PLG people don't talk enough about the messy part. It's not all rainbow and butterflies… Scroll to the bottom to read what gave us headaches.  It's not perfect like in the textbooks… That's the amazing part about growth You either thrive or you fold  ... But first, what happened so far… Last month, we launched free SOC 2 for startups! We had incredible success. We hit a nerve!  WHAT WORKED: 👍 👍 ◦ Startups and solo founders need*** SOC 2 compliance to sell to bigger customers. But they cannot afford it. We democratize access so they can compete and grow their business.  ◦ Customers want to just cut through the noise of evaluation and get started. "Which one is better? How should I spend my money? I want to know what I buy before making a big commitment!" PLG jump through all pricing and sticker-shock $$$ and let the product do the talking.  ◦Power of Word of mouth is real. How did you find out about us? "My CEO send it to me.", "A slack community", "my cofounder saw you on LinkedIn".  WHAT WAS MESSY: 🤕 🤕 ◦ "This seems Too good to be true" customers say often. "Free feels like a just a trial. How do you compare? Are you a startup version of other softwares?" They don't believe that compliance automation software can be free to use. It's so shocking and disruptive. We definitely asked ourselves maybe 🤔 we could be off here, we could turn back now. But with each call we take, we anticipate these questions better. We craft better stories to tell them what we believe in. Our mission. The big WHY. As Simon Sinek said, people follow you because of the why. Compliance should be as important as CRM, Email Marketing, or Analytics for startups. Why not make Compliance accessible and as affordable, like any other tools that every startup relies on.  ◦ We encountered 404s during launch. It was embarrassing when we did high-profile pitches. We lost customers and partnerships. We live and learn. We trust our product and engineering team to uphold product quality. We build robust QA processes. We share weekly bug reports. If it's not embarrassing, we launch too late. Well, we launched just in time then!  ◦ "Why don't we open it to everyone?" It's an incremental process to become fully self-serve. There is no 1 light switch. It's multiple light switches. As the product lead, I have to ask ourselves, "Have we stabilized our platform? What are our upsell levers? Have we validate this before opening the floodgate? What is the biggest challenge our customers are facing by industry verticals? Can users guide themselves to the Aha moment? Where should we nudge them?" All anxiety-riddled. But all tremendous learning ahead. Next step, we now have criteria & plan to get us to fully self-serve model. Reassure teams let's hit these milestones together.  <if you like this LinkedIn post 👍🏼, I hope to write a long form blog post with OpenViews> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garyyauchan_plg-activity-7017549727823003649-xwxM?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_ios