Inside Supabase’s Product & Community Led Growth
Reflections from helping Supabase scale their PLG engine
By: Zao Chen, Michael Robinson & Aaron Cort
Product-led growth (PLG) has become a cornerstone of modern software. PLG uses the product itself as the primary driver for acquiring and activating customers, focusing on the end user and enabling them to experience value directly through the product, often via free trials or freemium models. Users can then champion tools they find valuable, driving broader organizational adoption from the bottom up. This motion has fueled the rise of iconic software companies like Atlassian, Datadog, and Figma.
A few years ago, Michael Robinson and I joined ClickUp as its interim finance team to help plan, budget, and hyperscale their PLG machine. Last summer, we spent a lot of time with Paul, Ant, and Rory and realized we could use a similar playbook. After we co-led Supabase’s series C, I joined for 6 months as their Interim VP Finance while Aaron Cort also joined full-time to help build out the PLG machine and accelerate Marketing & Growth. It was an incredible experience and huge thank you to Paul, Ant, Rory, Scott and Oli for the opportunity to join the team.
As I reflect on my time, five things stood out as game-changing lessons behind the inner workings of their PLG motion and the engine that led to their recently announced $200M Series D. Huge congrats to the entire Supabase team on an incredible milestone — we’re thrilled to continue to partner and support them on their journey ahead.
Supabase: the open-source backend that developers love
Before we dive in, a quick overview: Supabase offers a fully-featured Postgres backend tailored for developers. It provides an intuitive way to launch, scale, and manage applications where developers can start for free and upgrade as they scale. Supabase has also become a cornerstone in the AI-native world as foundational infrastructure for app development on “vibe coding” platforms such as Cursor, Bolt, Lovable, and v0 by Vercel. We continue to be astounded by how much the product is loved by the developer community. In true Supabase fashion, here’s a meme from their early days that captures it all.
The 5 Key Takeaways from Supabase’s PLG Motion
- Relentless focus on product experience
Supabase’s PLG success is rooted in a relentless focus on fast time-to-value, seamless scalability, and deep community engagement through open source. Since day one, Paul and Ant have made product obsession a guiding principle.
- Fast time-to-value: Supabase makes it effortless to get started. Developers can spin up a backend for free in seconds and start building immediately. Within a weekend, you can have a full app live. This speed-to-value is foundational and shows in every database they host.
- Usable, scalable, and built on Postgres: After hitting the limits of Firebase, Paul and Ant set out to deliver both usability and scale. Supabase is built on PostgreSQL layered with a modern and sleek UI that grows with you as you scale.
- An integrated stack, out of the box: Supabase replaces what would otherwise take a patchwork of services like RDS, Cognito, DynamoDB, and Hasura. Everything you need is bundled, so developers don’t have to stitch tools together and can focus instead on building.
- Open-source at the core and loved by the community: Supabase empowers developers to contribute to the product through its open source model. In addition, their popular “Launch Weeks” showcase new features inspired by community feedback. The results? 2M+ developers and 3.5M+ databases on Supabase today.
This didn’t happen overnight. Supabase is the result of years of obsessive product focus and thousands of contributions from the open-source community. Only recently did it exit beta and officially launch GA, four years after it began. As Paul puts it:
“Four years is an incredibly long time to run a beta but when it comes to databases, you want to make sure that they’re scalable, secure, and you’ll never lose data. We’ve spent four years really making sure we can put our names behind this and you can build on top of a platform you really trust.”
2. Build a data-driven PLG operating model
Tracking data and using it to reveal what attracts, activates, and retains users helps you fuel smarter and faster growth. From product telemetry to sign-up channels — even meme performance — Supabase tracked every data signal. We used this data to build a bottom-up operating model that revealed how users behaved and moved through the funnel.
We focused on three core pillars:
- Acquisition: what was attracting developers to Supabase and which channels were most effective in doing so?
- Activation: what gets users excited about Supabase that keeps them using the product and ultimately paying for it?
- Retention & expansion: what made users stick and grow with Supabase?
A tactical tip: build your operating model by cohort. Adding a time dimension lets you isolate user behaviors and understand how product changes or messaging tweaks can impact engagement and growth over time.
3. Measure TOFU user acquisition by channel
Efficient PLG growth starts with channel-level top-of-funnel (TOFU) acquisition. Tracking investment by channel reveals the unit economics of each user and whether a channel is consistent in its ability to attract users. Incorporating this into our bottom-up model helped us double down on high-performing channels and adjust or eliminate those that weren’t delivering ROI.
At Supabase, we cohorted users by acquisition channel to track how quickly they paid back the cost to acquire them, aiming for a 12–18 month benchmark on a revenue or gross margin basis. Layering this into our operating model allowed us to monitor how payback periods evolved over time, identify which channels were becoming more efficient, and trace any spikes or dips in performance back to specific campaigns or initiatives.
4. Accelerate activation by delivering value fast
Activation starts by tracking key funnel stages, and continuously improving the experience to turn signups into engaged, long-term users. From the first website visit, the clock starts ticking to deliver value. To pinpoint what was working and what needed improvement, we broke the operating model into three core stages.
- Org creation: when a user signs up for a Supabase account
- Org initialization: when a user creates a database after signing up for an account
- Org activation: when a user is actively using the database or other products for a certain period of time
TOFU efforts bring users to the site, but what happens next is just as important. Supabase’s tagline is “Build in a weekend. Scale to millions.” Highlighting their speed, scalability, and ease of use is critical to capturing attention and compelling users to sign up. Once users sign up, the real work begins. A key insight from the operating model was a drop-off in user initialization, or the conversion between sign-up and database creation. To fix this, Supabase streamlined the flow, directing users straight to database creation instead of the dashboard. This simple tweak reduced friction and immediately boosted initialization rates.
The final piece of activation is sustaining engagement. Supabase closely tracked product telemetry across SKUs — like Database, Edge Functions, and Storage — and paired it with user feedback to drive continuous improvements. These enhancements built trust, giving developers confidence to move from side projects to production workloads. By the time users hit the limits of the free tier, the value was clear and upgrading became a no-brainer.
5. Don’t overlook the post-sale experience
The PLG journey doesn’t end at conversion. Sustainable growth comes from delivering ongoing value, tracking retention, and reinforcing trust continuously in the customer journey. While Supabase’s product was a clear hit with developers, several often-overlooked factors played a big role in their PLG success:
- Generous pricing: Supabase gave developers ample room to build without hitting early paywalls. Their pricing structure prioritized long-term value over short-term gains — a key PLG principle.
- Customer care: Support wasn’t just a function, it was part of the culture. Everyone at Supabase was invested in supporting customers
- Proactive troubleshooting: By monitoring early signals of misconfigurations or inefficiencies, the team could step in before users hit roadblocks, helping them stay on track to scale smoothly.
These thoughtful touches made a real difference, reinforcing product trust and driving sustainable growth.
Lessons from the field
At Craft, we’re big believers in bottom-up PLG and proud to back teams that embrace it. Seeing it up close at Supabase was invaluable, and the lessons shaped how we evaluate and support PLG companies every day. There’s no one-size-fits-all playbook and each company needs to shape the motion to fit their product, users, and culture. Supabase is a great example of what that can look like when done right.
