A Lot of Founders Are Forcing the Wrong Growth Model

One thing I keep noticing with early-stage startups:

Founders spend months optimizing growth without first asking whether the growth model itself actually fits the product.

A lot of technical founders default to Product-Led Growth because they dislike sales.

A lot of non-technical founders do the opposite and start hiring sales too early before the product is even easy to adopt.

Both approaches can become expensive very quickly.

The Real Question Isn’t “PLG or SLG?”

The better question is:

How does your product naturally get adopted?

If users can:

sign up alone
experience value quickly
onboard themselves
and start using the product independently

…then Product-Led Growth usually makes sense early on.

But if your product involves:

procurement
compliance
onboarding calls
multiple stakeholders
approvals before usage

…then Sales-Led Growth probably matters much earlier than most founders expect.

Most “Growth Problems” Are Actually Mismatch Problems

I think many startups don’t actually have:

bad products
weak sales teams
or poor marketing

They simply have a mismatch between:

the product
the customer buying behavior
and the GTM motion

That mismatch quietly burns:

time
runway
momentum
and team energy
The Mistake I See Most Often

Technical founders often assume:

“If the product is good enough, users will naturally convert.”

Non-technical founders often assume:

“We just need more outbound and more sales.”

In reality, neither works properly if the adoption path itself is broken.

Growth models are not ideology.
They’re alignment problems.

Final Thought

The startups that usually grow well are not blindly choosing PLG or SLG.

They’re paying attention to:

how users discover value
how buying decisions happen
and where friction naturally exists in the journey

I recently read a deeper breakdown on foundersbar around PLG vs SLG, and it genuinely made me rethink how many startups optimize the wrong GTM motion early on.

Leaving the article below for anyone interested:
https://foundersbar.com/articles-and-research/product-led-growth-vs-sales-led-growth