How We Built a Nearly Free PLG MarTech Stack and How You Can Too

Dave Rigotti
September 1, 2022

Marketing technology (martech) is a massive landscape that is ever-expanding. There are established crowd favorite products and also many notable new entries, especially in the product-led growth stack. There are SO MANY options to choose from and for an early-stage startup like ours, it can be overwhelming.

We are going to tell you how we made those decisions to choose our PLG martech stack. And, hope this helps you pick yours.

While we aren’t product-led yet, we will be soon, and wanted to ensure we had the right infrastructure in place to support that motion, in addition to our sales-led approach.

We decided to optimize for time and money. Time because we’re still small (25 employees) and doing something means saying ‘no’ to other work, and money because while we raised $6M, we want to control burn and build a lasting business.

The CRM

For CRM we choose Hubspot CRM over Salesforce, despite using Salesforce at previous jobs for the last 8 years, Hubspot CRM was easy to learn, gets the job done, and has enough integrations at this point that we are confident it will grow with us for at least a few years, and it’s inexpensive. We were able to get a steep discount on a paid tier through their HubSpot for Startups program.

Product Data

We chose Segment over Rudderstack, Heap, and Amplitude. It was a tough decision.

Rudderstack is on the upswing and cost-effective, Heap provides great WYSIWYG capabilities, and Amplitude has great analytics built-in and is investing heavily since going public.

We ended up going with Segment as it’s most common among our customers and Inflection has a direct integration with Segment, so it’s easy to use both. Additionally, Segment has a stellar startup program.

Marketing Automation

We obviously went with Inflection for marketing automation with the big pro of being able to send communications based on CRM and product data, so it works great for our sales-led motion and our product adoption efforts.

Outbound

The main reason we started looking for a tool for Outbound activities and not just using the HubSpot CRM is that we wanted to build a ton of micro lists to prospect to. And, Apollo is built for that. It was super easy to connect the life stages between Apollo and HubSpot.

Data Warehouse

We chose Snowflake for our core data warehouse, not only because of the features and functionality but also because our team has used Snowflake in the past. We aren’t doing much with it now, but it’s important for us to store historical Segment data in Snowflake for future efforts like reporting.

In Conclusion

Sales-led, product-led and every GTM motion in between can use a PLG martech stack considering the ease of use and shorter sales cycles. You can ‘try before you buy’ many of these SaaS products and be sure that they solve your issues before signing that contract.

We chose our martech stack that works for our use cases, integrates smoothly, and is simple to set up and use. And, many of these businesses have a startup program you must check out to stick to a budget. We do too. Check out Inflection for Startups.

To find out more about Inflection - the only B2B marketing automation platform purpose-built for PLG, request a demo.

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