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15 Proven Moats for PLG Motions
Navattic's LI Creators Partnerships, $2.3m revenue with LinkedIn Ads, Word of Mouth...
Okerosi Davis
January 19, 2025 • Letter: 6 minutes
Hello Marketers.
Happy New Year and welcome to 2025. As we plan to thrive this year, my goal for the newsletter is to provide weekly proven resources that are applicable.
Here is this week’s Product Weekly.
Kindly share the newsletter to your Marketer colleagues.
I am monitoring the rise of B2B influencer marketing efforts on LinkedIn. This week, I came across Navattic’s partnership with top marketing creators on LinkedIn to promote their upcoming State of Interactive Product Demo Report for 2025.
Some of the creators I have seen include: Dave Gerhardt, Nick Bennett, Camille Trent, and more.
This brand awareness efforts is clear that moving forward, B2B brands are embracing strategic awareness efforts that are sustainable for growth.
Proven Growth
Moats to Power Producut-led Growth
Maja Voje shared the above template courtesy of Wes Bush on the top 15 moats to build great products.
In the where AI is making every feature and capability a commodity, any SaaS startup looking to build a moat is required to merge 2 or 3 of the above PLG motions to win.
A good example I came across this week and wrote about is; Glean. The company scaled to $100m ARR focusing on mid-market in these three ways;
From looking into their growth efforts, I came up with 3 growth levers that worked for them.
1. Integration with existing enterprise applications.
Glean unified the search layer across all relevant enterprise applications including;
- Google Workspace
- Microsoft 365
- Salesforce
- Slack
And many more...
2. Clear technical differentiation
This gives them an edge on matters of enterprise permissions and governance.The goal here is to ensure users only see content they have access to while maintaining security and compliance.
Glean now has hundreds of pre-built integrations that meet this criteria, hence a strong moat against the competition.
3. Employing a land and expand strategy
Glean starts deploying its product to a given department, i.e., customer support teams.And over time, they expand company-wide into engineering, marketing, legal, and all.An example from Sacra, a $60k initial landing contract steadily grows to $500k+ within 9 months.
A bonus insight: Glean focuses on selling to CIOs and CTOs first whose sales cycle is typically 4-5 months.
Founder Story
Nilan Peirs - Wise, CPO - Founding Member
I re-listened to this interview from Harry Stebbings of 20VC with the Chief Product Officer of Wise; Nilan Peiris.
One key lesson that stood out for me is Nilan’s emphasis on weaving word of mouth into the product experience. You have to give customers an experience they didn’t have before.
2. How To Beat a Competitor With 8x Your Budget
- We can’t compete on SEM (search engine marketing).
- Instead we focus on word of mouth & shape Wise around this approach.
- Build a product that is so superior that people will talk about it.
3. The Secret to Word of Mouth Growth
- You have to be an order of magnitude better than the alternative.
- Customers must get an experience that previously didn’t exist.
- People didn't know they could move money instantly.
- Wise are moving £60BN instantly around the world.
570+ Leads Generating $2.3m in Revenue Using LinkedIn Ads
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Justin Rowe shared their playbook on how they generated over $2.3m for his agency using LinkedIn Ads. Above are files showing details of the playbook.
How is this structured?
1. Cold audience - small steady stream of quality prospects getting the first touches to your brand.
2. Capture all website audiences, qualify them with filters, and put them into 90-day retargeting layers.
3. Content is thought leadership, demonstrating expertise, third-party validation, and content that builds trust and credibility to nurture your ICP fit warm traffic.
4. Those who engage with our 90-day retargeting layer get moved to a 30-day higher-intent layer focused on stronger calls to action to convert those that show interest (lead gen works well here)
5. Those who don't engage in 90 days get moved to lighter touches to nurture for another 90 days (follower, text, and spotlight ads work well ).
Proven Startups
I just sold my startup for $200,000 after 11 months. AMA
That is all for this week.
Which section stood out for you today?
-Okerosi