A customer clicks ‘buy’ on your marketplace listing at 2PM. By 2:03PM, they’re already logged into your product, provisioned, and exploring features. No sales calls, no manual setup, no waiting for business hours. This is how leading software companies are turning marketplace purchases into active users in minutes.
For ISVs pursuing a product-led growth (PLG) motion, operational efficiency is key. Fast onboarding, streamlined order management, and automated workflows aren’t just “nice to haves”—they’re essential for scaling.
But how do you drive PLG with less friction? Clickhouse found the answer through strategic automation.
By integrating Tackle’s APIs and webhooks, ClickHouse automated critical workflows that would otherwise require significant manual oversight. The result? Faster provisioning, more efficient account management, and internal teams freed up to focus on higher-impact work.
Turning orders into onboarding with automation
The fastest way to kill PLG momentum? Making customers wait between purchase and product access. The best PLG companies eliminate this gap entirely by automating the handoff from marketplace to product (and Tackle’s APIs and webhooks can help with this).
Here’s the ideal workflow: When a buyer completes a purchase, they should immediately land on your registration page, get automatically provisioned in your system, and start using your product.
ClickHouse exemplifies this approach. When a buyer completes a marketplace purchase, Tackle immediately redirects them to ClickHouse’s registration page for its cloud offering. Because Tackle includes registration details in order notification webhooks, ISVs can monitor a buyer’s order status and automatically update their internal systems when an order is complete, modified, or cancelled.
This real-time sync keeps internal systems current, maintains compliance, ensures billing accuracy, and provides visibility into the customer lifecycle—all without manual intervention.
Without this setup, ISVs would either need to rely on basic email notifications that don’t support automation or build complex marketplace integrations themselves, which takes up significant time and resources.
Streamlined metering without the engineering headache
Usage-based billing is increasingly popular in PLG models, but managing consumption tracking across multiple marketplaces can quickly become an engineering nightmare. The smart approach is to centralize your usage tracking and automate the distribution to marketplace.
ClickHouse does this right by using Tackle to handle usage-based billing with minimal lift.
They track customer usage internally and send it to Tackle via API in periodic metering records. Tackle then immediately relays those records to the relevant marketplace, and provides additional API endpoints ClickHouse can use to confirm everything was submitted successfully and check the status. This allows for accurate metering, pay-as-you-go pricing, and hands-off invoicing.
Thanks to Tackle’s API architecture, these usage records are submitted with minimal latency and high reliability. This means ClickHouse can support a consumption-based billing model without the need to build and maintain a separate integration with each marketplace.
What scalable PLG looks like in practice
When the right automation infrastructure is in place, PLG companies see dramatic improvements across key metrics: fewer manual processes, more speed, and a better experience for everyone involved.
The measurable benefits include:
- Accelerated Onboarding: Automated internal organization creation ensures that users can start using the product within minutes of purchasing.
- Operational Efficiency: Webhooks and APIs replace manual workflows, saving time and reducing human error.
- Scalability: Companies can handle an increasing volume of marketplace transactions without needing to increase the scale of its operations team.
- Improved Customer Experience: Buyers benefit from a streamlined, low-friction path from purchase to product use, which helps drive adoption and retention.
ClickHouse has seen all of these benefits through their automation approach. They can now handle an increasing volume of marketplace transactions without adding to the burden on their operations team, while customers experience near-instant activation after purchase.
This is what PLG is all about: let the product do the selling, reduce dependency on human touchpoints, and allow users to discover value on their own terms.
Why the right partnership matters
In the age of PLG, growth isn’t just about getting customers through the door. Growth is about removing friction, delivering instant value, and scaling operations in a way that’s both efficient and customer-centric.
The companies winning at PLG have built growth engines powered by automation, real-time data exchange, and seamless customer workflows. This underscores the importance of the right infrastructure partner—one that can handle the technical complexity while you focus on product development and success.
Ready to scale your PLG motion? Reach out to us to see how Tackle can help you automate, onboard, and grow faster.
ClickHouse is a registered trademark of ClickHouse, Inc. https://clickhouse.com.
