Is PLG just B2B viral growth? The USS Shopify thesis, memes are worth a thousand words, 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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Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌

• Andrew Chen’s self-proclaimed “dumb” but profound question about PLG 🧐

  Is it just the B2B version of viral growth? Our take - the difference between PLG and traditional B2B products plays out in the impact on the role and efficiency of GTM teams

  1. Role: Who qualifies the lead? PLG ensures that the product qualifies whether a user is a prospective customer or not, instead of marketing and sales.

  2. Efficiency: PLG enables a higher level of sophistication for GTM functions like sales, account management & marketing. Leveraging product usage data to qualify PQLs enables these teams to operate at much higher levels of efficiency as compared to a traditional B2B GTM motion.

  We highly recommend going over the comments thread on Andrew’s tweet. Some terrific inputs from David Ulevitch, Ivan Kirigin, and Lenny Rachitsky.

Andrew Chen 🇺🇸 @andrewchen

dumb question is "Product-Led Growth" the B2B variation of viral growth? Or is it more expansive. Looking for definitions and it seems like it's all over the place

• USS Shopify! PLG companies at scale can be Aircraft Carriers 🛩

  Just look at Shopify! The company enables millions of merchants, three of which are already public companies 🤯

Tobi Lütke @tobi

6 years after $SHOP IPO there are now 3 Shopify companies with their own ticker symbols

• Urgency is your friend! 🚨

  Jason Lemkin is like the gift who keeps giving 😅 Below is an interesting observation about a key aspect that separates the BEST salespeople from the MEDIOCRE - urgency! Don’t just wait for the Docusign to come back 😳

Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin ⚫️ @jasonlk

The best sales professionals create urgency when there really isn't any ... and it's magic The mediocre just wait and wait for the e-signature to come

• A meme is worth a thousand words 🤪

  No, we’re not joking! George Mack makes a terrific point about the power of memes. We live in the attention economy. Time is the only resource none of us have more of 🤷🏻‍♂️ And the attention war will be won by two unique entities:

  1. Monopolies like Netflix and Amazon who own abundant resources and owned distribution

  2. “Meme” creators who make up for their lack of power or capital through their understanding of the pulse of culture and their specific knowledge of platforms

  Most importantly, George defines a meme for what it truly is. Not a gif, not a joke, but the most disruptive force known to humanity - an idea! 🤔💭

George Mack @george__mack

Chief Meme Officer. Why it may become a job title soon.

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Growth Stories 🚀

On popular demand from our subscribers - this growth story on Clearbit 👇🏻! The growth tactics and GTM motion that power the API biz used by 1,500+ businesses including Stripe and Figma 🚀

• Content content content 🗞 Leveraging SaaS influencers like Mark Roberge from HubSpot fame 🤩

• Free tools for everyone! 🆓

• No surprises here! Data-driven lead qualification 💰

Clearbit: The rocket fuel 'enriching' PLG sales

Top of the Lyne podcasts is back with another episode! Tune in and listen to how Superhuman is monetizing the rarest resource of them all - Time! Follow us on Spotify for regular updates 😇

P.S - We’re not happy with spotify for getting the embed text wrong 🤨

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Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

• Freshworks is now worth more than Zendesk 🚀

  Once accused of being an “unethical troll trying to cash in on Zendesk’s good name” 🤨… Freshworks (earlier Freshdesk) switched positions at the table by overtaking Zendesk’s market cap, in what was a huge moment for SaaS founders building outside the hallowed halls of Silicon Valley!

  But how did they get there? Check out this thread below 👇🏻

  Prasanna K @prasanna_says

  1/ Freshworks over taking ZenDesk in market cap is a huge moment for SaaS founders. Why is a company with ~$300Mn in trailing 12mo revenue valued higher than $Zen that is at $1000+Mn/yr? Why does $FRSH have a 40X multiple while $ZEN is at 10x and trending down?

• Tiger’s “startup index fund” strategy 🤭

  In an industry driven by the power-law 💪🏻 maybe it makes sense to just do every good SaaS deal 🤷🏻‍♂️

  Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin ⚫️ @jasonlk

  Every SaaS VC: "I should have just done >every< good SaaS deal we saw the last few years" Tiger: "Exactly."

• Refreshing pragmatism in an otherwise ridiculous market 😌

  Amjad Masad turned down a unicorn term sheet over the weekend… why? Well Replit doesn’t feel like its there yet. In a market obsessed with valuations and raises, we found this display of pragmatism by Amjad and the Replit team refreshing 😇

Amjad Masad ⠕ @amasad

Turned down a $1b cap term sheet. Don’t feel like a unicorn yet, and folks joining us today will share the glory of getting there.

• Metaverse! Gather.town raises $50M in series B so that you and I can ‘Gather’ online! 🙌🏻

  Phillip Wang @flippnflops

  Excited to announce that @gather_town has raised a $50M Series B led by @sequoia and @IndexVentures, with participation from @zoink, @jeffweiner, @ycombinator! Given all the Metaverse talk lately, we wanted to elaborate on what this means to us:

  

  gather.townWhy the Metaverse MattersOver the past year, “the Metaverse” has become a hot topic, with companies like Facebook, Roblox, and Epic Games now citing it as their end goal, or Microsoft making it a key strategic objective. However, missing from recent discussions about the Metaverse is how it will actually be good for people—…

Launches, events, and releases

• Acquisition-led growth @ Notion! 🔥

  Notion took a page out of Atlassian’s M&A playbook and launched link previews! Enabled by their recent acquisition of Automate 🤝

  Akshay Kothari @akothari

  First of many @NotionHQ releases, that have been enabled by the @automate acquisition. https://t.co/FHj0H97CNG

  

  Notion @NotionHQ

  Introducing: LINK PREVIEWS 🔗→🖼️ Create automatically up-to-date previews by pasting links to: • GitHub PRs • Jira issues • Slack messages • Trello cards • Asana tasks And we'll add support for more tools soon. This is just the beginning! https://t.co/Xo4N2KtlzE

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Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

Growth Superstar (we’re huge fans 🤩) Elena Verna talks about the 3 levers that make up a Growth Model

• How do you acquire your customers

• How do you monetize your customers

• How do you retain your customers

and the growth personas that pull them

• Innovator - the one with the hypotheses

• Settler - the one who validates the hypotheses

• The optimizers - the specialists who squeeze the maximum of a validated hypothesis

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