It's great to see the PLG Index expand to public companies. We've seen lots of searches and requests to add these companies and now it's easy to see the best public PLG companies along with the best private ones.
@bwagy the market split is also pretty wild as it relates to growth and valuations, especially with the rip down. Tough sledding if you are telling the street you aren't willing to take a PLG approach.
Great data set. Fun to have it all pulled together in one place.
Was there anything interesting that jumped out when you were gathering this data? A company or type of company that came in much higher than you expected, a market that seemed to be surprisingly over/under-served, etc.
@gtryan I'd say the biggest thing is how many public companies now qualify and then the data that supports moving to the PLG motion. The YoY ARR growth is pretty stunning (30%) along with the fact that these companies have held up much better as B2B growth stocks have gotten punished.
Hunters!
We are excited to launch our Public PLG Index with you. I hope you will support and help us highlight the best companies in B2B software.
Since originally launching on Product Hunt, we have added over 500 companies to the index and the list grows every day. The #1 search we have received was people searching for public B2B SaaS companies that would fit in this framework. Today, I’m excited to say we have launched our Public PLG Index with the help of Public Comps data.
As a reminder, here is how we evaluate each company to classify whether or not they are PLG and then rank them:
- Offering a freemium or trial product: Allowing a user to start using the product friction-free from a paywall or interaction
- Offering transparent pricing: At least one of their pricing stages gave a price, even if the enterprise edition might say something like “contact sales.”
We then cut these companies by:
- Valuation: Crunchbase or Pitchbook as our systems of record
- Success score: A way to look at their recent momentum with some secret sauce in it
There are 112 Public B2B SaaS companies. Based on our PLG Index criteria, laid out above, 43 of them are PLG, 65 are non-PLG, and four of them are conglomerates that are a bit too hard to describe so we decided to leave them off (Microsoft, Intuit, Salesforce, and Adobe).
Given how much data the public markets throw off, there are a lot of fascinating ways you can compare PLG and non-PLG public SaaS companies.
Public PLG (43) v Non-PLG (65) B2B SaaS Companies (median data):
- PLG companies have 23% more ARR
- PLG companies are growing ARR Y/Y 30% faster
- PLG companies have 8% higher Net Dollar Retention
- PLG companies have 22% higher ARR/Headcount
- PLG companies are 44% off their 52 week high, Non-PLG companies are 58% off their 52 week high
The numbers would be slightly more skewed in favor of the PLG companies if we added the conglomerates, which was another reason in our opinion to leave them out. You can also now cut the PLG Index by categories, private, public or random company.
What Does The Public PLG Index Tell Us?
The market has spoken. When you look at this data, PLG is creating bigger and more profitable companies that are also holding up better in the public markets as SaaS valuations come down. The only reason you wouldn’t have a PLG motion is that you were born and built in a different era. We believe every company built today will have a motion that matches the criteria above. That is what shareholders want, that is what customers want, and the best revenue and product teams are delivering on these expectations.
Thank you for the support in helping us build this and we look forward to building more PLG tools for you in the future!
The PLG Index