Case studyFunnel.io
Building a new product-led growth engine for a sales-led B2B SaaS.
Taking self-serve from zero to 20% of total MRR while improving acquisition across every major channel — website, SEO, paid, experimentation and pricing, run as one connected system.
From sales-led to a compounding growth system.
Funnel.io is a B2B SaaS data platform that helps marketing teams collect, connect and visualise their performance data. I joined in 2022 as an embedded growth consultant. Funnel had strong product-market fit and a growing sales-led business — but no self-serve revenue channel, an underperforming website and no systematic approach to experimentation.
The brief was deliberately open-ended: own growth. In practice that meant building the infrastructure, commercial motion and experimentation culture needed to make acquisition and monetisation more efficient over time.
Over three years my role evolved from embedded consultant and Product Manager to Growth Product Lead for Acquisition. I owned the complete acquisition surface and led the creation of a PLG motion that grew from zero to 20% of total MRR in under two years.
The starting point
A strong product, an immature growth engine.
Funnel had a strong product and an established sales-led motion, but its growth infrastructure hadn’t matured to the same level. The main challenges:
- No product-led or self-serve purchasing channel
- A website that didn’t convert efficiently
- Ad-hoc experimentation without consistent hypotheses or measurement
- Limited connection between acquisition data and product decisions
- High customer-acquisition costs and untapped organic search potential
- Growth initiatives distributed across functions without one owner
What I owned
The acquisition surface, end-to-end.
I owned Funnel’s acquisition experience end-to-end, and acted as Product Manager for funnel.io — leading developers and designers to ship website experiences, growth infrastructure and customer-facing improvements. My remit spanned:
The work combined commercial strategy with hands-on product leadership — defining problems, writing briefs, prioritising opportunities, running sprints, aligning stakeholders and measuring outcomes.
Act I
Building an experimentation engine
Turning ad-hoc tests into a repeatable growth capability.
From ad hoc to a system
When I joined, experimentation was largely ad hoc — individual tests could launch, but there was no shared structure for defining hypotheses, choosing opportunities, prioritising work or evaluating results, which made it hard to build institutional knowledge. I created a systematic framework that standardised:
- Problem definition and hypothesis design
- Opportunity prioritisation and experiment briefs
- Success metrics and test analysis
- Documentation, knowledge sharing and how learnings informed future decisions
70% more experiments, 2× the velocity
Within a year Funnel was running 70% more experiments at twice the previous velocity. More importantly, the insights fed back into the website, product, positioning, pricing and acquisition strategy — experimentation became part of how the organisation made decisions rather than an occasional optimisation exercise.
Act II
Rebuilding the acquisition experience
A fundamental rethink of brand, pricing and website — treated as a product, not a redesign.
Not a cosmetic redesign
A complete overhaul of Funnel’s brand, pricing and website — rethinking how Funnel positioned itself, which audiences it addressed, how product value and pricing were communicated, how users moved from discovery to conversion, and how the site supported both sales-led and self-serve journeys.
The website as a product
I treated the website as a continuously evolving product, combining qualitative insight, behavioural data, SEO opportunities, conversion analysis and experimentation to improve the whole acquisition journey. The work covered:
- Brand and positioning rollout
- Information architecture and product / value communication
- Pricing experience and conversion paths
- Search visibility and landing-page performance
- Analytics, attribution and lead-generation journeys
- Continuous CRO
Measurable across the funnel
The overhaul produced 50% growth in organic traffic, a 20% increase in marketing-qualified leads and more than a 30% reduction in CAC year over year — not just a stronger website, but a more efficient acquisition system that improved both organic and paid channels.
Act III
Creating the PLG motion
A self-serve route to revenue, built from the ground up.
From no self-serve to a new channel
When I joined, Funnel had no self-serve channel — prospects moved through a predominantly sales-led process, limiting the company’s ability to serve users who wanted to evaluate and adopt independently. I built the PLG motion from the ground up:
- Free-trial infrastructure and self-serve acquisition journeys
- Product onboarding, activation metrics and trial-behaviour measurement
- Conversion paths and commercial packaging
- Product and sales handoffs
- The operating model required to scale the channel
Defining meaningful activation
A central part was defining meaningful activation — which behaviours showed a user had understood the product, experienced its value and was likely to convert. Those signals informed onboarding, experimentation, prioritisation and the relationship between product-led and sales-assisted growth.
Zero to 20% of total MRR
This wasn’t simply a new signup flow — it connected the website, product experience, commercial model, data and internal teams around one new route to revenue. Within two years the PLG motion grew from zero to 20% of Funnel’s total MRR, a meaningful new channel alongside the existing sales-led business.
Results
A compounding acquisition system.
Across acquisition, conversion and a brand-new self-serve channel.
PLG from zero to 20% of MRR
I created Funnel’s self-serve growth motion from scratch. Within two years it generated 20% of total monthly recurring revenue — a significant new commercial channel that hadn’t existed when I joined.
50% organic traffic growth
The brand and website overhaul, combined with a more structured SEO approach, increased organic traffic by 50%.
20% more marketing-qualified leads
Improved positioning, conversion journeys and acquisition performance increased MQL volume by 20%.
More than 30% lower CAC
Stronger organic acquisition, better conversion, systematic optimisation and a new self-serve motion reduced customer-acquisition cost by more than 30% year over year.
Key learnings
What the engagement taught.
PLG requires more than opening the product.
A successful self-serve motion depends on acquisition, onboarding, activation, pricing, measurement and revenue operations working as one system.
The website should be managed like a product.
Continuous discovery, prioritisation, experimentation and iteration create more value than occasional redesigns.
Experiment velocity matters, but learning quality matters more.
A strong framework makes individual tests cumulative by feeding their insights into future decisions.
Sales-led and product-led growth can reinforce each other.
Self-serve created a new revenue channel without requiring Funnel to abandon its established sales motion.
Growth ownership needs to cross organisational boundaries.
The largest gains came from connecting product, marketing, data, design, engineering and revenue rather than optimising each function independently.
“I helped turn Funnel’s acquisition model from a primarily sales-led motion into a compounding growth system — building PLG from zero to 20% of total MRR while increasing organic traffic by 50%, growing MQLs by 20%, and reducing CAC by more than 30%.”
My role
Growth product leadership across the whole acquisition surface.
I operated as the de facto Product Manager for Funnel’s growth surface, working directly with developers and designers to move initiatives from opportunity to shipped experience — and managing website, acquisition, onboarding and monetisation as parts of one customer journey rather than disconnected functions:
- Building the PLG motion from concept to 20% of total MRR
- Managing the website as a product
- Leading the brand, pricing and website overhaul
- Establishing Funnel’s experimentation framework
- Owning SEO, CRO and performance marketing
- Developing activation and onboarding strategy
- Building growth analytics, RevOps and attribution infrastructure
- Leading developers and designers
- Connecting Product, Marketing, Sales and Revenue Operations around shared outcomes
Building a PLG motion?
If you’re adding self-serve alongside a sales-led business, let’s talk about the system — acquisition, activation, pricing and experimentation — that makes it compound.
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