Amelia Schmidt

Amelia Schmidt

Growth Through Marketing
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About

Believer in data-driven marketing, strong branding, and continuous learning. Always exploring new growth opportunities.

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12h ago

pent 6 months building self-serve checkout. B2B buyers just wanted a demo.

For the first year of our SaaS, all of our sales were done manually. I would hop on a Zoom call, walk the prospect through the product, answer their questions, and send them a Stripe link. It wasn't scalable, but it worked. We had 50 customers paying us $99/month.

Then, I drank the Product-Led Growth (PLG) Kool-Aid. I read all the blog posts about how "frictionless checkout" and "self-serve onboarding" were the future. I convinced my team to spend six months and $15,000 (we hired a contractor) building a complete self-serve funnel: a new marketing site, automated onboarding emails, and a seamless Stripe checkout integration. We removed the "Book a Demo" button entirely.

We launched the new self-serve experience two months ago, and our revenue has actually gone down.

When I started calling the leads who visited the pricing page but didn't buy, the feedback was unanimous:
"I had a few questions about how your security works, but there was no way to contact you without buying first. I just went with your competitor who offered a demo."
"I needed to know if this integrates with our legacy system, but I wasn't going to put in my credit card just to find out."

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