Newton's law of product-led growth! How fast is SaaS compounding?

The latest from the world of product led growth

👋 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 🐦🌌

• How fast is SaaS compounding? 📈

  While no one knows the exact number… 🤷🏻‍♂️ look no further than ProfitWell’s “ARR tracked” for a close enough proxy 🚀

  The company tracks ~$25B of ARR for its customers 🤯 A number that’s up ~40% YoY in 2021 and ~70% in 2020. I guess Satya Nadella wasn’t lying about the accelerating effect of Covid on the SaaS market 📈

PC @Patticus

"You can't scale a free product bootstrapped" 🙏 to all who trust us. Hope we provide enough value.

• The great PLG opportunity 🥇

  Excited about PLG? Eager to learn and make a mark? Think you’re too late? HELL NO 🙅🏻‍♀️

  

  PLG is like early 1960s space tech. The opportunity to work at NASA, learn how NOT to build rockets, and eventually learn how to land on the moon is very much open. 👐🏻

  This Dave Rigotti tweet really resonated with the young folks in our offic who are excited to learn and eager to build expertise 💯

Dave Rigotti @drigotti

Product-led growth (PLG) is still very early. If you are early in marketing career it's a good thing to "own." I did this with social early in my career and its a great way to ride a way an grow your career faster.

• Newton’s Law of product-led growth 🚀

  Friction is inversely proportional to growth!

Paul Yacoubian @PaulYacoubian

One underestimated feature of product-led growth business models is that it enables a startup team to totally focus on the product-user interaction as not only does that add the real value to the user but also to the company's core growth driver.

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🔎 The PLG hunt

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

• Doppler grew over 6000% in four months on the back of their $2.3M seed funding round

  Doppler is a Universal Secrets Manager that helps developers optimize for speed, while not compromizing security. Founded by Brian Vallelunga, their breakneck growth led to $6.5M in additional funding in March 2021. Doppler is the first developer-first product in the growing modern secrets management market.

  The Doppler effect - The productivity unlocks of not being shackled by security are liberating for developers.

Stephanie Zhan @stephzhan

Excited to share our partnership with @vallelungabrian & the @DopplerHQ team on their Seed round! Doppler's robust secrets manager will help developers maximize security & improve productivity while building core applications. @sequoia

seq.vcDoppler Raises $2.3 Million From Sequoia And Kleiner Perkins To Create The First Universal Secrets Management Solution For DevelopersSecrets management must be done well, or a developer team risks compromising their code at critical times. Brian Vallelunga has struggled first-hand with secrets management. He and his team have built Doppler to address the problem, allowing developers to build with speed and security.

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Growth Stories 🚀

There are only two kinds of SaaS companies in the world today: Those who are product-led and those who want to be. What separates one from the other? What did the PLG OGs like Slack, Asana, Shopify, and Figma do differently?

From being great storytellers to delivering value blazing fast and setting up the right infrastructure for the job, PLG companies are a cut above the rest.

Dive in 👇

Product led growth: What makes Canva, Figma & Shopify the best

• Algolia’s v1 was built for mobile devices. By optimizing for mobile devices, Algolia’s founders serendipitously stumbled upon blazing-fast user-facing consumer-grade search.

  🎙 Tune into the story of the second largest search engine in the world:

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Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

• Based on growth numbers alone, Retool could be valued at 2x or 3x their latest valuation

  Retool founder David Hsu has decided to pursue a model of smaller, stepped funding rounds every 6-9 months after being bothered by the idea that those who joined weeks after big jumps in valuation at similar companies stood to face far less financial upside than those who joined only weeks before.

Alex Konrad @alexrkonrad

Low code startup Retool just reached a $1.9B valuation. But founder @dvdhsu did it raising as little as possible — $20M in this Series C — and at a deliberately lower price. Here’s why he thinks most unicorn funding rounds aren’t helping employees.

forbes.comWhy Retool’s CEO Took A ‘Risky’ Fundraising Approach On The Way To A $1.9 Billion ValuationRetool CEO David Hsu took an unusual approach to his low code software startup’s Series C funding round, raising just $20 million from fellow founders like Stripe’s John and Patrick Collison and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman in a bid to limit dilution for Retool employees.

• Airtable: “I am the Walrus.ai”

  The no-code software testing platform Walrus.ai’s vision closely aligns with Airtable’s, and according to the former’s founding team, joining Airtable is the next step in bringing that vision to life.

Airtable @airtable

We're excited to officially welcome the Walrus.ai founding team to Airtable! So thrilled for you to join us Scott, Jake and Akshay 🎉 @TechCrunch with the story: techcrunch.com/2021/12/21/air… via @fredericl

techcrunch.comAirtable acqui-hires Walrus.ai’s founding team – TechCrunchAirtable today announced that it quietly acquired Walrus.ai, a no-code software testing platform, earlier this year. “Acquired” may be overstating things a bit, though. Best I can tell, Walrus.ai’s homepage became unavailable a few months ago and Airtable tells me it has no plans to use any of the s…

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Launches, events, and releases

• Developers: "Jeez! I wish there was a way to plug search components into our e-commerce storefront without worrying about UI/UX"

  Algolia: Say no more.

Algolia @algolia

We’re thrilled to introduce our first UI template, focused primarily on ecommerce. Learn all about it –

bit.lyAnnouncing our PWA Ecom UI Template in React | Algolia BlogFast, reliable and modern search and discovery

• Notion’s getting into the festive spirit

  You can now add color to all of your new year resolutions.

Notion @NotionHQ

🎁 New: COLORS for your simple table rows and columns!

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Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

The world and his wife have come out with a 2021 wrapped, and we don’t intend to add to that growing list. (not yet)

Having said that, here’s a super-thread on growth that we loved that does a great job of summarizing growth observations from 2021.

Growth Tactics @GrowthTactics

The 7 most valuable growth threads of 2021:

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