ZenDesk's founder gets his pay day💰& the cardinal laws of Growth 🎯

Your weekly PLG round-up: Acquisition, super launches, growth frameworks and a lot, lot 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 🐦🌌

• ZenDesk Buyout: Victory or Panic sell?

  Just 3 months ago, ZenDesk rejected a $17B offer because they felt that they weren’t fairly ‘valued.’
  
  Today, they’ve been sold at a much, much lower $10B to a private equity firm.
  
  Twitter experts are quick to liken this to LinkedIn being sold at $26B in 2016 during a downturn, only to later realize it was such a huge bargain.
  
  Slumping tech valuations, and a founder that finally got his payday after over 9 years of dilutions and turbulence.
  
  Was it worth it? Only time will tell.
  

  TechCrunch @TechCrunch

  Daily Crunch: Months after rejecting a $17B bid, Zendesk sells to private equity group for $10.2B tcrn.ch/3bgcz8E by @Kyle_L_Wiggers

  

  tcrn.chZendesk sells to private equity group for $10.2B – TechCrunchHello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

• Built to Last: A framework for strong Growth teams 💪🏻
  The #1 reason most growth teams suffer is due to the lack of systems that evaluate, measure and prime them for success.
  
  Adam Fishman comes through for all Founders and Growth leaders with a solid competency model to build and scale growth teams. Cheggit. 👇
  
  TLDR; Four main competency areas are:
  - Growth Execution
  - Customer Knowledge
  - Growth Strategy
  - Communication & Influence
  
  

  

  
  

• Telegram launches a premium-tier 💰
  In the quest to keep the development of the app driven primarily by users and not advertisers, Telegram launches premium subscription.

  

  
  Starting at 4.99$, we’re waiting to see how many of its users will move over the fence. They’ve coined this as sustainable monetization and we’re here 👏🏽 for 👏🏽 it 👏🏽

TechCrunch @TechCrunch

Telegram tops 700 million users, launches premium tier tcrn.ch/3Qx5CAs by @refsrc

tcrn.chTelegram launches premium tier as it tops 700 million users – TechCrunchTelegram has amassed 700 million users and is rolling out a premium tier with additional features as it pushes to monetize a portion of its large user base.

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🔎 The PLG hunt

SleekFlow is gunning for the social commerce throne 👑

Today’s shoppers spend 80% of their time on social media platforms. SleekFlow hopes to ride this wave of behavioral change. The Hong Kong-based company helps businesses build customer flow automation by merging conversations, catalogs, and payment solutions.

The goal? To become the #1 social commerce unified hub - in a market that’s projected to rise to a whopping $6.2 trillion by 2030.

SleekFlow @sleekflow_io

💬 Conversions through Conversations  It’s finally here! Today we’re so excited to share our new brand video with you! In this video, you’ll learn more about what we do and how we can help you sell faster, better, and more on socials. 🛍 #ecommerce #chatcommerce #whatsapp

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

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Growth Stories 🚀

Goodbye, spreadsheets and PDFs. Hello, Qwilr 🪶

Sales and marketing teams at Zendesk, TikTok, and Dropbox are ditching archaic documentation and going the Qwilr way. From murdering the v1 of their product to ditching freemium; here’s a deep dive into everything that got them this far 👇

‘Cause this is Qwilr 🕺

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Fundraising, Venture Capital, and Exits 🤑

• Appsmith pockets a whopping $41M Series B 👏🏽
  This US & India-based open-source app-development startup helps teams build custom apps. They’re honest about being Low code.
  

  Insight Partners @insightpartners

  Congratulations @theappsmith on your Series B raise! We're thrilled to be on this journey with you🚀 techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/app…

  

  techcrunch.comAppsmith, a low-code platform for building business apps, lands $41M – TechCrunchFor the last several years, Appsmith has been quietly building an open source platform for internal development teams to build the custom apps they need. These are business applications that companies tend to build themselves to give them access to data in a more streamlined and visual way. While t…

• Tech that does good? Sign us up ✍🏼
  Birdie, a caretech startup that enables care providers for the elderly with tools such as patient management, visibility, and operations raises a sweet $30M! 🎯

  Birdie @BirdieCare

  $30 million raised in Series B funding! Birdie are proud to announce we have raised $30 million in Series B funding. To discuss the impact of this raise, Birdie CEO Max Parmentier spoke with Tech Crunch. Read more here: hubs.la/Q01fRbTd0 #Birdie #BirdieSeriesB #TeamBirdie

  

  hubs.laSocial care SaaS maker Birdie tops up with $30M – TechCrunchBirdie’s SaaS platform provides care workers a suite of digital tools to support their work by streamlining admin and patient management

Launches, events, and releases

• END OF AN ERA!
  
  The good folks at Gong are bidding adieu to the old sales reports and quarterly forecasts, and saying hello to Gong Forecast.
  
  The Reality Revolution in sales hath begun.
  
  

  

• Payroll management across 90 countries? No big deel.
  

  deel @deel

  Global Payroll is here! Starting today, you can run payroll in 90+ countries for employees hired through your own entities. 🌎 Streamline international operations, eliminate human errors, and pay your team on time no matter where they live. letsdeel.com/blog/deel-laun…

• A new era for commerce.
  With 100+ new products in its Summer 2022 edition; Shopify is paying attention to the creator economy. 👯‍♀️
  
  Features that enable B2B businesses to go the D2C route easily, and allow stores to enable NFT activation and A LOT more to acquire, engage and turn customers into loyal champions 🔥

  Shopify @Shopify

  100+ new products and updates 1 destination This is Shopify Editions #PoweredbyShopify shopify.com/editions

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

Elena Verna on the 5 cardinal laws of growth 🔨

This one is gold. We’ll just let you read it for yourselves.

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