The company's first paying customer was using the product for a casual fantasy football league. However, this user loved the product so much he recommended it to his HR team, revealing a high-value enterprise use case the founders hadn't initially targeted.
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For Polly's horizontal product, the founder learned the most critical mistake was assuming every user should be a paying user. The key to success was distinguishing the vast user base from the specific buyer persona, a trivial-sounding but fundamental insight that guided their entire strategy.
For over a year, Mercor focused 100% of its resources on product and customer experience, forgoing a sales team. This deep focus on flagship customers in a tight-knit industry (AI labs) generated powerful word-of-mouth that fueled its historic growth.
After realizing most users creating casual polls for lunch spots would never pay, Polly found its premium market. They targeted users responsible for expensive, high-stakes events like company all-hands and sales kickoffs, where the value of instant feedback was undeniable and justified the cost.
Despite a clunky, multi-screen setup requiring users to copy and paste API tokens, 80% of early adopters completed the process. This incredible tolerance for friction was an undeniable signal that they were solving a desperate need in the market.
In industries with long sales cycles like healthcare, early traction isn't about dozens of logos. For YC's Demo Day, Aegis focused on securing just one large medical billing company as a happy, paying customer. Deep engagement—evidenced by data sharing and product co-development—is a powerful early signal for investors.
As a freemium product with millions of users, Polly struggled to identify its true buyers. By adding simple "book a demo" links and feedback request emails into the onboarding flow, they generated hundreds of valuable conversations that clarified their monetization path and ideal customer profile.
A common PLG pitfall is assuming the user base will naturally springboard into enterprise deals. Often, the enterprise buyer is a different person with different problems. This oversight can cost companies years, as they have to build a second, separate sales motion from scratch.
Fal employs a product-led sales motion where enterprise deals originate from self-serve usage. The sales team is automatically alerted when a pay-as-you-go account's spending crosses a specific threshold ($300/day). This signal triggers outreach to convert the high-usage account into a larger, committed annual contract, creating an efficient and scalable GTM.
Instead of trying to monetize every user, Polly strategically views casual, free creators as 'pollinators.' These users introduce the app into an organization and distribute it widely. This creates top-of-funnel awareness which eventually puts the product in front of high-value 'flowers' (buyers) who will pay.