Launching a Free Product to a Skeptical Customer Base: The PLG Journey at TrustCloud

Picture this. You’re a startup founder doing business with an enterprise. They ask: “Do you have SOC 2?”

“Sock-what?” Insert sweat emoji.

We get it, compliance is daunting. It’s one of the few industries that is still wary of product-led growth (PLG) as a successful growth lever.

We wanted to change that.

I started at TrustCloud (formerly Kintent) in August 2022 as a senior product manager. Three months in, my team launched a beta of our free tier called TrustCloud Starter — a tool that makes obtaining SOC 2 compliance easy and affordable for startups. Folks could sign up on FreeSOC2.com to get access. It was one of the first PLG-inspired tools to serve the governance, risk, and compliance market.

We hit a nerve. In less than two months, we had hundreds of sign-ups via FreeSOC2.com. We are aiming for thousands more startup customers this year.

Read more on the Openview blog https://openviewpartners.com/blog/free-product-customer-base-plg-journey-at-trustcloud/