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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Dec 16, 2021

👋 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!

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 ✨
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!
December 14th 2021
1 Retweet12 Likes
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 🤯
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
December 12th 2021
143 Retweets1,001 Likes
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”
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
December 15th 2021
2 Retweets31 Likes
PLG does not mean no sales! Just look at Figma’s ~50 person AE team….
Calendly…
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.

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! 🙌

CopyAI: 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!copy.ai

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

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.

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

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 …

5 months 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.

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

Software 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.cnbc.com

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.

TechCrunch @TechCrunch

Officely raises $2M to help hybrid teams coordinate office time right in Slack tcrn.ch/3ybxLE6 by @Grg

Officely 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 […]tcrn.ch

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
TechCrunch @TechCrunch
Airplane soars with $8.5M to make creating internal tools less burdensome tcrn.ch/3dB5L3n by @ChristineMHallAirplane 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.tcrn.ch
December 9th 2021
4 Retweets11 Likes

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

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

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.

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

New features: Sync data from outside sources in AirtableSynced information gives teams critical insights that they can act on.ow.ly

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:

SaaStr @saastr

10 Learnings Scaling from Consumer to SMB to Enterprise with Grammarly https://t.co/dtqiBqpON3

Some housekeeping…

Is your mailbox trying to keep our content away from you! 💔 What can you do about it? Mark this email as ‘not spam’ 😱 or move it from your promotions to the primary folder 👉🏻 It’s very easy!

Thanks again, and please tell a few friends if you feel like it.

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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