Building from Scratch: How to Drive Product-Led Growth

There is a popular tag on X(previous Twitter): #BuildInPublic. The tag is mostly used by indie hackers/developers and small teams who share their product journey, developing process, current progress, blocking chanllenges, and most importantly the experience and the monetization results from early stage. We saw how developers arrived $10k MRR within months, hacked 1M organic traffic with programming SEO, and someone did not know coding made app with more than 10k download.

How #BuildInPublic works?

All these experiences seem incredible and attractive. Thanks to the prosperity of generative AI, higher efficiency has unlocked the chains of creativity and imagination. However, why are people willing to openly share their business and path to making money? Here are the main potential considerations for this action:

Building Trust and Transparency with the Audience

The #BuildInPublic movement often begins with a simple idea and evolves through an open, ongoing process. This approach doesn’t just showcase the product—it reveals the creator’s dedication, creativity, and resilience. The journey is shared in real-time, continuing until the project is completed, pivoted, or discontinued.

Throughout this journey, creators often share critical moments, including challenges and tough decisions. By openly discussing their thought processes, obstacles, and solutions, they invite their audience into the experience. This transparency fosters trust, as followers feel connected to both the creator and the product, witnessing its growth firsthand. The result is a deeper sense of investment from the audience, as they become part of the story rather than passive observers.

Gathering Real-Time Feedback and Improving User-Centric Design

A key advantage of #BuildInPublic is the ability to gather real-time feedback from an engaged audience. By involving followers in the product journey from the start, creators can quickly gather insights from people who understand the product's evolution. This constant sharing encourages users to interact, offer suggestions, and highlight pain points.

User feedback becomes invaluable in refining the product. Instead of relying on assumptions or traditional market research, creators can directly listen to their audience, ensuring the product aligns with real demand. This is particularly beneficial for indie hackers and small teams with limited resources. By collecting feedback continuously, they can quickly identify what works, prioritize essential features, and iterate rapidly. Each cycle brings the product closer to users' needs, making the design process more agile and user-focused.

Creating Early Advocates and Organic Growth Channels

#BuildInPublic offers indie developers and small teams a powerful way to tackle user acquisition, even without established branding or large marketing budgets. By sharing the product's inner workings and behind-the-scenes decisions, creators give their audience an insider’s view, fostering a sense of transparency and trust.

This transparency has a powerful effect: early followers, who feel personally invested in the product’s success, become its first advocates. These loyal fans are more than just customers—they’re stakeholders who’ve witnessed the product's growth. This organic engagement fuels low-cost, high-impact marketing as early advocates spread the word through social sharing, personal recommendations, and word of mouth. For indie creators, this approach serves as a powerful growth engine, building a community that actively participates in the product’s journey.

The #BuildInPublic movement has become an effective channel for building products from scratch, allowing creators to establish trust, gather real-time feedback, and cultivate early advocates—all while driving organic growth. The core power behind these benefits is the magic of Product-Led Growth (PLG)

What is Product-Led Growth(PLG)?

First of all, Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a core and essential strategy for business.

One perspective on defining PLG might be as the concept of building a good product to drive growth. From my understanding, this is yes and no. All healthy businesses care about their products and strive to make them the best they can be. They invest effort and resources into building their products. Making best product as a core business focus is not the action limited to PLG. Without a distinctive product and solid product-market fit, no business has the potential to succeed.

So, what makes PLG distinct?

The key difference between PLG strategy and others is using the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion or AARRR Pirate Metrics (Explanation of AARRR). PLG goes beyond merely creating a good product; it fundamentally reshapes both the go-to-market (GTM) approach and the product shape.

Two Cores of Product-Led Growth Strategy

Early 'Aha' Moment and Trial-First Approach in Product-Led Growth - Case Study: Notion

In product-led growth (PLG), the "aha" moment—when users experience a product’s core value—is essential. PLG reverses the traditional “buy, then try” funnel, allowing users to “try first, then buy.” By granting immediate access to key features, users can experience the product’s benefits firsthand, building trust and familiarity before any commitment. This trial-first model reduces friction, increases engagement, and enhances the likelihood of conversion, even if advanced features remain reserved for paid tiers.

This approach is particularly effective for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), who often become early adopters. By experiencing core value upfront, SMBs are more likely to stick with the product as their businesses expand. This early connection promotes long-term retention and fosters brand loyalty, as the product becomes embedded in their workflows.

Notion's Trial-First Strategy: A PLG Success Story for SMBs

Notion, an excellent product led growth example, exemplifies this approach with a free tier offering key features in note-taking, task management, and collaboration. SMBs, like small design agencies, can use Notion’s free version to manage projects and collaborate without cost. As these teams grow, they can seamlessly upgrade to paid plans for advanced features, such as admin controls and permissions. This easy transition path has helped Notion become indispensable for SMBs, driving growth and deepening user loyalty as these businesses scale.

Proactive User Feedback Through Free Trials and Leverage Data-driven Product Iteration - Case Study: Apollo

In PLG, free trials are not just an entry point—they act as a critical feedback loop that provides insights into user behavior, challenges, and feature preferences. By offering users access to the product upfront, companies encourage authentic, organic engagement, which generates valuable data that traditional feedback methods like surveys can’t provide. This real-time user data helps identify pain points and areas for improvement, enabling the product to evolve in line with actual usage. As more users take part in free trials, the company gains a wealth of feedback, which drives continuous refinement, ensuring the product remains relevant and user-focused.

Moreover, free trials help attract a large number of users, resulting in an influx of data that can significantly improve the product. However, while free trials increase user acquisition, improving the NDR (Net Dollar Retention) score for free users is a bigger challenge than for paid users. Free users, who have no financial commitment, can be harder to convert into paying customers. However, by using feedback from free users to guide product improvements, companies can create a product that better meets user needs, making it more likely that free users will eventually convert to paid plans. The process of improving NDR for free users requires careful attention to product-market fit, continuous iteration, and offering enough value to justify the upgrade.

The data-driven nature of PLG enables companies to continuously improve the product based on user behavior. As users engage with the product, their actions provide insights into which features are most valuable, where they experience friction, and where they drop off. By analyzing this data, companies can prioritize the features that will have the most significant impact on user experience. This cycle of iteration creates a dynamic relationship between the product and its users, ensuring that updates are aligned with actual user needs. While converting free users into paying ones is harder, the feedback loop built into the free trial process helps refine the product to a point where those conversions are more likely. This approach fosters long-term user engagement and retention, ultimately driving business growth.

Product Led Growth Example: Apollo

Apollo Product-Led Growth Sharing: From $2M ARR to $100M ARR in 4 years with 10 employees

In short, #BuildInPublic fosters trust, accelerates product development with user input, and fuels organic growth—powered by transparency and community engagement.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) ties into this movement by using the product itself to drive customer acquisition and retention. By offering users the chance to experience core value upfront (through a free trial or free tier), products like Notion and Apollo generate valuable feedback and build user loyalty. The real-time data from free trials helps improve the product and boost Net Dollar Retention (NDR) for paid. This approach allows products to continuously evolve in response to user needs, enhancing the likelihood of future conversion and long-term retention.