Valubyl

Valubyl is a PLG consultancy that has helped 25+ B2B SaaS companies build product-led onboarding that helps new users quickly understand the product and reach value on their own.

Founder

Instantly.ai

PLG Advisor

Stockpress

Gymdesk

echowin

PI.EXCHANGE

Morgen

TrueClicks

Advisor

Databox

https://www.growthunhinged.com/p/the-evolution-of-product-onboarding-databox

DataTrails

Founder @ Valubyl | Product-Led Growth Advisor

Husband, father, and founder, currently building Valubyl.

Valubyl is a PLG consultancy that has helped 25+ B2B SaaS companies build product-led onboarding that helps new users quickly understand the product and reach value on their own.

Sound like something you need help with?

Feel free to send me a DM, email at yaakov@valubyl.com, or book an intro call with the link above.

Yaakov Carno

Everyone's adding AI prompt bars to their product. Almost no one knows how to design them right. So I mapped 40+ AI prompt journeys - from homepage to onboarding - across products like Canva, Notion, Vercel, Wix, and Airtable.

The result?
A full Prompt Bar Journey Library.

A teardown of how top teams are designing prompt-to-value flows that actually activated users - not just impress them.

Inside, you’ll see:
✅ Prompt examples that drive activation - not just “wow”
✅ How top products capture context without any setup friction
✅ The exact moment to execute a prompt (before or after signup)
✅ What happens after the first output (and why most teams lose users there)

If you’re building an AI feature or onboarding flow, this library will save you weeks of trial and error.
It’s for builders who care about activation, not aesthetics.

For teams who want to turn “Try our AI!” into actual adoption.

I built this for growth leads, founders, and PMs shaping how humans talk to AI.

Want the Prompt Bar Journey Library?

1️⃣ Make sure we’re connected
2️⃣ Comment "PROMPTBAR" below - and I’ll send it your way

Helped 30+ B2B SaaS companies upgrade their PLG self-serve onboarding. Building Valubyl and sharing the behind-the-scenes of our PLG revamps.

New Valubyl website is live! 🤩 

For the last 3 years, we've been building a simple and powerful vision:

Turn self-serve onboarding into your strongest PLG growth lever.

30+ clients later… we finally have a site that actually reflects what we do. 

Capturing onboarding and activation work in a website is hard. But this is version 1 and the first step toward showcasing the depth of what we deliver every day.

👉 Activation revamp sprints
👉 PLG execution and advisory
👉 Real results, real case studies

If you're focusing on getting more paying customers from your freemium or free trial, let's chat.

PLG onboarding & activation revamps for B2B SaaS companies

Has SaaS lost it's mind? We've entered the new UX era 🤯 

AI prompt bars are everywhere. And it’s fascinating to see how differently products are using them.

Some feel magical.
Some feel confusing.
And some are quietly redefining onboarding and user activation entirely.

Over the last month, I mapped out 40+ prompt-bar journeys from tools like Canva, Vercel, Lovable, Airtable, and Bolt to see how the best teams are solving this.

The results were wild!!!

A mix of brilliant patterns, clever UX details, and a few surprising misses. 

From “Ask me anything” chaos... 
to onboarding that teaches by doing.

This carousel shares the highlights, and the full deep-dive article (in the comments) breaks down exactly what’s changing in activation.

Thank you Kyle Poyar for another epic collaboration, just keeps getting better! 🔥 

If you’re building an AI product, you're going to want to save this one!

The New UX Era 🔥

“Why would you hire me when you could just do it yourself?”
That’s the question I asked Nathan from Freckle.io on a recent call.
(Yeah, probably not my smartest sales question 😅)

We were chatting about their PLG onboarding project I was working on, and I genuinely wanted to know.

Why choose to work with an agency like mine, Valubyl, when you could just handle it internally…
or even use AI to figure it out?

He paused for a moment and replied:

“There are certain business/product problems where it makes a ton of sense to bring someone in who’s seen that movie many times before, and onboarding and activation is one those.

If you think about a typical product manager or designer,
if they've been in their career for 10 years,
they've probably only worked on onboarding and activation flow maximum 3 times,
most of them maybe once or none”

And he’s right.

You can learn onboarding once. You can design onboarding a few times.

But when you’ve rebuilt 30+ onboarding experiences across SaaS products,
you start to see patterns that others miss.

That’s the superpower of a hyper-niche agency today.

In a world where AI can do “a bit of everything,” what actually stands out is being really good at one thing, not being average at everything. 

Nathan’s answer reminded me why I started Valubyl in the first place.

To go deep.

Not to do everything, but to do one thing. 
PLG activation and onboarding.
Better than anyone else.

New podcast drop with Alex Oppenheimer is live 🎙️ We went deep on what really drives PLG - and why most teams get it wrong.

Here’s what we covered:

> What PLG actually means: your product should do the job of Sales/CS - guide, qualify, and tell the story inside the experience.

> Why focus wins: one lever, done exceptionally well, compounds everything else - activation, retention, and CAC.

> AI ≠ magic: Prompt bars and “wow” moments drive curiosity, but long-term adoption still comes from solving a real problem with guided context.

> Why bring in specialists: Even great teams only tackle onboarding a few times. Repetition across dozens of SaaS products shortens the learning curve - and avoids the usual pitfalls.

And a whole lot more in our 30-min chat…

When I started Valubyl, the goal was simple: solve one painful, repeatable problem - self-serve onboarding and activation. 

At first, we were advisors - helping SaaS teams spot what wasn’t working and what to fix.
Now, three years later, we’ve evolved into an execution-first agency - not just telling teams what to do, but actually doing it for them.

Our core offer: In 2-4 weeks, we ship a redesigned onboarding experience your team can launch and see the results - no fluff, just outcomes.

If you’re trying to turn more signups into revenue, see what great activation actually looks like, and get a better understanding of what it takes to win with PLG - this episode’s for you.

Comment ALEX and I’ll DM you the link...

... just joking :) check the first comment.

One of the biggest ongoing challenges I’ve had as a founder is:
Our website still doesn’t do justice to what we actually do.

Every time I jump on a call with a new prospect, the same thing happens.
They say, “Oh wow - I didn’t realize how deep this goes.”

And that’s when I realize again: the visuals on our site just don’t capture it.

The moment they see inside a before-and-after Figma design from one of our onboarding revamps, or a real activation playbook - they instantly get it.

They see how much value actually comes out of these sprints. 

Not just pretty UX, but full product experiences redesigned around world-class activation.

It’s way more than “onboarding redesigns.”
It’s building the entire self-serve experience for first-time users.

And yet… that rarely comes across from the outside looking in.

I’ve been studying how other teams like Anthony and Rob from FletchPMM show their work - the before/after visuals, clear deliverables, and the way they walk you through what you actually get. It’s so well done.

So that’s my current project:
> Adding more visuals, walkthroughs, and real examples that show what our work actually looks like.

If you’re a founder or consultant, you probably know the feeling - that imbalance between how much depth you deliver and how simply it’s represented online.

I’m finally fixing that this month. 

Thank you Victoria Bakos for all the help! Super excited to share the new website soon!!

One of the clearest signs you’re working with a great team is the way they respond to bad results. 

Anyone can celebrate good results. But the best teams treat every experiment as part of the process, even when it doesn’t go the way you hoped. Learning is everything.

A small moment from working with the Freckle.io team really highlighted this for me.

A few months ago, we shipped a fully revamped onboarding flow. Before launch, they asked me what completion rate I’d expect. 

I said something like:
“Hard to benchmark, but I’d be disappointed with anything under 80%.”

Fast-forward a few months... the data comes in: 30%. 

I won’t lie, it hit me hard 😅 

I care a lot about what we deliver, and I care a lot about our clients.

But I also know this is how growth works. Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you learn the hard way.

Still… something didn’t feel right. 30% just didn’t match what we had built.

Then a couple weeks ago, Andy sent me a message:

"Turns out the old tracking wasn’t counting users who made it all the way through to the table view properly. Once we fixed that, completion jumped to 82.5%."

That obviously made my week. 
But honestly, the part that stayed with me wasn’t the better result, it was how the team reacted when we thought it was 30%.

There was zero blame. Just growth mindset and a keen energy to fix whatever was broken. 

That’s rare and a true testament to the culture Nathan and the team are building.

This is the kind of team you want to build with. This is the kind of team that is going to win BIG! 

It's already clear - Freckle’s growing over 240% month-over-month in signups, and they're just getting started! 🙌

If you’ve ever test-driven a car and suddenly couldn’t imagine giving it back…
you already understand why reverse trials work so well.

When Maja and I were writing our latest piece, we realized the real magic of reverse trials isn’t in the monetization model - it’s in the psychology behind it.

We went into the 4 biggest triggers that make it so powerful 👇

1️⃣ The Endowment Effect
> Once users “own” a premium feature, even temporarily, they value it far more.

↳That’s why free samples work in retail - and why SaaS users feel attached to features they’ve already used.

2️⃣ FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
> When users see the premium side of your product in action, they don’t want to lose it.

↳ FOMO exists in B2B too lol.

3️⃣ Loss Aversion
> We hate losing more than we love gaining.

↳ Kyle Poyar shared his experience when he tried to downgrade from the premium plan:

"I went to cancel my Canva for Teams account today -- but Canva's cancellation flow was so good that I changed my mind. 
And, no, it wasn't because they made me jump through hoops.

1) They reminded me that I have an amazing deal. I still pay $12.95/month, but prices have increased to $29.99/month. I'll lose my deal if I cancel.
2) They created loss aversion by reminding me of the premium features I've put to use.
3) They made some clever UX choices that subtly influenced my decision."

↳ That’s not manipulation - that’s smart UX reinforcing real value.

4️⃣ Full Product Experience
> Reverse trials let users see everything your product can do before asking them to pay.

↳Would you buy a car without driving it first?

Reverse trials make users feel like the product is already theirs - and that’s the most powerful growth engine there is.

Read the full breakdown/guide below 👇

Took a step back to rethink content here on LinkedIn. Looks like it's paying off 🤯 If you're building in the SaaS and PLG space, we've got some killer content coming up:

More of the good stuff that folks are asking about:

- Behind-the-scenes of how we build world-class PLG self-serve onboarding and activation journeys for our client's at Valubyl 👏 

- Epic free assets like the Prompt Bar Journey Library (about to hit 100K hits 🔥) - see my post from last Wednesday. We're going to be releasing more libraries, breakdowns, and tons of assets from how we're building our PLG canvas V2.

- 3rd collab with Kyle Poyar for Growth Unhinged, wrapping up what's about to be the best guide out there for building AI prompt bar experiences 🤓 

... and lot's more.

See you around 👀

Gururaj Pandurangi

CEO & Founder (Acquired by Zscaler)

ThriveStack

Embarking on a mission to address these inquiries:

- Can we make SaaS companies build fast and GTM at scale? At the same time.
- Can we simplify the implementation of PLG for SaaS companies?
- Can we make Growth efficient?
- Can we foster collaboration across diverse departments driving  SaaS Growth through a collaborative, multi-player mode?

CEO and Founder 

Early stage startups

Investing and Advising a dozen+ early-stage startups.
Always happy to connect with great small teams, attempting to solve bigger-than-them problems.

Investor & Advisor

Zscaler

VP, Public Cloud Infrastructure Security

Cloudneeti

• Disrupting cloud workload assurance space with Cloudneeti, laser focused on Continuous Cybersecurity and Compliance posture management.
• Security & Compliance Validation engine for Azure Blueprints like http://aka.ms/healthblueprint, http://aka.ms/pciblueprint
• Global presenter on cloud, security, compliance, and architecture.

Avyan Corp

Avyan Consulting's prime focus is to build upon its expertise in helping medium and large scale enterprises embrace the benefits of Cloud Computing and Big Data Technologies.

Leading a startup organization of multiple global delivery teams, based out in US, India and Eastern Europe, focusing on product engineering and solution development in the following areas 
•	Leading an enterprise scale Azure and AWS adoption by bringing in critical workloads for IaaS and PaaS. Built and led core Cloud Engineering, Cloud DevOps, Cloud Security and Cloud Operations teams. 
•	Led a team of data scientists and cloud engineering – Product recommendation engine using machine learning for a large retail eCommerce store. Increased conversion ratio by 400% and continuing
•	Built and Sold a cloud migration and assessment product to a large ISV.
•	Partnering with a mid-sized Application & Platform vendor along with various key initiatives with Microsoft Premier Services team / Microsoft Azure and Dynamics CRM Online teams in developing and delivering various offerings. 
•	Managing a team of cloud architects & engineers leading multiple cloud migration efforts for two large enterprise customers to AWS and Azure cloud and big-data solutions. 
•	Work extensively with customers (typical personas include VP Engg/CTO/CFO/Developers/Architects/) in providing them services ranging from - advice on managing & running efficient operations (e.g. reduce COGS, improve Performance, Resiliency), building and managing IP/workshops events, partnering with various Windows Azure teams to ship iterations on many services (Product planning, Engineering, Supportability and Marketing teams).

CEO and Founder

Avid, LLC

Cloud Backup and Recovery product. 
BCDR for Virtual machines from Data center to Cloud, Cloud to Datacenter
(acquired by a group of investors)

Chief Executive Officer

Infospace

Engineering Manager, Search and Advertising

Microsoft Corporation Redmond, WA USA

Bing and Azure/RedDog Platform, 
Windows Live Services

Software Engineering Manager

Development Manager

Wipro Technologies

Architect

Moody's Investors Service

Sr. Technology Consultant

Building ThriveStack: Making PLG Easy by Left-Shifting Growth

3x Founder: Engineer turned entrepreneur, exited 2 product startups ($2-10m ARR) and 1 cloud consulting company (150+ cloud consultants). Building my 3rd one, ThriveStack.

My previous startups were partner-led and sales-led. With significant investments in Sales & Marketing (S&M budgets were 60% company spend). Overtime I discovered that product-led startups were out-competing and getting deployed faster than us.

I realized that "We are in the age of self-service". Buyers and Users prefer self-discovery over sales interactions.  Building a self-serve product is very different than building a traditional sales-led product.

Now, building ThriveStack, an modern AI-enabled platform to enable Self-Serve for B2B companies, allowing their users to Signup, Try and Buy their products w/o (less) Sales conversations.

🚀 Launching the ThriveStack Self‑Serve PLG Scorecard
This Thanksgiving, we celebrate the customers, partners, and growth leaders who shaped our journey.
AI and PLG now move together—and finally tackle the visibility gaps across all 7 stages of the customer journey.
---
PLG teams have a visibility problem - across the 7 phases of customer journey. 

The new PLG Scorecard gives teams a unified view of the entire product-led funnel—Awareness → Acquisition → Activation → Conversion → Retention → Expansion—finally showing where growth leaks, why they happen, and who owns each one.


A few major inspirations shaped this release:
⭐ Wes Bush & Ramli John ⭐️ -  ProductLed
 For championing Activation as one of the most powerful North Star metrics in PLG.

⭐ Brian Balfour, Adam Fishman, Elena Verna and so many folks from the Reforge team

⭐ Andrew Capland — Delivering Value
 For the incredible work on the Growth Operating System.

⭐ Nick Mehta - Gainsight 
For driving home the message that Retention is the strongest growth multiplier.

⭐ Jacco van der Kooij, Dave Boyce  — Winning by Design
For the foundational Bow‑Tie Architecture that reshaped how SaaS companies view revenue across acquisition, retention, and expansion.

⭐ Kyle Poyar
 For highlighting the importance of team and department ownership in scalable growth execution.

This Scorecard brings those ideas together into one unified, actionable growth scorecard.

👉 Try the Interactive PLG Scorecard Demo: 
Link in comments 

Curious to hear from you: What’s the biggest visibility gap in your PLG funnel today — and what should we improve next?

Drop your thoughts here👇

Building ThriveStack: Driving success by left-shifting growth

Recently, we spoke with CMOs, and their primary concern was that 35% of their marketing spend was being wasted due to poor attribution. 

The main problem was simple but painful:
→ They know where the leads come from, but not which channels are driving real revenue.
→ ROI tracking is manual and often inaccurate.
→ Deals and pipeline data aren’t connected to channels.

So every month, budgets were adjusted on gut feeling, not data.

That’s what we’re fixing with “Marketing Channel Performance Analytics” inside ThriveStack.

It brings ROI, spend, CAC, and deal data together in one place, giving teams a clear view of which channels drive revenue in real-time.

Early users have already reduced wasted ad spend by 30% and improved marketing-to-revenue efficiency within a quarter.

👉 Try it here: https://lnkd.in/gyui84Mu

Vibe-coding a pricing page? We did. Read on to know what worked and what did not.

We recently needed a new Pricing page for ThriveStack.
 Simple, right?

So we did what any curious team of builders would do.
We asked every AI vibe-coding product we admire to take a swing at it.
Same prompt. Same goals.

 → Lovable (cc: Elena Verna)
 → Bolt.new (cc: Eric Simons)
 → Replit (cc: Amjad Masad)
 → Cursor (cc: Tony Sidhom)
 → ChatGPT (OpenAI)
 → Gemini 3.0 (cc: Allie K. Miller)

🤖 The prompt was simple:
 ✅ Ask the user 1 smart question to recommend the best plan
 ✅ Show 3 plans: Free, Starter, Growth - with a recommended pill
 ✅ Add a dynamic pricing calculator
 ✅ Explain how we calculate Monthly Tracked Users
 ✅ Include a feature comparison table (with viral loop links to product)
 ✅ Add an FAQ section
 ✅ Create an ROI Calculator and link to the page
 ✅ And a AI chatbot to answer any questions about plans, features, usage, limits etc.

💥 Here's what happened:
All of them got parts right.
- Cursor nailed structure.
- ChatGPT wrote clean, smart copy.
- Lovable understood PLG intent (probably Elena Verna's influence)
- Bolt designed beautifully.
But... trying to make it all work together was painful🤯.

The page had vibe. But no cohesion. The AI chatbot for all, except Google AI Studio, had zero context.
and the worst part - Prompt it to fix one section, all else gets Broken. Routing? Off. Latency to build and deploy? High.

Then we gave it to Gemini 3.0 (Google AI Studio)
It not only built the full experience—
 ✅ integrated copy, UX, chatbot, and FAQ
 ✅ learned from our product docs
 ✅ wrote clean semantic HTML + shipped SEO-ready
 ✅ deployed it on GCP (one click!)
 ✅ and gave page level insights from user interaction flow
All in one go.
 And surprisingly—it was the *cheapest*, Least errors. Fastest delivery.

💡 Hard truth:
"Vibe coding with AI is easy. Shipping something real still takes thoughtful orchestration."

Gemini didn’t just win because it’s smarter.
It won because it understood structure, simplified the delivery process.

Curious? Check it out:
 👉 https://lnkd.in/gBEcqz6j

❝ 
Would love your thoughts. Which tool are you betting on for full-stack product generation?
❞

Tagging the legends we admire:
 Elena Verna Amjad Masad Logan Kilpatrick Baris Gultekin

#AI #ProductLedGrowth #Builders #StartupTools #UX #PricingPage #VibeCoding #Gemini2 #PLG #GrowthHacking

Last month, we onboarded a few SaaS Companies. Three had the same problem with their Freemium funnel:
 40% of signups were fake.
 Not bots. just fake email ids.
 Bad data—polluting funnels, skewing metrics, and burning GTM cycles.

Here’s what was happening:
→ Disposable emails got in
→ Free credits were used
→ Sales teams chased ghosts

Growth teams worried that they were scaling fake growth.

Paid ads brought in users who never intended to convert.
Cloud Hosting (COGS) costs soared.
BUT ---- Revenue didn’t budge.

They had an abuse problem—at the top of the funnel.

This is how to fix it.

Full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gE4JkuSn

I’m excited to share the latest episode of ThriveCast, where I sit down with the incredible Andrew Capland to explore how growth really happens when alignment, activation and accountability aren’t just buzzwords—but the backbone of your system.
👉 Tune in to “The Growth Operating System — Building Alignment, Activation, and Accountability” here: https://lnkd.in/gZcP3zuM
Here’s what we dug into:
Here are the top insights we covered:
1️⃣ Ideas are cheap. Systems win.
 How team alignment, communication, and consistent execution outperform frameworks and playbooks every single time.
2️⃣ The new ladder for Growth Leaders.
 Why moving into growth leadership means influencing peers, managing pushback, and driving clarity—far beyond tactics.
3️⃣ Effectiveness > “Right answers.”
 Great growth leaders focus less on being correct and more on persuading teams, prioritizing under ambiguity, and keeping momentum.
4️⃣ AI is a multiplier, not a replacement.
 Tools can generate ideas—but timing, context, judgment, and cross-team communication remain deeply human.
5️⃣ Build your Growth OS before you scale.
 From rituals to scorecards to decision frameworks (yes, including RACI), we break down how to make growth repeatable, not accidental.

If you’re building or scaling a growth function in SaaS — whether you’re in product, marketing, revenue operations or leadership — this episode is for you.
🔗 Give it a listen, drop a comment with your key takeaway, and if this resonates, let me know and I’ll send you the full episode guide with all the frameworks we covered.
Thanks for being part of the ThriveStack journey—let’s turn your growth from chaos into a system.

#GrowthOS, Delivering Value #B2BSaaS

Open video: The Growth Operating System — Building Alignment, Activation, and Accountability on hybridgtm.com

The Growth Operating System — Building Alignment, Activation, and Accountability

Last quarter, we spoke with 40 SaaS marketers, and 80% of them said they lose track of users after signup, and this gap leads to wasted spend and missed revenue by 35%.

Here is how this shows up in their daily work:
 → They run campaigns without knowing which users actually reach first value.
 → They cannot tell who continues using the product and who drops.
 → They scale channels that bring signups but not paying users.
 → Budget plans look good on paper but do not match real product outcomes.

These issues increase cost, slow growth, and make targeting less accurate.
That is why we added Full Journey CRM inside ThriveStack.

 It connects signup activity with product behavior so marketing teams can see which users move forward and which ones need attention.

Read the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gKRGfKk9

A quick shoutout to Rosalyn Santa Elena and her The RevOps Collective community for driving real conversations around data driven GTM.

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