Zapier proves PLG prints $s faster than the Fed, fundraising like a Superhuman, the Google of Code, and more...

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Nov 18, 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 🐦🌌

How Zapier prints money faster than the Fed 🤑
Didn’t think anyone could be faster? Here’s a superb thread on how Zapier converts the coldesttt 🥶 of web traffic into the hottesttt 🔥 of ARR ($140M and counting) 🚀

Growth Tactics @GrowthTactics

Zapier's homepage is optimized to convert cold traffic into $140M in revenue this year This thread reverse engineers how they do it, so you can get there faster Apply these proven tactics to double your website's conversion rate:

Building a PLG business but struggling with setting up sales? 🙋🏻‍♀️
Look no further than Ryan Breslow and his insightful thread on how he set up sales at Bolt.com! ⚡️
1. Close the first deals yourself, end-to-end 🎬
  It’s impossible to know how to construct a sales team without first knowing how to conduct a sale.
2. Document the learnings 📜
  At Bolt, the team wrote a 50+ page sales playbook which included - Email scripts, cold call scripts, FAQs and rebuttals, negotiating tactics, Closing tactics…. With this handy, new salespeople ramp 3X-5X faster!
3. When ready, always hire in pairs 👥
  Why? If you hire just one salesperson and they can’t sell… you don’t know if the problem is the person or the product! Hire two, and you have a point of comparison.
4. for more…, we highly recommend checking out the thread below 👇🏻

Ryan Breslow 🕺 @theryanking

How to build a sales team:

Fundraising like a Superhuman 🦸🏻‍♀️
Fundraising is tricky 🤷🏻‍♂️ I worked in VC for just over 2 years and got a front row seat to some of the most interesting rounds. What surprised me most was how heavily the best opportunities skewed towards a handful of companies / founders.
What made these founders stand out? Why did they receive all the VC love? Did they just have better companies than the rest? Or was it something deeper… 🤔
Here’s are 5 essential fundraising rules from the Superhuman of fundraising himself, Rahul Vohra 👇🏻
Superhuman @Superhuman
"Raising money for your startup is almost always a wild ride; I’ve been through the process many times and I learn something new with each round." 💸 Superhuman CEO @rahulvohra shares his essential tips for your first fundraise with @TechCrunch ⤵️ tcrn.ch/3Co4qqB
tcrn.chSuperhuman CEO Rahul Vohra’s 5 essential rules for your first fundraise – TechCrunchI am often asked for fundraising advice, and these are the five tips I give out over and over again.
11:30 PM ∙ Nov 17, 2021
8Likes2Retweets

Growth Stories 🚀

A 4x increase in ARR and 7x increase in headcount later, Sourcegraph has been valued at $2.6B. Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu want to put great code-search in the hands of every dev in the world and it’s easy to see why:

Once you Sourcegraph, there's no going back. 😉

Top of the Lyne

Sourcegraph: Google for code

Hi there! Before we jump into Sourcegraph, we have some exciting news. We just raised $2.5M in seed funding from Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Together Fund, and angel investors from Canva, Freshworks, and Zoominfo. We’re excited to be building for a product-led world…

a year ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Rahul Krishnan

Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

The Times They Are a-Changin' 👩🏻‍🎤
With trillions of dollars flowing into the global economy, capital increasingly looks like a commodity asset. So as someone in the business of “selling capital” (aka, a VC) how do you convince a buyer (aka, a founder) that your capital is GREENER than the rest of the land? 💚 The simple answer… it’s really f*$#ing hard!
Especially when your competitors are the likes of Harry Stebbings, Josh Buckley, Naval Ravikant, Jack Altman, Elad Gil, Lenny Rachitsky and James Beshara 🤯

Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings

The times they are a changing. Unlike public markets, pure insight and picking is not sufficient to win deals. In venture, you have to fundamentally convince the founder to work with you over others. Proud to be on this my bro @joshbuckley @lennysan

angellist.comSolo Capitalists Are Gaining on Traditional Venture FirmsSolo GPs increasingly have among the best markup rates on AngelList.

7 years since their series B, and a rollercoaster ride that saw their NPS (Net Promoter Score) go down to 15 and bounce back to 85 🤩, Product analytics firm Mixpanel turns unicorn with a $277M series C led by Bain Cap 💰
AI-powered writing assistant Writer raises $21M Series A led by Insight Partners ✍🏻
[Self-plug 🚨] We are super excited to announce our seed fundraise of $2.5M led by Sequoia Surge and Together Fund 🤩 Here’s what Forbes, Nasdaq, LiveMint, Marketwatch, Yourstory, Yahoo Finance, Entrackr, and VCCircle had to say about us. ❤️

Launches, events, and releases

Microsoft Notion? Workspaces, pages, and components 😱

Tom Warren @tomwarren

Microsoft Loop is a new Office app for the hybrid work era. This is a rebranding of Fluid components, and Loop components are now coming to Teams, Outlook, and OneNote this month. Details here: theverge.com/e/22522992

And Notion be like…

Notion @NotionHQ

SIMPLE TABLES are here! Type /table to get started 🏓

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

Statuspage.io’s (Atlassian suite) co-founder Steve Klien shares his playbook for content marketing 🤩. Find out why and how early-stage startups should invest in

1/ creating viral content 📣

2/ and get into Google’s good books 🤝