How to GROW without really trying... for Dummies! All hail the power law, exceptions becoming the norm, 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 ❤️

Starting today’s newsletter with some exciting personal news - I just did my first podcast folks 🥳 Check out Entrepreneur.com’s Action and Ambition podcast below.

Loved discussing Toplyne’s founding story, the generational evolution in SaaS GTM strategy, and my favorite topic… the rise of the individual over the institution 💪🏻

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Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌

• How to sell a design tool by writing about Steve Jobs’ evening walk🚶🏻‍♂️

  Canva’s content strategy might seem broad-brush at first glance, but take a deeper look and you’ll see how each piece ties back to a use-case or a user goal in some way.

  One of their most popular pieces, “Why everyone from Beethoven, Goethe, Dickens, Darwin, to Steve Jobs took long walks and why you should too” is actually about boosting creativity, productivity and communication.

  Are you listening, designers? 👩🏼‍🎨

  Growth Student🎓 @growth_student

  Canva's SEO strategy is Elite How they grew to 55M monthly users with a solution focused content + SEO strategy A thread👇

• If you aren’t embarrassed by your first landing page… you’re doing something wrong 🤷🏻‍♂️

  A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step and a disagreeable landing page - Lao Tzu, probably

  Josh Millgate @joshmillgate

  Don't forget that every project starts out at Version 1! Check out how some of todays giants started out ↓ 🛍 @squarespace from 2005 🎵 @Shopify from 2007 (Web 2.0 award winner 😅) 💳 @stripe homepage from 2011 💻 @webflow pre-launch landing page from 2011

  

  

  

  

• All hail the power-law 📈🙏🏻

  My #1 learning from my previous life in VC - the power law is king 👑 And Jason “SaaS God” Lemkin breaks down how sales is no different! The best sales reps close anywhere from 2-5x more deals than the rest 🤯

  Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin ⚫️ @jasonlk

  If you've hired your first 10+ sales reps, you're now seeing how different their playbooks are Probably 2 of them close 2x-5x more than the rest, and a few struggle to close much at all Here are the 9 Qualities of a Great Sales Rep: 9⃣⬇️⬇️

• How to grow without really trying… for Dummies 🤓

  If this “How to” for Dummies book existed, we’re pretty sure it’d be authored by snowflake

  

  Accurate depiction of the GO-TO book on effortless growth

  What happens when you have a product that customers can’t seem to get enough of? What happens if those customers are themselves growing at break neck pace? You get Snowflake 🙌🏻 A company with an NRR of 173%! Implying that the company grows 1.73x YoY even without adding net new customers over the course of a year 🤯

  Tanay Jaipuria @tanayj

  Snowflake with 173% net revenue retention while at 5000+ customers and >$1B revenue run-rate is just wild

• When exceptions become the norm 😌

  When Slack got to $100m ARR faster than any SaaS company in history it looked like an exception, an anomaly, a freak of nature even! Cut to 2021, Snowflake is growing at 110% YoY at $1B ARR, Datadog at 70%, and Okta at 60%.

  PLG has moved abnormally fast-growing SaaS companies from being the exceptions to being the norm. Can someone make the next 5 years go faster ⚡️ We cant wait 😅 🙌🏻

  Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin ⚫️ @jasonlk

  When Slack rocketed to $100m faster than any SaaS company we’d seen, it seemed like an outlier, an anomaly Now we see Snowflake growing 110% at $1B, Datadog 70% at $1B, Okta 60% at $1B Now we see Slack wasn’t an outlier It was just early

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🔎 The PLG hunt

Tel-Aviv based start-up, Frontegg just raised their Series A, led by Insight Partners. 💰FrontEgg does the heavy lifting for engineering teams who bear the brunt of the ever-evolving set of self-serve capabilities in the product-led era. CEO Sagi Rodin says with Frontegg, full-stack developers can build self-served user management in days rather than years.

Frontegg @FronteggForSaaS

We're proud to announce our $25 million Series A funding, led by @insightpartners. All of this would not have been possible without the trust and support of our loyal customers. Big things are coming in 2022 🚀🚀 hubs.ly/Q0103MKj0

hubs.lyFrontegg raises $25M for its user management platform – TechCrunchFrontegg, a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides SaaS companies with the core user management tools they need to build their own services, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Pitango, which led the company’s $5 million s…

What hot and upcoming PLG company are you most excited about? 👇🏻

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Growth Stories 🚀

All Turtles founder Phil Libin wanted to call his next venture something so wacky, people would stop asking him what All Turtles meant. He succeeded.

Mmhmm breaks the mould of video presentations (and company names). Their long-term vision for an increasingly remote world is to provide a platform with the surface area to reveal people’s personalities. Because… tools like Zoom, Slack are not designed to get to know people as people.

Want zoom superpowers? Mmhmm. Mmhmm? Mmhmm!

Nobody loves Retool more than the developers guild, and for good reason. Retool frees up software developers from the rut of internal tools and moves them up stack to focus their creative attention and bandwidth on the core product. Here’s the story of a tool that was originally perhaps disastrously described by its founders as “Excel with higher order primitives.” 🤷🏻‍♀️

📻 Tune in to the Top of The Lyne podcast and don’t forget to follow us for regular updates

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Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

• AI-powered transcription and captioning startup Verbit just raised $250M. On the back of their new round, they plan to double down on their acquisition strategy in the very fragmented transcription space that’s estimated to be a $30 billion industry

  Verbit @Verbit_

  Huge news! We just closed our Series E funding round at $250M, bringing our valuation to $2 billion within just 5 years. 🎉 Our journey is just starting, so come join us! hubs.li/H0_rvdF0

  

• Developer productivity tool Raycast just raised their Series A. The “Mac Spotlight search” for developers helps software engineers navigate all parts of the job that aren’t development work.

  Raycast @raycastapp

  We're excited to announce some big news… 📣 $15m Series A, led by @Accel and Coatue 🏪 Public launch of the Store and API 🐱 Support our launch on Product Hunt – producthunt.com/posts/raycast-… Read more 👉 raycast.com/blog/series-a/

  

• Bitly made its first acquisition this week: 🇩🇪 German company who you might know better as the creators of QR Code Generator. They continue their evolution from just a link-shortening tool to becoming an all-in-one link management, QR code, and link-in-bio resource with the launch of their Customer Connections platform.

  Bitly @Bitly

  Thanks @christine_hall and @TechCrunch for featuring our acquisition of @qrcgcom and @egoditor; and launch of Customer Connections Platform, all-in-one #LinkManagement, #LinkInBio, #QRCode platform! bit.ly/Bitly-egoditor #CatalystForConnections

  

  bit.lyBitly makes first acquisition with QR code leader Egoditor – TechCrunchThe acquisition is in line with Bitly’s goal of becoming a global SaaS company that enables organizations to engage with customers and for people to connect with digital experiences.

Launches, events, and releases

• Spotify’s 2021 wrapped just dropped (as you might have noticed) with new yearly insights on your listening history including your personalized soundtrack to “2021: The Movie”, your genre moods visualized with Audio Aura, Wrapped Blend, and many more. Here’s our 2021 Wrapped: 😬

  

• What a week Jack Dorsey has had! Two days after announcing that he’s leaving Twitter, Square changed their company name to Block, while bringing in TIDAL, CashApp, and TBD under one roof.

  Square @Square

  We’re changing our company name so we can give the full @Square brand to our Seller business. So now we need a name to tie @Square, @CashApp, @TIDAL, and @TBD54566975 together into one. That name is “Block.” Why?

  

  Block @blocks

  Block is @Square, @CashApp, @spiralbtc, @TIDAL, @TBD54566975, and our foundational teams who support them. We’re here to build simple tools to increase access to the economy. https://t.co/CkVKxHPkqy https://t.co/RMOnxCLP9Y

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Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

If you’re a founder, community building deserves thorough thought and a philosophy driving your early decisions… which is exactly what David Spinks and Lenny write about in detail here. Quick summary of the longer post on Lenny’s newsletter in the 🧵 below:

davidspinks.eth @DavidSpinks

A FOUNDERS GUIDE TO COMMUNITY Should your startup invest in building community? It's a big question... one that deserves a thorough answer. I worked with @lennysan for the last 3 months on a 6,400-word guide published today in his newsletter. Here are the highlights... 🧵

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