How Developer Tools Win Enterprise Without Losing Their Soul | How To Nail Pricing As A PLG Company | Why Building for Free Users First Nearly Cost Us the Market with Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO & Co-founder of Socket
Every bottom-up PLG company faces this tension:
PLG gets you in. Enterprise funds the future. They need vastly different products - how do you prioritize?
If you try to please both motions at once, you starve both.
How to balance PLG with enterprise is what I discuss with Feross Aboukhadijeh, the CEO and co-founder of Socket ($65M raised from a16z, Abstract, Dylan Field, Aaron Levie, and other).
Socket, a developer-first security platform protecting code from vulnerable and malicious dependencies. Before Socket, Feross was an open source maintainer and developer who built widely-used libraries.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:43 - How developer background dictated Socket's PLG-first strategy over enterprise
04:50 - Building a GitHub app in 48 hours to avoid launching with zero user capture
07:56 - The counterintuitive rule: launch with intentionally missing enterprise features
10:53 - Why Socket deliberately ignored vulnerabilities despite every competitor offering it
11:20 - The dirty secret of startup pricing pages most founders won't admit
15:37 - How Socket mistakenly modeled pricing after GitHub's public/private repository strategy
16:08 - Why cryptocurrency companies exposed a fatal flaw in Socket's pricing model
18:19 - Going straight to enterprise sales to defend against fast-following competitors
19:37 - Why product quality loses to inferior products with superior go-to-market
21:36 - Socket's first enterprise deal was $500 and they kept doubling until pushback
24:27 - When PLG and enterprise roadmaps become zero-sum resource battles
26:27 - The strategic mistake of abandoning PLG motion after enterprise traction
28:54 - How developer awareness creates unfair advantages in security tool evaluations
29:23 - Enterprise handholding versus self-serve product design create opposing company muscles
33:01 - Figma's playbook: how connecting free-to-enterprise destroys customer acquisition costs
36:12 - The biggest regret: not building the PLG funnel before enterprise distraction hit
40:57 - Getting SOC 2 on day one would have parallelized six months of enterprise delays
41:00 - The monstrosity trap: second-time founders who hire VPs before product-market fit
40:13 - Why the popular advice to limit cap table size is fundamentally wrong
41:05 - Why Feross regrets turning away a $10K angel investment over ego
43:24 - The technical founder's fatal mistake: choosing to code over customer conversations
45:04 - Why selling before building feels wrong but saves months of wasted development
45:13 - The Mom Test: the book that teaches founders how to extract honest customer feedback
Creators and Guests
Host
Pascal Unger
Co-founder / Managing Partner at focal.vc We lead pre-seeds in North America with up to $1M: We exclusively back AI native software startups at the very start. Thereafter, we help them get off the ground better and faster, supported by a network > 200 GTM executives. That's our singular, unwavering focus.