👋 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👇

Get early access to Toplyne for free 🤩

Before we jump into another exciting edition of ‘This week in PLG’, introducing the mega referral giveaway 😍! Follow these super-simple instructions to get access to research that went into 6 of our best growth stories to date! Very sure that your friends and colleagues will agree that this is a WIN-WIN-WIN! 🙌🏻

Into the Twitterverse 🐦🌌

• We have to start with the bloodbath in the public markets 💀

  This video summarized most of our moods perfectly 😬

  logan bartlett @loganbartlett

  When your portfolio is all late stage private software companies priced at 200x ARR

  

  January 18th 2022

  43 Retweets1,244 Likes

• Go niche or go home🚀

  How does one go from 0 to 3M users in 6 months… How?

  “Don’t be afraid to go niche”

  Olivia Moore’s article captures how Discord started small within Reddit’s Final Fantasy community.

  Olivia Moore @omooretweets

  In this week's Launched, I explored the early days of Discord. A single post on the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit attracted the first 600 users. But how did this balloon into 3M users in Discord's first six months? ⬇️

  

  January 12th 2022

  52 Retweets333 Likes

• PLG dominates the SaaS secondary markets 🔥

  Nearly every SaaS company on Pitchbook’s 30 most sought-after startups on the secondary market are PLG companies - Stripe, Airtable, Canva, Figma, Snyk 👩🏻‍💻

• The SMB markets are deeper than any of us realize… 🤷🏻‍♂️

  Just look at Hubspot, which is accelerating… yes, ACCELERATING… as it gets past $1B in ARR 🤯

Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣ @jasonlk

HubSpot growth at $1.0B ARR: 32% $1.1B ARR: 41% $1.5B ARR: 49% Woah More here: HubSpot at $1.5 BILLION in ARR — Growing 49%!! Here’s How They Did ItHubSpot has been the leading marketing platform for SMBs for years. But it’s gone on to do something we never used to see. Accelerate and grow every faster...youtu.be

January 15th 2022

26 Likes

• Tesla Roadster vs. Bugatti Chiron reminded us of what PLG apps feel like vs. their old-timey competitors 🏎

  Stripe vs. Paypal

  Canva vs. Adobe

  Notion vs. Word

  …

  …

  The list goes on

  …

  …

  Rodrigo Teijeiro @RodrigoTeijeiro

  Pretty insane accomplishment.

  

  January 17th 2022

  904 Retweets11,168 Likes

• For all the “technical” perfectionists out there, @pmarca offers a reality check 😬

  Andreesen’s Law: Every technology becomes technically perfect at the precise moment when it becomes irrelevant.

Elad Gil @eladgil

Andreessen's Law: Every technology becomes technically perfect at the precise moment when it becomes irrelevant. From @pmarca

January 18th 2022

162 Retweets1,574 Likes

🔎 The PLG hunt

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

  That’s what Softr has set out to build. In just a year, the German company’s no-code web app building platform has attracted ~35,000 business and creator customers. Softr’s use cases range from custom apps to marketplaces, online communities, internal tools, client portals, directories, and more - currently powered by Airtable data, but set to become data-source agnostic very soon.

  They announced their Series A round earlier this week:

  Softr @softr_io

  Excited to announce our $13.5M Series A round at @softr_io led by @mattturck at FirstMark Capital, and 35+ amazing angels, the world’s top minds in product, growth and community. 🎉🚀 We are building the world’s largest ecosystem for no-code apps. softr.io/blog/worlds-la…Softr raises $13.5M Series AWe are excited to announce that we’ve raised a $13.5M Series A to create the world’s largest ecosystem for building no-code apps.softr.io

  January 18th 2022

  37 Retweets268 Likes

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

Leave a comment

Growth Stories 🚀

Introducing Scratchpad, the app with a mind-blowing 60% DAU/WAU ratio 🤯

In a world where the skillsets that make a great salesperson remain elusive, mysterious & rare, why would you waste their time scrambling to update records on Salesforce? Sales folk, meet Scratchpad. (That is if you haven’t, already.)

The average Scratchpad user uses Scratchpad 3 out of 5 working days a week! According to David Sacks, once a Sales rep started using Scratchpad, two things tend to happen: (1) it becomes a daily habit, and (2) they share it with their teammates." Here’s the whole scoop:

Top of the Lyne

Doubling sales productivity with Scratchpad

👋🏻 Hey, Ruchin here! Welcome to another edition of the Growth Stories series 🙌🏻 Every week we break down growth strategies employed by the hottest SaaS PLG Cos and share tactics that you can experiment with at work! If you’re a new subscriber or if you couldn’t find our emails this last month, fret not - We have you covered ❤️! Here are some of our …

Read more

2 days ago · 3 likes · Arjun Rakesh, Rahul Krishnan, and Ruchin Kulkarni

Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

• Say hello to better workdays ⏰

  Clockwise’s mission to rework the workday and make time for what matters kicks into next gear with the latest round of funding led by Coatue.

  Clockwise @getclockwise

  We’re proud to announce our $45M Series C to help bring a new way of working to more people worldwide. Led by Coatue, @Atlassian Ventures participated along with existing investors @Accel, @GreylockVC & @BainCapVC. Clockwise raises $45M Series C to rework the workday | ClockwiseToday, we’re proud to announce that we’ve raised $45M in funding to advance our AI technology and bring this new way of working to more people worldwide.bit.ly

  January 18th 2022

  8 Retweets38 Likes

  Read more about this beautiful little Chrome extension here.

  If you prefer to listen rather than read, tune into the Clockwise story on the Top of the Lyne podcast 🎙:

  Growing 5x in one year with $0 spent: A Clockwise masterclass By Toplyne Podcast episode

Launches, events, and releases

• Conditional logic for your unconditional love of automation

  Now you can prime Airtable automations to do exactly what you want. 🦾

  Airtable @airtable

  ✨ New feature alert: Today we’ve officially launched conditional logic for Automations ⚡ You can now create complex automations that let you put detailed workflows on autopilot. Get the details ➡️ ow.ly/p86c50HycSF

  

  January 19th 2022

  14 Retweets91 Likes

• Thank you, Notion. Was that so hard?🤣

  No more pulling your hair out trying to select text within and across multiple blocks.

  Notion @NotionHQ

  We finally did it 😤 Notion’s text editor has been completely rebuilt to combine: - the flexibility of “blocks” - the ease of a traditional word processor Rolling out this month on desktop & mobile: SELECT TEXT ACROSS MULTIPLE BLOCKS!

  

  January 19th 2022

  375 Retweets5,279 Likes

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

“Amp It Up” - ❄️ Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman’s new book on Hypergrowth is…unique

Snowflake CEO and Chairman Frank Slootman and Harry Stebbings cover a lot of ground here from prioritization, performance reviews, and what makes good people great… to the art of leadership and board management.

20VC: Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman on How To Narrow The Focus and Increase The Quality, Why Every CEO Should Feel Anxious, Why Performance Reviews are BS & How to Unleash the Best People in Your Business By Harry Stebbings | Entrepreneur | Investor | Blogger Podcast episode

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 😒