Matter revolutionizes reading, Appsmith raises $7M, running meetings likes Superhuman, and more...

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Oct 7, 2021

👋 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 🐦🌌

Sales absolutely has a role in PLG! 🙏🏻 … Jobs in PLG👇🏻
Product managers make it easy for the user to say YES ✅
Product marketers make it difficult for the buyer to say NO 🙅🏻‍♀️
Salespeople overcome customer intertia and MONETIZE 💰

Shreyas Doshi @shreyas

In product-led SaaS: Product Management’s main job is to make it easy for the User to say Yes. Product Marketing’s main job is make it difficult for the Buyer to say No. Sales’ main job is to monetize by overcoming Customer inertia.

PLG = hypergrowth 🚀
The fastest-growing companies have one thing in common - they all happen to be product-led 🤷🏻‍♂️ Julian Shapiro breaks down the common patterns across strong PLG motion
- Category #1: Invitations - When use of a product naturally encourages users to invite friends/colleagues because they both get more value from the product. Hence, 1+1=3. Think Figma, Zoom, Slack
- Category #2: Billboarding - when the use of your product creates a public advertisement. Think Intercom, Calendly, Google Drive
A must-read thread for PLG fundamentals 👇🏻

Julian Shapiro @Julian

1/ An intro to startup growth. Most fast-growing startups have something in common: Product-led growth (PLG) I define it as when existing users drive your growth.* PLG only works for these startups:

Superhuman’s Amazon-inspired meetings 🤝

Gaurav Vohra @gauravvohra1

This guideline dramatically speeds up meetings at @Superhuman

Growth Stories 🚀

The strategies and tactics used by Airtable in their campaign to claim the spreadsheet throne 👑 With a valuation of $5.77B, an ARR of $100M Airtable & a strong GTM machinery, they might just break the wheel 😉

Top of the Lyne

Heir to the tables: The Airtable story

Let's start today's blog a bit differently. We're going to try to sell you a hypothetical product. A product that does everything! 🤩 Customer relationship management, event planning, leave tracking, financial reporting, performance reviews, investor relations, and even your own personal taxes! Sounds too good to be true? What if we told you this produc…

a year ago · Rahul Krishnan and Arjun Rakesh

This week we also launched episode #2 of the Top of the Lyne Podcast. Prefer listening over reading? Catch our Calendly growth story on Spotify 👇🏻 Make sure to follow the channel for weekly updates

It’d be awesome if you could bring your friends along! Share this post with three of your friends or colleagues who’re as excited about PLG as all of us 🤗

Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

Appsmith raises $8M in Series-A funding to help companies build internal applications faster! In a world desperately in the need of more engineers - Appsmith is a breath of fresh air ❤️

Abhishek Nayak @arey_abhishek

Excited to announce our funding of $8mn Series A and $2.5mn seed round. We are building an open source platform to help companies build best internal apps. Here's more about the problems that we are solving Time for a🧵 techcrunch.com/2021/10/05/app…

techcrunch.comAppsmith raises $8M to take on the internal corporate app market with open source code – TechCrunchAppsmith, which provides open source software that helps companies quickly build internal applications, announced an $8 million Series A round of funding this morning. Unlike some upstart tech companies that we have seen in the internal application market, Appsmith doesn’t sport a no- or low-code ap…

Matter raises a $7M series-A led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) - techcrunch article

Launches, events, and releases

As with all things newsletters and substack… we’re super excited about the launch of Matter! 🤩 The latest and greatest reading experience custom-made for a generation of digital native reader 📚

Matter @getmatterapp

Big news: Today, we’re opening Matter to the world with the launch of our public beta! We’re also thrilled to announce we’ve raised a $7M Series A led by GV. GV also led our seed, joining YC and many stellar angels.

hq.getmatter.appMatterMatter pulls everything you want to read into one beautiful place. With powerful tools, social curation, seamless audio and more, we’re building a reader for today’s internet.

The ‘Loreum Ipsum’ for designers - Doodle Ipsum! A product that automatically generates placeholder illustrations 😌

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

Ed Sims shares insider pointers on what VC’s are looking for in a PLG company 🔥

Covered by Alexa Horwitz from Openview partners

Some housekeeping…

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Thanks again, and please tell a few friends if you feel like it.