LAUNCH PLG — A PLG MOTION YOU CAN READ CLEARLY ENOUGH TO IMPROVE
A 3-week sprint that designs your self-serve activation funnel, instruments it for your engineering team, and delivers a live dashboard before the first cohort flows through — so you have something real to optimise, not just something to count.
Your PLG motion launches with instrumentation your team uses · 3-week delivery
WHAT YOU HAVE AT THE END
Fixed price · 3-week sprint
You get a live system that tracks user behavior from their first click, so you can see problems and fix them before customers churn.
PRODUCT MANAGER
“Why did our free users stop using the new feature?”
Your dashboard shows which step they got stuck on and never completed. You can now tweak the feature or add a tutorial to help them succeed.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
“A user says our tool is too confusing. What happened?”
You look up their journey and see they skipped the onboarding guide. You can send them a direct link to the right help video immediately.
MARKETING LEAD
“Which ad campaign brought in the most engaged users?”
The dashboard connects sign-up source to actual product usage. You stop spending money on ads that bring in users who don't stick around.
WEEKLY REPORTING
“How many free users are on track to become paying customers?”
Instead of guessing, you have a real list of users who completed key tasks. You can focus your upgrade campaigns on the people most ready to buy.
Kickoff to live dashboard and activation baseline. Your engineering team implements events — the spec tells them exactly what to build.
Your team opens the dashboard and sees which cohorts are activating, which are churning silently, and what the free-to-paid funnel looks like — with numbers that mean something.
Scoped to your product and your existing setup. One price, everything included. Funnel design, engineering spec, dashboard, baseline, and 90-day plan.
WHAT SHIPS WITHOUT THIS
The PLG motion is live. The instrumentation measures the wrong thing.
“We launched the free tier six weeks ago. We can see logins and session duration. We cannot tell you whether anyone has reached the moment where the product actually solves their problem — because we never defined what that event looks like for self-serve.”
Head of Product — B2B SaaS, Series A
Free signups are flowing. Nobody knows which ones are real.
“We get signups every day. Some of them upgrade. Most of them don’t. We have no idea what the activating ones do differently because the dashboard doesn’t separate them. Every metric is averaged across the whole cohort.”
Founder — Pre-Series A SaaS
The 90-day PLG review is coming. The only number you have is total signups.
“Investors asked us for the activation rate last quarter. We gave them signup-to-login ratio because that’s the closest thing we had. They pushed back. We’re building the measurement now, three months in.”
CEO — Seed stage SaaS
WHY THE INSTRUMENTATION HAS TO BE DESIGNED FOR PLG SPECIFICALLY
Copying your sales-led event taxonomy into a PLG motion measures engagement. It does not measure self-serve activation.
In a sales-assisted motion, the account executive fills the gap between signup and value. They answer questions, run demos, and walk the user through the moment the product clicks. The instrumentation captures what happened — logins, feature use, session time — and that is enough because a human is already guiding the journey.
In PLG, the product has to do what the account executive did. If the instrumentation is not designed to see whether it does — if no event fires when a user reaches the value moment on their own — you cannot see the thing that matters. You see activity. Activity is not activation.
This sprint builds the instrumentation around one question: can a user reach the value moment without human help, and if they do, what does it look like in the data? That question is answered before the first cohort flows through. Day 30 produces a clear picture because the measurement was built to produce one — not assembled afterwards from whatever events happened to fire.
WHAT YOU GET
Your team maps the exact steps a new user must complete to reach genuine value — with a clear view of where users currently drop out and what's causing them to leave before they experience what your product does.
The specific in-product action that most reliably predicts whether a user will still be paying months from now is identified from your retention data — giving your entire product team a single, evidence-backed target to optimise toward.
The behaviours, timing patterns, and in-product signals that separate users who convert to paid from those who churn on the free tier are documented — so you can design interventions that actually move the number.
How your closest competitors structure their free experience, activation flow, and upgrade triggers is mapped and analysed — so you can identify gaps in their approach that your product can exploit.
The specific usage patterns that turn casual users into deeply retained customers are identified — giving product and growth a clear picture of the behaviours worth engineering toward.
A visual and written map of every step in your activation journey, annotated with current conversion rates, drop-off points, and the highest-leverage intervention opportunities.
A precise specification document that tells your engineers exactly what events to track and how to structure them — eliminating ambiguity and ensuring your analytics captures the data your PLG motion depends on.
A live dashboard that shows the full picture from new signup to paid conversion, updated continuously, so your team always knows where the funnel is healthy and where it needs attention.
Your current activation rate is established from real data and documented as the baseline — so every future optimisation effort has a credible starting point to measure improvement against.
A structured plan that defines what you'll measure, when you'll review results, and what decisions each review is meant to trigger — keeping the team aligned and accountable across the first three months.
A recurring reporting format that surfaces the metrics your team needs to make product and growth decisions each week, without requiring an analyst to build a custom report every time.
Your engineering team gets a written specification covering every instrumentation requirement, data structure, and implementation decision — so nothing is lost in translation between product strategy and code.
Step-by-step documentation for maintaining and extending the analytics dashboards as your product evolves, so the measurement infrastructure doesn't become stale or require external help to update.
A live session where all outputs are walked through with your team, questions are answered, and the full measurement plan is explained in context.
A written guide that explains what each metric means, how it's calculated, and what changes in the number typically indicate — so your team can read the data correctly without needing to ask an analyst every time.
A framework that clarifies which revenue is driven by self-serve versus direct sales. A month of active monitoring after launch. Two working sessions to review what the data is showing and make targeted adjustments. If you're raising capital, your PLG metrics and activation story are structured into a format that communicates traction clearly to investors.
Everything above at a price matched to your scope. No hourly billing. No scope creep. Everything stays with your team.
THE TIMELINE
A working session to define the self-serve journey: what does a user have to do to reach the value moment without human help? Existing instrumentation reviewed against what the PLG funnel actually requires — what fires when it should, what is missing, what is measuring the wrong thing. The activation funnel defined before any event work begins so the engineering spec is built for the right questions from the start.
The full event taxonomy documented and handed to engineering. The free-to-paid conversion dashboard built and connected to the event schema. Implementation validated before the dashboard goes live. The activation baseline measured from the first data flowing through the instrumented funnel — not from retroactive estimates. The dashboard is live and the baseline is set before the end of week two.
The 90-day measurement plan built and delivered — what to review at Day 30, 60, and 90, and what each result tells you about where to invest next. Weekly reporting template finalised so the Monday PLG review does not require assembling the report from scratch. Everything handed off in a 90-minute session with your product and growth team. Day 30 review date set with a specific agenda before the session ends.
FIT CHECK
Not sure if a self-serve motion is viable for your product? A Foundation engagement covers that question alongside competitive and go-to-market positioning. Or book a 20-minute call — if this sprint is not the right starting point, the call will clarify what is.
Jake McMahon — ProductQuant
I run this sprint myself — the funnel design, the instrumentation spec, the dashboard build, and the first cohort analysis. The most persistent mistake in PLG launches is treating the self-serve activation funnel as a simplified version of the sales-assisted onboarding. They require fundamentally different measurement. In a sales-assisted motion, the account executive is the instrumentation — they observe, they adjust, they fill the gaps. In PLG, that job goes to the data. If the events are not designed to see whether a user can reach the value moment on their own, you are not measuring the PLG motion. You are measuring activity in it.
Everything delivered in this sprint is formatted for the person who uses it. The funnel map is for your PM to use in planning. The event spec is for your engineer to implement without a follow-up call. The dashboard is for whoever runs the Monday review. No translation required between what I deliver and what your team acts on.
Teams Jake has worked with




PRICING
Exact price confirmed after a brief kickoff call — depends on your existing instrumentation and product complexity.
Book a Call to Start →Guarantee: Your team opens the dashboard on Day 1 and sees which free users are activating and which are churning silently — or the sprint cost is refunded in full. If week one reveals a blocker that makes the sprint impossible to complete as scoped, that is surfaced immediately and you pay nothing.
Three weeks from now the self-serve activation funnel is instrumented, the dashboard is live, and the first cohort data is flowing. Day 30 produces real signal — not a conversation about what to measure next time.