MKT1 Courses

Choosing the Right Growth Lever: PLG, CLG, ABX?

Emily Kramer

Founder @ MKT1 Newsletter, B2B Marketing Advisor & Investor

Leah Tharin

Product & Growth executive / PLG Advisor

Mallory Contois

Head of Community @ Mercury

Assess your product, market, and audience o identify whether PLG, CLG, or ABX is your primary path to growth.

Determine which growth engine fits your business model

Inside stories from high-growth B2B startups who've successfully implemented these strategies.

Hear real-world growth case studies

Understand how to adjust your playbook to handle changes in how companies find and buy products.

Learn how to adapt to decline of inbound & outbound

_____________07:00 PM (19:00), GMT+2, five sessions over 2.5 Weeks_____________ The top quartile SaaS companies between 5 and 20m in revenue are growing over 70% year over year, with an 8 month CAC payback, 110% Net dollar retention while having an 85% Gross Margin with an average Annual Revenue of over 250’000$. (Source: Growth Unhinged 2023 Report) And at the heart of most them sits a deep understanding of Product-led Growth. * How do we in B2B adress the growing problem of everyone asking for an improved buying experience and self-serve? * How do you package your offering with freemium, trial and/or interactive demo? * How do we activate individuals, teams and accounts in B2B as cost efficient as possible to drive our pipeline? * How does Product-led Growth work with an existing Sales motion? * How do we structure a strategy to bring product-led growth into our business? Leah Tharin brought product-led growth as an operative, executive, and advisor to dozens of scale up companies to optimize their user acquisition, retention, and monetization. She's recognized as an Industry leader on the topic having written some of the most referenced Product-led Growth &amp; Sales material to date. Learn how to structure a (product-led) growth strategy that works for your business. It is designed for leaders from all functions who want to understand and not just blindly execute. The course runs over 2.5 weeks (5 live recorded Zoom classes). All sessions have prerecorded material for you to study in your own time, the live sessions are solely focussed on world-class guest speakers, collaborative group exercises and your questions. You can expect per week about 2-3 hours of study for the asynchronous material at your own pace + 60-75 minutes per live session. Over 20 Guest speakers from past cohorts for example :* Adam Fishman, SVP new products @ Mozilla, Investor &amp; Advisor* John Cutler, ex- Evangelist @ Amplitude &amp; Toast* Itxaso Del Palacio, General Partner @ Notion VC* Benjamin Lamson, Head of Paperspace Revenue @ DigitalOcean* Casey Hill, Sr. Growth Manager @ Active Campaign* Henrique Cruz, Head of Growth @ Rows.com* Sara Gattoni, Senior Lead Growth PM @ Lokalise* Andrew Davies, CMO @ Paddle...and many more This course is not a good fit for: * Companies pre product market fit which are extremely early in their journey. * Non-software or D2C companies * Highly regulated industries that deal with government contracts

How experienced Growth operators use PLG in B2B SaaS

…the definition of PLG…where PLG sits in the market…when you might do PLG…PLG vs Saled-led Growth…Enterprise vs. Midmarket vs. Micro businesses…Best Conditions

What is product-led Growth

…freemiums…trials…reverse-trials…case studies, examples in the wild

Freemium, trial, reverse-trial

…understanding customer success stages…segmenting your users into ICPs (Ideal customer profiles)…turning funnels into loops, focussing on what matters

Defining customer success & ICPs

…separating the creation from capturing value…smart goal setting company wide

PLG strategy and goal setting

…Classical vs Growth Teams…(Growth) Product Skills…Your first Growth hire

"Growth” teams & PMs

…What is Product-led Sales…Shifting your perspective from users to teams… Product-qualified Accounts &amp; Leads…Expansion Revenue

Combining PLG with Sales: PLS

Course syllabus

We use the majority of the time to discuss as a group your specific challenges and questions you had from the async learning materials and to address Q&amp;A questions.

6 x one - hour long sessions with Leah

Before every session you get ~30min videos to ease you into the topics including some interactive exercises for you to prepare beforehand.

Asynchronous learning material

Miss a session? Not a problem, you will have access immediately afterwards.

All sessions are recorded

Course schedule

Senior level product, growth &amp; marketing leaders in B2B who want to understand and leverage PLG as a distribution model to optimize growth.

Ideal for companies in B2B with some revenue traction post product-market fit.

GTM leaders wanting to understand why PLG is disrupting many classical distribution models.

Who is this course for

What you’ll learn

<ul><li>Review the core principles of product-led growth (PLG), beyond just trials and freemium</li></ul> <ul><li>Look under the hood of leading industry examples</li></ul>

Understand PLG and its impact on B2B growth initiatives

<ul><li>How to objectively measure customer success and operationalize it with meaningful, outcome-driven team goals</li></ul> <ul><li>How to establish growth in your organization that sticks with growth teams and culture</li></ul>

Increase the efficiency of your distribution model

<ul><li>How to move from activating individuals to teams and subsequently to accounts.</li></ul>

Individual vs. Team vs. Account Activation

<ul><li>How to find, define, and identify meaningful ICPs (Ideal customer profile)</li></ul> <ul><li>Driving them through our acquisition funnel and retaining them for long-term revenue</li></ul>

Find ICPs in Product-led Growth

<ul><li>How to combine the best from PLG and Sales-led Growth: Product-led Sales</li></ul> <ul><li>How to apply the principles of customer success signals, and their ICPs to qualify deals and drive efficiency in mid-market / enterprise segments.</li></ul>

Combine sales and Product-led Growth: Product-led Sales

<ul><li>Create a long-lasting Strategy to acquire customers while they are small and grow into bigger clients with time.</li></ul> <ul><li>Creating the conditions to have a product that grows with your customers</li></ul>

Drive expansion revenue through PLG

<ul><li>Community sessions to network and discuss with other cohort participants</li></ul> <ul><li>Access a dedicated Discord community after the course</li></ul>

Interactive community & special material

Understand Product-led Growth to formulate a strategy that includes PLG without wrecking your existing business.

PLG Cohort 8

PLG Cohort 7

Cohort 9

Is your app getting traction and showing the signs of a product-market fit? Do you have dozens of ideas, features, and marketing tactics to test now? During the course you'll discover the key concepts of product-led and marketing-led growth as well as ready-to-apply tactics that will help you grow your app business. You'll explore all the app marketing channels and PLG mechanisms worth focusing on and prioritize your work on them

Take a structured, full-funnel approach to growing your app's userbase & revenue

<ul><li>You'll examine the performance of your app across the whole funnel to see if it's ready to scale</li><li>You'll build a hierarchy of metrics and break down your goals to find the most impactful levers and growth opportunities</li><li>You'll define how to measure success and calculate the impact of various growth scenarios and marketing activities.</li></ul>

Your app is getting traction, now what?

<ul><li>Plan tactics to not only get a user to download your app but to also become active in it</li><li>What is good retention, how to measure it, and how to keep it moving forward</li><li>Will your product benefit from viral loops? Explore different types of virality, and ways to build them into your product</li></ul>

Activation, retention, virality, and their importance for sustainable app growth

<ul><li>Analyze all revenue-related metrics and find the parts of the revenue funnel with the highest impact</li><li>Plan and prioritize experiments aimed at increasing trial opt-ins, upgrades, renewals, or resurrecting paying customers</li><li>Review your pricing &amp; packaging strategy to make sure users get the value of your paid offer</li></ul>

Improve your app's monetization and LTV:CAC ratio for sustainable growth

<ul><li>Paid user acquisition on mobile: search ads, social media ads, influencer marketing, and others</li><li>Organic acquisition: ASO for AppStore and Google Play</li><li>How to test creatives in the everchanging landscape: the What and the How</li><li>Non-obvious tips for optimizing paid campaigns' performance</li></ul>

How to acquire new users: which channels to focus on

We'll meet for live workshops at 17.00 - 18.30 CET. We'll go through the material, do light exercises in breakout rooms, and I'll answer all your pressing questions during the Q&amp;A at the end of each workshop.

Five live workshops

Throughout the whole course and after it's over I'll be answering all your questions in our Slack channel.

AMA / Q&A

In between workshops you'll be looking into data, your users' needs, and work on the strategy, tactics, and roadmap for growing your app. I'll be happy to give feedback on your projects!

Weekly projects

Founders (Seed-Series A/B) who want&nbsp;to learn the mechanics and design a winning strategy for scaling the app's revenue and acquisition

Paid UA, ASO, CRM experts trying to break into growth roles, build a holistic approach to marketing, and work closer with product teams

Product Managers who want to understand the value of marketing and approach growth not only through the lens of product features and UX 🚀

Marketing executives turning a mobile app into an extra revenue stream or transitioning from digital marketing into mobile 🎯

Other professionals working in app growth teams and interested in learning about app growth, user acquisition, retention, and monetization

This course is for:

During this course you will:

<ul><li>Break down your growth goals and KPIs into actionable metrics&nbsp;and measure the impact of moving each of them. </li><li>Assess the growth of your app and identify your biggest growth opportunities.</li></ul> Bonus: Templates for funnel analysis, scenario

Decide which parts of the app growth funnel and methods to focus on

<ul><li>Learn the paid and organic strategies to drive efficient user acquisition.</li><li>Apply the best practices, current trends (like UGC), and creative experimentation strategy.</li><li>Learn how to optimize the channels' performance in the post-IDFA era.</li></ul> Bonus: Channel matrix template

Develop your user acquisition strategy and define the marketing channels' mix

<ul><li>Examine the potential of viral and content loops for decreasing your CACs.</li><li>Review the state of your activation and retention to make sure they contribute to user and revenue growth.</li></ul> Bonus: Templates for engineering your product viral and referral loops

Dive into product-led growth and learn how to integrate additional growth loops into your app and power up your user acquisition

<ul><li>Build and prioritize a roadmap of monetization experiments to scale revenue.</li><li>Optimize your paywall, pricing, packaging, and discount strategy to increase conversion rates.</li><li>Apply top tactics for revenue growth.</li></ul> Bonus: Experiment launch and analysis templates, interview guides.

Maximize subscriber conversion, retention, and increase LTVs
 

Apply Product-led & Marketing-led Growth principles. No 'hacks' but a structured approach to growth by creating value for users and business

Ekaterina Gamsriegler

Cohort 7

Cohort 8

As traditional growth channels become more expensive and less effective—rising CAC, ad fatigue, and impersonal automation—brands need new ways to drive sustainable growth. Community-led growth (CLG) isn’t just a marketing tactic—it’s the key to sustainable brand affinity, word-of-mouth acquisition, and long-term customer retention. In today’s landscape, customers are increasingly skeptical of ads, burned out by impersonal automation, and looking for connection. Brands that build thriving communities don’t just sell products—they create movements. This course will teach you how to harness human behavior, psychological triggers, and strategic frameworks to turn your most engaged users into brand evangelists — without relying on expensive paid marketing. Why Community-Led Growth?A well-built CLG strategy leads to: ⚪ Increased Brand Loyalty: Customers feel a sense of belonging and become repeat buyers.⚪ Stronger Emotional Connection: A community fosters attachment, making customers less likely to switch to competitors.⚪ Higher Organic Growth: Community-driven customers refer others, reducing marketing costs and increasing conversion rates.⚪ Resilience to Negative Experiences: A strong brand-community relationship makes customers more forgiving of setbacks. Whether you're a founder, marketer, or community leader, this course will give you the playbook to design a CLG motion that fuels sustainable growth and retention. In this course you'll learn how to: ✅ Design a CLG strategy that aligns with business goals and drives measurable impact✅ Track and present key ROI metrics (CAC reduction, retention impact, revenue influence)✅ Position CLG as a scalable, repeatable growth engine—not a “nice-to-have”✅ Identify and empower your most engaged users to drive organic acquisition Why Learn From Me?I’ve spent over a decade designing growth loops, engagement ecosystems, and community-led strategies across multiple industries.I’ve tested these strategies as an operator inside startups and large brands, as well as founding my own $300k ARR community, learning how to adapt CLG to different business models, goals, and challenges.In this course, I’ll equip you to do the same—whether you’re launching a brand-new community or optimizing an existing one.

Supercharge your brand’s growth and retention through natural human behavior.

<ul><li>Overview of community-led growth tactics and strategies</li><li>Case studies of successful CLG implementations across B2B and B2C</li></ul>

Foundations of Community-Led Growth


<ul><li>Driving brand loyalty and community engagement</li><li>Psychological frameworks that prompt desired user actions</li></ul>

Leveraging User Psychology for Growth Loops


<ul><li>Community surfaces and types</li><li>Paid vs free community models</li><li>Software tools to support community growth</li></ul>

Implementation Strategies


<ul><li>We'll meet for 15 min to discuss your current problem set live, then you'll do some asynchronous work which I'll provide feedback on to help you make real progress</li></ul>

Your current problem set


What we'll cover:

Fundamentals of Community-Led Growth<ul><li>Overview of CLG tactics and strategies for user acquisition and retention</li><li>Case studies of successful community-led brands</li><li>Measuring success and results</li></ul>

Monday: Live session


Leveraging Psychology for Growth<ul><li>Tactics for brand loyalty and hype creation</li><li>Psychological frameworks for building engaged, sustainable community loops </li><li>Psychological frameworks for encouraging desired user actions</li></ul>

Tuesday: Live session


<ul><li>A 15 minute slot to discuss specific challenges and problem sets to you and your role, 1:1</li></ul>

Wednesday: Office hours


Implementation Strategies<ul><li>Community surfaces and types</li><li>Paid vs. free community models</li><li>Software tools to support community growth</li></ul>

Friday: Live session


<ul><li>Submit your plan or ideas for how to implement CLG in your work</li><li>Receive async feedback, ideas, and suggestions within a week</li></ul>

Week 2: Personalized feedback


Schedule

Growth Marketers &amp; OperatorsDiscover sustainable acquisition channels and funnels beyond paid ads.

Community Leads &amp; CX LeadersStrengthen existing engagement, prove ROI and connect community to business metrics.

Founders &amp; Product LeadersActivate effective and sustainable growth engines with limited resources.

This course is designed specifically for...

You'll leave this course with:

We’ll analyze CLG approaches across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C models so you can design a strategy that directly impacts user acquisition, retention, and revenue growth.

A Community-Led Growth Strategy Built for Scale and Impact
 

Community isn’t just about gathering people—it’s about understanding what makes them stay, contribute, and evangelize. You’ll learn to:<ul><li>Build engagement loops that feel natural, not forced</li><li>Leverage social proof, reciprocity, and identity psychology to drive organic referrals</li></ul>

Psychological Frameworks To Drive Loyalty & Advocacy

Free vs. paid communities—how to determine which is right for your modelHow to justify CLG investment to leadership by linking community growth to reduced churn &amp; marketing spendRevenue opportunities within CLG (sponsorships, upsells, partnerships)

A Monetization & Growth Roadmap

We’ll cover:<ul><li>The best platforms for building and managing a community</li><li>Automation &amp; engagement tools to increase retention and referrals</li><li>CLG analytics &amp; reporting frameworks to showcase success internally</li></ul>

The Right Tools to Scale & Measure CLG 

After the live sessions, you’ll submit a proposal for how to implement CLG in your role. I’ll provide feedback on:<ul><li>What’s working &amp; what needs adjustment</li><li>Personalized recommendations to optimize engagement &amp; retention</li><li>Guidance sell CLG's impact internally</li></ul>

Personalized Feedback on Your CLG Strategy

Turn community into your biggest growth engine—build, scale, and prove the ROI of CLG to drive loyalty, retention, and organic acquisition.

5x startup operator @ Linkedin, Pinterest, Cameo, Metafy & Mercury

April Cohort

Growth leaders and teams are expected to bring impactful results at high speed. However, in that high-paced environment, it's easy to get into a trap of constant local optimization. 👉 What is good for USER is good for BUSINESS. The biggest changes that drove product Growth for companies like Miro, Notion, Figma didn't happen due to local changes. These products combined both components: high-quality user experience and ethical PLG strategies. 📌 Growth teams face many challenges like: — Getting caught in a trap of local optimization and constant A/B testing with no impact?— How do we uncover new growth opportunities to impact Activation, Habit-forming, and Upgrades?— What behavioral principles can help create the most user-friendly and ethical solutions?— Finally, how do we receive a buy-in to implement meaningful product changes and drive Product-led Growth? I've been facing these challenges myself and collecting knowledge for years to address them. 📌 What prepared me to share this knowledge with you: 1.&nbsp;For 6+ years at Miro, I covered all parts of the Growth funnel holistically&nbsp;(Activation, Engagement, Monetisation, Community-led Growth).2. As a part of Growth Leadership at Miro, scaled from 1 Growth team (5 people) to a stream of 15 teams (170+ people).3. As a founder of Growthmates, collected knowledge directly from 20+ leaders from Notion, Canva, Dropbox, and4. As a Growth advisor, helped 10+ B2B and B2C companies in SaaS, Collaboration, Education, AI, and other sectors. 📌 What to expect on this course: ✦ Take an end-to-end look at 3 key Growth flows: Activation, Habit-forming, Upgrades ✦ Apply Behavioural science methods and uncover new opportunities through a user-centric approach ✦ Turn your ideas into roadmap by applying 5-step Growth Flow review and prioritisation framework 🎯 As a result — you will create a diverse roadmap that will translate your ideas into Quick Wins, Meaningful shifts, and Big bets that you can present and get a buy-in. 📕 Resources that you'll get as a part of the course:— 30+ product flows for Onboarding, Adoption, and Upgrade experience from Notion, Canva, Dropbox, and more— User Research Pack for Growth initiatives (Survey templates, Interview guides, and more)— Live time with Kate Syuma on sessions to receive feedback ——— ❗️ This course is NOT about abstract growth strategies. It's about real product examples, behavioral science knowledge, and PRACTICE that you can combine with your real work project. — Products that use only Sales-led model (course is about Product-led Growth)&nbsp;— Too early-stage products in the development phase (course is about your flows to analyse and improve).&nbsp;&nbsp;— If you want t learn deep Data analytics&nbsp;(course is more about Qualitative user-centric approach)

Create your Product-led growth roadmap — from Quick wins to Big bets.

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

📅 Join on Tuesdays for Live sessions

Bring your real growth challenge with Activation, Habit-forming, or Upgrades, and work on it by applying the frameworks shared in the course.

✏️ Work on your work-related projects during the week

Get feedback directly from me on Q&amp;A parts of live sessions, as well as from a small group of peers who are solving similar challenges — let's learn from each other!

🙌  Get feedback on your work

PMs and Product Designers working on Growth — apply frameworks and feedback to produce a roadmap to immediately take into work

"Growth team of one" — Product and Design Leaders who drive several parts of growth simultaneously (like Activation, Habit-forming, Upgrades

Growth Marketers, User Researchers, and other Product members who want to deepen their knowledge of PLG practices and Behavioural psychology

What you’ll get out of this course

You will create a draft of the roadmap and will apply the "3 types of initiatives" framework to articulate the value of Product-led Growth and get stakeholders' buy-in.

Create a diverse growth roadmap to get buy-in

You will get feedback from me directly and like-minded peers on the growth flow you're working on.

Get direct feedback on Growth flows improvements

User-centricity requires understanding how people behave and make decisions. You'll get access to 30 main behavioral principles; we'll practice 3 Behavioral methods — all of which are complemented with real SaaS examples.

Practice key Behavioral psychology principles

You'll practice using my 5-step Growth Framework to take a helicopter view of one of the flows you'd like to excel in —activation, Habit-forming, or paths to Upgrade. After the course, you'll learn how to incorporate this approach into your work.

Take an end-to-end look at 3 key Growth flows: Activation, Habit forming, Upgrade

For your Project work, you will apply this knowledge on 3-5 critical steps of the flows by combining Growth frameworks and Behavioural science.

Uncover new changes to impact Activation, Habit-forming, Upgrades

To inform your roadmap, you'll get 30+ flows of Onboarding, Habit forming, and Upgrade examples from the best B2B and B2C SaaS, learning how they address Activation, Habit-forming, and Upgrade experience.

🎁 Access to 30+ Growth flows visual base with best practices

Combine behavioral science and proven growth strategies to create a diverse roadmap, get buy-in, and drive impact with high quality.

Lightning Lessons

Choosing the Right Growth Lever: PLG, CLG, ABX?