Our 1-year anniversary of going freemium: Surprises and advice

Hard to believe, but it’s been a year since we launched Navattic’s freemium plan.

For anyone thinking about going PLG or already has a PLG plan and wants to compare, we wanted to share how the past year went.

Here’s what surprised us and what we’d recommend to anyone thinking about introducing a freemium motion for their SaaS company.

When we first started thinking about freemium, we assumed users would need to build a fully fleshed-out interactive demo to get buy-in from their team.

So we:

• Gave users a bunch of demo customization options
• Let users create multiple-flow demos
• Surfaced robust templates that they could copy and edit

The reality was that all people wanted was to see how Navattic worked. They didn’t need to test the more advanced features upfront.

Too much optionality caused two problems early on:

1. People got overwhelmed and just gave up building a simple demo
2. We gave away too much and made it harder to give people a reason to talk to our sales team (who could help guide users about what advanced features made the most sense for their use case).

How we addressed it

Now, the freemium plan focuses on what you need to build a good first demo draft: HTML Captures, AI Copilot, Capture editing, and publishing features.

This meant removing more in-depth features like templates or multi-branching demos.

Limiting users to building a single, simple demo stopped users from overthinking and got them to our activation moment (publishing a demo) much faster.

It also helped tee up sales when users needed guidance around these more in-depth features.

Since there are so many different use cases for interactive demos and Navattic, we've found it's still helpful for users to talk to sales so they share what features or plans make sense for their use case, vs just upgrading themselves.

We conducted extensive beta testing ahead of our launch, and thought we had onboarding in a pretty good spot.

We created a multi-step checklist to make it crystal clear what users had to do to get their demo up and running.

We made big strides from the early days of our beta launch and consistently got to a 33% activation rate (meaning one in three users would publish an interactive demo).

But over this year, we realized that users have less patience for learning a new tool, especially when they’re used to AI-first experiences where they see instant value.

Through conversations with real freemium users and observing their interactions, we realized our onboarding process still required too many upfront decisions from the user.

How we addressed it

First, we narrowed the setup process down to just a few steps. We made it obvious that the very first thing they had to do was to install the Navattic Chrome Extension and remove all other distractions.

We also created a short interactive demo that walked freemium users through the setup process. We’d received feedback that Navattic terminology was a little tough to get the hang of, and used that demo in our onboarding emails to explain what different terminology meant.

However, the biggest way we address this was by building a whole new onboarding experience.

We talked about, in an ideal world, we could just build the first draft for them.

Before the freemium plan, we didn’t really have to worry about onboarding – every customer had an experienced CSM who would have a setup session guiding users through the steps of creating their first demo.

We need to effectively replace a person who could show users live what to do and teach them demo best practices.

This became the inspiration for our new Navattic AI Copilot - an AI assistant that works behind the scenes as you take Captures to write demo copy, anchor tooltips, and craft a cohesive first draft demo story.

See an interactive demo of Copilot for yourself

By essentially building their first demo for them, freemium users could see value, start editing, and share demos to get buy-in from their team much faster.

At launch, our activation rate was 33%.

After adding Copilot into the mix, it’s up to 47% on average (a +30% increase).

Many companies launching PLG are concerned that their free trial or freemium plan will deplete other lead sources, or at least diminish the number of demo requests.

For us, that was true. We saw a 30% dip in our MQLs in the second half of 2024 (after freemium launched).

And our average inbound pipeline the two quarters after we launched freemium dipped by 39%.

How we addressed it

It was scary to see that drop at first. But cannibalization is pretty normal with PLG, and freemium can pay off in the long run.

As of 2025 on average, our MQLs + PQLs are 37% higher than our lead numbers for 2024.

Over the past 9 months, we’ve 2x’d our pipeline sourced from freemium and 1.8x’d revenue influenced by our freemium plan.

The main way we've addressed this was

1) Refining what was included in our freemium and Base plan
2) Working with sales to redefine our PQL process.

At first, we reached out to every PQL and acted more as a support service. While that was helpful initially, when our self-serve onboarding still needed work, it ended up taking a lot of the reps' time.

Now we focus reps on the highest fit and intent sign-ups who clearly have already seen value. In our case, they've already built an interactive demo.

Our outreach is now more around helping them try other, more advanced features than support-focused messaging.

We were surprised by how many different channels our PQL leads came from. While SEO and WOM have always been our highest, we saw PQLs come in as the same number of channels (and types of channels) as our MQLs.

Here’s where the majority of our PQLS (30+ employees, work email sign-up, ICP fit) came from over the past year:

• SEO (36%)
• WOM (19%)
• Organic social (10%)
• Other customer tours (9%)
• LLMs (5%)

It’s important to note that we do self-reported attribution, so some channels are a little inflated.

For example, someone may have found Navattic through a Reddit thread that was presented on ChatGPT, which we categorized as “LLM.”

One interesting pattern is recently we’ve seen lately is an uptick in leads from LLMs. In the past 60 days, % of leads from LLMs doubled.

During our weekly team meeting, my team reports on the largest (by employee size) MQLs and PQLs that came in that week.

There really isn’t that much of a difference in leads from MQLs or PQLs.

Director levels and above will come in as PQLs from some of our biggest target accounts.

In fact, our largest customer to date came in as a PQL, a signal that freemium really picks up on important buyer signals that you could be missing otherwise.

Ben Pearson, our Head of Sales, and I chatted about this on one of our Revenue on the Rocks podcast episodes. As he put it:

“I get really stoked when I open up our PQL channel and I see all of these new Navattic users that, for all I know, may never have come inbound or may never have used our product.

It’s great to see that our product is completely accessible to anybody at any time. I truly believe this has incredibly positive ramifications for our brand, our revenue, and our growth,” which is a perfect segue into our next surprise.

Initially, sales had the same fear about cannibalization as our team had.

But as the leads started coming in and wanting to upgrade, they got really excited about new buyers that began to surface, who may never have evaluated Navattic previously.

Seeing exactly how people are using the freemium functionality also gave them more granular ideas about what prospects might need and how to frame their follow-up.

Per Ben: “Freemium has turned into the strongest and largest lead volume, inbound lead router for our sales team. If a user signs up, has a good initial experience, they’re in a good mood when they talk to my reps, they already see the value.”

If you’re thinking about launching a freemium plan, below are my main suggestions:

1. Design for today’s attention span

User behavior shifts fast, and AI has raised the bar for instant value.

Try to pare down your freemium experience so users don’t even have to think about how to use it or what to do next.

Limit overwhelming them with decisions and prioritize getting them to value. Once you've hit that value moment, then you can show all the great customization options in your product.

You might get that wrong at first, after all, what we thought was intuitive wasn’t for our users. And even when you think you have something figured out, it may change next week, so be ready to keep experimenting.

2. Use qualitative + quantitative user feedback to guide experimentation

In our experience, roughly 2 out of 10 tests to raise our activation rate actually performed. For the most part, most experiments failed or didn’t do much. Know it’s common, and that is part of the experimentation process.

To increase your chances of success, maintain a steady qualitative and quantitative feedback loop.

View drop-off rates, survey real users, perform user research, talk with sales about blockers, and watch users as they use your freemium tool (we use Posthog for this).

See where they hesitate and use that as a starting point for your next experiment.

3. Get a growth engineer to help you run experiments

It’s hard to get engineering resources to help you when they could be doing important customer work like building new product features or fixing bugs. But if you can get one, we really recommend it.

We had to show proof that freemium was working before we could justify the hire, but we recently brought on a design and growth engineer who will own Copilot and our freemium onboarding.

It makes it much easier to ship new, consistent experiments and improvements when there is someone dedicated to the role.

4. Only have sales connect 1:1 with users who are getting value

It doesn’t matter how great your email is, personalized outreach lands best if someone sees value in your free trial or freemium plan.

That’s why our reps prioritize outreach to folks who:

• Created a solid first demo (is actually interested in Navattic)
• Comes from a company of a certain size or industry (is a good ICP fit)
• Checked out pricing in the app or on the website, or showed other intent signals like going through our interactive demos (is high intent)

And they frame their email like this, so that it’s actually helpful and nudges the prospect toward the Base plan:

Hey [first name] – I saw you built [comment on their demo].

Here are some other examples from companies in [insert industry] that have worked really well:

• Example 1
• Example 2

If it’s helpful, I can set you up with a 7-day trial of our Base plan and walk you through some new features.

Overall, it took a lot of time and trial and error to get freemium right. We still have a long way to go, but seeing how far our product and PQL process have come since adding freemium, I would 100% do it again.

Want to try out the freemium plan yourself? Sign up and let us know what you think.