Eric Siu argues AI agents are becoming the main growth channel for startups. Products like Supabase and Cloudflare are growing fast by targeting agents first. He warns against selling to enterprises that trap you in endless meetings, citing Apple as an example.
How product-led growth is dead, Neil. It's no longer about PLG, it's now about ALG. You want to know what ALG is? Guillermo, from— a CEO of Vercel, he says, this is why ALG will be the king for startups. It's agent-led growth. So have agents adopt your product first, then have meetings if needed. The companies that start with the meetings are likely not your ideal customers. Okay, so the dangers of selling to big companies if you're a startup, is that they don't say no outright. They have months of meetings with you first. Since you hate meetings, that seems to you a sign of commitment, but it's not. They love having meetings. It's almost all they do. That's what big companies do, right? And the funny thing is this. I talked to one of my friends who works at Apple, and his role at the company is to be taking notes, and his team takes notes about meetings, about meetings and meetings and meetings, right? So he has meetings to discuss the meetings to figure out how to disseminate information about these meetings. And that's what you do at Apple. And not everybody does that, but I'm just saying that if you— or I'm not just saying this, but Guillermo's saying this— if you have a product, so imagine again, you have an API, you have an MCP, you have good documentation around it for AEO SEO purposes, the agents discover it and they start using it. Look at how fast Supabase is growing, right? You look at all these other products out there. People are using like these Cloudflare agents and things like that. So you need to have an agent-led growth strategy. And I don't think product-led growth is necessarily dead. In fact, I think you need to have some product-qualified leads in terms of the stuff that you give away for free, but you need to have an ALG strategy as well.
