Jason M. Lemkin explains why early SaaS customers buy trust in the founder more than the product. At CircleCI, the CTO's emphasis on helping customers mattered more than product-led growth because buyers saw the new category as risky.
I think, at least in our early days, what I discovered was that people weren't buying a product so much as they were buying a belief that the company would help them. So I remember I went to an early sales call at CircleCI, who was actually friends with us, and they asked me a couple questions, answered. The CTO also answered like, oh, we just wanted to know that we could trust you. You know, so a lot of sales and is trust. So the reason why PLG didn't work for us very much in the early days is we realized that we were a new category. SaaS was still a little risky, and people really needed to feel like they could trust us.
