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Airtable's valuation crosses $10B, Superhuman open-sources success, famous last words of pre-IPO PLG companies, Replit's audacious vision, and more...
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This week in PLG 🗞

Airtable's valuation crosses $10B, Superhuman open-sources success, famous last words of pre-IPO PLG companies, Replit's audacious vision, and more...

Rahul Krishnan
,
Ruchin Kulkarni
, and
Arjun Rakesh
Dec 16, 2021
5
1
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Airtable's valuation crosses $10B, Superhuman open-sources success, famous last words of pre-IPO PLG companies, Replit's audacious vision, and more...
www.topofthelyne.co

👋 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 ❤️

Subscribe to get this newsletter every week👇

“So tell me about Toplyne. What do y’all do?”

After struggling (in elevators 😉 ) for the last 7 months, to put together words in the right order to describe what exactly we do 🙈 here’s a meme from last week that seems to have done the trick!

Image

Find your Waldo! Get started for free 🤩


Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌

  • The best PLG companies open source their success 🎓

    Want to know if you have product-market fit? Ask your users "how they would feel if they could no longer use the product?" If over 40% say they would be very disappointed then you’ve hit gold!

    But of course! Most of you have heard this already? That’s the power of the best PLG companies - they open-source their learnings and distribute them far and wide 🌎

    Here’s an insightful tweet by Olivia Moore on this phenomenon ✨

    Twitter avatar for @omooretweets
    Olivia Moore @omooretweets
    I smile every time I see a startup deck using the "Superhuman methodology" to measure product-market fit. Rare that an early-stage company creates a framework that so quickly becomes crucial to many other startups!
    5:01 PM ∙ Dec 14, 2021
    12Likes1Retweet
  • From New Mac to Rails Development in 11 Minutes ⚡️

    The best PLG companies deliver value fasssttt!

    • Canva - takes less than a minute to export a design

    • Stripe - 7 lines of code to integrate payments

    And this week we got to see this philosophy in action once again! rails.new solved a pain point I had for years as a kid… and all in 11 minutes 🤯

    Twitter avatar for @andrewculver
    Andrew Culver @andrewculver
    Before kids can get started learning about web development with Rails, they need it installed on their machines. This has long been a source of pain for me, so we decided to do something about it. rails.new: From New Mac to Rails Development in 11 Minutes
    Image
    9:11 PM ∙ Dec 12, 2021
    1,001Likes143Retweets
  • Famous pre-IPO words of every PLG company since 1999 😂

    Does this sound familiar? PLG founder in:

    • Year 1 🙅🏻‍♂️ “I will never hire salespeople”

    • Year 2 🚀 “See! I got to $1M ARR. PLG to the moon”

    • Year 5 😤 “Okay we’ll hire a few transactional reps but never enterprise reps”

    • Year 7 😬 “How quickly can we hire a massive enterprise sales team”

    Twitter avatar for @jasonlk
    Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin ⚫️ @jasonlk
    99% of PLG companies, from 1999 to 2022: Year 1: "We'll never have a sales team at all!" Year 7: "How quickly can we scale an enterprise sales team" @patrickmoran @Calendly
    Image
    6:15 PM ∙ Dec 15, 2021
    31Likes2Retweets

    PLG does not mean no sales! Just look at Figma’s ~50 person AE team….

    How Figma built a $10B GTM engine 🎨

    Calendly…

    How Calendly will scale to $1B ARR 🚀

    Productboard…

    Everyone’s got sales 🙌🏻


🔎 The PLG hunt

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

  • The internet is talking back to us

    Copy.ai announced a free plan just yesterday and we had a chance to take their AI-powered copywriting platform out for a spin. Based on a brief, it can generate blog post outlines, link descriptions for Facebook ads, and even company mottos. They announced their Series A earlier this year and are hiring aggressively.

Twitter avatar for @PaulYacoubian
Paul Yacoubian @PaulYacoubian
Announcing our $11m Series A round at copy.ai from Wing Ventures, Craft Ventures, Sequoia, Tiger Global, Elad Gil, and many amazing investors! 🙌
copy.aiCopyAI: Create Marketing Copy In SecondsGet great copy that sells. CopyAI is an AI powered copywriter that generates high-quality copy for your business. Get started for free, no credit card required!
5:03 PM ∙ Oct 14, 2021
1,475Likes124Retweets

We keyed in “Toplyne” and a brief description of what we do into Copy.ai and here’s what the algorithm wrote for us:

“Toplyne is designed for sales and revenue teams to increase conversion rates by focusing on the right leads at the right time. It works by analyzing inbound leads, then placing them into segments – all with a click of a button. This lets sales people target the segments they want while being able to avoid wasting time on the ones they don't.”

Holy moly… that was:

Pretty Good GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY

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Growth Stories 🚀

  • Replit’s vision for the world will make even the most hardened pessimists sit up and take notice

    Replit is building for a world where the internet is truly the Great Equalizer and this week they took big strides towards that goal with their Series B funding.

Twitter avatar for @amasad
Amjad Masad ⠕ @amasad
Beyond thrilled to announce that we raised $80m in Series B financing from amazing investors & angels. Our mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. Here is how we will do it: blog.replit.com/b
Image
4:25 PM ∙ Dec 9, 2021
1,658Likes99Retweets

If Replit’s truly transformative mission is able to put code literacy in the hands of every person on the planet, what may result would be something as impactful as the few revolutions that the Gutenberg press set off. Code literacy could really be that impactful.

We covered the Replit story from its origins as an open-source project based out of Jordan all the way up to their Series B announcement last week.

Dive in 👇

Top of the Lyne
Replit: Printing “hello world” shouldn't be this easy!
👋🏻 Hey, Ruchin here! Welcome to another edition of the Growth Stories series 🙌🏻 Every week we break down growth strategies employed by the hottest SaaS PLG Cos and share tactics that you can experiment with at work! If you’re a new subscriber or if you couldn’t find our emails this last month, fret not - We have you covered ❤️! Here are some of our …
Read more
a year ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Arjun Rakesh, Rahul Krishnan, and Ruchin Kulkarni

If you listen to these growth stories while on the treadmill or as you fire up the stove for breakfast, you should know that the Clearbit growth story is up on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Fully enriched, of course.

🎙 Tune in!


Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

  • Airtable continues to keep Excel and Google Sheets up at night 🌚

    With their Series F funding, Airtable have almost doubled their valuation to $11B, giving them the freedom to execute on the long-term opportunities in the space. Read more about their growth story here.

Twitter avatar for @airtable
Airtable @airtable
Today we're thrilled to announce a new round of funding, which will help us continue to innovate and serve our incredible Airtable community ❤️. We're so honored to be on this journey with all of you 🚀 @CNBC story: cnbc.com/2021/12/13/low… #nocode #futureofwork #ensw
cnbc.comSoftware start-up Airtable hits $11 billion valuation in latest funding, adds Salesforce, Michael Dell as investorsAirtable raises $735 million in a funding round with Michael Dell that values the enterprise software company at $11 billion, nearly double its last valuation.
5:26 PM ∙ Dec 13, 2021
187Likes30Retweets
  • If your company is going WFH/Hybrid you obviously need Officely

    The Officely Slack integration helps coordinate who goes to the office and when, book desks, set up health screening surveys, and even help with contact tracing. They announced $2M raised in seed funding this week.

Twitter avatar for @TechCrunch
TechCrunch @TechCrunch
Officely raises $2M to help hybrid teams coordinate office time right in Slack tcrn.ch/3ybxLE6 by @Grg
tcrn.chOfficely raises $2M to help hybrid teams coordinate office time right in Slack – TechCrunchSo your company is going WFH/Office hybrid. Great! Working from home more rules, even if management decisions or the specifics of your role mean it can’t happen every day. Now, how do you coordinate who goes in the office and when? Does it have to be the same day(s) every week? Do you just pick […]
9:32 PM ∙ Dec 9, 2021
12Likes4Retweets
  • Airplane takes off with their $8.5M Series A funding

    This week saw the announcement of their new funding along with the public launch of Airplane runbooks, a developer platform for automating internal workflows

    Twitter avatar for @TechCrunch
    TechCrunch @TechCrunch
    Airplane soars with $8.5M to make creating internal tools less burdensome tcrn.ch/3dB5L3n by @ChristineMHall
    tcrn.chAirplane soars with $8.5M to make creating internal tools less burdensome – TechCrunchWith developers in mind, the company gives engineers back the time they were spending building internal tools and away from product engineering.
    5:00 PM ∙ Dec 9, 2021
    11Likes4Retweets

Launches, events, and releases

  • Your favorite design tool is now coming to your phone

    That’s right! Figma’s mobile app is out of beta and available for download on both Android & iOS App stores

Twitter avatar for @figmadesign
Figma @figmadesign
Our updated Figma mobile app is out of beta and available to all📱🙌 🎉 You can now play prototypes as well as browse, view, and share files on-the-go. More features coming soon✨ Download on iOS: apple.co/3y9hRKJ Download on Android: bit.ly/3EGtbjT
7:37 PM ∙ Dec 9, 2021
758Likes123Retweets
  • Airtable began the week with a ✨ feature alert ✨, ended the week with another feature alert, and had the small matter of their Series F announcement in between

    They announced sync integration capabilities with external sources earlier this week and ended the week with a new feature update to edit individual cells on mobile.

Twitter avatar for @airtable
Airtable @airtable
🚨 New features alert 🚨 Today we're excited to announce new sync integrations with: ⚡ @Jira Server & Data Center ⚡ @Zendesk ⚡ @github Issues ⚡ @googledrive ⚡ @Box Get the details on how to sync data from these great sources ➡️ ow.ly/Chro50H7hK4
ow.lyNew features: Sync data from outside sources in AirtableSynced information gives teams critical insights that they can act on.
5:15 PM ∙ Dec 9, 2021
33Likes6Retweets

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

SaaStr Scale 2021 streamed live yesterday and was a wealth of great advice, tips, stories and mistakes to avoid. It included sessions from Box, Asana, Calendly, Grammarly, Airtable, and more…

These sessions are on the @SaaStr Twitter page

Here’s Grammarly’s take on scaling from Consumer to SMB to Enterprise:

Twitter avatar for @saastr
SaaStr @saastr
10 Learnings Scaling from Consumer to SMB to Enterprise with Grammarly https://t.co/dtqiBqpON3
5:01 PM ∙ Dec 15, 2021
5Likes3Retweets


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Airtable's valuation crosses $10B, Superhuman open-sources success, famous last words of pre-IPO PLG companies, Replit's audacious vision, and more...
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1 Comment
PD
Dec 22, 2021

This is a nicely written article, though a couple of things bother me!

1. Over and mis-use of the word open-source. Open source is not about just making anything open to everyone. It's also about allowing people to modify it. much like crowdsource, open-source is accepting help (in the form of code, quality checks etc) from a specific set of public (i.e. developers )

2. if you are building a product for PLG companies, why would you make fun of the PLG founders?

3. This sounds more like a VC article with funding announcements.

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