7 months, 84 convos & hundreds of hours - what Navattic learned building a PLG motion
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Navattic recently shifted to a product-led growth (PLG) strategy to meet market demands and cater to customers who prefer exploring products independently before buying. Moving away from a traditional sales-led approach, this transformation required a comprehensive effort across the company. Despite concerns about sales cannibalization and supporting a freemium model, Navattic saw an opportunity to reach new customers and adapt to evolving buyer preferences.
This article by Raman Khanna, Growth Marketing Manager, and Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth and Ops, at Navattic, explores the operational changes and strategic steps Navattic took to make the PLG transition, highlighting the challenges faced and the lessons learned. Navattic's experience offers a practical guide for companies navigating the shift from a traditional sales model to a more adaptable, product-led approach.
At Navattic, we recently added a product-led motion. It was a truly company-wide effort that required us to change more than we initially expected across the board.
While there is high-level content around going PLG, we couldn’t find many resources with tactical steps/operational details for companies that are making this change. The intent of this write-up is to share our approach with the PLGTM community and ideally make this process easier for other companies that want to make this transition.
To start - why did we decide to go product-led in the first place?
Quick context
Navattic helps marketing and sales teams create interactive product demos. Many customers use interactive guided demos on their marketing site (Ramp, Fivetran, Vitally) and as a follow-up asset in the sales process.
We had a sales-led motion with $500/month and $1k/month plan offerings.
While we were seeing strong growth, our Head of Marketing received a lot of notes like the ones below. It became clear there was an appetite for teams to try the product so they could prove value to their team and secure a budget.
When we first discussed the idea of freemium, not everyone on the team was on board.
Initially, the following questions/objections arose:
Would it cannibalize sales?
Would our customers downgrade from paid to free?
Who would own support for freemium users? Sales? CS?
They were valid concerns. To take an incremental step in this direction, we ended up getting buy-in around a $50 / month plan.
Step 1 - We organized around a $50 / month plan “Starter Plan”
It seemed like a good compromise—a lower barrier to entry without fully committing to freemium.
So, using Mutiny, we showed 10% of our website traffic (across all segments) a variant that included a one-seat starter plan for $50/month.
With our starter plan now live, we saw our first few users pay $50/month upfront to access the single seat plan. This was a great signal, even with this frictionful experience, there was clear interest in a light, entry-level plan.
Step 2 - Assign owners & define key metrics
To fix this, we assigned a “tiger team” internally to own the Starter project. It included:
Raman - Growth Lead - The “Owner” of Starter. Shared updates at weekly team meetings, tracked metrics, talked to users, etc.
Randy - Co-founder, Product-lead - Talked to users, worked tickets into product sprints, and set up tracking & internal systems.
Ryan - Engineering Lead - Talked to users, and owned core feature development.
There are three components to a successful PLG motion - acquisition, activation, and conversion.
Given there was interest in our $50/month plan (acquisition), we decided to next focus on activation.
Step 3 - Iterate on the onboarding experience to improve activation
Our customers up to this point were onboarded by our team of CSMs and we just hadn’t spent time focusing on the self-serve experience.
We defined activation as publishing a demo in the product. Solid SaaS activation rates are anywhere between 20 and 40%. As shown below in the PostHog report, our initial activation rate was ~5% …
To remedy this, we did the following:
Raman & Randy routinely watched PostHog sessions to identify points of user drop-off
We conducted user interviews to learn more about their early experience with the product
Ryan pushed weekly updates designed to resolve those points of friction across the product
A core part of the demo creation flow in Navattic is to create captures of your application using Navattic’s Chrome Extension.
We found that our old experience wasn’t cutting it for free users. We ran a Wynter user test on our existing onboarding and one user called it “startling”…
In chatting with users, the core problem was that they weren’t anchored on their next step and often, it meant they bounced right away.
So, over a few iterations, we created a pop up that specifically laid out the steps and helped them get started.
We also added a set-up guide to clearly anchor users on what their next action should be in the product.
This helped a lot.
Our user activation rate shot up to 33%.
Now that we were seeing stronger activation rates, the team was comfortable taking the next step; expanding access to the starter experience.
Step 4 - Free trial vs freemium, monetization, lead routing, and email campaigns
Expanding access to starter wasn’t as easy as changing our website CTA. At this point, it forced us to confront the following questions:
Free trial or freemium?
This was the first big decision once we aligned on the free tier.
A time-bound free trial would allow users to experience Navattic and it would have a natural conversion point.
Freemium, on the other hand, would allow users to build and share demos without the pressure of a ticking clock. It would also expand our use base, which we knew would supercharge our most powerful growth loop (the more people seeing "Powered by Navattic", the better) and we would also get valuable data to improve the product experience.
We elected to pursue freemium.
Now, what should we include in the free version?
This was tricky. We wanted users to experience the “wow” moment that our platform delivers for free, but we also wanted to avoid cannibalization of our paid plans. We figured that this would naturally lead to interest in upgrading for more features and additional demos.
So, we decided that users should be able to build and publish one high-quality interactive demo for free. To protect our paid plans, we added a seat limit and gatekept the use of integrations.
What is our path to monetization?
Ideally, users who experienced the “aha” moment of publishing the demo, would see the true value of Navattic, be able to easily share it with their team internally, and get buy-in for a purchase.
To facilitate this, we added contextual upgrade prompts, upgrade buttons, and created a self-serve checkout flow. These were engineering investments, but were well worth it to ensure that users could upgrade in-app.
Now we had the basics set up for our core freemium motion in place.
Next, we used Zapier to route leads based on company size to our sales team. To help prioritize leads, we used Koala to track key product signals, like publishing a demo or website actions like visiting the billing page. Our sales team loves these alerts.
We used Customer.io to set up email nurtures to guide users through their customer journey (tips for building your first demo, how to understand demo analytics, the benefits of upgrading to our base/growth plans, etc).
With this in place, we were ready to launch all of our website traffic.
Step 5 - Prepare and launch to 100% of website traffic
To maximize reach, we prepped content for our blog, our podcast, and Slack communities.
We also asked key team members to spend ~1 hr drafting a personal LinkedIn post discussing the launch and why we went this route.
On launch day, we turned the dial so that 100% of traffic would see the new experience 🎉
Raman sent out a launch day calendar hold and at peak LinkedIn posting time (10 am ET), we all published our posts and engaged to maximize reach.
We were blown away by the reception from our network. In the 48 hours after launch, we saw 7 organic customer posts around the launch, ~45k impressions, 1.5k reactions, and 385 comments (many from existing customers!).
Sign-ups, WAUs, and demos created all jumped off the charts that week. Although very early, it seemed to resonate with our ICP and opened the door so that more people could experiment with interactive demos.
This comment below was awesome to see; this was exactly the persona we were targeting with a starter offering.
Recap & unexpected learnings
In the ~6 weeks since launch, we’ve seen the following unexpected benefits from the freemium offering:
It now allows agencies, partners, and consultants in the martech world to recommend Navattic more frequently (many signups now come through this channel).
It’s not just for startups. ~45% of sign-ups are over 30 employees and non-work emails
We initially expected to see demo requests cannibalized by the freemium offering, but the demo requests stayed consistent
Customers are launching fast - we’ve seen many startups and even larger co’s launch the same day after signing up for an account
Our CS team loves working with freemium accounts that upgrade. These accounts already know the product well and can start their CS journey with “level two” conversations.
We still have room for improvement in our website conversion, activation, and free-to-paid conversion rate, early signals suggest that going freemium was well worth the effort.
Hope this write-up helps other companies that are considering PLG!
PLGTM Summit 2025
We’re excited to share that PLGTM Summit 2025 is happening again in San Francisco on May 20 & 21, 2025! The 2024 Summit was a massive success with over 230 joining us live. Last year sold out fast, so this year we’ve moved to a new, expanded venue the City View at Metreon. Also new for 2025 is Spring Fling by MarketingOps.com, and a dedicated executive track/offsite.
Tickets start at just $240 when you use code EARLYBIRD. See you there!
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Candidate Profiles
Matt Lyman | Marketing Leader | Seattle, WA
Sarah Hofmann | Strategy & Operations Leader | New York, NY
Subhashree Durai | Marketing | Remote or In-person | Chennai, India.
Christopher Haywood | Marketing | Remote | Barcelona, Spain.
Dave Reinke | Marketing | Remote or In-person | Spokane, Wa.
Kacyn Goranson | Marketing | Remote | Denver, CO.
Cassandra Schwartz | Marketing | Hybrid | Seattle, WA.
🚨Are you looking for a GTM role at a PLG company? Fill in the form and we'll feature your profile in the next PLGTM Insider newsletter.