👋 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 ❤️
Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌
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 🌟
Sales is a friend 🤝
Calendly’s sales engine is a great example of the power of assisted sales!
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)
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
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 👇🏻
Fundraising and Exits 🤑
API platform Postman valued at $5.6 billion in $225 million fundraise!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
SaaStr Annual 2021 announced Jenn Knight from AgentSync as a speaker.
