Airtable's valuation crosses $10B, Superhuman open-sources success, famous last words of pre-IPO PLG companies, Replit's audacious vision, 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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“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!
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 ✨
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 🤯
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”
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
PLG does not mean no sales! Just look at Figma’s ~50 person AE team….
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.
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:
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.
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 👇
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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:
Some housekeeping…
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Thanks again, and please tell a few friends if you feel like it.
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.