GTM Now

From the Zoom record

If you are a seed to Series A collaboration tool selling to small and mid-sized businesses under $10K a year, where each session involves people outside the paying account

1. Make joining free and instant for invitees, and make hosting free with one ceiling placed at the moment of value.
2. Put a light prompt in every shared output (invite, recap, summary) that leads to hosting your own.
3. Track usage by company domain and flag accounts that cross a seat or department threshold for a sales touch.
4. Price expansion on products, usage, or AI add-ons, not only headcount, so a hiring freeze does not stall growth.

Signal: The share of new hosts whose first exposure was an invite or shared output, and the share of large customers that started free (Zoom's filed figure was 55%).

From the Zoom record

If you are a later-stage seat-based SaaS company whose net dollar expansion is sliding toward 100%

1. Report self-serve and enterprise cohorts separately, as Zoom's 10-Ks do, so a mix shift cannot hide churn.
2. Track self-serve monthly churn as its own number.
3. Add a second and third product sold to the same buyer before pushing more seats.
4. Include an AI baseline in existing plans for retention, and charge for customisation.

Signal: Enterprise net dollar expansion back above 100% while self-serve monthly churn keeps falling.

From the HubSpot record

If you are a seed to Series B B2B SaaS company selling to small and mid-sized businesses at $1K to $15K a year, with a product people can try alone

1. Ship one free tool that grades or diagnoses something your buyer cares about, with output specific enough for an AI answer to quote.
2. Write fewer, data-backed pages that answer the exact questions buyers ask AI assistants, and track citations as well as rankings.
3. Start one owned subscriber channel early, a newsletter or a YouTube channel, so search is never your only source.
4. Put an inside rep on high-intent signups before you add a free tier.

Signal: The share of new pipeline from channels other than search, and how often you are cited in AI answers for your top 20 buyer questions. No single channel should exceed about 30% of leads.

From the HubSpot record

If you are a growth-stage platform whose buyers usually hire outside help to implement it, such as CRM, marketing operations, or ERP add-ons

1. Recruit services firms already doing the work, and pay a recurring commission on the subscriptions they bring.
2. Certify partners and co-sell with your reps instead of competing with them.
3. Track partner share of revenue and partner share of customers separately, since the gap shows whether partners bring larger accounts.

Signal: Partner-sourced and partner-influenced share of revenue, and average revenue per partner customer compared with direct customers.

From the Cursor record

If you are a seed or Series A developer tool, used daily by individual developers, priced under $1K a seat

1. Ship to the public within weeks and use the product yourselves every day.
2. Define one paid-habit metric, such as paid users active four or more days a week, and review it weekly before any growth spend.
3. Run at most one time-boxed growth experiment a quarter, and drop it if it does not beat the lift from your latest product release.
4. Use founder posting and a waitlist for the launch only, then put that time back into the product.

Signal: Week-over-week growth in paid power users, and the share of new signups who say a colleague or friend sent them.

From the Cursor record

If you are a product-led AI tool where heavy users cost far more than light ones, with company domains showing up in signups

1. Move heavy usage to included allowance plus overage, and publish worked examples of monthly cost before you switch.
2. Announce with a dated changelog, keep the old plan available for a fixed period, and offer a refund window.
3. Have team billing, SSO, SCIM, and a SOC 2 report in place before you hire account executives.
4. Hire expansion account executives to work accounts that already have many individual users.

Signal: Gross margin by segment (individual, team, enterprise) and seat growth inside accounts that started as individual use.

From the Salesforce record

If you are a seed to Series B company selling a cloud replacement for an entrenched, disliked way of working to SMB and mid-market buyers at $1K to $10K a year

1. Name the old model you are ending in a few words and use the same words everywhere, the way Salesforce used The End of Software.
2. Run one memorable, low-cost public stunt aimed at the incumbent's own event or audience, and have press ready the same day.
3. Stand up an inside sales team that calls every trial signup within a day, with reps segmented by company size from the start.
4. Pay referral partners a share of first-year revenue rather than building a reseller channel.
5. Hold a customer-only event as soon as you have a few hundred customers, so customers sell to each other.

Signal: The share of new revenue closed by inside sales from trial and inbound leads, and marketing and sales as a share of revenue falling while revenue grows (Salesforce went from 66% in fiscal 2003 to 50% in fiscal 2008).

From the Salesforce record

If you are a later-stage seat-based SaaS company adding AI agents to an established product, selling mid-market to enterprise at $10K to $100K-plus a year

1. Ship the agent into every existing account, turned off by default with a free starter allotment, and make turning it on the first sales motion.
2. Price agents per action or outcome, and offer a contract that lets customers swap seats for credits so the agent does not look like a seat cut.
3. Put forward deployed engineers on the first large accounts to get agents into production, and publish those customer stories.
4. Open a marketplace for partner-built agents on your platform before competitors become the agent layer.

Signal: The share of AI bookings from existing customers (Salesforce reported more than 60%) and AI ARR growth, tracked on a fixed definition.

From the Atlassian record

If you are a seed to Series B tool for technical or operational teams, bought by team leads, under $10K first-year ACV, and extensible by third parties

1. Publish full pricing and let a team of 10 buy or start free without talking to anyone.
2. Instrument expansion by account (seats, products, teams) and review cohort spend every year.
3. Open an app or integration marketplace early and share revenue with the developers who build on it.
4. Recruit local partners for languages, currencies, and customization before hiring field sales.
5. Add a small sales team only for accounts that cross a spend threshold, focused on expansion.

Signal: The share of revenue from accounts that started on a free or starter plan, and a cohort's spend multiple after three to five years (Atlassian's filed figure was 7x over five years).

From the Atlassian record

If you are a later-stage self-serve company whose largest customers now want security reviews, contracts, and multi-year deals

1. Keep self-serve as the landing motion and state the size at which sales takes over, as the FY2026 10-K does.
2. Build an enterprise edition with data residency, an SLA, and central admin before pushing sales, as Atlassian did with Cloud Enterprise in 2020.
3. If you are retiring a self-managed product, announce a multi-year timeline with migration tools and loyalty pricing.
4. Report $10K-plus and $50K-plus customer counts separately so the sales motion has its own scoreboard.

Signal: Growth in customers above $10K of cloud ARR (45,842 to 57,334 from FY2024 to FY2026 at Atlassian) while marketing and sales stays well below research and development as a share of revenue.

From the Slack record

If you are a seed to Series B collaboration or workflow tool sold per seat to teams inside SMB and mid-market companies, under $10K a year at first, where usage builds up a history the team relies on

1. Make the free plan fully usable for a team, with a ceiling tied to accumulated value (history, search depth, retention), not to core features.
2. Track organizations by email domain and flag companies where three or more separate teams are active.
3. Before hiring quota-carrying reps, put inbound account managers on those flagged companies to help with security review and procurement, with no outbound.
4. Build one admin and consolidation product (single sign-on, central controls, merged workspaces) that IT will pay for once several teams are on it.

Signal: The share of new paid revenue from organizations that started free (Slack's filed figure was about 8% to 10% of a year's revenue from same-year conversions) and the count of customers over $100K a year.

From the Slack record

If you are a Series B or later B2B product whose customers already work with outside vendors, clients, or partners over email

1. Ship a shared space that lets an outside company join from an invite, with value on their side before they pay.
2. Show the host's brand and a path to set up their own workspace to every invited party.
3. Count invited organizations that later create their own paid account, and report it as its own funnel.
4. Give admins controls over external access so security teams approve the feature instead of blocking it.

Signal: The number of paying customers using the cross-company feature (Slack went from more than 32,000 to more than 74,000 Paid Customers in a year) and the share of new paid organizations whose first touch was an invite.

From the Figma record

If you are a seed to Series B collaborative creation tool (design, docs, diagrams) with prosumer and SMB entry under $10K first-year ACV, where the output is reviewed by people in other roles

1. Make every artifact openable from a link in the browser, with free view and comment.
2. Keep a free personal tier and a paid team tier, and track how many company-plan customers already contain a paid team member (Figma's filed figure is about 70%).
3. Add the company plan (shared libraries, admin, SSO) and a first sales hire when several teams in one domain pay separately.
4. Seed supply with free access for students and a public gallery where users publish reusable files.
5. Publish an MCP server or assistant app so the artifact can be created and opened from inside AI tools.

Signal: The share of new paying teams whose first user arrived through a shared link or a Community file, and the share of company-plan wins that already had a paid team inside.

From the Figma record

If you are a growth-stage seat-based SaaS company with a strong core persona and many view-only visitors from other roles

1. Measure visits by role on paid accounts, as Figma did before Dev Mode.
2. Build a role-specific workspace, give it free to existing paid editors during beta, then charge a lower-priced role seat.
3. Report net dollar retention with and without the new role seat to see whether expansion comes from roles or headcount.
4. Add consumption pricing such as AI credits on top of seats, and enforce limits only after usage is established.

Signal: Net dollar retention above 130% (Figma's filed range was 122% to 136%) and the share of customers using two or more products (Figma's filed figure is 76%).

From the Twilio record

If you are a seed to Series B API or developer-infrastructure company, usage-priced, selling to developers at small companies and engineering teams at larger ones, under $10K starting ACV

1. Make the first working call possible in minutes from public docs, with a free trial and published per-unit pricing.
2. Publish docs and samples in forms AI coding assistants can use (OpenAPI specs, runnable snippets, a plain-text docs index), and test that popular assistants produce working code for your API.
3. Set a spend threshold at which an account gets a named account manager, plus an enterprise add-on (SSO, compliance) that tells sales which accounts to work.
4. Report net dollar expansion and top-10 customer share together every quarter, so concentration risk shows before a large customer cuts usage.

Signal: The share of new paying accounts with no sales touch before first spend, and net dollar expansion with and without the top 10 accounts.

From the Twilio record

If you are a later-stage developer platform that has bought or built a second product sold to a non-developer buyer (marketing, CX, data), with growth slowing

1. Cross-sell the new product to current API customers before hiring a separate sales team, as Twilio's 2025 priorities do.
2. Set a payback gate (pipeline per rep, win rate inside the base) before scaling dedicated go-to-market, the step Twilio reversed for Segment in 2023.
3. Move the mature product toward self-service and ISV partners to fund the newer one, as Twilio did for Communications.
4. Keep one owned event where developers and business buyers of both products meet.

Signal: Net dollar expansion back above 110% while sales and marketing falls as a share of revenue (Twilio: 25% in 2023 to 17% in 2025).

From the Datadog record

If you are a seed to Series B infrastructure, data, or developer tool selling to engineers, with value that scales with the customer's workloads and ACV from under $10K to over $100K

1. Ship a free tier and trial that installs in minutes with no sales call, and open access wide rather than hand-picking pilots.
2. Meter on the unit that tracks your customer's growth (hosts, events, tokens, requests) and sell committed usage with overage.
3. Put a high velocity inside sales team on trials to land the first paid commitment, then hand accounts to customer success for expansion.
4. Build the second product on the same agent and data model so it sells to the same buyer with no new install.

Signal: The share of new customers landing with more than one product (Datadog's filed jump was from about 15% to 60% in a year) and net retention above 130%.

From the Datadog record

If you are a later-stage usage-priced platform whose net retention is sliding as customers optimize

1. Report retention on a trailing basis and break out cohorts, as Datadog's 10-Ks do from FY2023, so one cohort's optimization shows early.
2. Track concentration: how much growth comes from your largest cohort (Datadog disclosed about seven points from its AI-native cohort).
3. Shift expansion weight from more usage of one product to more products per customer.
4. Add a hyperscaler marketplace and co-sell agreement so large commitments can draw down existing cloud budgets.

Signal: Trailing net retention recovering (Datadog went from mid-110s to about 120%) while the share of customers on four or more products keeps rising.

From the Snowflake record

If you are a Series B to D data or infrastructure company selling to enterprise data teams at $100K-plus a year, with usage that grows as customers add workloads

1. Offer a prepaid capacity contract at a discount, and keep on-demand for onboarding and overage.
2. Pay part of each rep's commission on consumption so sales keeps working the account after signature.
3. Report net revenue retention by cohort and watch for optimization drops after price-performance improvements.
4. List on the marketplace of the cloud you run on so buyers can spend committed cloud budget on you.
5. Recruit two or three systems integrators for migrations before building a broad partner program.

Signal: Share of revenue from existing customers (Snowflake's filed figure was about 94%) and net revenue retention above 120% once the first cohort matures.

From the Snowflake record

If you are a later-stage platform company adding AI features to an existing data product, mostly for enterprise buyers

1. Ship AI as metered consumption on existing contracts rather than a separate SKU, so adoption needs no new procurement.
2. Publish AI feature account counts each quarter so adoption is visible before revenue is material.
3. Sign joint go-to-market agreements with one or two model providers, with named field collaboration, not just an integration.
4. Keep the self-serve trial but put costly AI features behind a credit card, as Snowflake's trial does.

Signal: Accounts using AI features each quarter, with net revenue retention holding or rising as AI usage grows.

From the CrowdStrike record

If you are a Series A to C security or risk product selling to mid-market and enterprise buyers at $25K to $250K ACV, with an agent, connector, or data pipeline in the customer's environment

1. Publish original research that names the threats you see, with a consistent naming scheme, so journalists and AI answers cite you by default.
2. Offer a fast, credit-card-free trial of one module, and route trials from larger domains to sales within the trial window.
3. Design every later product to turn on from the existing footprint, with no new install.
4. Package your services team (incident response, audits, migrations) as an entry offer that ends in a subscription proposal.
5. List on the cloud marketplaces your buyers already commit spend to, before you build a large reseller program.

Signal: Net dollar retention above 120% driven by module count, and the share of new logos that started as a trial, a services engagement, or a marketplace purchase.

From the CrowdStrike record

If you are a later-stage multi-product company where customers stall at two or three products and every expansion needs a new procurement cycle

1. Introduce a pre-committed, draw-down licence that covers the full portfolio and lets customers swap products, as Falcon Flex does.
2. Report the share of customers above product-count thresholds every quarter, and move the threshold up as adoption rises.
3. Put partners and MSSPs in the primary plan for new logos, not just fulfilment.
4. If a quality incident hits, make concessions in extra products and term length rather than cash, and say publicly what it costs.

Signal: ARR from accounts on the commitment licence and its growth rate, plus gross retention above 95% through any incident.

From the Okta record

If you are a Series A to C B2B security or IT infrastructure company selling to IT and security buyers at $25K to $250K ACV, where the product connects to many third-party apps

1. Build and publish a catalog of pre-built integrations for the apps your target buyers already own, and count it as product, not services.
2. Recruit the platform vendors you integrate with into co-selling and co-marketing, starting with the largest one your buyers already use.
3. Price on a unit that grows with the customer (users, identities, agents) and plan a second product for the same buyer before year two.
4. Run one owned customer event and one annual research report from your own usage data, built on customer stories.

Signal: Net dollar retention (Okta's filed figures were 120% to 129% in its early years) and the count of customers above $100K ACV.

From the Okta record

If you are a later-stage enterprise vendor adding a developer or self-service product line, or recovering from a security incident

1. Give the developer product its own self-service path (free plan, paid developer plan) and its own sellers, instead of routing developers through enterprise sales.
2. Report self-service and enterprise customers separately, as Okta does by excluding self-service-only accounts from its customer count.
3. After an incident, publish a dated root cause with completed remediation steps, and ship at least one control customers can turn on.
4. Turn the response into a long-term, named program with product, customer, industry and internal pillars.

Signal: Self-service to enterprise conversions per quarter, and net retention plus growth in $100K-plus customers in the four quarters after an incident.

From the Anthropic record

If you are a seed to Series B AI infrastructure or API company selling to enterprises, ACV $50K and up, product consumed programmatically

1. Ship a self-serve API with public per-unit pricing so developers can start without a call.
2. List on at least one cloud marketplace where your target buyers hold committed spend, and make the listing count against that commitment.
3. Add an enterprise tier with SSO, SCIM, and audit logs behind a contact-sales path once self-serve accounts with company domains appear.
4. Track accounts over a spend threshold, such as $100K annualised, as the core expansion metric.

Signal: Count of accounts over the spend threshold quarter over quarter, and the share of new revenue billed through cloud marketplaces.

From the Anthropic record

If you are a company that owns a model, engine, or platform and is building its first developer tool, priced under $1K a seat to start

1. Get the tool into daily internal use and chart internal daily active users before any external launch.
2. Release externally as a labelled research preview to early adopters, and plan for a slow start.
3. Bundle the tool into existing paid plans instead of selling it separately at first.
4. Offer team admins premium seats with usage controls once companies adopt it bottom up.

Signal: Weekly active users of the tool, and the number of team or enterprise accounts that upgrade seats to include it.

From the Replit record

If you are a seed to Series B AI app or agent builder selling to non-technical professionals at $20 to $100 a month self-serve, with highly variable inference cost per task

1. Launch with a free tier that lets anyone try the core outcome, then gate heavier use behind a low monthly plan.
2. Price agent work by effort with visible per-task cost, and publish worked examples before you switch.
3. Plan a credit or refund for the transition and announce it in the same post as the change.
4. Add a two-sided referral credit once there is a paid plan to refer people into.

Signal: Gross margin per active paid user by usage decile, and the share of new paid users who arrive through referral codes.

From the Replit record

If you are a product-led AI tool where employees at large companies already pay on personal or team plans

1. Ship SSO, RBAC, audit logs, and a SOC 2 report before hiring field sales.
2. Make the Enterprise plan purchasable online as a pooled annual credit commitment with unlimited seats, and assign an account manager on purchase.
3. List on the cloud marketplaces where your buyers already have committed spend.
4. Recruit SIs and consultancies to run rollouts inside large accounts.

Signal: Share of enterprise revenue from accounts that began as self-serve users, and net revenue retention on enterprise credit commitments.

From the Wiz record

If you are a seed or Series A security or infrastructure company selling to CISOs or platform heads at large enterprises, with a product that can read the customer's environment through APIs

1. Cut setup to under an hour with read-only, agentless access, and make connecting the buyer's environment the first sales meeting.
2. Target a short list of the most regulated, most referenced logos first, and ask investors for one introduction each.
3. Over-serve each early account and ask for two peer introductions at the first value moment, with any early discounts time-boxed.
4. Publish original vulnerability research under the company name from the first quarter.

Signal: Share of proofs of value that show a critical finding in the first session, and new opportunities sourced by customer referral each quarter.

From the Wiz record

If you are a Series B or later cloud security or data company with enterprise traction on AWS or Azure, deals above $100K, and customers holding committed cloud spend

1. List on AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace with private offers, and get MACC or equivalent eligibility so purchases draw down committed spend.
2. Build co-sell relationships with each hyperscaler's partner team and track marketplace-sourced deals separately.
3. Open an integration platform for other vendors and a services track for consultancies before launching a reseller programme.
4. Give customers a visible outcome badge, such as zero critical issues, that their own leadership can see.

Signal: Share of new ARR transacted through marketplaces, and the share of customers who reach and stay at zero critical issues.

From the Dropbox record

If you are a seed to Series A prosumer or small business tool under $1K a year, where users already share files, links, or workspaces with people outside their account

1. Make the shared artifact viewable without signup, with one clear prompt to create an account that keeps a copy.
2. Add a two-sided referral paid in your own unit, such as credits, storage, or usage, capped per user the way Dropbox capped it at 32 referrals.
3. Remove friction step by step in the share and referral flow and measure yield at each step.
4. Prompt individual payers who collaborate with others to move to a team plan.

Signal: The share of new signups whose first touch was a shared link or referral, and the share of new team plans that include a former individual payer (Dropbox's filed figure was over 40%).

From the Dropbox record

If you are a mature self-serve SaaS company with flat revenue, a large free base, and over 80% of revenue from self-serve

1. Build a company-level view of free and paid usage and route accounts with many active users to a small sales-assist team.
2. Launch the AI product as an add-on for existing teams first, sold in the product, before chasing new logos.
3. Cut paid acquisition for side products that do not feed the core loop.
4. Track whether cutting sales activity costs paying users, since Dropbox's fiscal 2025 10-K names that as a cause of its decline.

Signal: Paying user growth back above zero, which Dropbox reported for three straight quarters by Q2 2026, and add-on attach rate among existing teams.

From the Notion record

If you are an early-stage horizontal productivity or workspace tool, used by individuals and small teams, under $1K ACV at first, with outputs users like to share

1. Make single-player use free with no content cap, and put the paywall on multi-person features.
2. Ship one-click duplicate for any shared page or setup, and a public gallery that accepts user submissions.
3. Recruit the 20 most vocal users you can find on social media into an ambassador group, and fund their meetups.
4. Sponsor a small set of creators with tracked links, and keep only the ones that drive first-time visitors.

Signal: Month-over-month net new visitors to the site, and the share of new team workspaces created by someone who had a personal account first.

From the Notion record

If you are a product-led workspace or collaboration company with a large free base, starting to see company email domains and wanting to move upmarket while adding AI

1. Add a mid tier between team and enterprise that carries SSO and admin controls, and give the free plan a team trial.
2. Launch a certification and a consultants directory so partners can implement for larger customers.
3. Bundle core AI into the business tiers rather than selling a separate add-on, and meter only autonomous agents, with a visible credits dashboard and alerts.
4. Hire solutions consultants by segment and country before scaling outbound, and package use cases as solutions.

Signal: Share of new paid business accounts that contain prior free personal users, and the percentage of ARR from accounts using AI features.

From the Stripe record

If you are a seed to Series B API or infrastructure company in your customers' revenue or transaction path, with developers as the integrating user and an ACV under $10K at first

1. Ship a public self-serve signup with a working test mode and copy-paste requests on the landing page.
2. Publish one simple usage price with no setup or monthly fee, plus a stated volume threshold where custom pricing starts.
3. Make your product installable from inside AI coding tools, with a sandbox that converts to a live account.
4. Build a platform API so software vendors can onboard their own users and take a fee.

Signal: Share of new accounts that reach a first live transaction within 7 days without talking to anyone, and the share that arrive through a platform or AI tool.

From the Stripe record

If you are a growth-stage infrastructure company with a large self-serve base, where some customers have become large businesses, starting an enterprise motion

1. Count how many existing customers now exceed an enterprise volume threshold and use them as references.
2. Hire a sales leader who has sold usage-priced infrastructure, and keep the self-serve path unchanged.
3. Lead enterprise deals with an adjacent product the buyer cannot easily build, such as billing or embedded finance, rather than a price cut on the core.
4. Run one owned annual event with separate enterprise, platform, and developer tracks.

Signal: Number of customers above the enterprise volume threshold year over year, and revenue from non-core products as a share of total.

From the Shopify record

If you are a seed to Series B platform for SMBs, under $1K a year at entry, where customers need add-ons, design or setup help you will not build yourself

1. Publish APIs and a theme or template system early, and recruit the first 20 builders by hand, as Shopify did with app developers and a theme competition.
2. Give partners a referral payment and a directory that sends them paid work, so agencies bring you customers.
3. Take zero or a small revenue share from partners until they reach real scale, and say so publicly.
4. Run an owned partner event or release showcase on a fixed schedule so partners can plan around your roadmap.

Signal: The share of new paying customers referred by partners, and partner payouts growing faster than your own sales and marketing spend.

From the Shopify record

If you are a growth-stage SMB SaaS company whose product sits in customers' transactions (payments, bookings, invoices, shipping), with most revenue still from flat subscriptions

1. Add a built-in, volume-priced service such as payments as the default, as Shopify Payments did, and report its penetration rate.
2. Price top plans so the highest-volume customers upgrade before they leave, and track upgrades separately from new logos.
3. Add a sales team only for customers already at high volume or migrating from legacy systems, as Shopify did for Plus.
4. Make your service usable inside AI assistants and agents, so volume still reaches you when discovery moves off search ads.

Signal: Volume-based revenue as a share of total (Shopify's path was 36.5% to 76%), and sales and marketing falling as a share of revenue while growth holds.

From the Gong record

If you are a Series A or B B2B SaaS company selling to a department leader at $20K to $100K ACV, where the product captures activity data across many customers

1. Write down which budget owner your current category name sends you to, and test a name built around the metric in the CRO's, CISO's, or CFO's title.
2. Publish one anonymised, aggregate finding a month from product data, written by a former practitioner of the buyer's job.
3. Pick the one social channel where your buyers already tag colleagues on your posts, brief every employee to engage there, and drop the others.
4. Run a category-named event or roadshow before you run a company-named conference.

Signal: Share of first meetings held with the economic buyer rather than the end-user team, and the number of inbound demo requests that cite a specific research finding.

From the Gong record

If you are a growth-stage platform with a first team standardised on your product and a second product shipped, selling to enterprises

1. Report multi-product adoption as a headline company metric internally, the way Gong reports it publicly.
2. Package the second product for the adjacent team that already reads the first product's data.
3. List on the cloud marketplace where your largest accounts hold committed spend.
4. Use the annual customer conference to launch products, with customers presenting results on stage.

Signal: Percentage of customers on two or more products, and the count of accounts above $1M ARR quarter over quarter.

From the Canva record

If you are a seed to Series B self-serve tool whose output is a concrete artifact, sold to individuals and small businesses under $1K ACV, with demand that shows up as searches for that artifact

1. List the 200 most searched artifact names in your category and ship one landing page per job with a live, editable template above the fold.
2. Make the free tier produce a finished, shareable artifact, and charge for premium content, brand controls and collaboration.
3. Rebuild onboarding until a first-time user ships something in under five minutes, watched in user tests.
4. Publish an MCP server or assistant app that returns an editable artifact in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and give assistant referrals their own target.
5. Translate the top 20 templates for the two largest non-English markets in your traffic, with local pricing, before adding a third language.

Signal: Weekly new activated users, meaning a first artifact exported or shared, by source: search, assistant referral, shared link, direct.

From the Canva record

If you are a product-led company with heavy unmanaged usage inside large companies, such as hundreds of accounts on one email domain, and no enterprise motion yet

1. Count accounts and paid seats by corporate email domain, and rank the top 100 domains by active users.
2. Build the admin layer first, with SSO, SCIM, workspace consolidation and brand controls, and give it a named owner before hiring account executives.
3. Offer each top domain a free usage report and a consolidation proposal aimed at the one buyer who owns brand or IT.
4. Add a middle plan between individual and enterprise so small teams do not jump straight to a sales call.
5. Recruit one reseller or consultancy in your largest region once ten enterprise accounts are live.

Signal: Share of the top 100 domains moved onto one contract within two quarters, and net seat growth inside consolidated accounts.

From the MongoDB record

If you are a seed to Series B infrastructure or data company (database, queue, search, observability) whose first user is a developer, with a self-managed edition today and enterprise deals at $50K to $500K ACV

1. Decide in writing whether the free edition is distribution or a community project, and keep IP ownership (or a CLA) so the licence terms stay yours.
2. Ship a hosted version with a permanent free tier and pure usage pricing, so the paywall question goes away.
3. Score self-serve and free accounts on usage and route the top ones to sales, as MongoDB's 10-K describes.
4. Train sales to win one painful workload per account, and track workload count per account as the expansion metric.
5. List on the cloud marketplaces your customers already buy from, so their committed cloud spend can pay you.

Signal: The share of subscription revenue from accounts that started self-serve or free, and net ARR expansion above 120% (MongoDB's filed range).

From the MongoDB record

If you are an established open-core or source-available vendor whose hosted product is growing but whose developer funnel now runs through AI coding agents

1. Publish an MCP server or agent integration for your hosted product so agents can provision and query it directly.
2. Make the free tier usable from an agent with no human signup friction, and count agent-originated signups separately.
3. Add the AI capability your category needs (retrieval, embeddings, evaluation) inside the existing product, as MongoDB did with Voyage AI.
4. Keep routing usage to sales, and add agent-originated usage as a signal.

Signal: The share of new hosted accounts created through an agent or MCP integration, and their conversion to paid usage within 90 days.

From the GitLab record

If you are a seed to Series B open source or open core developer tool, with individual developers as users and mid-market or enterprise organizations as the eventual buyer, at $10K to $100K a year

1. Write down and publish the buyer-based rule (individual features free, manager and executive features paid), so the community knows what will never move behind a paywall.
2. Offer a hosted free tier even if self-managed is the revenue line, because hosted users can be identified and contacted.
3. Hire sales development early, as GitLab did in 2016, and route organizations with several active users to it.
4. Put security, compliance, and audit features in the top tier and track that tier's share of ARR.

Signal: The share of new paid organizations whose first contact was an identified free hosted user, and top-tier share of ARR (GitLab's filed path was 17% to 29% in about 18 months).

From the GitLab record

If you are a later-stage seat-priced developer platform seeing net retention drift down as customers adopt AI coding agents

1. Keep the seat price for the human platform, and add a metered unit for agent work with a fixed allowance included in paid tiers, as GitLab Credits are.
2. Offer one annual commitment that covers both seats and usage, so customers do not renegotiate every time the mix of people and agents shifts.
3. Set free tier limits in units that still bind when one user runs many agents (groups, compute, credits), not only users.
4. Report retention separately for customers using the metered AI unit, so its effect on expansion is visible.

Signal: Net retention for customers using the metered unit versus those who do not, and the share of expansion ARR that comes from usage rather than seats.

From the Asana record

If you are a seed to Series B team collaboration or workflow tool selling to SMB and mid-market buyers under $10K a year, used by groups that work with people outside their company

1. Offer a free tier and a trial of the top self-serve tier, and make inviting outside guests free so every project shows the product to non-users.
2. Track usage by company domain and flag accounts where a second team or department starts using the product.
3. Hire a small sales team whose first job is expansion inside those flagged accounts, not cold new logos.
4. Report net retention by spend cohort from the start, so you can see which customer size expands fastest.
5. Review the free tier's limits each year against how often free teams pull in a second team.

Signal: The share of your 100 largest customers that started free or on a trial (Asana's filed figure was virtually all), and net retention in the top spend cohort.

From the Asana record

If you are a later-stage seat-based SaaS company whose net retention has slipped toward or below 100% and which is adding AI agents or automation

1. Sell the AI capability on credits or usage, with an allotment bundled into each paid tier and more credits for sale.
2. Keep a rate-limited free version of the AI feature so self-serve teams can still try it.
3. Let large customers buy one credit budget at the top and split it across departments.
4. Give one revenue leader the job of aligning the product-led and sales-led motions.

Signal: Net retention in your largest cohort back above 100%, and the share of expansion revenue that comes from credits rather than seats.

From the Cloudflare record

If you are a seed to Series B infrastructure or security product with near-zero marginal cost per free user, developer and SMB entry buyers, and enterprise deals of $100K a year and up

1. Write down what the free tier does for you besides conversion, such as data, testing or supplier leverage, and instrument each one.
2. Put the headline capability in the free plan but keep reporting, controls and support in paid tiers.
3. Run one fixed launch week a year on your own blog, with each day shipping something free or cheaper.
4. Add inside sales when self-serve accounts cross a usage threshold, and track $100K-plus customers as a headline metric.

Signal: The count of $100K-plus customers whose first touch was a free or self-serve account, and net retention above 110% excluding free upgrades, the way Cloudflare defines it.

From the Cloudflare record

If you are a later-stage platform company whose inbound traffic is falling as answer engines and agents replace clicks

1. Measure bot and agent traffic to your docs and product separately from human traffic.
2. Make the product usable by agents directly through APIs, docs and usage-priced access.
3. Price agent use per request or per unit of work rather than per seat.
4. Keep a sales team for contracted customers, since that is still where most of Cloudflare's revenue comes from.

Signal: The share of new paying accounts whose first activity came through an API or agent integration rather than a web visit.

From the monday.com record

If you are a seed to Series B horizontal SaaS tool for business teams, SMB to mid-market, under $10K ACV, with a self-serve trial and seat pricing

1. Set paid spend by cash payback per channel (pick a window, for example 8 to 12 months) rather than a fixed budget, and cut any channel that misses it.
2. Split reporting into paid search, paid social and video, and track the share of trials that come from search clicks, since that share is what AI answers erode.
3. Make inviting a second team part of onboarding, so each paid acquisition seeds word of mouth inside the account.
4. Add account managers when usage data shows accounts adding teams, and measure their effect on cohort expansion.

Signal: Blended cash payback on paid holding inside the window while the share of new trials from invites and direct traffic rises.

From the monday.com record

If you are a growth-stage seat-based SaaS company that grew on performance marketing and sees search traffic and net dollar retention slipping

1. Report customers by ARR tier ($50K, $100K, $500K) and net dollar retention per tier, as monday.com's filings do, so upmarket progress is visible.
2. Launch a second product on the same data layer and sell it to existing accounts before buying more top-of-funnel traffic.
3. Move part of the online budget to field sales, partners and brand for larger accounts, and keep self-serve for the long tail.
4. Add a usage or credits component for AI features so revenue tracks work done, not only seats.

Signal: Share of ARR from customers over $50K rising (monday.com went from 36% to 41% in 2025) while sales and marketing as a share of revenue falls.

From the Zscaler record

If you are a Series A to C infrastructure security company selling $100K-plus deals to enterprises, replacing appliances or legacy on-premises tools

1. Map the two or three partner types already selling the larger project your product fits into, and build a joint motion where your rep owns the customer relationship and the partner transacts.
2. Write the architecture argument in plain buyer language first, and adopt the analyst or government term only where your product implements it fully.
3. Publish research from your own telemetry on a fixed annual cadence, and reuse it in every earnings or customer update.
4. Track every champion who changes companies and give sales a play for their new employer.

Signal: The share of new logos sourced or co-sold by partners, and the count of new logos whose buyer had bought you before (Chaudhry's figure: 285 security leaders bought Zscaler at two companies).

From the Zscaler record

If you are a later-stage multi-product security platform whose net retention is sliding toward the low 110s

1. Add a pre-committed spend pool that lets customers adopt new products without a new contract, as Z-Flex does.
2. Price at least one new product on something other than users, such as workloads, data volume, or agents.
3. List on the cloud marketplaces where your largest customers hold committed spend, and report marketplace sales as a tracked number.
4. Use your owned flagship event to launch the new products and give partners sponsorship roles.

Signal: The share of net new ARR from non-seat products and from customers adding a product within an existing commitment.

From the Lovable record

If you are a seed-stage AI product for non-technical prosumers, self-serve, under $1K ACV, where the first output is visible within a minute

1. Ship a public demo or open-source proof first, and watch which audience reacts.
2. Launch with a free daily allowance and a low entry price, and put a removable built-with mark on anything users publish.
3. Post every release from the founder's and team's own accounts, several times a week.
4. Sponsor any user who offers to run a hackathon with free credits, and book that as marketing cost.
5. Price heavy usage by work done rather than per message once usage cost varies widely.

Signal: Share of new signups that arrive from a published app, a shared post, or a community event (one-question signup survey plus referrer data), and week-four retention by acquisition source.

From the Lovable record

If you are a product-led AI tool with hundreds of thousands of paying individuals, many inside large companies, and no sales team yet

1. Find accounts with many individual paying users on company email domains, and route only those hand-raisers to a small sales team.
2. Ship SSO, SCIM, audit logs, and a SOC 2 report before scaling account executives.
3. Price workspaces by shared credits with unlimited members, so a team can expand without a seat negotiation.
4. Turn the agencies already doing client work into a partner program with commissions and a directory.

Signal: Net dollar retention of company-domain workspaces, and the share of enterprise pipeline sourced from partners versus inbound hand-raisers.

From the Vercel record

If you are a seed to Series B developer-infrastructure company with an open-source project developers adopt for free and a hosted product with usage costs, selling to engineering teams under $10K a year at first

1. Keep the open-source project fully usable without your platform and document the self-host path yourself, so hosting wins on operations, not lock-in.
2. Build the deepest integration you can with the developer's Git or CI tool, and make every change produce a shareable link.
3. Run a free tier with no card, then a low flat plan with included usage and granular overage, with spend alerts on by default.
4. Host an annual conference for the open-source project, not the product, with partner sponsors.

Signal: Share of new paid teams whose first event was linking a repository, and paid conversion among accounts whose preview links were opened by a non-deploying viewer.

From the Vercel record

If you are a growth-stage platform with a large self-serve base, enterprise accounts arriving bottom-up, and AI tools letting non-developers in those accounts build software

1. Move table-stakes enterprise features such as SSO and compliance documents into the self-serve paid plan.
2. Reposition the enterprise tier around governing non-developer builders and agents: identity, data access, model and token budgets, and audit.
3. Sign solution partners and give them co-selling support before scaling direct reps.
4. List on the cloud marketplace your largest customers already buy through.
5. Launch an AI builder that deploys onto your platform, with a free credit allowance and a referral bounty.

Signal: Share of enterprise revenue from accounts that started on self-serve, and the number of non-developer builders per enterprise account.

From the OpenAI record

If you are an AI product company with a free consumer or prosumer tier, real per-user inference cost, and a growing share of signups from company email domains

1. Tag every signup by email domain and report a weekly count of companies with five or more individual users.
2. Ship a self-serve team plan with admin and data controls that can be bought from inside product settings.
3. Route domains above a seat threshold to sales with a usage summary, and sell the enterprise plan on data controls, SSO, and admin.
4. Track seat growth inside converted accounts as the expansion metric.

Signal: Share of new business contracts that started as three or more individual accounts on the same domain, and time from first team seat to enterprise contract.

From the OpenAI record

If you are a model or API company selling to enterprises whose IT standardises on one or more hyperscalers

1. List on the marketplaces where target accounts already have committed spend, and make usage count toward those commitments.
2. Keep a direct API with token pricing for developers who want to start without procurement.
3. If a partner offers exclusivity, negotiate a dated or conditional exit before you sign.
4. Publish price cuts as passed-through savings, as a reason for existing users to build more.

Signal: Share of new enterprise revenue transacted through marketplaces versus direct, and API spend growth in accounts that first arrived through a marketplace.