a guided setup to eliminate the intimidating blank state for new users. When first enrolling and setting up their workspace, users don’t have to feel overwhelmed by the workload of migrating from another product.

With a simple 5-step quick setup, Slack helps users hit the ground running. 

Together, you’ll create your workspace, set up channels, and name your spaces. In just two minutes, you’ll feel like you belong.

This is your new work home, and you’ve made it happen effortlessly.

Interactive User Onboarding

After the setup, Slack doesn’t abandon you.

There’s an interactive onboarding tour with engaging tooltips and friendly copy. 

The tour is a concise, 4-step product tour, covering only the most essential and basic information to help users get started. It points out what’s where and introduces a few key features, like huddles, to-do lists, and canvases, in a gentle and approachable way.

Rather than overwhelming users with an exhaustive tutorial on how to use each feature, it ensures they’re familiar with them and know where to find them if they’re interested.

Remember UserGuiding’s final modal in the in-app survey guide? How it mentioned configuration, customization, and triggering capabilities without forcing users through a 20-step process?

Just like that.

In-app Help Center 

Slack has an in-app help center where you can access some of the guides and articles. Some of the content has visuals (educational videos, screenshots, etc.), as well. 

Like this one:

Slack provides links to additional resources, such as the page to download the desktop app or the page for premium plans. It ensures that you get quick answers within the platform, but if you have further questions, you know exactly where to go. 

Standalone Resources Page

While we’re on the topic of additional resources, here’s the resources library of Slack:

Slack has a lot of educational material and articles.

Like, a lot.

That’s why they create collections and bundles with ebooks and guides that cover related topics or cater to people with similar interests and purposes. 

For example, sales teams, service teams, or individuals using Slack for productivity.

And when you scroll up and down for some time, this modal pops up on your screen ☝🏻

So, Slack does not hide its powerful categorization and filtering capabilities deep within the UI for users to discover on their own. Instead, they proactively assist anyone who could use a little guidance. 

You can filter content based on your team, industry, use case, or even your role.

Dropbox’s PLG Strategies

Let’s see what Dropbox drops from its PLG box 📦

See what I did there? 

Anyway…

Free Trial and Freemium

Dropbox doesn’t limit itself to just one strategy, whether it’s freemium or free trial. They offer both as part of their business strategy.

Here’s Dropbox free:

And here are all the premium plans with a free trial:

However, although Dropbox offers both a freemium plan and a free trial, they don’t make the free plan immediately obvious. It’s not listed among the plans on the pricing page or the main homepage. Instead, you have to search for “Dropbox free” to find its dedicated page.

Once you create your free account, they trigger a promotion for the premium plan trials, which some users might find a bit tacky or annoying.

So yes, Dropbox offers both freemium and free trial as part of their PLG strategy. However, it seems like they highlight the free trial more, compared to the freemium. 

Value Proposition Segmentation

PLG is built on the foundation of Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD). 

Customers have specific tasks they want to accomplish —whether it’s achieving goals, fulfilling desires, or resolving pain points. These are the "jobs" on their minds. And your product promises to help them tackle those jobs.

That’s the essence of JTBD.

PLG, on the other hand, takes it a step further: if your product is aligned with what your customers need, it will drive customer acquisition, shorten sales cycles, boost expansion revenue, and increase customer lifetime value. 

Because in a product-led growth strategy, the product itself is the value, and it speaks for itself.

Nevertheless, you still need to have and tailor your value proposition. 

Dropbox is a file hosting service. 

But this is not a charming value proposition. It wouldn’t motivate you to start a free trial with them.

For the product to be able to wow you, the Dropbox team needs to catch your attention with a value proposition that is tailored to your needs, goals, and desires. That’s why Dropbox offers different value propositions to its various user segments, catering to potential customers from diverse backgrounds.

Dropbox for work and Dropbox for personal use offer more or less the same capabilities with only minor tweaks. Nevertheless, each version has tailored promotions, different highlighted goals, and even unique visuals in their campaigns.

They both keep files on a cloud. 

However, one ensures you’re synced with a client, and the other ensures your family does not lose their memories together. 

When a product speaks directly to your needs 🫵🏻, you are significantly more likely to sign up and discover its value.

Interactive User Onboarding

When Dropbox succeeds in impressing you (whether with a free trial, freemium, or a personalized value proposition) and gets you to sign up, they’ll welcome you to the platform with an onboarding checklist.

The checklist is very short and to the point. 

Add a file, share the file, and connect your other devices. There are CTAs for each item on the list that takes you to the relevant feature page on the product. 

Plus, they come with an interactive guide that walks you through each step to complete the action 👇🏻

The guides are short and very to the point, as well. They consist of 3-4 steps only and the microcopy is written for instructional purposes only. Meaning that there is no fluff or extra information.

A smooth onboarding like this provides tangible value to the user and instantly takes them to their “Aha!” moment.

Help and Resources Center (Both In-app and Standalone)

Dropbox has an in-app help center, in theory. However, it’s not a very functional in-app help center where you can access the guides, articles, and help videos without leaving the app.

Here, it looks like this: 

As you can see, it’s also where they announce the new releases and updates. They have guides or CTAs that take you to the feature, so they’re cool.

However, the actual help center with all the educational material and the “Learn”, which is a very cool product academy with different courses and modules, are not accessible within the product.

For the academy it makes sense. But I would like to access some of the help articles without leaving the product, to be honest. 

Here’s the help center:

There is some categorization, but the contents of the guides/articles within those categories aren’t visible. There’s no highlighted material, not even a “getting started” section. This approach feels a bit cluttered and relies too much on the user’s research skills to find the answers they need.

Which we cannot say for the product academy, Learn:

The design is more visually appealing, with distinct sections that highlight courses and clearly showcase their value propositions and expected learning outcomes. This makes it easier for users to see what they’ll gain from each course.

Instead of searching for the 101 guides in the help center, I’d personally just enroll in the Dropbox Fundamentals course. 

It could be their strategy to promote the academy by keeping the help center cluttered and visually unappealing, but it’s a risky approach...

Calendly’s PLG Strategies 

Calendly relies heavily on PLG strategies to impress prospective customers and turn them into product-qualified leads (PQLs). 

Here are those strategies: 

Freemium Plan

The significance of the freemium plan strategy in product-led growth speaks for itself at this point. So, let’s dive into Calendly’s pricing page to see how they stand out from the crowd and what they excel at 👇🏻

First of all, they really highlight the “free” part, mentioning it 2 times. 

Then, instead of listing what is included in each plan with a lengthy list, they speak to the user directly. They define the ideal user for each plan and let the user find their segment. 

Choosing between “Am I an individual just starting out with basic scheduling, or are we a team? And if we’re a team, do we only need collaboration tools, or are we an enterprise with advanced security needs?” is much easier than sifting through long feature lists.

You won’t need to memorize which features come with which plan —instead, you’ll naturally know when it’s time to upgrade from free to standard. Premium plans become more relatable when they’re designed for specific groups of users rather than just a list of add-ons.

It’s actually a very JTBD-based pricing model.

Trust Badges and User Success Statistics 

The social proofs are scattered around Calendly’s website. They are both the first and the last thing you see there.

We have customer numbers ​​👇🏻

“Trusted by more than 100,000 of the world’s leading organizations.” 

“... including 86% of the Fortune 500 companies.”

And also the logos of their existing customers, like Zendesk, Dropbox, and Gong. 

Scrolling down, you’ll notice Calendly highlights their power users and the successful outcomes they’ve achieved after adopting the platform.

But they don’t stop there. To further boost customer acquisition, Calendly also displays data security-related trust badges at the bottom of their website.

Onboarding Survey for Personalization 

Another PLG strategy Calendly employs is onboarding surveys.

These surveys ask targeted questions to understand the user’s use case and role. With this information, Calendly can segment users more effectively. Later, this segmentation becomes a valuable tool for tailored product education, personalized add-on or upgrade promotions, and targeted feature release notifications.

This survey also doubles as a quick account setup tool. The role and working hours entered by the user are automatically saved to their account. By handling these tedious setup tasks upfront, Calendly ensures users complete them quickly and efficiently. 

This way, users don’t have to revisit and finish them later when they’re ready to send an invite.

In-app User Education

Upon completing the onboarding survey, there comes the in-app onboarding process.

There is a “Get Started” checklist, that does not actually seem checkable at first glance, and tooltips explaining the buttons and features around the UI.

Like this one:

And this one here:

The items on the onboarding checklist are cleverly bundled guides. When you click on one, it directs you to the relevant feature page to complete the desired action. There, you’ll find two additional, checkable items related to the first task on the “Get Started” checklist.

In reality, the initial checklist includes seven tasks. 

However, to avoid overwhelming users with too many steps, related tasks are grouped together into four broader items. This bundling makes the checklist appear less daunting and more approachable.

Here’s what an item on the “Get Started” checklist looks like when you click on it:

The checklist becomes noticeably more user-friendly with actionable prompts, a concise explanatory video, and direct links to relevant help articles.

Through this checklist, users can learn everything about using Calendly with a team, leveraging a variety of educational materials tailored to different learning styles.

It’s not just an interactive, hands-on tutorial for experiential learners. There’s also a video for visual and auditory learners and detailed reading material packed with information for analytical users who have lots of questions.

Calendly ensures comprehensive user education so users extract maximum value.

Help Center and Video Tutorials

Calendly has a very well-structured and categorized help center. 

They group their articles and educational materials under cohesive concepts like getting started or becoming a Calendly pro. Additionally, they organize resources by features and product capabilities, making it easy for users to find the information they need.

Within the getting started category, the educational material is actually organized and summarized as a big step-by-step guide. So, instead of reading separate articles, you read one page of video summaries. 

And on the right part, there are the videos walking you through these steps. 

If you’re looking for a specific guide for a specific action, you can easily skim through the summary of the steps and find the task you couldn’t complete. All the videos are less than 3 minutes, so even if you don’t have time to finish the whole 101 series, you can easily watch the video relevant to your task. 

The other categories (becoming a pro, integrations, etc.) consist of written guides. 

So Calendly doesn’t actually force you to learn everything by watching a video. It’s just easier for the less complex setup tasks to show what to do instead of explaining it with paragraphs. 

Chatbot Assistant

Calendly Chatbot is an AI assistant that helps users learn how to use Calendly within the product. It highlights the most common questions for the user to save time if they’re struggling with the same thing.

But it doesn’t stop there. As you start typing your question, recommended questions appear on the screen. If you spot a question similar to yours, you can skip typing your own and simply click on the recommended one instead.

This way, you save time trying to craft the perfect question that both communicates your problem and is understandable to the chatbot. The suggested prompts are simpler for the chatbot to process and respond to.

So, you not only save time thinking but also get the best possible answer with the perfect question.

 It's a win-win.

Here’s an example answer generated by Calendly Chatbot 👇🏻

It answers the question directly with clear instructions and a visual from the UI. While the gif is small and not very easy to understand, clicking on it enlarges it to full-page size.  

Additionally, there’s a link to the page you need to visit to complete the action. For this particular case, it takes you to the homepage, so the navigation is straightforward. However, for actions that require navigating to less easily accessible subpages, this feature can be especially handy.

‍

[Calendly Chatbot suggesting FAQs]

This way, you save time trying to craft the perfect question that both communicates your problem and is understandable to the chatbot. The suggested prompts are simpler for the chatbot to process and respond to.

So, you not only save time thinking but also get the best possible answer with the perfect question.

 It's a win-win.

Here’s an example answer generated by Calendly Chatbot 👇🏻

[Calendly Chatbot explaining how to share an event]

It answers the question directly with clear instructions and a visual from the UI. While the gif is small and not very easy to understand, clicking on it enlarges it to full-page size.  

Additionally, there’s a link to the page you need to visit to complete the action. For this particular case, it takes you to the homepage, so the navigation is straightforward. However, for actions that require navigating to less easily accessible subpages, this feature can be especially handy.

Notion 

Notion creates its own PLG strategy set by combining a freemium plan, onboarding surveys, checklists, and a product academy.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes Notion’s approach to these strategies unique.

Freemium Plan

Notion offers a forever-free plan and promotes it prominently, unlike Dropbox. The “Get Notion Free” CTA is everywhere on the website – right under the value proposition, at the top right corner of the page, towards the bottom of the page when you scroll down… 

Onboarding Survey for Personalization

Notion offers use-case-oriented personalization. It tailors your product homepage and subpages based on whether you're using it for work, personal life, or school.

This strategy helps eliminate the frustration of a blank state. When you first encounter your Notion page, you’ll find content that’s already familiar and useful to you.

Onboarding Checklist 

For a first-time Notion user, there are many things that require exploring and a little bit of education. The document types, UI elements, workspaces, shortcuts… 

It’s not easy to fit all of this into an extensive product tour or interactive guide. It could be too long and overwhelming. Plus, it's impossible to retain all this information after just one try. 

That’s why Notion’s static “Getting Started” page is so helpful 📋

It’s still a checkable checklist with a strikethrough animation, providing that sense of accomplishment when you complete tasks. However, the items on the list don’t disappear unless you delete them, so they remain accessible anytime.

So you can revisit the checklist and refresh your memory.

Help Center and Notion Academy 

Notion’s help center is well-organized and user-friendly. The articles within each category are arranged from basic 101-level information to more complex tasks, much like UserGuiding’s help center. Additionally, the most popular guides are featured on the main page under their respective categories.

So, if you're looking for a popular tutorial, you don't even have to navigate through the categories —it's easily visible right on the help center!

Here’s how the articles are organized within the categories:

Each article includes a brief one-paragraph summary. For longer articles, the summary serves as a description of what you'll find inside, while for shorter articles, the summary itself often provides the key information you're looking for.

Have you noticed how Notion goes the extra mile to save your valuable time?

Providing direct links to the most popular guides… Summarizing the key information in the articles…

This ensures they don’t disrupt your motivation to learn how to use Notion more effectively. Instead, they educate you quickly so you can get back to the product and focus on using it more.

Very mindful, Notion. 

Anyway, here’s Notion Academy 📚

Notion Academy offers more structured and professional tutorials designed to help users maximize the product’s potential. It includes various courses and modules, each focused on a specific feature, with several videos within each course/module.

These courses are not focused on solving immediate problems users may encounter but rather on educating them about the possibilities they can unlock with Notion. As a result, the videos tend to be a bit longer and sometimes extend beyond Notion’s features.

Like in this AI course example 👇🏻

There are several videos dedicated to Notion AI specifically, but also broader videos about AI in general. This way, users learn how to use AI tools effectively, maximizing their results with Notion AI as well.

SocialSense

SocialSense is a tool that helps you monitor and analyze social media conversations. It provides insights, tracks brand sentiment, and enables better audience engagement. The platform uses AI to offer real-time social listening and analytics, too.

Here’s how we know SocialSense is also a successfully product-led company:

Free Trial

It offers a free trial. Plus…

It doesn’t ask for credit card details when you try to check it out before committing to it.

In today’s world, even free trials that don’t require a credit card are starting to feel like a burden to users. People have begun to feel committed as soon as they sign up for a trial account. 

They don’t want to provide personal information to multiple tools, keep track of trial periods, or spend excessive time experimenting with different options.

That’s why UserGuiding has a short, interactive experience with the potential users right on their home page, even though they offer a free trial. And that’s also why SocialSense offers an interactive product demo right on their homepage, too 👇🏻

Interactive Product Demo 

Interactive product demos are pre-recorded, semi-interactive experiences commonly used by companies that don’t offer free trials or freemiums. These demos provide users with a hands-on, self-serve experience, allowing them to explore the product without the need for a sales call.

However, SocialSense also offers one even though they have a free trial.

Here’s the interactive demo:

It has an onboarding checklist, just like a real onboarding process. Within the checklist, you can choose a guide that covers the basics of the feature/use case you’re interested in. 

Here’s an example guide:

While the guides may be a bit long, the tooltips offer short, digestible microcopies that are concise yet informative. They focus on key features and functionalities without overwhelming you. 

You can explore the product without having to provide personal information or set up an account. Plus, the demo account is filled with mock data, which gives you a realistic preview of the product's capabilities after some usage.

Social Proof and Testimonials 

SocialSense leverages different types of social proof to build trust and solidify their market position in the eyes of potential customers. For instance, they feature LinkedIn profile pictures of their users along with an approximate number of their customer base, like this:

They showcase the logos of well-known companies they work with, like this:

And share user testimonials, like this:

What’s important here is that each testimonial highlights a different use case and feature. This way, SocialSense ensures that there’s a review that resonates with every potential user.

Onboarding Survey for Personalization

Their PLG strategies extend beyond just the website. SocialSense also has an onboarding survey that not only helps you set up your account but also allows them to better understand your use case. 

This way, they can personalize both your product experience and your onboarding journey.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a project management and team collaboration software. It helps you organize tasks, communicate, and track progress on projects. 

And here’s how it nails product-led growth 🔨

Proportional Free Trial Periods

Basecamp offers a freemium plan, as well as free trials for its premium plans, Basecamp Plus and Basecamp Pro Unlimited. 

These are standard offerings seen in most product-led businesses. 

However, what sets Basecamp apart is its unique approach to free trial periods: the duration of the free trial increases proportionally with the plan and its features.

Basecamp's approach to free trials stands out by offering extended periods, especially with their higher-tier plans. While most trials typically last 7 or 15 days, Basecamp provides a generous 30-day trial for their Basecamp Plus plan and an impressive 75-day trial for the Pro Unlimited plan. 

This extended timeframe acknowledges that users may need more time to explore all the features, set up their accounts, onboard their teams, and fully integrate the product into their workflows. It’s a strategic choice that supports users who require more time to recognize the value of the product, beyond just a quick trial period. 

After all, some products, like Basecamp, require accumulating data or testing across different teams, which can take more time due to varying schedules and workloads. 

With a 75-day trial for the Pro Unlimited plan, Basecamp provides ample opportunity for users to truly explore its capabilities and see its full potential.

In-app User Education

There is a lot of educational material available right within the product. First of all, there’s a big “Getting Started” page that welcomes you when you first create your Basecamp account. 

On this page, there’s a “basics” checklist, guides, and best practices on how to use Basecamp most effectively from the Basecamp team itself, along with links to the help center and the video hub.

It can be a lot for some first-timers.

But the intentions are good. Basecamp has a very friendly tone across all its copy (their welcome message from the CEO and the tips from the team, etc.). So, it feels less intimidating when the copy is engaging and original.

Here’s the “Getting Started” page:

And here’s a closer look at the “basics” checklist:

As you can see, the “essentials” part of the checklist has 22 steps. There’s also a “next level” section with 10 more steps. So, the checklist -literally- covers everything.

Most of the items on the checklist have very short 3-4 sentence guides/instructions. However, they can feel crowded and intimidating at first glance.

Here’s an example guide from the checklist:

Most of them also do not have videos but links to help articles with lots and lots of screenshots from the UI or some also have links to pre-recorded walkthrough video guides. 

Most of the guides don’t have videos but links to help articles with lots of screenshots from the UI. Some also link to pre-recorded walkthrough videos. To keep the guides short and more to the point (I assume), they decided to hide the videos so that you’ll only click the link if you’re looking for further clarification. 

However, the instructions themselves are pretty clear, too.

There isn’t an interactive product tour or guide on Basecamp. That might be impossible or very tiring, considering the extensive checklist. But there are tooltips for additional and contextual guidance here and there.

Like this one:

In-app Help Center

Another important and highly useful in-product education feature that Basecamp offers is their in-app help center.

It's a mini version of the standalone help center that resides in the corner of the product. You type in your question and interact with it similarly to how you would with the search bar in the full help center. 

While it's not an AI assistant, it pulls help articles from the knowledge base and presents them directly within the product. It doesn't generate new answers based on the articles like an AI assistant would; instead, it displays the relevant article on your screen.

Here’s how it looks:

There are some highlighted articles, like getting started article or intro to project tools article. And as you can see, it says “Search the Basecamp help guides”.

Here’s what the guides look like:

Live Classes and Q&A Sessions 

Beside all the in-app guides and help articles, there is one more thing Basecamp does to educate their users and help them achieve their goals with their product. 

Offering free live classes.

As you can see, they’re not just Basecamp 101 classes that look like live demo sessions. There are more focused and feature-specific classes like Card Tables.

There isn’t much information provided to set expectations for this course or outline the learning outcomes. This lack of detail might not be motivational enough for some users, as they don’t know who is delivering the course or what specific aspects of the feature will be covered.

Nevertheless, it’s still a commendable and original effort for user education 💡

To Wrap Up…

Product-led growth (PLG) is a framework that encompasses several strategies, such as offering free trials or freemiums, personalization and segmentation, user onboarding, and education. While these strategies are generally applicable across various businesses, they can be tailored to fit the unique needs of your user base and product category.

Not all product-led businesses that offer a free trial use the same strategy.

The same holds true for user education. 

In this article, we've examined 7 companies that operate within the PLG framework, each utilizing similar strategies but applying them in different ways.

❓ As you consider implementing these strategies, ask yourself:

• How complex is your product, and how technical are your users?
• How large and diverse is your user base, and what are their specific use cases?
• How can you leverage the product and user data already available to you?
• What are the industry standards within your product category?
• What are your competitors doing, and should you differentiate or align with their approaches?

👉🏻 Here are some product-led growth experts to follow 👈🏻