👋 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 🐦🌌

• The trillion-dollar question 🤑

  As SaaS market caps enter the 10 figures, the question on everyone’s mind…What should a hypergrowth company (>80% YoY) like Snowflake be worth? ❄️

  And if you ask Jamin Ball, the answer is 20-25x NTM revenue 🤷🏻‍♂️

  And with 178% NRR holding fairly steady, it looks like Snowflake is going to be a ‘hypergrowth’ company for quite some time 🚀

  Jamin Ball @jaminball

  What should a public software company growing 100%+ at $250M+ ARR be worth (multiple)? There are very few companies to hit this. Im excluding companies that hit that growth only bc of covid. I believe that list includes Snowflake, SentinelOne, Zoom, Crowdstrike, Shopify, Workday

  March 7th 2022

  51 Retweets390 Likes

• The Mount Rushmore of SEO 🏔

  Hubspot STILL gets 26% of its net new users from SEO.

  And frankly, it’s not surprising! It’s a common theme across the best PLG businesses operating in large markets with millions of users. Canva. Zapier. ClickUp. Millions of backlinks painstakingly acquired through the years leading to 10s/100s of millions of page views a month.

  If you’re a young PLG business, invest in SEO. You won’t regret it 😉

  Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin #ДобісаПутіна @jasonlk

  Not sure most folks get how epic it is that at $1.5 Billion in ARR, HubSpot still gets 26% or so of its customers from SEO

  

  March 8th 2022

  11 Retweets141 Likes

• From mainstream to contrarian… WAGMI 🔥

  Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings

  I finally feel like a contrarian in VC. I am not focused on Web3. Give me enterprise, give me payroll, compliance, HR. 😉

  March 4th 2022

  67 Retweets2,405 Likes

  Did he just say enterprise, payroll… compliance… AND… HR?!

🔎 The PLG hunt

• Your daily stand-ups are missing one crucial ingredient: Spinach.

  Spinach.io helps you structure your daily stand-up meetings and facilitate sharper, focused updates.

  Spinach cuts through the song and dance of unstructured stand-ups and other recurring meetings.

  Through features such as ice-breakers, an agenda & timer, a parking lot for thoughts and questions, and a meeting summary in Slack, Spinach reduces overhead in running what should be very simple meetings.

  Spinach.io @spinach_io

  After many requests from teams running their daily standups on @Google Meet, @MicrosoftTeams, @SlackHQ , @discord, @Webex and other platforms, we're excited to announce Spinach.io now supports all platforms! Sign up at Crush your daily standupSpinach.io helps you run faster, more focused standups. Cut standup time in half. Get sharper updates. Track progress and blockers in your existing tools.spinach.io

  March 2nd 2022

  4 Retweets6 Likes

  Spinach makes the promise of cutting meeting times in half, and could quickly become a staple of remote work!

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

Leave a comment

Growth Stories 🚀

This week, we put the “PLG CRM” under a microscope and pressure test the hypothesis that the answer to the monetization struggles of PLG companies is a new CRM.

Verdict - We call bullsh*t.

Official transcripts of the trial, as reported from the courthouse 👇

Top of the Lyne

PLG CRM: Curing symptoms, not diseases 🦠

Let's start today's article with a public service announcement (PSA): If you're a PLG company struggling with monetization and you think a "PLG CRM" is going to turn the tide... boy do we have some bad news for you 😬 SaaS multiples are at all-time lows. Funding markets are drying up. ARR is back in vogue. You need your free users to convert to paid plans…

Read more

2 days ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Ruchin Kulkarni

Fundraising, Venture Capital and Exits 🤑

• SaaS data collaboration platform Atlan raised $50M in Series B funding yesterday 🎉

  The latest round was led by Salesforce Ventures, Insight Partners, and Sequoia Capital India with participation from Taylor Brown (Fivetran founder) and Ajeet Singh (ThoughtSpot founder), along with existing investors Waterbridge Ventures.

  Prukalpa ✨ @prukalpa

  We have BIG NEWS to share: @AtlanHQ raised a $50M Series B led by @insightpartners, @SalesforceVC, and @Sequoia_India. 🥁🥁🥁 We decided to keep this one real... so here’s exactly how we announced the news internally and our team’s reaction to it. 💙

  

  March 9th 2022

  45 Retweets602 Likes

• All-in-one sales intelligence and engagement platform Apollo raised $110M in Series C 💰

  The platform finds prospects and derives deeper insights on them from a database of 220M+ would-be buyers

TechCrunch @TechCrunch

Apollo.io raises $110M as its crosses 16K paying users of its sales intelligence platform tcrn.ch/3hxz3lu by @ingridlundenApollo.io raises $110M as its sales intelligence platform crosses 16K paying companies – TechCrunchOne of the bigger impacts of COVID-19 has been that more business than ever before is now being carried out online. To meet that opportunity, today a startup called Apollo.io has raised $110 million. Apollo built an all-in-one sales intelligence and engagement platform to find sales prospects from …tcrn.ch

March 3rd 2022

7 Retweets15 Likes

• Speech-to-text API AssemblyAI raised $28M in series A funding led by Accel, with participation from Y Combinator, the Collison brothers (Stripe), Nat Friedman (GitHub), and Daniel Gross (Pioneer)

  That’s some line-up. ⭐️

  TechCrunch @TechCrunch

  AssemblyAI snags $28M for all-in-one API to transcribe, summarize, and moderate audio tcrn.ch/3Mq8kWk | by Devin ColdeweyAssemblyAI snags $28M for all-in-one API to transcribe, summarize and moderate audio – TechCrunchThe explosion in audio and video content and interfaces over the last few years has been plain to see, but ways of dealing with all that media behind the scenes hasn’t quite caught up. AssemblyAI, powered by $28 million in new funding, is aiming at becoming the go-to solution for analyzing sp…tcrn.ch

  March 4th 2022

  12 Retweets26 Likes

Launches, events, and releases

• Hi there subscriber - if you’re reading this from your inbox, you could instead be doing so through the new Substack app!

  All your subscriptions now tuck neatly into one app and a dedicated inbox.

  “It offers a quiet space to read, where the work itself is given the spotlight and you’re not pulled into status games or trivial diversions” - reads the official blog post announcing the app, that’s soon coming to Android.

  Substack @SubstackInc

  Introducing the Substack app. It’s like your email inbox, but better. Get it now for iPhone and iPad: substack.com/app/get-ios Learn more 👇

  

  March 9th 2022

  122 Retweets537 Likes

• Megathread of all Notion features announced at “Block by Block” 2022:

  Including the Notion API coming out of beta, a new sidebar, database customizations, and more. 👇

Fre @fre_notion

All new features announced on @NotionHQ Block by Block 2022 explained🌟 A summary 🧵

March 3rd 2022

42 Retweets252 Likes

Nerding out on PLG 🤓📚

This week we’re nerding out on the latest Twenty Minute VC podcast:

Head of Revenue & Growth (Americas) at Stripe, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser in conversation with Harry Stebbings on all things Sales at Stripe and Dialpad (where she was CRO). Jeanne talks about her entry into Sales, the 101 of creating a playbook, hiring salespeople, onboarding, and more.

Dive in 👇

20 Sales: The Stripe Sales Playbook; Who Should Create It, When Should it Be Done, Where Do Many Go Wrong | How To Identify 10x Sales Hires and How To Structure the Hiring Process in Sales with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Head of Americas Revenue & Growth @ St By Harry Stebbings | Entrepreneur | Investor | Blogger Podcast episode

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