The Product-Led Polymath
You believe a great product sells itself. PLG metrics are your love language.
What you bring
You instrument everything. You read activation curves like sheet music. Your roadmap follows the data, not the loudest opinion in the room — and your product gets dramatically better between every funding round even when the team doesn't grow.
Where you get stuck
You assume people read documentation. You assume the metric you optimized for is the metric that matters to the user. You can spend six months making something objectively better that subjectively no one notices.
The decisions that trip you up
- Is this the right activation metric to be optimizing?
- Should I add the feature users ask for, or the one the data says they need?
- When does PLG break down and we need a sales motion?
What you should be reading
Adviserry retrieves from all of these so you don't have to keep up.
Lenny Rachitsky
The default product-growth canon — PLG, retention, onboarding
Reforge
Frameworks for growth, monetization, and retention done rigorously
Brian Balfour
Four-fit framework: market, product, model, channel
First Round Review
Long-form operator interviews on the non-obvious product calls
Other archetypes
The Margin Hawk
You know your unit economics down to the cent. Growth at a loss makes you twitch.
The Distribution-First Builder
You'd rather own a 100K-person audience than a perfect product. Distribution beats novelty.
The Operator-Operator
You optimize funnels for a living. Every step has a metric, every metric has an owner.
The Bootstrap Romantic
VCs make you nervous. You'd rather grow $1M ARR slowly than burn $10M chasing it.