One PLG idea a week — one specific, usable idea for turning free trials and signups into paying customers. It’s the same thinking I use with clients, written from the work rather than from a content calendar. No fluff, no pitch.
What a week actually looks like
- The Golden Path your converting users already walk — and why the feature you think activates them usually isn’t on it.
- Why an activation rate measured against a setup step measures compliance, not value, and the one query that tells you which you have.
- What the four kinds of trial user do differently in their first session, and which one is worth building for.
One email, most weeks. If a week’s idea doesn’t hold up, I don’t send one.
A welcome email lands right away, then one idea a week. Unsubscribe in a click, any time.
Who it’s for
People running a real self-serve or free-trial motion — usually B2B SaaS under $10M ARR — where users can convert without a sales call and the gap between signup and paid is the biggest leak in the business. Founders, growth leads, and whoever actually owns activation.
If your motion is sales-led end to end, or the trial isn’t the path to revenue, this won’t be useful to you. I’d rather say that here than take your address.
Who’s writing it
Michael. Fourteen-plus years running customer success and post-sale revenue, now on one problem: trial-to-paid conversion. The anchor result behind a lot of what you’ll read is a B2B SaaS product that went from 0.03% to a sustained 5% trial-to-paid conversion — anonymized, but real, and measured against its own day-1 baseline. The work runs on one system, the Trial Conversion Engine, and the Delta-Only Attribution Model means I only count the lift I actually caused.
Running a trial you’re not happy with? Book a call and I’ll walk your funnel live.
Not ready to hand over an email?
Fair. Read something first and decide from there.
- The 10 Laws of Conversion — the full scorecard I run against a trial funnel.
- Trial activation benchmarks — the seven numbers worth tracking, and what good looks like.
- The moat diagnostic — where your product is actually defensible.
- The Golden Path — the one action that predicts conversion.
- Everything else — the full archive.