The Ultimate List of Product Led Growth Investors
The fastest growing startups in the world are Product Led. These are the investors that realise that.
Companies like Slack, Dropbox and Calendly are all driven by the same strategy. It’s called Product Led Growth (PLG) and it’s going to be the defining startup trend of the 2020s.
“The center of power has shifted from the buyer to the end user,” — Blake Bartlett, Partner at OpenView Ventures
As OpenView Ventures (the firm that defined the term) puts it, PLG is about more than just go-to-market strategies like virality, freemium models and bottom-up distribution. Product led companies understand that the end user has become the new buyer, hiring products to solve their own pain points rather than thinking from an executive’s bottom-line perspective.
The term was only defined in 2016 by Blake Bartlett, so it’s still a very new concept to many. As a result, pitching a startup that leans on PLG for your core strategy will often result in you trying to explain or convince investors of the power of a product led approach.
Not all investors are unconverted. Many love PLG startups, evidenced by their track record of investing in PLG startups or self-proclaimed fondness for the strategy.
So, I decided to create a list of these PLG-friendly investors. As of today (January 25th 2021), this list is rather incomplete. If you are an investor that’s bullish on PLG or know a fund/angel that should be added to the list, just fill in this form (or scroll down to the bottom for an embedded version).
Why did I create this list?
To itch my own stratch.
I’m the Co-Founder & CEO of OpinionX, a dynamic survey tool built for understanding end users’ biggest unmet needs, pains and motivations.
OpinionX isn’t just a product led startup; we see PLG as the driving force behind our entire market opportunity too. We realised how much more important it is for PLG startups to understand end user pains compared to normal companies. Research tools like traditional surveys are really bad at this sort of ‘discovery’ research. Discovery is about uncovering unknown insights about users, not just validating and measuring things you already know about (which is what most survey tools are for).
I was personally experiencing this issue of talking to investors that don’t understand PLG two-fold; they didn’t get our business model OR our market opportunity. So I figured it was time to build a resource to help other founders like me find future-focused investment supporters.
This is a living document that is now and will continue to be in an unfinished state for some time. Please build on this, share it with others and continue to expand the supports available to product led startups.
