Atlas

🚧 Building PLG paywalls didn’t always go smoothly! 😔 Here’s what I learned from our challenging journey and what I’d do differently if I had the chance. Product-led Growth is never a straight line. What started as a tough quest turned into a critical learning experience that reshaped our entire product strategy. Early on, we were giving too much away for free 🆓—a wide-open playground with no paywalls and plenty of sign-ups, but not enough conversions. We were navigating in the dark, driven by gut instincts about feature gating. Key Insights for PLG Leaders: 1️⃣ Start paywall discussions early—don’t wait until you’re drowning in user acquisition! 2️⃣ Secure leadership alignment—get senior leaders to “disagree and commit.” 3️⃣ Invest in the right tools—consider entitlement platforms like Atlas or Stigg. Our journey was anything but glamorous, spanning six months of intense discussions and heated debates about feature gating. We constantly balanced delivering an exceptional customer experience with meeting business needs.We collaborated closely with our engineering team 🔨 to streamline our development process, simplify paywall architecture, and minimize backend complexity. This partnership was essential in building a robust and efficient system. Navigating the Product-Led Growth Waves 🌊 Product-led Growth is about navigating uncertainty. Our paywall journey taught us that progress isn’t linear—it’s a series of calculated experiments, tough conversations, and continuous learning. Final Thoughts: Embrace the Product-Led Way 🛣️ Building PLG strategies isn’t about finding a perfect blueprint; it’s about staying adaptable, listening to your customers, and being willing to pivot. Our paywall journey was incredibly rewarding—onward to driving revenue! 💸 #ProductLedGrowth #Paywalls #productledsales Read more here https://lnkd.in/eZpuvhTv

Lost the deal. Started a company. That’s the short version. As Paul Harvey would say, "Here's the rest of the story." In a previous life, Anthropic came inbound. My team led a great sales cycle - outcomes aligned, value agreed upon, total contract value blessed by the CFO. Everything was greenlit… except for one thing: our pricing model. They wanted to buy on a different consumption metric - one that actually reflected their use case. And it made total sense; it didn’t disincentivize usage, scaled with value, and aligned perfectly to how they’d use the product. But here’s the kicker (there's always a kicker): implementing and managing this unsupported model would have meant hours of manual work every month for ops and finance teams - pulling data from one stack, manually creating invoices in another, and then updating the system of record by hand. Our billing systems couldn’t handle it. So we had a choice: take the deal and bury the team in spreadsheets, or walk away. We walked. And it SUCKED. Walking away from a big deal that fits in every way except for the logistics? Gut-wrenching. But that moment—the “We can’t be the only ones dealing with this” realization—was the spark. It was when I started to see the bigger picture. If we, a scaling SaaS company, were struggling with this, how many others were, too? How many deals were lost, customers frustrated, or teams overworked just because their billing systems couldn’t keep up? That’s why Atlas exists today: to make billing as flexible as your customers expect, without breaking your systems or your team. Because here’s the truth: your customers don’t care about your internal complexity. They care about buying on their terms. And if your billing infrastructure can’t support that, you’re the one missing out. _______ Sound like something you're going through? We got you. Give me and my crew a shout.

"How in the hell does this work?" - me for the last 6 months. There has been lots of conversation in the threads of Kyle Poyar, Pulkit Agrawal and Shar Dara regarding usage based pricing, its impending nature and how to operationalize it. Specifically, how to financially account for it. Chas Scarantino and I have been working on the best methods to financially plan and project in a usage based model - a challenge I've spoken to many CEOs about and one we're trying to solve for inside of Atlas. We've started to solidify around a waterfall method in a model Chas recently built. Its complicated to build, but you're off an running once its fitted and you nail your vectors of assumption (customer segments, estimated usage, ramp to usage). So, I'm making our usage based financial model open to anyone who wants to use it as a template. Give me a ✋ in the comments and I'll send it over via DM. PS If you have a better way of doing this...TEACH ME. We're all trying to figure this out together 😅 ____________ Hi, I'm Michael Hoy, CEO of Atlas and I sometimes post about #SaaS #SaaSBilling and #UsageBasedPricing. Other times I post stupid memes.

Yesterday, Atlas hosted its first "Pricing and Packaging Executive Roundtable." The learnings were massive. 🌋 We asked, "When you start to think about pricing and packaging changes, where do you start and what should you expect?" The group answered: - "Before beginning your pricing and packaging reset, put everything to the side and determine what is the ideal commercial journey for the customer. What are the graduation paths for the customer - where do you want them to end and how do you want them to get there?" - Blake Guerrero - "Interview your customers and specifically ask 'what do you hate about how you're being charged by the market/competitor right now?' Find differentiation in your pricing and packaging." - Pleasant Middelhof - "Pricing discipline is sensitive to price point. The more transactional, the easier to stick to list. The larger the ticket, the more discounting will be expected." - Jay Bourland 45 minutes of conversation cruised by. But, with most things pricing and packaging, we left feeling there were far more questions to be answered. Like: - When thinking about packaging, how are you determining the bifurcation of features? - And, as you add a consumption metric how do you decide on the unit of measure? - How are you connecting feature bucketing to the billable metric you're optimizing for? Roeland Delrue encouraged the call to continue the conversation. This prompted us to kicked off a dedicated pricing and packaging channel. Welcome to the P/P Thunderdome! ⚡ A single slack channel built to ask questions and share pricing and packaging learnings in real time. This is a selective group for now, so it doesn't get too rowdy. 😉 Send me a DM if you would be interested in joining. Come link arms with your pricing and packaging colleagues and let's win the day. **note - this is not a sales slack channel ___________ #pricing #saas #ai #product #sales