The Best Tools for Early-Stage PLG Startups
If you have ever worked in a startup, you know better than anyone the value of time and money. Having the right tools in place for your team will help you and the team stay on top of what matters: delivering value to your customers and driving growth. If you follow a product-led growth strategy, the right tooling is even more important. But with millions of options out there, where do you start, and which tools matter?
In this article, I dive into some of my favorite tools, each a great choice for an early-stage or growing, product-led startup. I’ve used these across customer success, growth, sales, marketing and beyond. Let’s dig in!
1. Intercom
If you want to understand what your users are doing, offer proactive support and build no-code onboarding journeys, all in the same place: Meet Intercom.
Intercom is an all-in-one customer engagement platform designed for outreach, support, user onboarding, and even light analytics.
When we started our PLG pivot, we wanted to have an easy way to get insight into who signed up for our product, where they came from, which actions they took in the product, and above all, be able to engage with them without much fuss. Intercom allowed us to do that. Here are 3 of the best features:
Series
If your go-to-market and activation strategy are product-led (PLG), you need tools that reduce the need for high-touch customer success—guiding users through critical steps in your journey, no matter how complex. The series feature in Intercom is great for that. It lets you build an entire onboarding journey, directly into your product, without having to code a single thing. It has tooltips, pop-up messages, email sequences and other “bumpers” that help put users back on track to their “aha!” moment with ease. Intercom is one of the few tools that combine onboarding with great email sequencing capabilities–it's very helpful to experiment with new messaging and iterate quickly.
Custom Event Tracking
Every product has their own activation journey, critical steps users go through–including distinct “aha!” moments–to achieve their desired outcome. Tracking users through this journey helps your product team understand how users use your product and adopt the features. In Intercom, you can set up custom events to track, which means that you can track any action a user takes in your product, from buttons they clicked to features they used. Intercom isn’t the best analytics tool, its features in this area are basic. But the event tracking tool is great–it's very similar to what Pendo or Amplitude offer, just a bit simpler and a stronger focus on engagement. Beyond getting insights, Intercom actually lets you act on these events too. You can use them to trigger emails, messages, tooltips or other actions to users. Insights into user behavior are invaluable, so once you're ready for the next step, check out more dedicated analytics tooling, such as Mixpanel.
Proactive Support
Great support reflects positively on your company. If your support team performs well in solving problems users are facing, it will reduce friction and increase chance of renewal. If you’re a small startup without dedicated support, you need help managing the influx of all those support requests. Intercom’s proactive support offers a great way to handle large volumes of data, with smart features like loading support articles directly in the chat, qualifying requests and auto-assigning it to the right team member, or even using a chat bot that can answer questions without the need for a person to be involved.
In short, Intercom is a great, feature-rich tool that scales with your needs. Yes, there are better tools out there for each of these topics individually. But if you are getting started and want an affordable, simple, all-in-one solution, Intercom is the place to start. If I convinced you, do make sure you sign up for the startup plan. If not, a plan that includes the features described here will cost you as much as your AWS bill.
2. Framer
For startups strapped for time and money, prioritizing a website over shipping your first product is a hard sell. But let’s be honest—a beautiful website can be the difference between being noticed or looking like a group of amateurs building an obscure tool in a garage box somewhere in Amsterdam.
At NEXT, we had limited design resources available when we decided to revamp our website. This meant we had to use a tool that let us build a beautifully designed, fast, SEO-optimized website, ideally by a non-designer. Framer checked all our boxes.
Originally a prototyping tool, Framer pivoted to a full-on web design tool. And although Framer is geared towards designers, it’s easy to use by anyone who’s willing to learn. I took on the challenge to build our website (nextapp.co). I had zero design skills and never used design tools before, besides for commenting on other people’s designs. Our website was up-and-running within a week. And it wasn’t a crappy one-page website either. It had a blog, a pricing page, animations, it was fast, SEO-optimized, and had everything you’d expect from a website designed by a pro – which, if I may remind you, I wasn’t.
And best of all? It’s affordable to get started. For €20 per month, we had an amazing website running in a week.
The only downside? It doesn’t have a cookie banner that comes out of the box with script blocking. But hey, if that’s all, I’ll forgive them.
3. Umami
As an Amsterdam-based startup, we have to comply to GDPR, which tells us that for web analytics tools like Google Analytics, we have to ask explicit consent–yes, that’s right, with the cookie banner that Framer doesn’t offer.
We started with Google Analytics, installed via Google Tag Manager. And it worked great, until we noticed that half of our website visitors didn’t want our cookies and the other half used their browser’s cookie blocking feature. We were left with a fraction of users in our analytics dashboard–pretty depressing. And worst of all, we had to integrate with an unappealing, yet compliant, cookie banner on our website. All that Framer beauty in the bin.
We needed an alternative analytics tool. One that didn’t use cookies, didn’t need an annoying cookie banner, was lightweight, and offered all essential capabilities of GA4. And there it was: Umami! Funny name? Yes, I know, but it’s great!
We self-host Umami, which means it’s free, gives full control over the data, and can conveniently be accessed on your own domain. What I love the most is their easy-to-use “Events” feature. What a pain this was in Google-land. We wanted to track which of our buttons were clicked the most on our website to understand how to improve out CTAs. All it needed was a simple code override in Framer and it shows them instantly.
4. Leadfeeder
Once we had our website up-and-running and our basic analytics in place, we were excited! Until we realized, we had no idea who was visiting our website. Did our ad campaigns pay off and were all those visitors our ICPs with signup intent? Or did we only reach Candy Crush players who accidentally clicked one of our lost ads from Google’s weird algorithms? The answer to our curiosity? Leadfeeder.
Leadfeeder is a tool you can install on your website and will track who visits your website. They use various ways to figure out information about your visitors, like IP tracking and database matching. You have to be careful with how you install it–read: make sure you stick to GDPR rules. But once set up correctly, it worked surprisingly well. It gave us great insights into the companies that visited our website, and sometimes even pointed us to the right leads. It helped us improve our ads, content strategy and messaging on our website. It’s not as thorough as Lead Forensics, but if you’re early stages, Leadfeeder works wonders and as a lot more affordable.
5. Hubspot CRM
Staying on top of your leads and customers is one of the basics you need to get right. The last thing you want is to lose track of when customers are renewing, who the decision-makers are, what the deal-size is, and what conversations you’ve had. Hubspot makes it easy to track these things and share them with your team. It’s not an exciting tool per se, but what it does, it does very well. It’s flexible, you can customize the phases of your customer journey or sales pipeline, and best of all: it’s free! That’s right, free.
What I like the most about Hubspot, is that it integrates seamlessly with Gmail via a browser extension. Once you’ve installed the extension, it will BCC your emails to Hubspot, seamlessly connecting conversations to your contacts and accounts. Hubspot helps bring structure and stay on top of your sales and CS funnel. It's a great place to start if you have no CRM or dedicated Customer Success platform, like GainSight or Totango, in place just yet. Once you start to scale, I'd check out these last two.
6. Loom
I wanted to limit this list to 5 tools. Five is a nice number. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to put Loom on the list. Loom is a tool that lets you record short videos. It’s great for preparing short introduction videos of your product, sending personal messages to users, instructions, sales outreach and even internal communication.
I used to be camera shy. I hated hearing my voice after I recorded myself, it felt weird. But when you’re in Customer Success at a startup, Loom videos will become your new currency. They’ve brought an amazing amount of value and we’ve used them across our entire user journey, from sales, to onboarding and beyond. You can start for free, but you’ll have to upgrade to lift the viewer and 5-minute limit.
Honorable mention: ChatGPT
I did not want to add ChatGPT, because you likely already use it every day. If not, sign up today and make a new friend. ChatGPT is great for refining your emails, demo scripts, pitches, LinkedIn ads, SEO strategy, Framer code overrides, setting up Umami, conducting competitor research, creating Python scripts to automate basic things, or having late-night conversations.
The best tools don’t make you think
The best tools for us may not be the best tools for you. Take this list as inspiration, not the absolute truth. Keep in mind, the best tools are easy to use and don’t make you over-think.
The ones I listed in this post have had a huge impact on how we worked as a company. They stuck with us from the early days when we were just a few people, until today as we’re serving tons of large enterprise customers.
What’s Next?
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