Merci Grace
Repeat founder, former head of growth at Slack, game designer, and co-founder of Women in Product. Joined Slack ~early 2015; worked directly with Stewart Butterfield; the shared game-design background shaped Slack’s onboarding philosophy. Later became a VC before returning to founding; built Panobi, a PLG tooling company.
Ideas and contributions
- Distinction between product-led and bottom-up growth: PLG requires self-serve value; bottom-up additionally requires zero-seniority friction.
- Developed Slack’s activation metric through regression analysis: three real humans, 50 real messages.
- Onboarding must be designed from the product’s first principles, not bolted on last; copying visible patterns from competitors is dangerous.
- Connector-persona leverage: maximise invite surfaces for naturally social users rather than optimising for reluctant ones.