Universal basic computing, TAM is a social construct, Stripe drives into Detroit, 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 ❤️

Subscribe to get this newsletter every week👇

---

Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌

• Universal basic incom…puting

  While the world may not see eye to eye on UBI… Universal Basic Computing is something we strongly believe should be bipartisan 🌎

Replit, FTW! An IDE for every kid 🚀

Amjad Masad ⠕ @amasad

Universal Basic Computing.

Thoughts on Data 👨🏾‍💻💭 @thoughtsondata

@Replit never fails to amaze me. Giving convenience and advanced computational power to anyone with an internet connection, even if it's from a 10yr old laptop, is pure brilliant

• Postmadness 📈

  It’s incredible how Postman keeps finding more developers in a world with such an acute shortage 😅 The company grew its user base 173% over the last year ahead of growth monsters like Figma, Miro, and Airtable.

  Maybe their mission has something to do with it? 🤔

  "Our vision is for Postman to help create net new developers in the world" - Abhinav Asthana, Founder & CEO, Postman

Abhinav Asthana @a85

Excited to see @getpostman show up in this report as one of the fastest growing apps (#3) in the world! okta.com/businesses-at-…

Here’s how Postman does it 🔗👇🏻

How Postman built a $5.6B developer community 👩🏻‍💻

• Hubspot enters the B2B payments market… proving yet again that TAM is a (social) construct 😅

  

  Yamini Rangan @yaminirangan

  Big news for @HubSpot and our customers: HubSpot payments is now generally available in the U.S.! It’s no secret that today’s buying experience is full of friction, for both buyers and sellers.

• Stripe drives into Detroit 🚗

  Change is gradual until it is sudden. Ford is one of the latest large, established businesses to move over to Stripe. A segment that is now the fastest-growing for the payments provider! 🤯

  Patrick Collison @patrickc

  🚗 @Ford is moving to @stripe! Our fastest-growing segment is now large, established businesses looking to retool for the digital age. detroitnews.com/story/business…

  

  detroitnews.comFord inks 5-year deal with financial service Stripe to overhaul online paymentsFord touted the deal as a way to make the online payments process more seamless for its customers.

Growth Hunt 🚀🌕

• If it’s Day 0… Don’t serve everyone 🙅🏻‍♂️

  Just look at Substack. The company acquired 25K paying users within 1 year by focussing on a tiny hyper-focused sliver of the writer community:

  • Creators who had existing free newsletters (with many subscribers)

  • Writers with an audience who were recently laid off by major publications

Ryan Kaufman🎓 @growth_student

"If you serve everyone, you serve no one" How SubStack acquired 25K paying subscribers in year 1 by building a hyper focused writer community A thread👇

• 0 to 1M users in 6 months… The mint framework 😳

  A 7 Step quant-based growth marketing strategy that got Mint from 0 to 1M users in 6 months (against a target of 100K)

  • Set your goal

  • Chose a timeframe

  • Set up your spreadsheet

  • Research your sources

  • Set your targets

  • Create a timeline

  • Track your progress

Noah Kagan @noahkagan

I grew Mint from 0-1M users in 6 months Here's the 7 step quant-based growth marketing framework I used that you can steal

---

🔎 The PLG hunt

• The world’s largest ecosystem for building no-code applications…👩🏻‍💻

  Communicating tone is hard, as anyone who has ever texted their grandparents will tell you. Meet Mote! Mote integrates into most everyday apps - Slides, Docs, Forms, Gmail, and more to add voice notes in places that could do with further explanation. With voice-to-text, translation, and engagement tracking features, Mote's Chrome extension is a must-have for educators, learners, and really, busy people everywhere.

  Having raised $2M in Seed funding in March 2021 from Sequoia, Craft, and Oxford Angel Fund, there are ~1M users already on the Mote boat.

  Mote @justmoteHQ

  What an honor it was to be named to the #ChromeWebStoreFavorites for 2021, as selected by @googlechrome! We know that we couldn't have done it without our global community of awesome educators. Thank you! 🗣️💜🙏

  We're excited for where Mote can take the future of async communication 🤩

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

---

Growth Stories 🚀

Meet ClickUp - the slayer of productivity giants and the one app to replace them all. 👑

ClickUp bootstrapped its way from $0-$20M ARR pre-funding and then in 2021, grew +3x in revenue, +4x in user count & almost +7x in headcount. Survivor of FOUR near-death experiences, Zeb Evans built a PLG flywheel at ClickUp that’s operational even today. Read more 👇

Save one day every week with ClickUp

ClickUp to all of us at Toplyne HQ this week:

---

Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

• With an NPS of 77% and a DAU/WAU ~ 60% and now 33M in the 💰,
  Scratchpad is 🚀🌕

  A week after we wrote about them, Scratchpad raised their series B… just saying 🤷‍♂️

  Scratchpad @Scratchpad

  Big news: We’re delighted to announce we’ve raised a $33M Series B to support our mission of making salespeople happy 🥳 This round is led by @DavidSacks's @craft_ventures w/ continued participation from @Accel - & all thanks to our incredible users. We’re just getting started.

  A masterclass in user delight, here’s the growth story in full:

  Doubling sales productivity with Scratchpad

• “Money ball, but for Sales teams” - AtriumHQ raised their Series A round this week!

Atrium - Data-Driven Sales Management @AtriumHQ

Big news! We're sharing with the world that we have officially raised our $20M Series A Round. We're bringing Data-Driven Sales Management to the masses thanks to the help of @craft_ventures, along with @bonfire_vc, @bullpencap, and @CRV. Learn more: bit.ly/3IEeaRb

Launches, events, and releases

• Substack’s been bridging language barriers this week 🤝

  Substack @SubstackInc

  Good news for writers writing Arabic, Hebrew, Pashto, Urdu, and Sindhi: Substack now supports right-to-left script. Just start writing in your language of choice, and the Substack editor will align your text accordingly.

• Intercom teased us with a virtual launch announcement to unveil what they’ve got cooking 👩‍🍳

  Karen Peacock @karenpeacock

  Looking forward to @intercom’s first virtual launch event - #NewAtIntercom! Launching new products, customers sharing best practices & stories + an exciting vision to share We just opened & already have >1,000 folks registered - Hope you can join us!

  

  bit.lyNew at Intercom | IntercomOur leaders have some brand new Intercom products to share with you. You won’t want to miss it. New at Intercom: the virtual launch event on Wednesday, March 23rd. Register now.

---

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

There’s a sweet spot between being purely product-led and being Sales assisted where the balance is jussssst perfect. Here’s Yaagneshwaran Ganesh on how to find the PLG-spot:

Andrei Zinkevich @AZinkevich

Product-assisted nurturing is brilliant. Most tech companies focus just on selling you the product and don't care about your experience and later are wondering why the activation rate is low or churn is high. Awesome guide by @Yaagneshwaran

avoma.comHow to build a Product-led and Sales-assisted GTM motion for your SaaS? | Avoma BlogIn the recent few years, many SaaS companies have started to take the product-led route—which is great. But very few realize that product-led growth (PLG) alone may not always deliver the best results. There’s a huge opportunity to layer a sales-assisted motion on its top. But setting up the right b…

---

---

Some housekeeping…

Is your mailbox trying to keep our content away from you! 💔 What can you do about it? Mark this email as ‘not spam’ 😱 or move it from your promotions to the primary folder 👉🏻 It’s very easy!

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

---

How did you like this week’s newsletter?

Legend 🤩 - Great 😄 - Good 🙂 - OK 😶 - Meh 😒