He studied how cities adapt to rising seas. Then he spent a decade dissecting how software companies charge for their products. Then he quit the firm and wrote about it instead.
Kyle Poyar's resume reads like three careers running in parallel. Climate researcher. Pricing consultant turned venture operator. Newsletter writer with 84,000 people waiting on his next dispatch. The third one swallowed the others whole.
Before PLG became a slide in every SaaS pitch deck, Kyle was at OpenView Partners building the research infrastructure that gave the idea credibility. Not just coining terms - running surveys, tracking cohorts, publishing the data that founders used to justify changing how they distributed and monetized software. The annual OpenView SaaS Benchmarks report he started in 2017 went from a modest survey to an 800-respondent industry standard. He helped turn product-led growth from a theory into a measurable, repeatable motion.
Then in March 2021, during the pandemic-era stretch when conference rooms were empty and LinkedIn became the industry's town square, he started writing. No grand plan. Just deeper takes on topics he cared about - pricing strategy, GTM frameworks, usage-based models - the kind of tactical depth that fits poorly in a tweet thread but fills a weekly newsletter.
Growth Unhinged was the result. Within three years it had become one of the most-read newsletters in B2B software, with readers ranging from early-stage founders making their first pricing decision to operators at companies doing hundreds of millions in ARR. In 2024, Kyle left OpenView to run it full-time - a bet on owned audience over institutional affiliation. By his own description: "This leap into the unknown is only possible because readers like you take the time to open my emails."
The same year, he co-founded Tremont with Tom Holahan and Chris Gaertner - an early-stage B2B and AI venture firm. The pattern holds: writer, researcher, investor, operating partner. The categories blur in his hands, which is probably the point.
His central obsession is pricing - not as a number but as a signal. "Pricing is really about understanding how people make decisions," he says. Most companies treat it as an afterthought. ProfitWell data he often cites suggests the average SaaS company spends roughly eight hours in its entire lifetime thinking about it. Kyle has probably spent more in a single conference week.
What he actually argues is stranger and more useful than the standard "charge more" advice. His 2025 State of B2B Monetization report - based on data from 240 companies across stages and sectors - found credit-based pricing models growing 126% year-over-year as AI products struggle to match traditional seat-based billing to actual customer value. The shift isn't cosmetic. When AI delivers outcomes rather than occupying seats, the entire revenue architecture has to change. That's the terrain Kyle maps, every week, for 84,000 readers who have nowhere better to get this information.