Calendly: enabling series A's since 2013, that 70s show - the PLG edition, how to run a company for Dummies, 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 🐦🌌
Calendly: enabling series A’s since 2013 💰
What can be more product-led than sneaking onto an investor call by guessing their Calendly link! Web2 has its charm folks 😬
“But Ruchin, that’d never work”
Well then you’re clearly not the *surprise* founder in Lennysan’s zoom meeting room are you? 🙈👇🏻
That 70s show… the PLG edition🕺
Jason Lemkin makes a strong case for PLG being as 70’s a phenomenon as pet rocks and the last era of good music (rock n’ roll) 🎸…you heard that right, trance 😛
How to run a company… for dummies 🤓
It all comes down to people, culture, and a common collective goal 🥅
Ryan Breslow put out a simple yet elegant framework describing the six things one must get right to run a business… the right way 😉
Step 1 ⭐️ Define a crystal clear north star
Step 2 🥴 Hire uncomfortably good people
Step 3 ⚡️Create a culture of urgency
Step 4 🚧 Make sure no one gets blocked
Step 5 ⚾️ Occasionally take big swings
Step 6 💪🏻 Nail the attitude
Step 7 🏆 You have a WINNER
🔎 The PLG hunt
Show, don’t tell - Arcade
Arcade’s mission is to give creators show off their work with magical high-impact experiences/demos on websites, social media, and beyond. Arcade could elevate product demos to a whole new level of interactivity, and dare we say, fun?
We’re excited to see where their product roadmap takes them once they’re out of beta, especially after we checked out their own demo on the Arcade website.
Mind = 🤯
What hot and upcoming PLG company are you most excited about? 👇🏻
Growth Stories 🚀
In the spirit of “show, don’t tell”, we let Copy.ai write the intro to their own growth story. Judge for yourself. Here it goes:
“Once there was a startup called “Copy.ai” that had the dream of disrupting the world of content creation with Artificial Intelligence (AI). But doing this was harder than thought. Through constant iteration and improvements, Copy.ai has become one of the most accurate and fastest content creation tools on the market today.”
Here’s the copy.ai story and the product-led + build-in-public ethos that's powering their supercharged growth - $0 to $2.4M ARR in 1 year!
🎙 If you prefer to tune in to our growth stories rather than read them, we’ve got you covered!
Here’s the story of the “Google, but for code”: Sourcegraph.
Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑
Grand theft Au… Farmville?! 🐷
The creator of the popular video game Grand Theft Auto bought the Farmville creator Zynga last week.
What do Zynga investors get? Well… a rich 60%+ premium to the companies current stock price
Are Take-Two shareholders being done dirty? Not really… a major chunk of global video gaming revenue as of 2022 is on mobile. And Take-Two has historically struggled to grab market share. After this deal, the collective company will end the year with over 50% of its revenue coming from mobile. Not to mention the invaluable expertise Zynga would bring to the table as the world’s pre-eminent mobile game creator.
Launches, events, and releases
New features are coming to Descript!
Descript has given us the promise of cool new features. And we can’t wait! They’re dropping in a live event on January 26.
We are yet to find the remote equivalent of water-cooler talk
In an attempt to solve this problem, Asana seems to have found the middle ground between over-compensating with meetings, and under-compensating with async tools.
The solution? Video messaging powered by Vimeo.
Mark your calendars!
Notion announced a conference that’s set to happen on March 2nd and is packed with (more) feature announcements, workshops, and more.
Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚
Failure Teachable moment.
Jason Lemkin talks here about how to turn failures into teachable moments, and what to learn from them, with examples from 30+ founders, CEOs, and top executives.
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.
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