There is a moment in every founder's journey when the product finally clicks with its intended user. The planner opens it every morning. The analyst swears by it. The practitioner, the person with the actual pain, tells colleagues about it over coffee. Adoption climbs, usage charts point up and to the right, and it feels like the hard part is done.
It is not. In fact, you may have just walked into the most dangerous stretch of the whole journey.
Two different people, two different jobs
In most business software, the buyer and the user are not the same person. The MD or the suit in the corner office authorises the spend. The planner, the media buyer, the campaign manager, the ops person, whoever sits closest to the work, actually uses the tool. One holds the budget. The other holds the pain.
When you build product-led growth, you make a deliberate choice about which of these people to put at the centre. The classic, correct answer is the practitioner. Win the person with the pain. Make their day easier, their reports faster, their output sharper. Let the product spread bottom-up, desk by desk, team by team, until the organisation cannot imagine working without it.
This is the right call. Practitioners adopt quickly because they feel the problem every day. They do not need a procurement process to try a free tier. They champion the product internally because it makes them look good. Every successful bottom-up software company you can name, from Slack to Figma to Canva, rode exactly this wave.
But here is the uncomfortable truth that gets glossed over in the PLG playbooks. By centring the practitioner, you have also just widened the gap between who loves the product and who pays for it. And that gap is exactly where "great adoption, no revenue" ventures go to die.
The graveyard of loved products
Walk through the startup graveyard and you will find plenty of headstones that read the same way. Thousands of active users. Glowing feedback. Real, measurable value delivered. And a bank account that never grew, because the people getting the value were never the people signing the cheques.
The failure mode is seductive because every early signal looks like success. Sign-ups grow. Engagement is strong. NPS is high. The founder tells investors that monetisation is just a matter of flipping a switch. Then the switch gets flipped, and nothing happens.
Why? Because the planner who loves your tool does not have a company card. She has to go to her MD and make a case. And her MD does not feel her pain. He feels his own pains, which sound like revenue, margin, risk and client retention. "This tool saves me four hours a week" is a compelling story to the person losing the four hours. To the person approving the invoice, it is an abstraction competing against a dozen other line items in a budget meeting.
The product spoke fluently to the user. Nobody taught it to speak to the buyer.
Bridging the gap without betraying the user
The answer is not to abandon the practitioner and build for the boardroom. Products designed for buyers rather than users tend to demo beautifully and gather dust after the contract is signed, which is its own slow death. Shelfware does not renew.
The answer is to treat the gap as a design problem in its own right, and to work on it as deliberately as you work on the core product. A few principles help.
Arm your champion. Your user is going to have to sell your product internally whether you like it or not. Make that easy. Give them the one-pager, the ROI summary, the usage report they can forward to their boss. If your product can generate an email that says "here is what this tool did for our team this quarter, in rands and hours", you have turned every enthusiastic user into a salesperson.
Translate pain into money. The practitioner's pain and the buyer's pain are usually the same pain wearing different clothes. Four hours saved per week is a user story. Multiply it across a team, price it at loaded cost, and connect it to faster client turnaround, and it becomes a buyer story. Your job is to do that translation inside the product, not hope someone does it in a meeting.
Build something the buyer sees. Dashboards, oversight views, audit trails, team-level reporting. These features often feel like distractions from the core user experience, and practitioners rarely ask for them. But they give the person paying a reason to keep paying, because now the product delivers something to them directly, not just to their staff.
Price where the value lands, charge where the budget sits. If the buyer thinks in campaigns, projects or client accounts, consider packaging around those units rather than seats. A seat is a cost. A campaign delivered is an outcome. Buyers pay for outcomes with far less friction.
Shorten the distance early. In smaller organisations the buyer and user are sometimes the same person, or at least sit in the same room. Owner-run agencies, small consultancies and independent operators can be brilliant first markets precisely because the gap barely exists. Revenue from that segment buys you time to build the bridge into larger organisations, where the gap is a canyon.
The gap is the strategy
None of this means the bottom-up choice was wrong. It remains the correct one. Practitioners are how modern software gets discovered, trialled and loved. But love is not revenue, and adoption is not a business model.
The founders who win are the ones who hold both truths at once. Build for the person with the pain, because that is how you get in the door. Then build the bridge to the person with the budget, because that is how you stay in the building.
The gap between the two is not a footnote in your go-to-market plan. It is the plan.
