When Adopters Aren't Buyers
David Peterson, early Airtable employee, on the future of product-led growth
This is the core limit of pure PLG, adoption creates demand signals, but closing revenue still requires finding the person who owns budget, security approval, and cross team standardization. At Airtable, builders and operators often brought the product in first, but enterprise deals were won later by translating that grassroots usage into a formal buying process led by customer success, rev ops, and eventually sales.
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At Airtable, customer success came before sales because the company first had to understand who inside large accounts was using the product, what workflow they had built, and whether that usage was broad enough to justify an enterprise motion. Sales then became less persuasion and more procurement, security, and contract packaging.
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The most valuable adopters were often not the budget owners. Airtable spread through marketers, ops teams, researchers, and internal builders, but the people who could turn that usage into a larger contract were managers and cross functional translators who could connect tool usage to business outcomes and justify spend.
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This is why modern PLG companies build a hybrid motion. The self serve funnel acts like lead generation, then product usage data, collaboration patterns, and team spread tell success and sales when an account is ready for outreach. That model showed up at Airtable and became common across companies like Figma, Notion, and similar PLG vendors.
The direction of travel is toward product-led sales, where software still lands bottom up, but expansion is increasingly systematized. The winners will be the companies that can turn usage data into timing, package messy grassroots adoption into a clear business case, and make the jump from individual love to organizational budget feel natural.