Jargon-Led Growth (JLG)

Product-led growth, sales-led growth, customer-led growth. 

If you’re running an early stage company, you’ve probably had a VC suggest you implement one of these go-to market motions. You’ve also probably had another VC (or advisor, or mentor, or friend, or reddit stranger) suggest you implement a different one.

But at the end of the day, you probably don’t care if it’s PLG, SLG, CLG or any LG - you just want the growth. 

So you spend about a week reading everything you can about each growth strategy, wondering how much of it was written by a GPT, and then giving up on ever making a decision as to which approach is right for your business.

Welcome to our first series of posts, focused on demystifying these assorted growth motions, and helping you pick the one that is the best fit for your startup.

Today, we’re going to focus on defining these growth motions as simply as possible, before getting into a series of deeper dives next week:

PLG: Product-led growth relies on the product as the primary driver of customer acquisition. What does that mean? Typically, it means your product is so user-friendly and so sticky that users will buy it without ever speaking to a salesperson. 

SLG: In a sales-led growth motion, you rely on a robust sales and marketing function to build awareness and interest in a product, and then convert those prospects to paying customers.

CLG: Customer-led growth motions rely on customer insights to drive improvements in customer experience, and create a flywheel of positive feedback and promotion that leads to more sales.

Curious which growth motion is the best fit for your startup? Tune back in next week, and sign up for our newsletter so you never miss a new post.