"Be honest about what your customers need. Don't fake PLG if your customers require sales. Most companies are hybrids, and the question is not IF you need sales but WHEN."
Evidence from the Archive
SaaStr (founder); EchoSign/Adobe (former CEO)
Canva: deferred building a sales team until north of $500M in revenue because its self-serve motion was 'epic'
Portfolio company collapse: $5M ARR growing 100%+ to under $1M after firing the sales team because founders found sales 'icky'
Jason Lemkin has advised or invested in thousands of SaaS companies through SaaStr and personally built EchoSign from zero to acquisition by Adobe, giving him both pattern recognition across the industry and firsthand operator experience with sales-led GTM. Their core argument: Be honest about what your customers need. Don't fake PLG if your customers require sales.
The evidence is specific: Portfolio company collapse: $5M ARR growing 100%+ to under $1M after firing the sales team because founders found sales 'icky'. Furthermore, canva: deferred building a sales team until north of $500M in revenue because its self-serve motion was 'epic'. Slack: started entirely self-serve, but by IPO the majority of revenue came from enterprise sales.
In Jason Lemkin's own words: "The most important thing though I've found is however you get those first 10, 15, 20 customers, be honest, be honest, and if you've talked to them as a founder and you know that they need a sales type motion, they need effort to deploy it, they have questions about security, they have questions about competition, they have onboarding requirements, and you say, 'Hey, I don't like sales, so I'm going to do a PLG motion,' you'll fail." (Explaining why founders must be honest about their GTM needs.)