Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
More companies are adopting product-led growth (PLG), in which the product itself does most of the selling, and usage-based pricing (UBP) — meaning users are charged based on consumption, not seats — than ever before. A new wave of startups is helping them succeed at it. Let’s explore. — Anna
Enabling product-led growth
SaaS companies that adopt product-led growth — as more and more do — often have a problem: They know that droves of people are signing up for their product, but they don’t know which of these users their customer success team should reach out to in order to pitch a paid tier or upsell features.
Uncovering the right leads is one of the key challenges of freemium models: Some customers will never convert out of the free tier, while others could bring very valuable revenue into the fold, as long as they get pitched the right offer at the right time. But knowing who’s who requires connecting the dots between product usage and the tools that marketing and sales teams use in their day-to-day.