Premium: Overview of Product-Led-Growth and implications for Chinese SaaS

Summary of my talk on Product-Led-Growth (PLG) as it relates to the Chinese SaaS market. It draws heavily on my prior work on "The state of Chinese cloud Parts I, II and III" and "Why there aren't big Chinese SaaS companies."

First, a quick recap of Chinese cloud and SaaS adoption. In the US, digitalisation, cloud adoption and automation happened sequentially from the 1970s to now while the three processes are happening concurrently in China.

Thus the US has a stronger foundation of digitalisation to build on for cloud adoption. Thus, cloud adoption is heterogeneous in China and varies vastly by industry relative to the more homogenous cloud adoption in the US.

This set of starting factors means that vertical Chinese SaaS often have a better development prospectus than horizontal SaaS platforms. Industry-focused or verticalised solutions make it easier to find and acquire customers through word-of-mouth and retain them since desired features sets are similar. The difficulty in scaling horizontally has meant that there's been more uniform adoption of SaaS in the US compared to China. This is highlighted by the lack of Chinese SaaS players.

So that's the backdrop. Now let's talk about PLG.