How Miro grew 3x YoY, Twilio's sales motion, PLG metrics, and more...

👋 Hey, Ruchin here! Welcome to the first edition of the Top of the Lyne newsletter 🥳

Just over two years ago, I was a 23-year-old blue-eyed tech enthusiast joining Sequoia Capital's growth investment team - woefully uninformed of the world I'd stepped into. Within my first few days, I'd learn of a new word called SaaS and about the phenomenon of product-led growth (or PLG for short) powering the sexiest companies in the world! 🚀

The next few months were both challenging and exciting, as I played catchup with my colleagues. Luckily for me, the PLG community (much like Hogwarts 🔮) was more than willing to help those who asked for it!

Engineers, PMs, salespeople, marketers, amongst others were more than willing to point me in the right direction. And boy was I surprised by the wealth of knowledge (substacks, blogs, tweets, podcasts, financials...) out there in the wild! Accessible to anyone who was motivated enough to look for it 💪🏻

It's been a while since then, and I'm now a co-founder of a SaaS company (Toplyne) that is building for the product-led world! 🤷‍♂️ This newsletter is a humble effort to help those in my position just a few years ago. Those eager to learn, read, absorb and grow but facing the hurdle of initial discovery! Every week, my team and I would be curating a list of the best resources to learn from and stay updated on the happenings in the world of 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 🐦🌌

1. Miro’s insane growth curve 📈: Five strategies Miro used to grow 3x annual - learning from their users, incessantly reducing TTV (time to value), engaging customers through courses, building virality loops (invites), aligning everyone to the company’s north star metric - users creating more boards and session 🌟

Ryan Kaufman | The Growth Student @growth_student

How Miro Grows 3x Annually Here are their product led growth strategies used to build viral loops A thread👇👇

2. Sales is a friend 🤝

Rahul Mathur @Rahul_J_Mathur

A mistake I made in the early days of starting up is underappreciated the value of Sales & Marketing. Product led growth is a powerful engine but not scalable after a point - supplementing this growth engine with Marketing followed by Sales is immensely valuable.

Calendly’s sales engine is a great example of the power of assisted sales!

Calendly’s sales engine

3. Product-led growth with sales assist is the GTM motion of the future! ✨ Everyone’s doing it 😉 (Airtable, Coda, Dropbox, Figma, Github and Notion to name just a few)

Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan

The GTM motions of 30 B2B startups, then and now

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Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

Do you feel like the PLG folks you talk to speak an alien language? 👽 Here’s a primer to the weird language our industry uses. The product-led growth metrics. - by Product-led Growth Collective

Key growth metrics for product-led growth

Growth Stories 🚀

Why Twilio is the most important company the world’s never heard of 🤑

It blew our mind thinking of the sheer scale PLG companies are operating at! Twilio, as an example, facilitates over 930 billion human interactions every year! That’s 30,000 interactions per second 🤯

Here’s how they manage customer sales through a intent-based sales-assist model 👇🏻

Twilio’s Sales process

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News on the hot and sexy celebrities of the PLG world 🤤

Fundraising and Exits 🤑

1. API platform Postman valued at $5.6 billion in $225 million fundraise!

   Abhinav Asthana @a85

   Excited to share that we have closed on a $225 million Series D round that values Postman at $5.6 billion. Read more about it here!

   

   blog.postman.comPostman’s Series D Funding and the API-First World | Postman BlogToday, Postman is thrilled to announce a Series D investment round of $225 million that values the company at $5.6 billion. The round was led by Insight Partners and joined by three new investors—Coatue, Battery Ventures, and BOND, with participation from existing Postman investors CRV and Nexus Ven…

2. Walnut the world's first sales experience platform, announces it has raised $15 million in a Series A funding led by Eight Roads Ventures, a global VC managing $8 billion of assets, with portfolio companies such as AppsFlyer, Alibaba, Hibob and Made.com.

3. Backed by marquee Silicon Valley funds Accel and Sequoia Capital as well as New York's Tiger Global, Freshworks stated that it has filed the initial documents for a $100 million initial public offering in the United States.

4. San Francisco-based Checkr, said on Wednesday it raised $250 million in capital in a late-stage funding round led by private equity investment firm Durable Capital, valuing the human resource technology company at $4.6 billion

Launches, events, and releases

1. Docker on Tuesday announced enhancements and expansions to its product subscriptions, aiming to provide developers with the efficiency and collaboration they need while also providing the security and trust that companies want.

2. CI/CD platform @ repo management tool GitLab has seen its usual monthly update and is now available in version 14.2, which this feature is, among other things, to be the first to allow the definition of a needs relationship between all jobs in a pipeline.

3. SaaStr Annual 2021 announced Jenn Knight from AgentSync as a speaker.

   AgentSync @AgentSync_io

   Who's headed to @saastr?! 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️🙋 Jenn Knight joins @murr of @craft_ventures and @darynakulya of @OpenPhoneApp to talk about #product-led growth Book your place at our session👇 register.saastrannual.com/talks/saastru-…