👋 Hi, I’m Kyle from OpenView and welcome to my newsletter, Growth Unhinged. Every other week I take a closer look at what drives a SaaS company’s growth. Expect deep dive takes on SaaS pricing, product-led growth, public company benchmarks, and much more.
As recently as 2016, Slack Co-Founder & CEO Stewart Butterfield emphasized that Slack intended to keep relying on organic and viral growth rather than a large sales force. Back then he told Business Insider, “I think we can get away without having a sales team in any kind of traditional way probably forever.”
The best PLG businesses solve end user pain, distribute where those users live, make it easy to get started, deliver value before the paywall and then hire sales last.
But they do hire sales!
In Slack’s Q2 FY2020 earnings call, Butterfield described the company’s current go-to-market approach as always starting with the end user, which allows Slack to go ‘bottoms-up’ and ultimately win million dollar Enterprise deals. Here’s what he said on the call:
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