Product-Led Growth

Onomondo pursued a Product-Led Growth motion to drive upgrades and expand usage on its self-service SIM platform. Free login opened the platform to prospects. Users could browse the connectivity tools and order SIMs to test.

The initial upgrade motion: feature advertising banners, content blocking, contact forms.

Design focus: the landing dashboard.

Four themes tested against the create-account form.

Lead with the global IoT network marketplace. Show coverage and reach next to the create-account form.

Lead with the form-factor timeline: 1FF through SoftSIM. Show the product's full range next to the create-account form.

Lead with a customer quote from Connected Cars. Credibility from a real deployment instead of the product pitch.

Focus on the map and network marketplace alongside the create-account form. Matched the marketing message and the global focus.

I stepped back from the push motion and asked who the real customer is on this platform. Cohort analysis of 23 customer organisations and 71 active platform users.

Different definitions of value. Different willingness to pay.

Patterns from the cohort contradicted the assumption users were passive.

• Nearly half of all SIM update API calls platform-wide originated from mid-market customers in the last twelve months.
• 17 of 23 companies had active API keys making calls at least every six months.
• 8 of 23 were piping webhook events into their own internal systems.
• Around 50% of SIM updates made via the dashboard came from this segment.

In smaller organisations, where C-level was very hands-on, different roles within the same customer used the platform differently. Support engineers lived in the SIMs table and Traffic Monitor. Software engineers opened single SIM pages directly from links in their own tools. CTOs checked network lists and created API keys. CEOs updated SIMs themselves more often than any other role. Hardware engineers opened the specific SIMs that needed attention, bypassing search entirely.

These users were not browsing. They were operating. The interface was a control panel wired into their day-to-day work, not a showcase waiting to be explored.

Successful customers showed a clear pattern. They had created multiple custom network lists. As they expanded geographically or operationally, they created more: specific devices connecting to specific networks in specific business areas.

This was the inflection point. The moment a customer's connectivity needs became complex enough that manual management broke down was the moment the platform became genuinely valuable to them. That was when they were willing to pay for more.

The PLG motion was optimised for the trial user, who rarely reaches that inflection point. It was almost entirely ignoring the scaling user, who does.

The research also revealed a third dimension: who actually uses the platform is not always who decides to buy it.

Designing for one of these people while ignoring the others breaks the entire experience.

Informed by the research. Resonated best with sales and marketing. Carried forward.

Users see an empty app.

No features. No activity. Zeroes across every metric and a Fleet upgrade banner where the map should be.

The PLG motion succeeds by placing an upgrade moment on the page each role already needs. Support engineers meet the Pro gate in Traffic Monitor. CTOs meet the Pro gate on API keys. Software and hardware engineers meet the Fleet teaser on SIM detail. CEOs meet the Fleet cross-sell on Dashboard.

The account upgrades when any one of these roles converts their moment, which means role coverage is the growth lever, not overall visit count.

Surfaces where software, hardware and support engineers already work. Each page carries its own upgrade moment, tied to the task the role is trying to complete.