I'm a co-founder of a company called Factor House[1]. We build a devtool called Kpow for Apache Kafka[2] and I guess you could say we rely on PLG. I can't say I had heard of the term when we started back in 2018. We are bootstrapped and have always preferred to describe ourselves as a business rather than a startup.

Kpow provides enterprise-grade Kafka tooling. It comes from our experience working with Kafka since 2012 and more broadly working in the enterprise space for much longer. I'm an old-ish engineer and when everyone else was raising we were coding, selling, and supporting.

Our growth has been slower than I expected but we are profitable and growing. We sell to everyone from startups to Fortune 500 companies. In every case the sale begins with an engineer in the client company evaluating our product after finding it themselves.

We don't spend much on sales or marketing. If you start a trial and chose not to continue with the product you never hear from us again. We cancelled our Google Adwords some time ago, that may have been a mistake but we felt we were paying for crap.

At the end of last year we soft-launched the (inevitable) free, community edition of Kpow[3]. It is scary giving away four years of hard work and the associated risk but we believe in our product and we think the best way to grow our company is to show value to engineers and make sales to organisations.

I think some advantages/disadvantages of this approach are:

Advantages:

1. The Sales That Matter Are Comparative.

For the sales that matter an engineer will evaluate three products in the market to fit the needs of their team/org. We don't need to be the first product you think of, we just need to be in the comparative evaluation. We make an expert system for experts, if our product is on-point we will win.

2. Purchasing Power Is Shifting.

Who needs top-down sales through the CTO when teams/engineers have access to AWS and some discretionary budget. We started selling Kpow on the AWS Marketplace in 2020. You can pay by the hour if you like. This model has a lot of legs in it. Counterbalanced significantly by disadvantage [1].

3. Engineers See You.

The no-bull approach pays dividends with our target audience. Our users are very supportive and we have 0% churn in 3 years of sales/renewals.

4. Focus.

We're a small engineering team, we focus on doing what we do best which is shipping working software. We also have the pleasure of being able to focus on a fixed surface area without having to broaden our pitch to appeal to investors.

Disadvantages:

1. The Sales That Matter Are Big And Slow.

We sell to plenty of companies, but it's the bigger ones who pay the bills. The enterprise sales cycle is slow and unavoidable.

2. PLG Doesn't Mean No Marketing.

We intend to switch our focus into marketing this year, there's no point having a great product if no-one knows about it. A great product doesn't make a great business and there's more to it than just coding.

3. Getting it Right is Hard.

You bet a lot on a narrow focus. We cut our first code in May 2018 and our product vision has not changed. It would be easy to get that wrong and hard to recover.

[1] https://factorhouse.io/

[2] https://kpow.io/

[3] https://kpow.io/community/

[4] https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=ab356f1...