Bottoms-up GTM: It's more than magic.
Part 1: A framework for marketing's role in product-led growth
Everyone loves the Product-Led Growth (PLG) success stories of companies like Slack, Figma, Notion and Linear. The narrative is seductive: build an amazing product with a freemium model and watch it spread organically while your team focuses purely on product. Then it spreads on its own.
Lucky you, marketer! Nothing to do but hang out and not mess it up. People used to tell me that a lot when Figma seemed to be “magically” successful during hyperscale. But there’s a lot more to it than that. After 10 years there starting as #10 and first non-technical hire, I can tell you: yes, a great product is required—but the magic of PLG isn’t actually magic. It’s a deliberate go-to-market strategy. While a great product is non-negotiable, marketing plays key roles in making PLG work.
Welcome to part 1 of my three-part series on Bottoms-up GTM:
Part 1: Bottoms-up GTM and marketing’s role in PLG (this post)
Part 3: The 4 phases of a Bottoms-up GTM
In this post I’ll demystify the role of marketing in the core motion we deployed constantly and I’ve seen successful across B2B today: bottoms-up go-to market (GTM). It starts with a framework you can apply to your own business, and I’ll help you decide whether this approach is right for you.
The framework
Let’s start with a definition.
Bottoms-up GTM: A motion that focuses on building evangelism with the end user and empowering those end users to spread the product to their companies, regions, and communities—driving acquisition, expansion, and retention.
That happens in two steps:
First, individual contributors (ICs) love your company. They need to trust you, see you as cutting-edge, and believe in your product, your brand today, and your vision for the future.
ICs spread the product within their organization. Each IC isn’t only a consumer, they’re a wedge into a company. They bring your product to their teams and convince others to adopt it at scale. They also advocate externally, creating the next layer of advocates.
Key comparison: In Top-down GTM, marketing and sales target executive buyers first—those with budget authority—pitching them on the product’s organizational value. Traditional demand generation activities like field marketing, customer advisory boards, and executive trips to St. Lucia fit into this category.
Top-down and Bottoms-up GTM aren’t in conflict, but you can’t start with top-down. Bottoms-up is the foundation and you can layer on top-down once you have a strong IC base. As my demand gen buddy Laura used to say (once we were at a much larger scale), “The bottoms-up ocean feeds the top-down river.”
Step 1: Building love with your core user
The first step is creating deep passion and loyalty among ICs—not just for your product, but for your brand and your people. Here’s where to start:
Build credibility through people, not just brand.
Before anyone uses your product, they need to believe the builders know what they’re doing. Early on, you won’t have brand recognition, so lead with real people— technical experts who openly share product thinking with no fluff. Often this is your CEO, but could also be a designer, engineer, or product manager.
➡️ Linear does this exceptionally well. Their CEO and VP of Product consistently post details, tactical content around craft and quality. This builds technical credibility and trust with their audience. It’s not random, it's a marketing strategy.
Build your product with your users.
Actually talk to users one-on-one. Listen to their feedback, then act on it. This isn’t scalable at first, but it builds real relationships that turn into advocates. To find these people In the early days, you can just go look up your most active users and DM them. As you grow, these people usually find you. They are the skeptic on a sales call, the person complaining on twitter. Rather than ignore them, you need to lean in.
➡️ At Figma, we constantly monitored Twitter for feedback. If someone had a legitimate complaint or suggestion, someone from our team would jump on a Zoom with them. We’d either route the feedback into our product development or escalate bugs immediately via a #maybebugs Slack channel. If the process wasn’t fast enough, our CEO would ping us to make sure someone was on it.
Keep your power users close, forever.
Once you earn passionate users, you can’t take them for granted. Not only will they hold you accountable, but you must keep engaging them: stay human, stay credible, and never hide behind your brand. It never ends, or they will turn against you and this GTM falls apart.
➡️ The Browser Company launched their second product, Dia, but didn’t include their original Arc power users in the early access program. This pissed off some of their most loyal advocates and hurt their launch.
Step 2: Driving org-wide adoption
Advocacy is great, but without revenue, it’s not enough. The key to Bottoms-up GTM is that ICs bring your product into their companies.
How do you know when it’s working? Track internal spread: Filter by company domain and analyze how signups cluster. Find your “patient zero”—the person who introduces your product—and watch how adoption grows from there. All of your marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) will come from upgrading your current free or self-serve users.
But, those internal champions need help to convert to enterprise. Here’s how to support them:
Empower the IC.
All the passion in the world isn’t enough without support. Give your champions resources to advocate internally—through Customer Success teams, communities, templates, training, and events.
➡️ Asana’s Asana Together community aggregates power users, trains them to drive adoption, and strengthens their connection to the brand at scale. Caution: You can only do this successfully when you already have a base of true advocates. Do not do it too soon! No one will care!
Target operational systems.
Identify the “operational glue” inside companies—the systems teams rely on daily. These are hard to change but important for spreading your tool, as they will enable faster spread and create a moat around your product.
➡️ In product design, this operational thing is design systems. Early on, Figma’s lack of strong design system support was a top objection. Once we doubled down on content, training, and features around design systems, adoption—and retention—skyrocketed.
Bring sales into the motion.
Initially, Figma ran purely on self-serve. When we introduced sales, we kept our same Bottoms-up motion, starting with those internal champions. Your “lead” might be the same person who once tweeted a bug report. Understand their entire journey with your brand—across marketing, product, and sales—treat them like a person, not a business account.
➡️ At Figma, our (internal) advocates live between marketing, product, and sales. They follow up on tweets, build relationships, and lead sales conversations. If an internal champion voiced dissatisfaction online, we engaged immediately—well before renewal conversations.
The checklist
It is important to note this won’t work for everyone. Here’s a checklist I made to consider before starting this motion or thinking about how you might implement a Bottoms-up GTM. It includes doing a gut check about your team culture, core user, and the nature of the product itself.
wHaT aBoUt AI?
I couldn’t avoid it. Yes, we know, AI is changing everything. So in the age of AI is the Bottoms-up GTM over?
🔥 Hot take: AI is disrupting traditional growth channels. Search, paid, content, email are all increasingly saturated or being displaced, and the returns are not justifying their investment.1 In a world of automation and noise, what we have left is humans—their advocacy and their influence. And humans will matter more than ever. Even better, tools like Common Room, Clay, and Pocus now use AI to make a Bottoms-up GTM measurable in ways that just wasn't possible before.
For more examples on how we built Bottoms-up GTM at Figma from early days to scale check out this podcast I did with
.In future posts, I’ll share frameworks for measuring this motion and show how brand and community fit in at different company stages.
See ya next time ✌️
Big thanks to
for the feedback and edits on this post.
this is poetry to my ears--thank you 🥰 (and it's coming from someone building a AI company):
"In a world of automation and noise, what we have left is humans—their advocacy and their influence. And humans will matter more than ever."
Your episode with Lenny is one of my favorites. This is a good summary of your discussion on the podcast. Looking forward to reading the next ones