Prediction! ClickUp to win the Superbowl, PLG ages like fine wine, a shade of narcissism
👋 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 🐦🌌
PLG goes mainstream ⚡️
Tune in on Feb 13th to see history being made… the PLG industry goes mainstream with its very own Superbowl ad 🏈
Thank you, ClickUp 🙏🏻
Aging like fine wine 🍷
The Top 20 public PLG/freemium companies are growing faster today than they did last year 🤯
Why? 10/10 recommend Jason Lemkin’s thread for the deep dive… TL;DR below 👇🏻
Cracking the “dirty” art of sales: Asana has a 60:40 ARR split on self-serve vs sales. That number is trending to 50:50 this year and will move over to the sales heavy in coming years
Going upmarket: 80% of Datadog’s ARR comes from customers paying $100k+… this used to be 80% small customers just a few years ago
Growing with your customers: 60% of Expensify’s Customers started off in the Free edition, even at IPO!
More on this 🧵 below
The other day I did a deep look at the Top 20 public SaaS companies doing PLG and freemium As a group, they are all growing >faster< than last year, at an average of $400m in ARR. Which is just incredible! My Top 20 learnings here: 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽Need more proof? Check out Bill.com’s ARR acceleration… growing ~4x faster at $240M ARR than at $158M 🚀
There's acceleration in SaaS Then there's Bill.com's acceleration 51% growth at $158m ARR -> 190% growth at $240m ARR Pick your jaw up off the floor
Coincidence or destiny? 🔮
While unicorns might be rarer than a Stradivarius 🎻 … it’s no surprise that the world’s 1000th unicorn is a PLG company 🙌🏻 Congratulations Productboard on the Series D!
Spotted: the 1000th unicorn🦄 on a billboard in Times Square! We're thrilled to share that we've raised $125M in Series D funding led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global Management, landing us a place as the 1000th unicorn across the globe 🌏. lnkd.in/e2AHETW5
And in what now looks like a stroke of Nolan-esque foreshadowing coupled with a shade of narcissism… here’s a piece we wrote in September 2021 about “How Productboard will become the Salesforce of product management” 😎
🔎 The PLG hunt
“Data science is overdue for the benefits of tools that are cloud and collaboration native.”
Deepnote is an IDE-like collaborative tool that abstracts away the infrastructure and provides data scientists with a cloud-based platform to build machine learning models. Built using Jupyter notebooks at its core with collaborative features layered on top, Deepnote is a game-changer for data science teams!
📣 We’re beyond excited to announce that we’ve raised $20M to help data teams do their best work! Our Series A round led by @Accel and @IndexVentures will allow us to bring in the brightest talent and build the best-in-class tool for analysts and data scientists
With the new round of funding, Deepnote plans to build out the product and get a foothold in the data science community.
Which hot and upcoming PLG company are you most excited about? 👇🏻
Growth Stories 🚀
Webflow: From the brink of bankruptcy to revolutionizing web design
A case study in patience, perseverance, and great timing, it took four attempts, a brush with bankruptcy, a failed Kickstarter video shoot, and rejections from YC and countless investors before Vlad Magdalin took Webflow off the ground. And then into orbit. Here’s the Webflow story. It’s a nailbiter.👇
Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑
Rudderstack, a platform that helps businesses build their own customer data platforms announced their series B round this week
This after a great year, when the company’s revenue grew almost four and a half times, while its customer base tripled.
Reverse ETL tool Census announced $60M in series B funding
Tiger Global and Insight Partners joined existing investors Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.
Launches, events, and releases
ClickUp’s Super-Bowl ad kicked derriers 📜
Plenty of Sketch updates coming your way 💎
It's time to update! ⏰ Head to sketch.com/updates or keep reading to find out what to expect in our latest release 🔽 (1/11)
Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚
Monthly churn across categories 🎢
The merits of tracking “monthly churn”, what separates good from great, correlations with pricing, and more.👇
Some housekeeping…
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Thanks again, and please tell a few friends if you feel like it.
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