Yep, the product-led growth or “PLG” stack has officially arrived. Not only cause it’s been an obvious need for over a decade, but because once our buddies in venture capital started to invest heavily, the ecosystem exploded and is now in hyper-growth mode. As a result, we’re now seeing startups are popping up everywhere.
PLG is also now an umbrella term, as there are many layers around which entrepreneurs are now building tech to optimize and automate. The startups listed below fall more into the category of sales engagement/automation of product-led sales.
Here are a few interesting startups to keep an eye on the rest of this year and particularly in 2022:
Endgame
Headquarters: Los Angeles, CA | Founders: Alex Bilmes, CEO; Graham Murphy, Co-founder
Endgame makes it easy to observe what’s happening in your trial or free motion, prioritize sales-ready accounts and users based on behavioral signals, and act on them to drive more revenue faster.
Correlated
Headquarters: New York, NY | Founders: Tim Geisenheimer, CEO; Diana Hsieh, Product; John Peña, CTO
Correlated is the leading platform for product-led revenue. With Correlated, your sales team can easily identify which self-service or free trial customers are ready to convert and find new expansion opportunities within your existing customer base.
Correlated has raised over $8 million funding from leading VCs to power product-led revenue at top enterprise software companies including Ally, Pulumi and ReadMe.
HeadsUp
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Founders: Earl Lee, CEO; Momo Ong, Product;
HeadsUp is a tool for account executives at product-led growth companies that identifies product-qualified leads (PQLs), including conversion and upsell opportunities and the appropriate actions to take at each step of the customer journey.
HeadsUp distills customer data, such as product usage, billing, and website traffic, into an intuitive interface for sales reps and seamlessly integrates with existing tools, including Salesforce and Slack, so sellers can efficiently drive and close more PQLs.
HeadsUp is currently working with companies such as Sendbird, Sendoso, and Saleswhale to enable their product-led sales motions.
Pocus
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Founders: Alexa Grabell, CEO; Isaac Pohl-Zaretsky, CTO
Pocus is the solution for sales teams at product-led companies. Pocus identifies top opportunities and surfaces insights that help sales teams convert self-serve users to paid customers. Pocus combines customer profile data with product activation metrics to provide sales teams with a complete picture of their self-serve funnel.
With this data, Pocus identifies top accounts and power users, alerts sales teams of product usage changes, and recommends the next best action to help sales teams close bigger deals faster.
GroundSwell
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Founders: Brendan Short, CEO; Nick Carchedi, Product; Harikiran Nayak, CTO
People are using your product, but you don’t know what they’re doing or when to reach out. Groundswell empowers your sales team with just-in-time notifications and account prioritization based on product usage insights.
Never miss another great sales opportunity.
Bliinx
Headquarters: Montreal, Canada | Founders: Fred Melanson, CEO; John Espinoza, CTO
Bliinx helps product-led SaaS companies convert more leads into happy paid customers by uncovering engagement insights in how those leads are engaging with the product, social media content and sales messages.
The tool nudges sales reps when accounts are sending revenue signals, so they can prioritize the best people to engage and know when to engage them.
Inflection.io
Headquarters: USA & India | Founders: Dave Rigotti, Aaron Bird
Inflection is a stealth mode startup building B2B marketing technology for product-led companies.
They are private about what they are building, but based on their past success and experience at Bizible and Marketo we’re keeping a close eye on this one.
Calixa.io
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA | Founders: Thomas Schiavone, Fred Sadaghiani
Calixa’s platform makes it possible for companies to empower their salespeople with the product insights they need to find, close, and grow customers in a sea of self‑serve signups.
Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash
