Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world.
Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work. Google has a long term channel based sales model, and a newer but rapidly growing direct enterprise sales team. They're constantly trying to get GApps in against the aforementioned behemoth MS team.
You’re confusing google for work or whatever it’s called now with Gmail.
Trello sold itself. Explosive growth. Great product. Whether they have given up market share is irrelevant.
Gmail had explosive growth. You use it, you're sold on how good it is.
I'm not sure why some of you think having a salesperson means a product doesn't sell itself. Everyone layers on sales to capture more of the market share at some point.
I'll submit Craigslist and Wikipedia as other options. Also Plenty of Fish.
Communities and knowledgebases can be built without salespeople.
Microsoft absolutely has sales people for the B2B side of Microsoft Office constantly shilling Office 365. This absolutely doesn't sell itself.
I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.
Maybe Word and Excel aren't the best examples, but I don't doubt they could have succeeded if they only gave it away to EDUs and had a base plan for consumers and a self-service enterprise plan. Microsoft had a foothold in desktop market so pushing Office and getting users to use it was easy. And once you try it, it does sell itself.
But I think Trello, Craigslist and Wikipedia are great product examples. You need not have a sales team to scale everything.
You can achieve that with a great product, great customer support, digital marketing and word of mouth.
