Bloodbath in the public markets, Andreesen's Law of irrelevance, go niche or go home, and more...

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Jan 20, 2022

👋 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 🐦🌌

We have to start with the bloodbath in the public markets 💀
This video summarized most of our moods perfectly 😬
logan bartlett @loganbartlett
When your portfolio is all late stage private software companies priced at 200x ARR
10:50 PM ∙ Jan 18, 2022
1,244Likes43Retweets
Go niche or go home🚀
How does one go from 0 to 3M users in 6 months… How?
“Don’t be afraid to go niche”
Olivia Moore’s article captures how Discord started small within Reddit’s Final Fantasy community.
Olivia Moore @omooretweets
In this week's Launched, I explored the early days of Discord. A single post on the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit attracted the first 600 users. But how did this balloon into 3M users in Discord's first six months? ⬇️
4:36 PM ∙ Jan 12, 2022
333Likes52Retweets

PLG dominates the SaaS secondary markets 🔥
Nearly every SaaS company on Pitchbook’s 30 most sought-after startups on the secondary market are PLG companies - Stripe, Airtable, Canva, Figma, Snyk 👩🏻‍💻
The SMB markets are deeper than any of us realize… 🤷🏻‍♂️
Just look at Hubspot, which is accelerating… yes, ACCELERATING… as it gets past $1B in ARR 🤯

Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣ @jasonlk

HubSpot growth at $1.0B ARR: 32% $1.1B ARR: 41% $1.5B ARR: 49% Woah More here:

youtu.beHubSpot at $1.5 BILLION in ARR — Growing 49%!! Here’s How They Did ItHubSpot has been the leading marketing platform for SMBs for years. But it’s gone on to do something we never used to see. Accelerate and grow every faster...

Tesla Roadster vs. Bugatti Chiron reminded us of what PLG apps feel like vs. their old-timey competitors 🏎
Stripe vs. Paypal
Canva vs. Adobe
Notion vs. Word
…
…
The list goes on
…
…
Rodrigo Teijeiro @RodrigoTeijeiro
Pretty insane accomplishment.
3:18 AM ∙ Jan 17, 2022
11,168Likes904Retweets
For all the “technical” perfectionists out there, @pmarca offers a reality check 😬
Andreesen’s Law: Every technology becomes technically perfect at the precise moment when it becomes irrelevant.

Elad Gil @eladgil

Andreessen's Law: Every technology becomes technically perfect at the precise moment when it becomes irrelevant. From @pmarca

🔎 The PLG hunt

The world’s largest ecosystem for building no-code applications…👩🏻‍💻
That’s what Softr has set out to build. In just a year, the German company’s no-code web app building platform has attracted ~35,000 business and creator customers. Softr’s use cases range from custom apps to marketplaces, online communities, internal tools, client portals, directories, and more - currently powered by Airtable data, but set to become data-source agnostic very soon.
They announced their Series A round earlier this week:
Softr @softr_io
Excited to announce our $13.5M Series A round at @softr_io led by @mattturck at FirstMark Capital, and 35+ amazing angels, the world’s top minds in product, growth and community. 🎉🚀 We are building the world’s largest ecosystem for no-code apps. softr.io/blog/worlds-la…
softr.ioSoftr raises $13.5M Series AWe are excited to announce that we’ve raised a $13.5M Series A to create the world’s largest ecosystem for building no-code apps.
3:53 PM ∙ Jan 18, 2022
268Likes37Retweets
Which hot and upcoming PLG company are you most excited about? 👇🏻

Growth Stories 🚀

Introducing Scratchpad, the app with a mind-blowing 60% DAU/WAU ratio 🤯

In a world where the skillsets that make a great salesperson remain elusive, mysterious & rare, why would you waste their time scrambling to update records on Salesforce? Sales folk, meet Scratchpad. (That is if you haven’t, already.)

The average Scratchpad user uses Scratchpad 3 out of 5 working days a week! According to David Sacks, once a Sales rep started using Scratchpad, two things tend to happen: (1) it becomes a daily habit, and (2) they share it with their teammates." Here’s the whole scoop:

Top of the Lyne

Doubling sales productivity with Scratchpad

👋🏻 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 …

a year ago · 3 likes · Arjun Rakesh, Rahul Krishnan, and Ruchin Kulkarni

Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

Say hello to better workdays ⏰
Clockwise’s mission to rework the workday and make time for what matters kicks into next gear with the latest round of funding led by Coatue.
Clockwise @getclockwise
We’re proud to announce our $45M Series C to help bring a new way of working to more people worldwide. Led by Coatue, @Atlassian Ventures participated along with existing investors @Accel, @GreylockVC & @BainCapVC.
bit.lyClockwise raises $45M Series C to rework the workday | ClockwiseToday, we’re proud to announce that we’ve raised $45M in funding to advance our AI technology and bring this new way of working to more people worldwide.
2:03 PM ∙ Jan 18, 2022
38Likes8Retweets
Read more about this beautiful little Chrome extension here.
If you prefer to listen rather than read, tune into the Clockwise story on the Top of the Lyne podcast 🎙:

Launches, events, and releases

Conditional logic for your unconditional love of automation
Now you can prime Airtable automations to do exactly what you want. 🦾
Airtable @airtable
✨ New feature alert: Today we’ve officially launched conditional logic for Automations ⚡ You can now create complex automations that let you put detailed workflows on autopilot. Get the details ➡️ ow.ly/p86c50HycSF
5:48 PM ∙ Jan 19, 2022
91Likes14Retweets

Thank you, Notion. Was that so hard?🤣
No more pulling your hair out trying to select text within and across multiple blocks.
Notion @NotionHQ
We finally did it 😤 Notion’s text editor has been completely rebuilt to combine: - the flexibility of “blocks” - the ease of a traditional word processor Rolling out this month on desktop & mobile: SELECT TEXT ACROSS MULTIPLE BLOCKS!
7:30 PM ∙ Jan 19, 2022
5,279Likes375Retweets

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

“Amp It Up” - ❄️ Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman’s new book on Hypergrowth is…unique

Snowflake CEO and Chairman Frank Slootman and Harry Stebbings cover a lot of ground here from prioritization, performance reviews, and what makes good people great… to the art of leadership and board management.

Some housekeeping…

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Bloodbath in the public markets, Andreesen's Law of irrelevance, go niche or go home, and more...

Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌

🔎 The PLG hunt

Growth Stories 🚀

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

Ready for more?