Freshworks goes public, Fivetran raises at $5.6B, 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)
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Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌
(Indian) software is eating the world: Freshwork’s public listing is a story straight out of a movie. From being told they “CANT” win to listing on the Nasdaq, Kyle Poyar summarizes the things Freshworks got right! ✅
Focusing on users, not just buyers: Existing vendors designed their products for executive buyers at the expense of frontline employees. Music to a young disruptor’s ears 🎶
Focus on being found ‘organically’ via free, low-cost channels and often guerilla channels - they even flew a #Failsforce blimp over Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference. The blimp was meant to highlight ‘bloated’ legacy products 😅
The power of self-service: Freshworks puts its money where its mouth is, making it simple and easy for folks to trial the product and quickly onboard users. There are 21-day free trials for nearly every Freshworks product
SaaS as a means to an end (read, bank 🤑) … emerging markets might be the hotbed of SaaS business model innovation 🧪
Toast went public yesterday! Who said a hardware business can’t be product-led 🙌🏻 Here’s an investment memo from their first institutional investor - BVP!
Growth Stories 🚀
One billion knowledge workers spend roughly three years of their entire lives reading and writing emails. Superhuman lets them do it 2x faster ⚡️
For $30/mo what Superhuman truly sells is the gift of more time 😌
This weeks growth story covers how they did it….👇🏻
Gaurav Vohra, Head of Strategy @ Superhuman was kind enough to connect with us after our blog post 😊 Gaurav set up a lot of the key functions at the company (onboarding, success, delight, growth…), scaled them from 0 to 1, built repeatability, and moved on to build the next function. We asked him what enabled him to succeed at what most struggle with… His response was insightful and a reminder as to the strength of core values in driving outcomes!
Gaurav Vohra: “I think there’s some table stakes qualities and skills you need to bring such as identifying the customer need, problem solving, being able to hire, being able to manage a team. But I’d say the guiding light at least for me was sticking to our core values as a company (delight, quality, intentionality) so that even if the problems were new there was consistency in how to approach them. Having clear company values is a critical step towards helping the team identify whether a solution is going to be any good.”
Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑
Freshworks rang the bell at Nasdaq yesterday listing at a $10B IPO valuation and popping to over $13B! 🚀
Fivetran hauls $ 565 million on a valuation of $ 5.6 billion and acquires competitor HVR for $ 700 million
Sunday raises $100 million for its fast restaurant checkout flow 💰
Launches, events, and releases
Slack launched features to natively record video, audio, and screen-shares in any channel/DM! Async comms FTW 💯
Sprig (formerly UserLeap) recently launched In-Product Microsurveys to make a better email survey experience
Offline conferences are back 🔥 SaaStr Annual is scheduled for Sep 27-29 in San Mateo
Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚
Switch From Lead-Centric To Account-Centric Marketing
and more tactics that the PLG reimagined marketing functions must take care of 👇🏻
Marketing In An Era Of Product-Led Growth by Shawn Herring, VP of Marketing at PandaDoc
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