PLG CONSULTING — Diagnose and build the self-serve motion
Product-led growth means your product does a share of the selling: users sign up, find value on their own, and expand without a rep involved at every step. This engagement diagnoses where that motion is breaking, builds the data and onboarding layer it needs, and leaves your team running it without outside dependency.
Start with a focused audit. Then build the motion.
WHAT YOU HAVE AT THE END
Audit first → then build
You get a specific plan for turning your product into your best acquisition and retention channel — so growth doesn't depend entirely on sales.
FREE-TO-PAID
Thousands sign up for your free plan. Almost nobody upgrades.
We find the exact moment users hit a limit that should trigger an upgrade — and redesign that moment so upgrading feels like the obvious next step, not a paywall.
VIRAL LOOPS
Your users love the product but never invite their team.
We identify the features that naturally involve other people and build sharing prompts into those moments. Your users bring in new users because the product makes it easy.
ACTIVATION
New signups create an account and never come back.
We map the steps between signup and "aha moment" and remove every unnecessary one. Users reach value faster, so they stick around instead of bouncing.
SELF-SERVE REVENUE
Every deal requires a sales call, even for your smallest plan.
We build a self-serve upgrade path so small customers can buy without talking to anyone. Your sales team focuses on enterprise while revenue grows in the background.
Activation gaps identified and resolved — the exact step where users stalled, confirmed with data, rebuilt and measured.
At-risk accounts surfaced weeks before they cancel — CS acts on a weekly list instead of reacting to churn that already happened.
Experiment program live — hypotheses grounded in real data, results that produce clear ship-or-kill decisions every sprint.
Teams Jake has worked with




THREE SIGNS THE SELF-SERVE MOTION ISN’T WORKING
Users sign up but never reach the value moment
“We see hundreds of signups a month. But when I look at how many of them actually do the thing the product is designed to do — use the core feature, get the output — it’s a fraction. They just leave before they get there.”
Head of Product — Series A B2B SaaS
Sales carries all the revenue — the product can’t close on its own
“Every conversion still involves a demo, a rep, and a proposal. We wanted self-serve two years ago. But the product experience isn’t good enough to get a user from trial to paid without someone holding their hand through it.”
CEO — B2B SaaS, Series B
Users activate but don’t stick — churn starts inside 60 days
“The onboarding looks fine. Users get through it. But 60 days later half of them are gone and we can’t explain why. The product is doing enough to get them through the door. It’s not doing enough to make them stay.”
VP Growth — B2B SaaS
WHAT’S INCLUDED
Every step between a new signup and the moment they first experience genuine value is mapped against your real data — revealing exactly where users are dropping out and what's causing it, so your team knows where to focus before writing a single line of code.
Your current analytics setup is assessed against what a functioning PLG motion actually needs to measure — identifying the specific gaps that are making your activation and retention data unreliable or incomplete.
The specific in-product action that most strongly predicts whether a user will still be retained months later is identified from your data — giving your product team one clear, evidence-backed target to engineer toward rather than debating proxies.
A structured system for deciding which activation improvements to test first is built around your specific funnel data — so your team is always working on the highest-leverage fix rather than the loudest internal request.
The cadence, format, and agenda for your ongoing PLG review meetings is designed from the ground up — so your team spends time making decisions rather than arguing about metrics or sitting through status updates.
A written report documenting your full activation funnel with conversion rates at every step, annotated with the highest-priority drop-off points and the likely causes behind each one.
The critical gaps in your analytics setup are resolved — so your team is measuring activation, retention, and conversion against real data rather than approximations and best guesses.
Your onboarding flow is restructured to lead users directly toward the value moment your retention data has validated — removing friction, reducing time-to-value, and increasing the proportion of new users who actually make it through.
Your highest-leverage activation improvements are documented as ready-to-run experiments, scored and sequenced — so your team can start testing immediately without spending weeks in planning.
A repeatable meeting template your team uses every week to review activation metrics, assess live experiments, and decide what to focus on next — without the meeting drifting into discussion that doesn't produce a decision.
A measurement framework that gives you a continuous, real-time view of how your self-serve motion is performing — so leadership can see PLG health at a glance and your team always knows what the numbers are saying.
Every event your product tracks is documented with its name, trigger, properties, and purpose — so new engineers and analysts can understand your data model without needing to reverse-engineer it from the codebase.
The full specification for your revised onboarding flow is written up so that product and engineering can implement it without ambiguity — covering copy, step sequence, logic, and edge cases.
Reusable templates for structuring new experiments so your team can design tests that are statistically sound and clearly documented, without starting from scratch every time.
A written agenda that keeps your weekly PLG review on track — with a defined structure for reviewing metrics, discussing experiment results, and locking in the next priority before the meeting ends.
A structured session covering your full PLG framework, recorded for any new team member who joins. A month of direct access for implementation questions. Weekly review facilitation during the engagement so your team learns the rhythm by doing it. Each new experiment designed during the engagement is reviewed and refined before it runs.
Everything above for $3,497. No hourly billing. No scope creep. Everything stays with your team.
HOW IT WORKS
Funnel mapped from event data. Instrumentation gaps flagged. Activation breakpoints confirmed. Priority fixes scoped by impact and effort.
Tracking plan implemented. Onboarding rebuilt around the value moment. Dashboards live. Experiment designs drafted and ready to run.
Weekly review cadence installed. Ownership made explicit. Monthly prioritisation in place. Team keeps improving without outside input.
Audit only · or audit + build · or full ongoing advisory — choose the scope that matches where you are.
FIT CHECK
The situation
You have a product customers pay for. You either have a self-serve trial that isn’t converting well enough, or you’re building one and want to get it right before it goes live. Sales is closing deals but you want the product to carry more of the load — fewer demos, more users who get there on their own.
What you leave with
The product does more of the acquiring and retaining — sales effort goes where it actually matters.
When this doesn’t apply
If you haven’t validated that the product creates value for customers, PLG work is premature — the thing that needs fixing is the product itself. If you have no event data at all, the audit won’t produce reliable results. And if you’re enterprise-only with no intention to build a self-serve motion, this engagement isn’t the right fit.
Better starting points
For instrumentation setup before any analysis sprint, or for a focused look at churn rather than activation, get in touch and we’ll point you at the right place to start.
Jake McMahon — ProductQuant
I run this work myself. The funnel mapping, the instrumentation review, the onboarding redesign, the weekly cadence install — all of it. PLG is not a feature or a campaign. It’s a set of conditions that have to be true at the same time: users can find value without a rep, the data layer shows what’s working, and the team reviews and iterates on a regular basis. When one of those is missing, the others don’t compensate.
My background is in the behavioural and quantitative side: understanding why users make the choices they do inside a product, and building the measurement layer that makes those choices visible. Every deliverable from this engagement is formatted for the person who needs to use it — the funnel map for your PM, the tracking plan for your engineer, the experiment designs for your growth team.
Teams Jake has worked with




PRICING
Most teams start here
PLG Audit
The audit defines the implementation scope. Most teams start here before committing to the full build.
Full engagement
PLG Implementation
Scope confirmed after the audit. Monthly advisory also available for teams that want ongoing support.
On the audit: if we cannot identify and rank the activation breakpoints from your data, we will scope what's possible at no additional cost before you decide to continue. The deliverable is a clear diagnosis or a clear path forward.
Start with a two-week audit that shows exactly where sign-ups stop becoming active users — confirmed by your data, not assumptions. Then decide whether to build from there.