Product-Led Growth (PLG) For Early Stage Companies: Ernesto Reza of Mayan and Rez Khan of Pace

On May 5th 2022, CEO and Founder of Mayan, Ernesto Reza-Garduño, hosted Founder and CPO of Pace, Rez Khan to discuss Product-Led Growth (PLG). This virtual "fireside chat" was first made exclusive to the Y Combinator network, where Mayan was part of the YC Winter 2021 batch. If you're an early stage company that's decided to pursue a product-led GTM strategy, be sure to check out the recording below:

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In case you want to jump into a specific part of the talk:

• Introduction
• What is Product-Led Growth
• Common misconceptions about PLG
• Is PLG for every type of company
• How do you know if PLG is working well
• Rez's experience running experiments
• Good examples of thought leaders or companies using PLG
• How can YC community leverage Pace
• Q&A

What is Product-Led Growth (PLG)

The definition of Product-Led Growth (PLG) is not as straight forward given that, depending on who you talk to, there are numerous definitions. Different thought leaders seem to be trying to formulate their own definitions.

According to Rez, PLG is related to "how do you create an experience for your customers such that they can learn about what you do very quickly and use the product for a real life use case without any restrictions."

By restrictions, Rez means such as talking to a sales representative to get a demo, or a solutions engineer to implement the product.

Is PLG for Every Type of Company

When it comes to PLG, are there better companies that it is suitable for? And at what stage should companies start to think about PLG? You should consider first the market and then second is whether the particular solution you are selling is solving a problem that can be solved via PLG.

According to Rez, PLG makes sense if the market is very massive and there is a long tail of customers. A product that, for example, only car manufacturers can use may not be a good fit for PLG.

When it comes to assessing whether your problem can be solved via PLG, Rez says "the point is to provide an experience where an end user can quickly understand the value of the product." If there are multiple stakeholders in a company to closely coordinate for using the product, PLG may be more difficult.

About The Speakers

Ernesto Reza-Garduño started Mayan, a growth automation platform for Amazon Sellers, with his three friends he’s known for a decade from MIT. Mayan was part of the YCombinator Winner 2021 batch and has been helping Amazon Sellers optimize their advertising and inventory ever since. Prior to Mayan, Ernesto was an early employee at Thrasio, a major player in the Amazon ecosystem and the fastest US company to reach unicorn status, for a $1 billion valuation. Born and raised in Mexico City, Ernesto is now based out of Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

Rez Khan is the Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Pace. Before Pace, Rez spent nearly 4 years at MongoDB, where he was leading a team of product managers for Atlas, MongoDB's managed database service. In that role, Rez and his team were responsible for increasing consumption and retention of self-service customers by building products for observability, automated recommendations, search, and developer productivity. Prior to MongoDB, he spent 5 years at AppNexus (now Microsoft) building programmatic ad bidding technology. Rez is a proud immigrant who moved to the United States from Bangladesh at the age of 18 and is the first member of his family to go to college.

Follow Mayan's Product-Led Growth Journey