(2025-11-21) Saper Many Of The Fastest- Growing Ai App Companies Today Are Plg

Jake Saper: Most of the fastest-growing AI app companies today are PLG: think Bolt/Lovable, HeyGen/Synthesia, Cursor/Cline, etc. But many are repeating mistakes that cost the last generation of PLG companies market leadership—or even their independence. Take Slack.com and Zoom.*

Here are three lessons from Zoom (and other PLG winners) that today’s AI founders should internalize:

1. Treat PLG as marketing, not the revenue engine. Bottom-up adoption drives awareness and distribution, but the real revenue comes from the enterprise motion you layer on top. PLG revenue alone is too churny to sustain scale.

2. Don’t wait to build enterprise sales. Design a motion early to identify and nurture enterprise-grade users hiding in your PLG funnel. The sooner you do, the more defensible your business becomes

3. Delight drives adoption. Moats drive endurance.The strongest PLG businesses turned usage into compounding advantage—through network effects (Slack, Figma, Canva), data loops and integrations (Notion, Airtable), or workflow lock-in (Zoom).