The PLG gap nobody named
An essay for anyone running a long sales cycle with a nagging feeling that nobody can find them.
An enterprise-only sales motion can hide a missing self-serve entry for years, because everyone inside the company is busy making the existing sales cycle work better. When the people who use your product every day have no way to find it or try it on their own, you have a go-to-market gap, and it needs to be named as one before anyone builds anything.
You can't see a missing door from inside a twelve-month sales cycle, so the diagnosis has to come before the build, and PLG in this case means an entry point rather than a rebrand.
The business everyone could see
When I joined Properti as Head of Product & Design, the company had only ever sold to enterprise and mid-market real estate franchises. Deals took twelve to eighteen months to close, and onboarding took another two to four weeks after the contract was signed. It was a serious business with serious customers, and nearly every process in the building had been tuned to serve that motion well.
Nobody asked me to build a new product. The sensible brief, the one I would have written for myself if I'd been handed the job cold, was to smooth out onboarding and keep the customers we already had. That's a safe bet. I'd have nodded it through in a planning meeting and gone to get lunch.
The gap nobody could see
The thing that took me a while to notice was who wasn't in the room. An individual agent could not find Properti on their own. There was no free version to try, and no page where a curious agent could poke at it at nine at night after a long day of open homes. If an agent at a franchise liked what we did, they waited for head office to sign. If an agent outside a franchise wanted us, there was simply no way in.
Nobody inside the company was being careless. Sales measured deals and customer success measured onboarding, and product listened hardest to the customers who were already paying. Every dashboard described the people who had already made it through the front door, so the missing door never showed up on any of them.
How you name a problem nobody has said out loud
The hardest part was the sentence. "We should have a free tool" sounds like a feature request, and feature requests go into the backlog to die quietly with a priority label. So I wrote it down as a go-to-market problem instead. The only way into the product was a year-long sales cycle, which meant the company had no way of being found by the individual people who used it every day.
Once it was phrased that way, it stopped being my pet idea and became a hole in the business that anyone could look at and argue with. That shift mattered more than any mock-up I could have brought to the meeting.
What I built instead of waiting for a brief
I didn't wait for someone to hand me a brief, because the gap was exactly the thing nobody was going to write one for. I conceived Agent Grader as the product-led entry point and built it from scratch. It's a free scoring tool for Australian real estate agents with a path in that takes about two minutes. An agent gets a useful read on how they're tracking, and Properti gets a relationship with someone it previously had no way to reach, with a layer of data building up underneath every score.
There's a pipeline and a scoring engine behind it, and I'll spare you the diagrams, which is a kindness to both of us. The part worth talking about is the decision that came first, when the company needed a front door before anyone agreed one was missing.
What happened after launch
Agent Grader went from zero to live in beta in eight months, with a scoring engine, SMS sign-in and Stripe payments, across tens of thousands of agents. It was validated at TechFest and it's still live in beta, with more engineering work ahead. It also opened a revenue channel that didn't exist when I walked in, inside a company that had only ever sold one way.
How to spot a go-to-market gap nobody has named
- 1.Try to find your product the way one individual user would, with no referral and no sales call, and write down exactly where you get stuck.
- 2.Compare the person who uses the product every day with the person who signs the contract. When they're different people, ask whether the daily user has any way in on their own.
- 3.Read the backlog for the request that keeps coming back in different clothes. Five versions of "can we try it first" usually point to one missing entry point.
- 4.Rewrite the idea as a go-to-market sentence before you pitch a build. If it only makes sense as a feature, it probably is one.
- 5.Build the smallest entry that gives an individual something useful within minutes, and make sure it feeds the existing sales motion rather than competing with it.
FAQ
What is a PLG gap in an enterprise sales motion?
A PLG gap is the absence of any way for an individual user to find or try the product without going through a sales team. In an enterprise business it usually looks normal, because the whole company has been built around long deals, so nobody reads the missing entry point as a problem.
Why do teams miss it for years?
Teams miss it because every metric they track describes customers who have already come in through sales. People who bounced off the lack of a trial never appear in the pipeline or the churn report, so the gap leaves no trace on the numbers anyone reviews.
How do you tell a go-to-market gap from a feature request?
A feature request makes the product better for people who already use it, and a go-to-market gap changes who can reach the product in the first place. If the idea only makes sense once you describe it in terms of who can find you and how, you're looking at a go-to-market problem.
What does a self-serve wedge look like when the core product is still enterprise?
A self-serve wedge is a small, free or cheap tool that gives one person real value in minutes and sits beside the enterprise product without replacing it. At Properti that was Agent Grader, a two-minute scoring tool for individual agents that also gave the company a way to meet people its sales cycle couldn't reach.
When should you not force PLG?
Don't force it when the person using the product has no power to adopt it alone, or when the product can't give anyone something useful without a proper implementation. In those cases a free tier mostly creates support tickets and disappointed sign-ups, and the better work is usually in the sales motion you already have.
Close
The decision behind this is written up in Identifying the PLG gap nobody asked about, and the product itself lives at Agent Grader. If you're inside a long sales cycle and suspect the people who'd love your product have no way of finding it, I'd like to hear how you're thinking about it. My inbox is cam@cameronvaea.com.