Is it ZAPPier or ZAPEier... ANSWERED! Balaji was right (again), Wall Street says PLGeez, 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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Before we jump into our Thursday newsletter, we wanted to express our deep gratitude to the Top of the Lyne subscriber family for supporting our Product Hunt launch! 🙏🏻 We finished the day at #2, growing our subscriber base ~2x over the last 2 days! 🚀

To our new subscribers - Welcome! 👋🏻 Every Tuesday, we publish a deep dive on a popular PLG business’ go-to-market function. And every Thursday, we summarize the hottest PLG news of the week in our weekly newsletter! Let’s dive right in…

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Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌

• It’s settled… Zapier rhymes with Happier 😊

  The week began with one of our long-term office debates coming to a victorious ending (yes - I won this one 💪🏻). Its ZAPP-ier! Not ZAPE-ier 👻

Andrew Hoyer, Coder 💻 @andrewhoyer

Learned something already from #ZapConnect: How to pronounce "Zapier". 😆

Zapier @zapier

@andrewhoyer Rhymes with happier 😉

• It’s the decade of the individual 🙋🏻‍♂️

  And as always, Balaji Srinivasan was a decade ahead of the rest of us!

  

  Ryan Breslow wrote an excellent thread on how Balaji’s prediction (from his Stanford lecture 7 years ago) has played out across all industries:

  1. Entertainment: Joe Rogan >> CNN

  2. Finance: Redditors >> Powerful Hedge Funds

  3. Art: NFTs >> Regular Art

  4. And software as well! Bottom-up adoption/PLG🥳 >> Top-down sales🥱

Ryan Breslow 🕺 @ryantakesoff

7 years ago, @balajis was my professor at Stanford. He developed an insight nearly a decade ago which looks more obvious by the day. "Unlocking individual potential is the key to unlocking the world's potential." This is playing out in real time across every industry.

Here’s one of our favorite articles ❤️ on the power of the individual by Packy McCormick!

Power to the Person

• How to win large markets… A masterclass by Lennysan! 🎓

  The answer? Start small with a wedge.

  

  Some of the best PLG companies were started in small niches of markets with large adjacencies! For Twilio, it was the market of Ruby on Rails developers. For Paypal, it was eBay merchants. For Doordash, restaurant deliveries in underserved Tier-2 and 3 markets. For Stripe, young Y-Combinator startups.

  A must-read thread and article from Lennysan on using wedges strategically👇🏻

Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan

Wedge: A strategy to win a large market by starting small. In this week's post, I share why, when, and how to pick your wedge, with help from @ataussig @ajay_bcv @annimaniac @BryanOffutt @lpolovets @mduboe @npilosof @saarsaar and @sarahtavel

lennysnewsletter.comPicking a wedgeWhen, why, and how to pick a wedge for your product

• Wall Street 0 - PLG 1 📈

  Why are PLG businesses so hot in private markets? Well just look at how their older siblings are performing in the public markets!

  Jamin Ball shared an insightful chart of the estimated growth rate (Wall Street analysts predicted) for Datadog at the time of IPO vs. how the company actually performed! HOLY S#$T 🤯 Talk about overdelivering!

  Jamin Ball @jaminball

  Trend in cloud software: Growth Durability 📈📈 Historically, many people have overestimated how quickly software companies would decelerate growth. below chart shows rough Datadog quarterly growth expectations at IPO (orange) and actual (blue)

  

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Growth Stories 🚀

When one thinks PLG, Retool is without doubt one of the most exciting companies that comes to mind! Here's how the company grew to a near $1B valuation by thinking "developer-first"

1. 👩🏻‍💼 Starting with founder-led outbound sales

2. 📈 Rebranding and re-launching on Hacker news

3. 🚀 Switching on the #PLG machine with inbound sales assist

Retool: Saving developers from internal tools since 2017 😇

The Airtable story is out on our Spotify channel! Tune in and listen to the GTM strategies powering Airtable’s campaign for the spreadsheet throne 👑
Make sure to follow the channel on Spotify for weekly updates

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Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

• Startups aren’t the only ones causing disruption!

  Sequoia Capital deprecated the default 10-year fund cycle and announced “The” Sequoia fund.

Sequoia @sequoia

Patience is a virtue. We believe it’s also smart business. The traditional 10-year VC fund cycle no longer makes sense for today’s world, or tomorrow’s founders. Introducing The Sequoia Fund. seq.vc/sequoia_fund (1/2)

• A shortcut for everything, everywhere!

  OSlash raised $2.5M of capital in a seed round led by Accel. O/funding-announcement 😋

• Reimagining those daily standups 😒? That’s a mission we’d get behind. Fellow raises $24M in Series A!

Aydin Mirzaee @aydin

Today is the day… We’re excited to announce that @fellowapp has raised $24M in Series A Funding 🎉 Led by @craft_ventures (@lainypainter @DavidSacks), @inovia @felicis @GarageCapital, Formentera and SVB. We’re super excited about what this means for the company...👇

Launches, events, and releases

• Built Loom into your product! Presenting - Loom SDK 🥁

Loom @loom

We're thrilled to share the @loomSDK is now generally available to the public! @Netlify, @Upwork & @InVisionApp are already using the SDK to unlock async video at scale. And so can you 🙌 Interested in building with our SDK? Get your API keys today: loom.com/sdk

loom.comloomSDKThe easiest way for developers to integrate Loom asynchronous video messaging into their product. Register for the loomSDK now.

• Creators rejoice!! 🎉 LinkedIn launches global freelancer platform to compete directly with Upwork, Fiverr!

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Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

Did you also miss SaaStr 2021 🥲? Matt Harney to the rescue! Matt summarizes all the PLG discussions (there were quite a few and we’re not surprised 🤭) from the event 👇🏻

6 Product Led Growth Sessions From SaaStr Annual 2021

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