Substack 1 - NYT 0, Deel races to $100m ARR, "scheduled maintenance" grounds Jira, 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)

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Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌

• Let’s address the 800-pound gorilla in the room first 🦍

  Elon’s offered to buy 100% of Twitter at $54.20 (nice) a share… a 54% premium over the Jan 28 closing price. *grabs popcorn*

  Elon Musk @elonmusk

  I made an offer sec.gov/Archives/edgar…

• Substack 1️⃣ New York Times 0️⃣

  • How do you manage the storm after a shitpost from the world’s largest news publication?

  • A masterclass in managing public comms from Lulu Cheng Meservey @ Substack 🧵👇🏻

  • P.S. For what it’s worth we’ve learned a 100x more from Substackers over the last year than the boomers at NYT and all their peers… combined

  Lulu Cheng Meservey @lulumeservey

  Today the NYTimes wrote an article about Substack. While it's a compliment to remain top of mind for the paper of record, the piece contains a lot of hearsay, cherrypicking, and personal opinion presented as fact. Here, I offer an alternate framing and excavate the buried lede:

• The SaaS world crowns its latest Guinness World Record holder…

  Deel! From an ARR of $1M to $100M in 20 months 🤯⚡️

deel @deel

We made a little chart update 💯📈🔥

• *(Well designed) software is eating the world - Marc Andreessen…

  jcgr.eth @jc__gr

  Software with great design is eating the world: JIRA -> @linear Calendar apps -> @Cron Amplitude / Analytics apps -> @JuneDotSo PagerDuty -> @incident_io Adobe -> @figma

• …And Indians are eating the Cloud 🇮🇳

Jared Sleeper @JaredSleeper

Weekend research results. 30/72 companies in the @BessemerVP Emerging Cloud Index have at least one of: Indian CEO Indian CTO/CIO >10% of headcount in 🇮🇳 No other country is close. The interconnection between the 🇺🇸/🇮🇳 tech ecosystems is deep, growing and crucial for both.

• “Scheduled maintenance” grounds Jira 🤷🏻‍♀️

  ….It’s a great time to be ClickUp 😉

  Atlassian @Atlassian

  Update on cloud outage impacting ~400 customers. As part of scheduled maintenance our team ran a script to delete legacy data from a deprecated service. Instead of deleting the data the script erroneously deleted sites, and connected products, users, and 3rd party apps. (1/5)

• Find someone who looks at you like Dylan and Amjad look at DALL.E 2

  Amjad Masad ⠕ @amasad

  Getting DALL·E 2 to approximate @Replit style art:

  

  Dylan Field @zoink

  some DALL·E 2 experiments

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🔎 The PLG hunt

• In-Tandem remote work: Meet Hybrid Spaces 💻

  Tandem just launched Hybrid Spaces that enable users to teleport around the office, unlocking hybrid collaboration and spontaneous interactions.

  Tandem @Tandem

  Be at the office, when you can't be at the office with Hybrid Spaces! Check out our 2-minute explainer 👇 and book a demo: tandem.chat/hybrid

  We're excited about where Tandem can take the future of remote work 🤩

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

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Growth Stories 🚀

The one and OnlyFans 👙

By the end of 2020, the company had grown its revenue by an astonishing 540% to reach $400million. In 2021, they hit an estimated $1.2B in net revenue, and are expected to almost double that figure this year.

In an industry that’s notorious for ~50% retention rates, here’s how OnlyFans built out a growth engine that powers their ridiculous revenue numbers.

The explosive growth of OnlyFans

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Fundraising, Venture Capital, and Exits 🤑

• Bolt acquires crypto start-up Wyre for $1.5B 🤝

  Bolt @bolt

  Thrilled to share that @bolt will acquire @sendwyre, a disruptive cryptocurrency infrastructure provider. Together, we’ll be powering the industry’s first one-click cryptocurrency checkout. ⚡️🔑 As seen in @WSJ👇 wsj.com/articles/crypt…

• Airbyte 🤝 Grouparoo

  Andy Jih 🏳️‍🌈👨🏻‍💻🏃🏻‍♂️🎻🍾🌁 @andyjih

  After starting Grouparoo with @bleonard and @EvanTahler ~2.5 years ago, we’re excited to share the next chapter in our journey! We’re honored to be joining @MichelTricot, @JeanLafleur, and the amazing team they’ve built @AirbyteHQ! 🦘🐙 airbyte.com/blog/airbyte-a…

  

  airbyte.comAirbyte acquires Grouparoo, reverse-ETL open source product | AirbyteAirbyte acquires Grouparoo, reverse-ETL open source product

Dive into Airbyte’s growth story from earlier this year. 👇

Plumbing with Airbyte

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

Fast announced last week that they’re shutting down.

Here’s Domm Holland with the story of what went wrong at Fast:

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