A $196M mistake 🙊, Fortune favors the distributed 💰, Avengers assemble , and more...

👋 Hey, Ruchin here! Welcome to this week’s edition of the ✨Top of the Lyne✨ newsletter. Each week we publish the hottest news from the beautiful world of product-led growth! (PLG)

The outcome we're shooting for is simple... to get enough folks excited about the product-led world that we so dearly love ❤️

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Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌

• Lessons from a $196M mistake 🙊

  Last week brought us Paddle’s acquisition of ProfitWell bringing a conclusion to one of the hottest wars in 2010s SaaS - “the 1-click SaaS metrics wars”.

  So why did Baremetrics, who was first to market sell for $4M while ProfitWell, a fast follower, sell for $200M!

  1. Don’t charge for commodities: ProfitWell made metrics FREE and charged only for dunning… completely nerfing Baremetrics “paid-metrics” product

  2. Choose your investors wisely: ChartMogul aggregated metrics across payment processors (Stripe, Adyen, Paypal) while Baremetrics stayed exclusive to its early investor - Stripe

  3. Think ahead: SaaS metrics dashboards ultimately started getting embedded deeper into the payments stack and commoditized by the layer beneath. Stripe itself started rolling out subscription metrics! Chargebee, Recurly, Zuora, and Chargify followed as well.

  Jan-Erik Asplund @janerikasplund

  In 2013, @Baremetrics created the category for 1-click SaaS metrics on Stripe and raised from top investors BVP, GA & Stripe @ProfitWell fast followed in 2014 PW just announced a $200M acquisition by @PaddleHQ while BM sold for $4M to private equity in 2020 What happened? 👇

• Avengers assemble 🦸🏻‍♀️🦸🏻

  Replit assembles Earth’s Mightiest heroes to support 12 special teams!

  Replit ⠕ @Replit

  A few weeks ago, we announced Replit Ventures $10,000 grants + 10 weeks of mentorship to support builders. It is core to our mission... but we did not stop there. Today, we are happy to announce the Replit Ventures Builder Kit. Here are the eight partners:

  

• Fortune favors the distributed 💰

Ross Simmonds @TheCoolestCool

Disney has understood the power of distribution since 1957.

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🔎 The PLG hunt

“If you know, u-no”

Security is a design problem. That’s the premise of ex-Google designer Parteek’s brainchild: Uno.

Uno attempts to solve the problem statement of security through a design-led approach, starting with a fresh new password manager.

Parteek @parteeksaran

Hello! I started a company. Meet @unoidentity! We’re building a new kind of password manager. The one that you’ll love using. uno.app A bit about why a designer is building in security...

Which hot and upcoming PLG company are you most excited about? 👇🏻

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Growth Stories 🚀

King Gong 👑

The whirring growth engine that powered the revenue intelligence tool - a category they themselves created - to a $7.25B valuation, 140% net revenue retention, and close to 0 churn - what can product-led growth learn from Gong?

You can’t go Wrong with Gong

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Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

• Unified search across all of your apps. 🔎

  Glean has raised $100M in Series C funding.

  Glean @gleanwork

  We're thrilled to share that we've raised a $100M series C led by @sequoia at a $1B valuation. Glean searches across all your company's apps to help you find exactly what you need and discover the things you should know. And we're just getting started!

  

  glean.comGlean raises $100M series C at $1B valuation to power search and discovery across workplace SaaS appsArvind Jain | Sequoia leads investment in Glean’s powerful, unified search solution to help employees combat knowledge fragmentation and SaaS sprawl at work.

• Vouch aims to unlock the power of video. Minus the production headaches. 📹

  Vouch @VouchHQ

  A big day here at Vouch HQ! We are thrilled to announce our $8M funding round, led by @Stage2Capital & @OIFVC Ventures. Thank you to our incredible team, customers, investors and advisors for your support so far. We can’t wait to share what’s next❤️

  

  vouchfor.comVouch raises $8M funding to unlock the power of video | VouchIt’s an exciting day at Vouch HQ as we officially announce our $8M AUD seed round, led by Stage 2 Capital and Our Innovation Fund.

Launches, events, and releases

• New embeds are coming to Substack 🆕

  Hamish McKenzie @hamishmckenzie

  New things on Substack: - swipeable images - TikTok embeds - profile-displaying likes - font choices in the app You should start a substack.

  

  on.substack.comProduct news for writers: Post reactions, TikTok embeds, updates to the Substack app and moreA rundown of the latest product improvements to help Substack writers succeed

• Content marketers, rejoice 🎉

  Webflow now allows you to unpublish CMS items without hitting that dreaded “Publish” button.

  Webflow @webflow

  Now this is a time saver ⏰ You’ll no longer need to republish your entire site whenever you want to remove individual CMS items from your site.

  

Blazing hot meme zone 🚧

Brute forcing to default alive through founder-led sales is a common theme in the early days of many of today’s big logos - Retool, Gong…

Let us know in the comments if you know a FLS (Founder-Led Sales) story 👇

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