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Overview
📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - AWS Marketplace growth through product-led growth and international expansion
In this video, Alex Jones and Patrick Ludwig from AWS explain how to grow internationally using product-led growth through AWS Marketplace. They discuss how PLG focuses on end users, enables self-service experiences, and drives monetization. Key insights include that 80% of AWS Marketplace subscriptions are self-service, and cloud marketplace spend is forecasted to reach $163 billion by 2030. The session covers AWS Marketplace's availability in 190 countries, automated translation, multi-currency support, and automated tax compliance. They introduce the AWS Marketplace Seller Prime program and share case studies from Databricks, Snowflake, and Varonis demonstrating successful international expansion strategies.
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Main Part
Product-Led Growth Through AWS Marketplace: A Strategy for Global Expansion
Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for being here for our session today. I hope everyone's having a good time at Reinvent. My name is Alex Jones. I lead growth marketing for AWS Marketplace, and with me we have Patrick Ludwig who leads our international development efforts. Today we're going to talk to you about how to grow internationally by leveraging product-led growth through AWS Marketplace. I'm going to start by going through what product-led growth is all about, why it's important, and how to activate it through AWS Marketplace. Then Patrick's going to go through how to really make your international sales fluid.
I love this topic. Having spent the majority of my career in developer marketing, there's nothing that resonates with me more than being helpful to our target audience. To me, that's what product-led growth is all about. It's how companies like HubSpot, Twilio, and a whole host of new AI startups have been growing from zero to meaningful recurring revenue levels, all without having to first invest in a global sales team.
Product-led growth is a go-to-market strategy where the product itself drives customer acquisition, conversion, and revenue. There are three key things that I want to leave you with today. First, PLG is focused on the end user. We're talking about the practitioner or the developer who's hands on keyboard getting value out of your product. Next, the self-service experience is incredibly important. We need the end user to be able to find your product, try it, and figure out how to use it all without being able to talk to a human. Finally, the product also acts as a sales channel, and especially when paired with the cloud marketplace, the product experience drives monetization and growth and makes it really easy to purchase.
Today in particular, it's powerful when we're talking about scaling through a cloud marketplace. Let me tell you about why this is important right now. We're seeing a few different trends come together. The first is a shift towards self-service. Buyers increasingly want to buy through self-service, and we did a study last year that indicated eighty percent of cloud marketplace users plan to procure more in the next two years. AWS Marketplace today has over eighty percent of our subscriptions as self-service.
If we pair that with the fact that we're seeing rising power of the developer, with even back in 2021 IDC doing a developer survey that showed that seventy to seventy-nine percent of developers feel that they have either complete or significant influence over purchases in their organization, and then if we pair this as well with the fact that cloud marketplaces spend is accelerating and forecasted to reach one hundred sixty-three billion dollars by the year 2030, we have a strong convergence here. We've got buyers. Our users are no longer just users, they're buyers, and they want to buy through self-service, coming together with the fastest growing channel for software distribution today. The way to take advantage of that opportunity is by activating product-led growth through AWS Marketplace.
If you're not yet familiar with AWS Marketplace, it's a proven channel for AWS partners to grow. A lot of partners report faster, shorter sales cycles, increased renewal rates, and the ability to grow faster generally through cloud marketplace. For buyers, it provides a single destination where buyers can find, try, and buy all of the software they need to be successful with what they're building on AWS across seventy different categories. Critically for our conversation today, Marketplace is available in thirty-seven different regions to support your international expansion.
Now let's consider our go-to-market model with the need to expand internationally. If we approach with traditional sales-led growth, we need to typically have a legal entity in a market. We need to have salespeople in a market, and we're making bets on where we're going to best realize that growth. We tend to see high customer acquisition costs and longer sales cycles in comparison with a product-led growth strategy, which really flips this on its head. When your product is listed in AWS Marketplace, it's accessible in one hundred ninety different countries from day one. Your product now becomes your global sales team, and it doesn't matter whether your customer is in Singapore or Seattle. Because everything is done through self-service, you have a lower customer acquisition cost, and Marketplace is there to help simplify the operations of all of that.
Let's talk about how that recurring revenue model actually works through Marketplace. To demonstrate this, I'm going to bring up a model that's originally developed by Dave Boyce at Winning by Design. If you take a look at the left-hand side there, we have the discovery and acquisition layer. When your product is available in Marketplace, it's now discoverable in AWS consoles. It's available to be found within the Marketplace experience itself and through the co-marketing efforts that we do together.
Looking at the middle section of the model, we can see how users can experience value through a free tier or free trial, and then become willing to pay as you go for consumption. All billing is handled through AWS. By freeing up our sales people from cold prospecting, they can focus on helping users expand their usage of the product, achieve more impact, and expand recurring revenue. They can also upgrade customers to private offers, which are committed contracts in AWS Marketplace.
Product-led growth also provides valuable data to guide our next steps by analyzing customer behavior. We can look for signals like how traffic reaches our marketplace product listing, how visitors convert into new subscriptions or signups, and where we see strong product-market fit with free users becoming paid customers and expanding their usage. By examining support tickets and identifying where active users are looking to expand their use cases and get help, we can identify clusters of signals that indicate where we should invest in establishing a stronger sales presence in that market.
To help AWS partners get started, we have a program called AWS Marketplace Seller Prime. Any ISV can sign up and take advantage of best practices we offer, along with a roadmap showing what success looks like. We provide conversion optimization tips and strategies for getting the most out of your marketplace product listing. We also support activating your own marketing campaigns, including funding to help get those campaigns off the ground. Partners who participate in the program are prioritized for inclusion in our AWS-led campaigns, which helps amplify your discovery efforts.
The program also includes product-led growth go-to-market reporting so you can better understand where visitors are getting to your product page from and how to optimize your tactics to drive conversion. Let me share one important point: do not simply list your product in the marketplace and expect users to find it and consume it. You need to tie your product in the marketplace to your overall company's go-to-market strategy.
Looking at how a company like Databricks has executed this over the last couple of years, they've increased traffic to their marketplace product listing by 9X, realized a 5X improvement on subscriptions, which drives self-service consumption revenue. Their sales team then takes that pool of self-service subscribers and upgrades them to private offers. With a different company, a smaller startup in the vector database space over a shorter timeframe, we see a similar pattern with increased traffic, subscriptions, and 3X improvements on revenue.
We can see a consistent pattern: when you drive high-quality traffic to your marketplace product listing and convert those initial visitors into self-service subscribers, your sales team can take those subscriptions and upgrade them to private offers and committed contracts. With that said, I'm going to introduce Patrick, who will explain how we can operationalize this internationally using AWS Marketplace's global infrastructure.
Operationalizing International Sales: How AWS Marketplace Enables Fluid Global Transactions
Thank you, Alex. Now that we've learned how our product helps us attract customers in over 190 different countries via AWS Marketplace, I want to spend some time showing you how AWS Marketplace operationally supports you transacting with customers around the globe. When we think about AWS Marketplace operationally, we think about fluidity. What we mean by that is your transactions run smoothly. Private offers can be completed within minutes, customers can subscribe to your products within a few clicks, and we want to give you the right processes, tools, and systems so that transactions don't hit a wall because of unanswered questions that might block you from implementing your product-led growth strategy.
These are questions that come up normally and that we discuss with our sellers. Do we need to translate our listing now that we're going to market globally with AWS Marketplace? With our current setup in AWS Marketplace, can our entity even sell to customers around the globe? When we do transact with these customers, how do we handle local currencies and how should we set up our revenue operations processes to support that? And lastly, there are also questions around meeting local regulations and fulfilling our tax duties in those regions.
Our vision and goal with AWS Marketplace is to support you in a comprehensive way with those questions, making the marketplace your preferred global route to market by enabling local experiences in the countries where you operate. What this means is making your software feel native in every market where you're selling.
AWS Marketplace has already built in automated compliance in the regions you go to market in. We provide efficiency as well as localized experiences for our customers. Let's look into more details about what this means for the questions we asked ourselves at the beginning. The first question was whether we need to localize our listings, whether we need to translate everything 100 times. The good news is no, we do that for you. AWS Marketplace has automated translation available.
Whether it's a buyer who wants to explore your product in Japanese, we provide a product listing in Japanese. If a French-speaking customer wants to check out or you send them a private offer, they can explore that offer in French. We've already translated that for you. Another cool feature is that you can opt in to use our standardized licensing terms, and we provide translated copies of those as well. So a Spanish-speaking customer can explore the terms that govern the use of your software in their native language, which makes your software feel native in those local markets.
We've been asking ourselves how we can set up one entity to go to market in 190 countries. The good news is you don't need to set up new entities. We support your business to be registered from over 40 different jurisdictions. I highlighted India because that was our latest addition to that model. If you have a business registered in India, you can set it up as a seller in the marketplace and transact globally. If you have multiple local entities, for example, an entity in Germany to support your transactions with German customers in local currencies, you can set that up as a seller in the marketplace as well. There's nothing blocking you from doing that.
The next question was around regulations and tax duties. This is what I mean by the automated compliance of AWS Marketplace. In most of the countries and regions where you're transacting, we automatically assess, collect, and remit local taxes. With our global operator model and local AWS entities facilitating your transactions, such as our entities in the US, India, Australia, Japan, and our latest addition in Korea, your customers get invoiced for the purchase of your solutions from the same AWS entity that they receive their AWS invoices from. This also provides localized tax treatments for even more countries and supports local payment systems such as SEPA payments in Europe.
The last question was around currencies and your local RevOps processes. How do we consolidate the payments from around the world? You set this up when you register as a seller in AWS Marketplace. Those of you who have already registered may remember that first step where you set up the currencies that you want to support in AWS Marketplace and your bank accounts. I want to underline that you can add multiple local bank accounts and associate them with each currency. If you want to support euros, you can add your local European bank account to be targeted for euro payouts. Similarly, AWS customers set up their billing preferences with AWS when they set up their account. As a German AWS customer, I may set up my AWS billing to receive my AWS invoices in Zurich.
Let me walk through this transaction circle. By default, all of your public product listings, the ones that you support your product-led growth with, are in US dollars. However, you can choose to do a private transaction with your customer in other currencies, such as euros, Japanese yen, or Australian dollars. The customer is then invoiced by the local AWS entity when they purchase your solution in the format they set up when they created their AWS account. The customer pays for the use of your service via their AWS invoice, and we then pay you out in the currency that you quoted in. There are no surprises for you. The currency that you set up at the beginning of the transaction is the currency you receive, and we target the bank account that you choose. This way, you can set up your local entities to receive payments when you quote a customer in local currencies.
Let's bring it all together again. You may be familiar with that view from Alex's part. What I want to tell you is that whether you have a sales-led go-to-market strategy, you're starting now with your product-led go-to-market strategy, or you do a hybrid of both—something we're seeing every day—AWS Marketplace is there to support you with local compliance, localized invoicing experience, and an overall localized purchasing experience for your customers, making your software and product feel native in every market you sell into.
Best Practices and Success Stories: Implementing Your Global Marketplace Strategy
So what does this mean now for your product-led growth strategy? We're going to start with that. A few best practices we're seeing include the following. If you're going to market already via your local entities, set them up as sellers as well. Reduce the workarounds you have to do in order to transact with a German customer by going through a US entity. Set up the German entity if it's there and enable local currency transactions and set up those bank accounts in the region where the transaction is happening.
On the product-led growth side, everything that Alex said—thanks for all the tips and best practices there—do optimize your listings knowing we localize them in the region and use the Seller Prime program to fund your go-to-market initiatives. Let's end it with fluidity again, the way we started it, and I want to do the fluidity check with you by introducing you to two case studies. The first one is Varonis. I know it's a long quote, so let me walk you through it.
What Varonis did was set up their local entities as sellers in the AWS Marketplace and enable local currency transactions under those local entities. The outcome is that now the Deal Desk and RevOps teams of Varonis are treating marketplace transactions just like they would do any other transaction. What does that do? That removes friction. They don't have to do any workarounds at the last minute of a transaction. It just flows through smoothly and it helps them accelerate their transactions. Another example I brought with me today is Snowflake, one of those vendors that transacted over a billion dollars in 2024. Snowflake also leverages the automated compliance with the AWS Marketplace where they can, and they set up to mirror their regional RevOps processes with the AWS Marketplace. What that brings them as well is greater efficiency when they transact locally, which is also one of the key contributors to how they've been able to grow globally with our service.
I wanted to bring up that fluidity slide one more time to test if we've proven it. If you set it up the right way, your transactions will go smoothly around the globe. Couple of next steps to end this presentation—maybe not today, maybe after re:Invent once you're rested a little bit—is to do validation. If you're already a seller on the AWS Marketplace, compare your current setup in the marketplace to how you go to market generally. Follow Alex's best practice in optimizing your listings to the countries you want to operate in. Then plan and implement your product-led growth strategy using the support of our Seller Prime program and constantly review how your strategy is performing. Always have a critical eye, double clicking on those campaigns that are converting well and double down on those. Where you see room for improvement, don't shy away. Keep on iterating to grow your marketplace business globally.
You can find us on the AWS Marketplace booth if you want to double click on one or two things that we presented today or if you want to self-study. Here's some additional material available around Seller Prime. We also just published a blog post around the best practices and the trends we're seeing around the operational support of international expansion. Work through that. Remember, Alex and I—once you've implemented your strategy, reach out to us and become the next case study of our next year's re:Invent presentation. With that, I want to thank you a lot for spending 20 minutes with us and learning about the AWS Marketplace. Thank you.
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