Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast · Louis Grenier | Marketing & Branding

25 Years of (Product-Led) Growth: Actionable B2B Lessons From Leah Tharin

·1 hr 2 min·2 clips

Product-led growth means your product itself becomes your primary marketing channel

Leah Tharin is a product-led growth advisor for B2B companies with 25 years of experience, previously working with smallPDF which had 50+ million monthly active users. She also runs a Substack with over 20,000 subscribers and teaches cohort-based PLG courses. The episode tackles the confusion created by marketing acronyms like PLG, ABM, and ROI that describe concepts predating the terminology. Tharin reveals that no business metric has universal agreement in the industry—not even revenue—because participants leave meetings thinking they discussed the same thing when they actually defined terms differently. She defines product-led growth as distributing products by enabling customers to self-serve value before monetization, prioritizing both time and money as currencies customers spend. Sales-led growth involves human-assisted evaluation and works best for complex, niche products in immature categories where self-service is impractical. Using board game complexity ratings (1-5 scale), she illustrates how heavy games requiring 4-10 hours to learn parallel enterprise software needing sales support. Tharin explains that price depends more on replaceability than value—her cleaning lady saves hours but can't charge thousands because alternatives exist easily. Sales-led approaches require charging high prices to offset expensive salespeople, but product-led companies can undercut them when self-service is possible. Her typical clients are B2B SaaS companies with $1-100 million revenue experiencing rising customer acquisition costs and longer payback periods. YouTube advertising CPMs tripled from $6 to $18 between 2021-2023, forcing companies to differentiate rather than compete on horizontal positioning. She ran a board game store in Switzerland that achieved a 4.9-star rating by curating only highly-rated games, categorizing by use case, and offering demo games—applying PLG principles to physical retail. The store never required advertising because customers recommended it organically. Her positioning targeted people who wanted expert curation rather than lowest prices, allowing premium pricing. The conversation style is direct and profanity-laced, with both host and guest rejecting industry jargon in favor of first-principles thinking. Tharin emphasizes honesty in customer relationships and verticalization as the future market trend. This episode suits B2B marketers, product managers, and founders frustrated by rising acquisition costs who want practical frameworks beyond buzzwords. It also benefits physical retail operators seeking differentiation strategies applicable outside software.

As heard by us

A blunt teardown of niche use cases, PLG, and CAC payback.

The episode uses a 17th-century cottage in rural Ireland as an unexpected frame for a blunt business teardown, and that contrast gives it real bite.

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Why you'd press play

You want the blunt version of why broad B2B growth is getting harder to win.

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