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Case Study: Enterprise PLG & Monetisation Strategy

How Arise GTM Designed a Product-Led Growth Model for a $50M+ ARR SaaS Company

Redesigning pricing, packaging, and onboarding to transition a complex, sales-led enterprise platform into a scalable product-led motion.

Aquant mockup

Overview

Aquant is a $50M+ ARR SaaS platform delivering AI-powered service intelligence for enterprise field service organisations across medical equipment, foodservice, industrial equipment, and beyond.

Despite strong revenue and enterprise traction, Aquant’s growth model was primarily sales-led. Leadership recognised an opportunity to:

  • Accelerate user activation
  • Reduce friction in early adoption
  • Introduce usage-based monetisation
  • Expand beyond heavy enterprise deal cycles

Arise GTM was engaged to design a structured Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy that aligned pricing, onboarding, and product value with scalable growth.

The Challenge

Aquant’s platform delivers deep AI analysis on service data — powerful, but complex.

Challenges included:

  • High onboarding friction
  • Limited visibility of value during early use
  • Sales-led engagement model limiting self-serve growth
  • Premium feature gating without structured upgrade paths
  • Usage tied to data processing capacity, complicating pricing

The core problem wasn’t demand.
It was how value was packaged, accessed, and monetised.

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Objectives

The engagement focused on monetisation architecture redesign.

Defining a scalable PLG framework

Designing a usage-based pricing model aligned to product economics

Introducing free trial and freemium mechanics

Improving early user activation

Creating a clear path from self-serve to enterprise expansion

The Strategic Insight

Office Work

Aquant’s value was strongest once customers saw their own data in action.

So instead of gating insight behind enterprise contracts, we designed a model where:

  • Users could upload data and see real value early
  • Usage thresholds introduced natural upgrade moments
  • Premium features aligned to backend processing costs
  • Pricing reflected product economics, not sales tradition

PLG was not replacing sales.
It was feeding sales with better-qualified, activated users.

Our Approach

1. Value Mapping & Activation Design

  • Identified the critical “aha” moment within the product
  • Mapped onboarding milestones to activation metrics
  • Reduced friction during initial product interaction
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2. Usage-Based Pricing Architecture

  • Designed pricing tied to data processing volume
  • Created structured refresh and analysis tiers
  • Aligned backend cost structure with monetisation logic

3. Free Trial & Freemium Model

  • Built a hybrid model allowing limited data upload
  • Introduced credit-based usage during trial
  • Defined premium upgrade triggers based on usage depth
purchase
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4. Enterprise Alignment

  • Ensured PLG model fed enterprise pipeline
  • Created clear expansion paths from self-serve to full contract
  • Maintained enterprise credibility while introducing accessibility

Results

Aquant now operates with:

  • Usage-based monetisation
  • Free trial and freemium layers
  • Structured upgrade paths
  • Reduced friction in early engagement
  • Better alignment between product value and revenue capture

The platform evolved from purely sales-led enterprise deals to a hybrid growth engine combining product-led activation with enterprise expansion.

Why This Case Study Matters

This is not a startup PLG experiment.

This is a $50M+ ARR enterprise SaaS company evolving its growth model without destabilising revenue.

It demonstrates:

  • How to introduce PLG into complex enterprise software
  • How to align pricing to product economics
  • How to reduce activation friction at scale
  • How to design hybrid sales-led + product-led growth

Note that we engaged with Aquant at around the $20M ARR.

Trend

Redesign Your Monetisation for Scalable Growth

If you’re above $10M ARR and considering PLG, we help you redesign pricing, onboarding, and growth architecture without breaking revenue.