Most founders optimise the product before the first experience

From my week

Spent a session this week helping one of our founders choose his next company from scratch. We went through buying-signal tools, B2B data enrichment, customer intelligence, and ad attribution. Starting from a blank page with someone who has already built and shipped is a good way to spend an afternoon. Growth people are joining across the portfolio to run outbound and sit in on product feedback calls, with seven more recruiting calls booked for next week. And in September we're getting the European founders together for a day in Berlin. I've wanted this one for a long time. Putting people who are all building at the same moment into the same room is still my favourite thing we do.

This week in PLG

Observer removed the credit card gate and added a 30-minute free trial. Before that, people had to pick a paid plan before they could see the product work. NINA launched last week, an in-product AI guide for B2B SaaS: the user asks by voice or text and it walks them through the live screen instead of them opening a support ticket.

Activation before commitment

32 commits later, the biggest improvement wasn't technical (Indie Hackers, Rohit Malhotra) Observer required sign-in, permissions, and a paid-plan choice before users could try the product. Rohit changed it to a 30-minute free trial with no credit card. He put it this way: "As founders we sometimes optimise the product instead of optimising the first experience." Worth checking what your own sign-up asks for before anyone has seen the product work.

NINA: Guide users step by step inside your product. (Product Hunt) A user asks how to do something by voice or text, and NINA walks them through it on the live interface. It is aimed at teams currently answering those questions with onboarding calls, product videos, and Slack channels.


Also worth a skim

From elsewhere this week: Santosh Iyer and Samma Hafeez on what FDE teams actually do day-to-day at four companies (the third piece in their series, on how four teams turn a messy customer problem into production value in weeks), Kevin Indig's AI Halftime Report for H1 2026 (AI's impact on growth kept rising while the ability to measure it fell behind), and Appcues on who should own lifecycle marketing as the stack gets more complex (lifecycle work drifting toward GTM engineering under RevOps, and why they call the two-paths framing a false choice).

What FV is building

If you find the digest useful, you might find one of our tools useful too.

Rankwise: find where your site is invisible in AI search and fix it. Free AI Visibility Checker.

Debriefing: weekly competitive intelligence briefs delivered to your inbox.

_The PLG Digest is curated weekly by Founder Ventures. Reply to this email with what we missed._