A land and expand strategy wins a customer with a small, low-risk first offer (a free tier, a small order, one license or usage-based pricing), then grows revenue from that customer over time through upgrades, more usage, more users and add-on products. It works when you have product/market fit, solid onboarding and something genuinely valuable to expand into.
Key takeaways
- Land with something small and easy to say yes to. Expand into something bigger once the customer trusts you.
- The five factors: an attractive initial offer, product/market fit, re-earning the business, solid onboarding and a funnel.
- Measure expansion, not just sign-ups: MRR, ACV, revenue growth, LTV, renewal rate, CAC and net revenue retention.
- Land and expand needs somewhere to expand to. When DocuSign's landing product commoditized, it had to build a second product.
- In 2026 the fastest growers expand through usage and credits, not just seats.
It was May 2013, and Jack Conte was utterly exhausted.
It was a good kind of exhaustion. He'd spent most of the past fifty days building a replica of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Eighteen-hour days had finally produced a set he could shoot his next music video on.
He uploaded the video to his YouTube channel. A hundred thousand subscribers lapped it up.
But Jack had a problem. He'd maxed out every credit card he had to make it.
He also had a possible solution. With his friend Sam, he'd built a new platform called Patreon, where fans could pay him directly for his work. He popped the link in the video's description.
Within a couple of weeks, the economics of his channel had changed completely. Instead of the $100 or so the video earned in ad revenue, he received $5,000 from patrons who wanted to see more.
A good idea was buried in that platform. And the way Patreon grew from there is one of my favorite examples of land and expand.
What is a land and expand strategy?
Land and expand means you win a customer with something small and easy to say yes to, and then you grow what they buy from you over time.
The "land" might be a free trial, a small first order, a single software license or a usage-based price that starts tiny. The "expand" is everything after: upgrades, more usage, more users, more locations, more products.
Patreon is the perfect illustration because it used two pricing models.
The land: usage-based pricing. Patreon charged a percentage of what creators earned. A new creator with ten patrons paid almost nothing. If they blew up and started earning serious money, Patreon earned more too. That's the expand part, and it happens automatically.
The expand: a subscription. Eventually, successful creators may resent handing over a slice of every dollar. Patreon's answer was a sister product, Memberful, where creators pay a monthly subscription and a lower transaction percentage.
So Patreon pulled creators in cheaply, grew with them, and gave the biggest ones a recurring subscription when they outgrew the percentage model.
And it did all of that without a massive sales team.
What's changed since the book
In August 2025 Patreon announced that fans had sent creators more than $10 billion since 2013. It also simplified its pricing. Creators who launched after 4 August 2025 pay a standard 10% platform fee instead of choosing between the old tiered plans, while existing creators kept their legacy rates. That's a pattern worth copying: tiered options help you land early adopters, and a single clear fee is easier to sell at scale. See the Patreon case study.
The great thing about land and expand is that it brings more people to your product. If they like what you're doing, they tell others. You're landing new clients with the help of existing ones, which is a referral loop and a network effect rolled together.
Best of all, it's something any small business can do.
How a local bakery "lands and expands" into cafés
My local bakery wants its bread in as many cafés as possible. Here's how it does it.
It gives cafés free samples of every type of bread it makes, and tells them there's no minimum order. The cafés try the samples, love them, and order an amount they're comfortable with. Over time, those orders grow as the bakery's products become part of the menu.
Land and expand.
Notice what the bakery isn't doing. It isn't sending out samples and hoping. It's building relationships with café owners: quality product first, then showing them how they could use more of it.
That's the part most people miss. Land and expand isn't about attracting as many people as possible. It's about the relationships you form with the people you land. Communication is everything.
Worked example: a bakery's numbers (illustrative)
Say the bakery lands 20 cafés at an average of $150 a week. That's $3,000 a week. Over a year, 3 cafés stop ordering (minus $450 a week), but 8 cafés double their order as they add toasties and sandwiches (plus $1,200 a week). The bakery has grown its weekly revenue from those same 20 cafés to $3,750, a 125% revenue retention rate, before signing a single new customer. That's the power of expansion.
Why land and expand works (and why it forces a better product)
The idea is to build confidence in a new product or service.
People won't take a chance on you if you demand a hefty fee upfront for something they've never used, and perhaps don't even understand.
Patreon had exactly that problem. Before Patreon, YouTube creators like Jack relied on ad revenue. Fans paying creators directly was a novel idea, and many creators thought it wouldn't work. In the early days Jack told forty creators about it, and not one signed up. Only after Jack's own success did people get interested. Then Patreon made it easy for creators to join and start earning, and the "I don't understand this" problem disappeared.
Land and expand does three things for you:
- It removes the risk of trying. Small offer, small decision.
- It enables product-led growth. Users find the product, sign up for the small version without you pushing, and pay for more when it delivers. My guide to product-led growth covers this side in detail.
- It forces you to improve. If you land clients who drop off before expanding, something isn't working. You find out fast, often from the users themselves, in a way a traditional sales process never shows you.
The five factors needed to make land and expand work
Factor #1: An attractive initial offer
Land and expand is not about selling big upfront deals. If you're planning to hire a sales team and pelt the market with offers for your expensive subscription, you're doing the opposite.
You need an offer that lets people try before they buy: a free trial, usage-based pricing, no minimum order.
The crucial part is that you don't give new users everything. Offer your minimum viable product, enough to prove it works for them. Or the whole product, but for a limited time or a limited number of users. Then, once you've landed them, gently guide them towards a recurring subscription.
A good-better-best pricing table is the simplest way to make the next step visible.
Factor #2: Product/market fit
An easy way in means nothing if people don't need the product. Giving it away won't change that.
Patreon had strong fit. Creators felt underpaid for their work. A video with 100,000 views might earn as little as $100 (at least in Jack's case). Creators wanted more income streams and, like you, they wanted recurring, reliable revenue.
You'll know you have fit when you see high growth, high retention and a solid net promoter score. If you're not sure, my product/market fit guide shows you how to measure it.
Factor #3: Re-earning the business
You've landed a subscriber. Great work.
Now, how will you keep them?
If your service is woven into what the customer does every day, they'll see the value and stay. But if what you offer has a shelf life, you need to keep creating value beyond what attracted them in the first place. You have to re-earn the business.
When I wrote the book, Mailchimp let users send marketing emails free up to 2,000 contacts, charged as they grew, and kept adding tools small businesses wanted, like a website builder and postcards. More value at every step.
This is also why you hold back from putting everything into your free or entry tier. You need room to keep giving.
Factor #4: Solid onboarding
Remember the main problem land and expand solves?
I'll give you a second...
Lack of familiarity.
The small offer gets people in the door. It doesn't teach them how to get value. You have two choices:
- Be so easy to use that you don't need onboarding; or
- Provide solid onboarding: video walkthroughs, guided tutorials, templates and, for bigger accounts, a customer success person.
If your onboarding also shows users what the expanded version would let them do, you're on your way to a profitable relationship.
Factor #5: A funnel
If you're not using a huge sales team, what are you using?
A funnel with a healthy helping of network effects. Make it easy for your users to engage with the product, with each other, and with the people you want to attract:
- Put sharing buttons on anything shareable. MyFitnessPal users can share workout stats, and every share puts the product in front of new people.
- Ask users for reviews and social posts. Most won't. Some will, and their friends often need what you sell.
- Publish user success stories. Social proof convinces the next person to try.
The goal is to turn your users into the sales team.
Pricing Table BuilderDesign a good-better-best pricing table and export it.Open the free tool →How do you know if land and expand is working?
Your customer count is growing. Is that enough?
Not necessarily.
Landing customers only matters if you get the expand part right. Otherwise you end up with lots of customers and no profit. Think back to Ethan Stock and Zvents in the network effects chapter: a growing business that makes no money isn't a business.
Here are the metrics I watch.
Revenue metrics
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Are you building predictable revenue?
- Annual contract value (ACV). What does the average customer pay you a year, and is it rising because of expansion?
- Revenue growth rate. Consistent growth usually means you're landing people and a good share of them are expanding.
User metrics
- Customer lifetime value (LTV). What does the average customer spend with you over their lifetime? It takes time to know, and it tells you how much you can afford to spend landing them.
- Annual renewal rate. You want it as high as possible. Low numbers mean subscribers aren't getting what they need.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Keep CAC to a third or less of LTV. The LTV:CAC calculator does the math.
Stickiness. Are new users exploring features and showing interest in the extras they'd get by paying a little more? If yes, you have a sticky product.
The metric I'd add today: net revenue retention
The single best test of land and expand is net revenue retention (NRR), sometimes called net dollar retention. It tells you whether the customers you had a year ago are paying you more or less today.
NRR = (Starting MRR + Expansion MRR − Contraction MRR − Churned MRR) ÷ Starting MRR
Above 100% means your existing customers grow faster than you lose them. That's land and expand working. Read the full NRR guide or the guide to expansion revenue, or run your own numbers:
Is your expansion beating your churn?
Plug in starting MRR, expansion, contraction and churn to see your net and gross revenue retention in seconds.
Here's how some of the companies in this site's research compare. These are reported figures, from different years and different kinds of business, so treat them as reference points rather than targets.
| Company | Reported net revenue retention | What it lands with | What it expands into |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linear (2026) | 177% | Free plan, unlimited members | Paid plans and AI credits for coding sessions |
| DocuSign (Q1 2021, from the book) | 125% | Single-user e-signature plan | Multi-user tiers, then contract management |
| TechnologyOne (FY25) | 115% | Core enterprise software | More modules, implementation bundled in "SaaS+" |
| Procore (2025) | 106% | Priced on construction volume, unlimited users | Grows as the builder's volume grows |
| Zoom enterprise (FY26) | 98% | Freemium meetings | Phone, contact center, paid AI |
| Udemy Business (2025) | 93% | Team course subscription | Larger company plans |
The bottom two rows are the honest ones. Under 100% means expansion isn't covering losses, and both companies responded by trying to sell more products to the same customers.
Making land and expand work: DocuSign's keys to success
DocuSign was founded in 2003 with a simple idea: let people send, receive and sign documents digitally.
Its lowest tier offered the basics. One user, a limited number of documents and simple fields. But it included templates and integrations with tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, which made it attractive without a sales push. If you liked it, you expanded into higher tiers like Business Pro with multiple users and unlimited documents.
It worked. DocuSign became the industry standard and "the verb" for e-signature. In Q1 2021 it grew 54% and reported 125% net dollar retention.
So how did it do it?
Key #1: Establish a key strength, then scale. DocuSign landed with e-signature, its core strength, and expanded into branding, payment collection, bulk sending and more. Its operating margin grew from 11% in 2019 to 29% in Q1 2021.
Key #2: Create a new industry standard for trust. E-signatures were unfamiliar in 2003, with no standards. So DocuSign created one, the xDTM standard, with a board of governors, eight areas of trust and a neat line: "What the PCI Standard is to Payments, the xDTM Standard is to Digital Transactions."
Key #3: Use equity financing strategically. DocuSign partnered with companies like Google, SAP, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Salesforce and FedEx, taking investment and getting access to new markets through their scale. No extra sales team required.
Key #4: Leave room for international growth. When I wrote the book, only 21% of DocuSign's revenue came from outside the US, and international sales were growing fast.
Key #5: Create and expand categories. It positioned itself as the leader in Digital Transaction Management, then expanded into an enterprise category it called the System of Agreement.
Key #6: Build a trust network. In 2013 it launched the DocuSign Global Trust Network. By 2018 the network had signed up more than 450,000 companies across 188 countries.
Land with something that shows your strength. Expand into something your market needs.
What happened to DocuSign next
The pandemic surge didn't last. As e-signature became a commodity, growth slowed to single digits. DocuSign's answer was a second product to expand into: Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM), using AI to store, analyze and manage contracts. For fiscal 2026 (to 31 January 2026) revenue was $3.2 billion, up 8%, and IAM grew from 2.3% to 10.8% of total ARR in a year. It guided fiscal 2027 revenue to $3.49 to $3.50 billion, a small reacceleration. The lesson: land and expand needs something to expand into. When your landing product commoditizes, build the next product on the same customer relationship. The DocuSign case study has the detail.
When land and expand is the wrong strategy
I love this strategy, but it isn't for every business.
- When customers have a one-off need. If people buy once and never need more (a single legal document, a one-time renovation), there's nothing to expand into. Focus on referrals instead.
- When there's no expansion path in the product. Zoom shows the problem. It reported that its self-serve customers churned at 2.9% a month in Q4 of fiscal 2026, and that enterprise net dollar expansion was 98%. A great landing product without enough to expand into leaves you running to stand still.
- When your entry price can't cover your acquisition cost. If it costs you $500 to land a $10-a-month customer and few of them expand, the math never works. Check CAC against realistic expansion before you go cheap.
- When the buyer only purchases big. Some large organizations buy through a formal tender for the whole contract. A small pilot may still be possible, but don't expect a slow organic expansion.
2026 update: how the fastest growers land and expand now
Land and expand has gone from a SaaS sales term to the default growth engine. In the research behind this site, covering 44 companies reported to have crossed about $100 million in ARR in 2026, it was the most common growth lesson, appearing 20 times. Here's what's changed.
1. Expansion runs on usage and credits, not just seats. AI products now land customers on a plan with an included allowance and expand as usage grows. GitHub Copilot moved every plan to monthly "AI Credits" from 1 June 2026. Atlassian includes Rovo AI credits per user. Lovable charges credits per prompt, and it says its software has reached employees at nearly two-thirds of the Fortune 500: individuals land on cheap plans, companies follow.
2. Seats can shrink, so price on work. If AI lets your customer do the same work with half the team, a per-seat price expands backwards. WiseTech removed seat fees from CargoWise in December 2025 and now charges on transactions, so "our revenue is not diluted by customers becoming more productive." If you charge per user, read my comparison of seat-based vs usage-based pricing.
3. Design the expansion path on day one. Payhawk publishes modules "from" $299 to $499 a month and then sells a bundle. Corgi's insurance packages step up with the customer's funding stage. Scribe's team seats cost less per head than an individual seat, which pulls individuals into team plans.
4. Australia has some of the best examples. Canva reached US$4 billion of annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025, and business accounts with more than 25 seats doubled to about $500 million of ARR: individuals adopt for free, then teams and companies pay. Employment Hero lands small employers with HR or payroll and expands into recruitment, engagement and benefits. It passed A$300 million in ARR in October 2025, a tenfold increase in just over five years. Read the Employment Hero case study.
5. Expansion is a valuation story. Buyers and investors pay more for revenue that grows by itself. Retention above 100% is one of the clearest signals of a high-quality subscription business, which is why it matters to anyone thinking about selling one day.
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Prepare for landing: what to do next
Here's how I'd put this chapter into practice:
- Define your land offer. One sentence: what can a new customer try, for how long, at what price, with what limit?
- List what they'd expand into. At least three things: a bigger tier, more usage, an add-on service. If you can't list three, build that first.
- Map the moment it clicks. Write down the first result a new customer must get, and design onboarding to get them there.
- Give your users a reason to share. One share button, one review request, one success story a month.
- Measure NRR monthly. Track expansion, contraction and churn separately so you know which lever to pull.
Land with something small. Expand into something unique.
Read the whole book free
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Claim the free hardcover Get the ebookAction exercise: How can you use land and expand in your business? Write your land offer and your three expansion paths now. Then read the next chapter, on growing client numbers on a shoestring budget.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between land and expand and upselling?
Upselling is a single tactic: offering a customer a bigger or better version of what they're buying. Land and expand is the whole strategy around it. You design the first offer to be easy to accept, build onboarding that shows the bigger version's value, and plan your tiers, usage and add-ons so the customer naturally grows into them. Upselling is one of the ways you expand.
Is land and expand only for SaaS companies?
No. My local bakery does it with cafés: free samples, no minimum order, then bigger orders as its bread becomes part of the menu. Accountants land with a tax return and expand into bookkeeping and advisory. Gyms land with a casual pass and expand into memberships and personal training. Any business with more to sell to a happy customer can use it.
Does land and expand work with usage-based pricing?
It's one of the best fits. With usage-based pricing the customer pays little while they're small and pays more automatically as they grow, so expansion happens without a sales conversation. Patreon's percentage of creator earnings and Procore's pricing on construction volume both work this way. The risk is that revenue also shrinks when customers have a bad year.
How do you price the first 'land' offer?
Price it so the decision is easy and low-risk, but hold back enough value to give the customer a reason to expand. Limit the number of users, documents, projects or months rather than crippling the core benefit. The customer should get a real result from the small offer and see clearly what the next tier would add.
What kills a land and expand strategy?
Three things: landing customers who were never a good fit, weak onboarding so new users never reach the moment the product clicks, and having nothing meaningful to expand into. Watch for customers who sign up and stay on the smallest plan for months. That pattern usually points to one of the three.
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Robert Coorey, MBA
Robert is the author of The Subscription Playbook and Feed a Starving Crowd and a Director at BPAG Accountants in Sydney. More about Robert.
Sources
- Axios, Patreon crosses $10 billion creator payout milestone (5 Aug 2025)
- Patreon Help Center, a standard platform fee for new creators after 4 Aug 2025
- DocuSign, Q4 and fiscal 2026 results (Mar 2026)
- DocuSign, Q1 fiscal 2027 results and guidance (2026)
- Employment Hero, Employment Hero surpasses A$300M ARR (8 Oct 2025)
- TechCrunch, Canva gets to $4B in revenue as LLM referral traffic rises (18 Feb 2026)
- ARR Club, Linear hit 40k paying customers with a 177% net revenue retention rate
- Procore, Q4 and full-year 2025 results (12 Feb 2026)
Facts and prices checked 27 October 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.