Murf is the runaway leader of the text-to-speech space not just for prosumers, but also for businesses. What separates the wheat from the chaff in this space (and Murf from the rest) is a GTM orchestration that (a) proactively triggers self-serve conversions and (b) serves flaming hot enterprise opportunities to their sales team. On a platter.

This is the story of how the generative AI company Murf uses behavioral AI to penetrate the enterprise market while putting their self-serve conversions on anabolic steroids.

Come say hi to us at PLGTM: Okay, so this is fresh off the press. Sort of.

We're hosting a first-of-its-kind conference for Go-To-Market teams at the Mezzanine in New York City on June 27 🎉

Read about the speakers, sessions, and the agenda for the day here. If you’re in town and would like to attend, use the code Toplyne50 to get 50% off on your tickets when you sign up. ⚡️

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Meet Murf AI 🤝

Entertainment animation agencies creating entire TV series episodes using AI-generated voices… authors creating a series of fantasy fiction audiobooks with little to no production costs… YouTube influencers creating rap videos using AI-powered speech - these stories are all very real in 2023 and they’re all powered by Murf.ai.

Synthetic speech company Murf lets users generate “human-like” voiceovers without needing to buy recording equipment or hire a voice artist.

Founded in October 2020, Murf saw its ARR rise 26x over the next two years while synthesizing more than one million voiceover projects along the way, in various speaking styles and tones. With a library of more than 120 human-parity AI voices across 20 languages, Murf raised a $10 million Series A round in September 2022, on the back of their blazing growth.

What they didn’t know at the time, was that their growth so far was about to pale in comparison to the volcanic surge that was coming their way.

“Post the announcement of DALL-E and ChatGPT, we started seeing 3x more website visits than we were, three months ago.” - Chaitanya, Head of Growth at Murf

The trouble with growing 3x in 3 months...

Murf tracks the behavioral data of users on Mixpanel. On the GTM end, they use Customer.io and Sendinblue to trigger emails to their customers prompting conversions - both self-serve and sales-driven.

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Prior to using behavioral AI, Murf built cohorts on Mixpanel to qualify users to trigger conversion prompts to. They tested a few hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Anyone who’s created 10 minutes of audio

Being a content creation tool fundamentally, Murf’s north star metric is “minutes to content created.” Qualifying anyone who created 10 minutes of speech on Murf broke at volume. Way too many users crossed the threshold, and once past the 10-minute mark, they all looked the same.

Hypothesis 2: Anyone who’s used 5 or more different voices

While this logic was good at disqualifying users who weren’t ready to convert yet, it failed to surface the conversion crème de la crème.

Hypothesis 3: Anyone who shares while on the free trial

In Chaitanya’s words: “If a user shares while on the free trial… that's a very high interaction, but a very small percentage was doing that. The percentage was similar to our conversion rate. Then again, it's tricky to qualify.”

Murf experimented internally with cohorts defined on Mixpanel against these and various other actions they hypothesized to be correlated to conversion. Although individually each of these experiments positively impacted conversion rates, they were discovering a bottleneck with each, beyond which there was no meaningful difference.

“Given that it’s a software tool, there are a bunch of things that users could do. As we got into more metrics, it got trickier and trickier. How many metrics, which metrics - where do we stop? So yeah, then it was very clear that this is a data science problem.” - Chaitanya, Murf

And so in September 2022, an AI company Murf turned to AI for help in a very unsurprising turn of events.

Murf integrated behavioral AI into their GTM stack.

Skyrocketing conversion rates by 7x

Murf's problem was two-fold. On one hand, they needed to focus their relatively small sales team on the leads most likely to convert, rather than waste time, energy, and emails chasing leads who weren't qualified to convert yet.

On the other hand, Murf didn't want to spray and pray by email blasting the many thousands of new users who sign up every day. For many reasons:

1. Murf's sales bandwidth is a bottleneck. While their sales teams looked to book meetings, they didn't want to book too many meetings either and swamp them with leads who in reality had shown no intent. Not too many, not too few.
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2. E-mail marketing fatigue is real. E-mails triggered to users who, through their behavior, show no intent to convert can lead to decaying open rates over time, and tune them out of the channel completely.

"Our (growth's) job is to drive Calendly invites. That's our success metric. You can run an email campaign, or in the future, run an in-app campaign, the idea is to drive Calendly invites. We can't drive too many and we can't drive too less," adds Chaitanya.

Murf built two orchestrations through the behavioral AI engine.

Playbook #1

Goal defined to the AI: Free-to-enterprise sales-led conversions

Integrations into the AI engine: Mixpanel (product analytics), Customer.io, and Sendinblue (e-mail engagement)

GTM touch: E-mail sequence asking users if they'd be interested in talking to sales to learn more about Murf.

Impact: Within the first two months of running the playbook, the AI engine increased Murf's enterprise conversions by 10%, leading to an immediate 20% lift in revenue closed for the sales team.

Playbook #2

Goal defined to the AI: Free-to-pro self-serve conversions

Integrations into the AI engine: Mixpanel (product analytics), customer.io, and Sendinblue (e-mail engagement)

GTM touch: E-mail sequence prompting a discount code to users during Black Friday if they upgrade to the pro plan.

Impact: In the duration that this playbook ran, Murf ran an A/B test to validate the impact of the AI engine, against a cohort defined on Mixpanel. The conversion rates among the AI cohort outperformed the Mixpanel cohort by 7x.

AI for AI: Up next for Murf

With these two playbooks orchestrating their GTM, Murf is able to be proactive about penetrating enterprises at a higher ticket price. Their top of the funnel growth rates continue to hold.

And so, while acquisition is not a burning problem for Murf (it's an understood problem statement), a problem with a lot of unknowns is churn reduction and account expansion.

Playbooks 3 & 4 loading ⏳, but more on that later.

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This battle should be over long before it even starts. But David (and Malcolm Gladwell) has other ideas.

In his eyes, Goliath is a lumbering dude with blurry vision weighed down by heavy armor. About to engage a kid who fights off Asiatic lions for a living.

Armed with a sling that can send a rock hurling with the stopping power of a .45 caliber handgun.

Yup - the battle is indeed over long before it even starts.

It’s a strange thing. Invoking the idiomatic use of David and Goliath in the ‘David vs. Goliath’ story, but with all cards on the table, makes David, Goliath and Goliath, David.

The advantages of the ‘underdog’ are not always obvious.

There are many VC-funded Goliaths with massive Sales & Marketing budgets and large enterprise Sales teams in the user-onboarding space. Watching on as a younger bootstrapped 3-person David races to $3M in ARR against all “odds” in front of their eyes.

If the ripple effects of Generative AI births the first one-person SaaS unicorn in history, they’d be right to look here for inspiration - to the three Danish guys who are flying closest to the sun.

Meet Esben Friis-Jensen, Sebastian Seilund, and Jonas Kelstrup. The founders of Userflow.

We sat down to interview Esben two weeks ago in a live event in an attempt to codify the Userflow playbook of bootstrapping to $3M in ARR with 3 employees.

If you want the recording of our conversation with Esben, leave an “aye” in the comments 👇🏻

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On entering a crowded market

Appcues: 2013. Pendo: 2013. Intercom: 2011. Userflow: 2019.

Esben and Sebastian were entering a market crowded by players with a half-a-decade headstart.

The disadvantages are obvious. The advantages? Not so much. What are the advantages?

1. PMF is a solved problem

A five-year headstart has allowed your competitors to go to market and find product-market fit, so you don’t have to.

2. You’re forced to differentiate

With the quest for PMF out of the way, you’re laser-focused on differentiating your product. This is your entire play.

Esben thinks very deeply about differentiating Userflow from the early movers. Userflow does this across two dimensions:

1. UX - With pureplay PLG, nothing matters more, arguably, than your users’ first impression of your product. The Userflow founders obsess over giving users the absolute best UX in the market. In a PLG playground, in a very Darwinian way, Userflow blows their competition out of the water.

2. Sophistication - “Five years ago” is a long time horizon in SaaS. The late mover advantage Userflow had was this: they were able to rethink the onboarding category from scratch, and not stay married to assumptions from five years ago.

On being outsiders in the valley

Esben is a two-time founder. He scaled his previous company, Cobalt, a Penetration-Testing-as-a-Service product to 200 employees with $37M raised before he set out to build Userflow with Sebastian.

Cobalt was founded by four Danish guys new to San Francisco. Userflow, by two Danish guys, one of them new to San Francisco, and the other working remotely from Denmark.

There are obvious disadvantages to not being in the valley. The advantages aren’t so obvious.

“This is a common mistake I see founders making. US founders tend to focus only on the US market. European founders only focus on the European market. The advantage I had in moving from Europe to US is I had a focus on both markets.”

Userflow’s customer base is split 50-50 across US and Europe. Not being from here allowed them to widen the locus of their GTM.

Liftoff: 0 to 100

Back in 2018, Sebastian Seilund was building Studio1: a product that aimed to automate the production of screencast videos for customer support, marketing, and sales. Although Studio1 fizzled out after launch, early users couldn’t stop raving about something inside Studio1: the product tours.

With the Cobalt founder now on board, the duo now had a personal network and the Studio1 distribution list to take them from 0 to 100.

Liftoff: 0 to 100 but not counting friends and family

The next 100 customers came from a place all small businesses know and love. Userflow’s ProductHunt launch got them their first set of core users to absorb feedback from and fine-tune the product with.

Scaling: 100 and beyond

Blitzing past 100 users as a three-person company, bootstrapped is no easy feat. Esben breaks down the Userflow playbook:

1. Setting goals

Without external funding, stakeholders, or pressure, how the hell does Userflow set growth goals?

Do they even set growth goals?

“We don’t have to be that scared of not hitting the target, but we still set targets so we have the ambition to grow to a certain level, so we don’t become a lifestyle business. We want to be a growth business.”

Four principles stand out to us about how Userflow looks at goal-setting:

1. The founders set revenue goals. “I want to 2x my ARR in the next year”

2. They set 2-month schedules for features, etc. So they can easily change priorities and goals.

3. They measure core metrics against peers and use tools like Chartmogul to automate their metric collection.

4. “Constant iterative optimization.” They adjust goals constantly.

2. Funding growth

The secret to funding might appear to be common sense, but it’s still worth iterating. And Esben does.

“#1 thing? Charge for your product. You have to believe in your product and then charge for it. You’ll only get the right feedback if you charge for it.”

Userflow have 6x-ed their pricing in the last five years.

3. While we’re on pricing…

Grow with your customers. If you’re Userflow, you make pricing usage-based against MAUs so as your customers scale, so do you.

4. Adding Marketing fuel

Esben borrows lessons from Cobalt here, but here’s what worked for Userflow:

1. Start with SEM

2. Find words that work for your targeting, and funnel that into SEO.

3. Parallelly pilot thought leadership and social selling.

“In an authentic way tell a story that is either directly about your product or is in the vicinity of your product.”

Cobalt went from the outbound grind that was *sort of* working to blowing up inbound massively the second they brought on Caroline Wong. Caroline was a thought leader in the security space who had even written a book about application security. Thought leadership works.

Watch Toplyne in action

5. Conquering events

Userflow makes harsh selections about which events to sponsor or attend. These are no small spends for your marketing teams. All decisions here are made on the payback period.

“What’s the price of a booth, how many do users can we get approximately, how long is it gonna take us to pay it back?”

Userflow is sponsoring SaaStock this year, so you know the payback period calculation was made here.

6. Going upmarket

Five years later, Userflow has public market companies as customers. Names like Amplitude, Johnson & Johnson.

Without the machinery you’d traditionally need to run this operation. An enterprise sales team, customer success, onboarding specialists, legal - the whole nine yards.

How does Esben convince a large enterprise company to choose them over the Goliaths he’s competing with?

“We’re in the end-user era. You get someone at this org to try for free, make them your internal champion. Then make them fight for you.”

That aside, his principle with going upmarket to Enterprise is simple: Make your enterprise customers think hard about whether the friction they infamously crave is really necessary here.

1. Disincentivize traditional enterprise requests. Userflow made it a lot more expensive to do custom paperwork & fill security questionnaires. You can get the same features at a much more affordable rate. Make them think “Are you sure you want the friction?”

2. Make them really think about which plan they really need. “Are you sure you aren’t good with the Pro plan? Do you really want custom limits to start with? Custom contracts?

A Day in the Life

Esben’s official title is Chief Growth Officer. Code for one-man-go-to-market machine. He’s Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales all rolled into one. That’s at least a 20 person team at a run-of-the-mill SaaS company.

With 500+ customers to support, new features to market, and acquisition targets on his radar, Esben has to be ruthless with his prioritization and diligent with his time.

He gave us a sneak preview into a day in his life:

P0 - Help existing customers. Esben maintains a strict 24-hour SLA on support requests. Recurring support tickets are funnelled back to Sebastian as suggestive fixes in the product.

P1 - Get more customers. Generating content for SEO and social selling to get more customers. If you’re on any of the various PLG Slack communities, LinkedIn, or the other content watering holes, you’d be hard-pressed to not spot Esben on an average day.

“Any Productivity hacks, Esben?” - Yes. Automate. Always fix the root cause. Create GREAT documentation. Maintain backlog religiously. And about Sales…

“Those cookie cutter demos? Why would you waste time on setting up a meeting? Just watch them as a video.”

The Userflow stack: Zapier for automation. Userflow in Userflow for onboarding. Intercom for support. Hubspot as CRM. Chartmogul as a metrics tool. Notion for task lists, backlog. And Loom.

Why not… hire, Esben?

“If we’re still growing at the rate we want to, why hire more people? For me, hiring doesn’t reduce the work, it increases the work.”

Userflow’s support tickets have remained largely the same over the last year, and with the recent launch of a GPT-4 powered AI assistant, Esben expects them to go down in number going forward.

He ends the interview with a stark reminder to all of us that we’re in the product-led growth end-user era where traditionally human-driven channels are quickly being taken over by product-drivers.

The knock-down effect: Userflow have derisked themselves from bad hiring calls and knocks to productivity from just… managing humans while preserving the lean-hustle of a 3-person supernova.

“We’ll see how far it goes.”

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His crime? Breaking the magician’s code. Besides the greatest hits - the death saw, levitation, and making elephants disappear, Val took his audience behind the scenes of some of magic’s most closely guarded secrets.

In ‘98, he was sued for $500k by Andre Kole, the creator of an illusion wherein the magician escapes from a falling bed of spikes: A 20th-century trick known as the Death of Cora.

Kevin and Cindy Spencer came after Val too. Two illusions from their repertoire: “The shadow box” and “Houdini’s torture cell,” which cost over $50k to develop had to be thrown in the trash now that the cats were out of the bag.

A woman appears from the shadows. A man escapes from a locked water-filled container. Doesn’t sound like there’s much to it.

At Dreamforce last year, Slack presented a six-tile grid that powers their segmentation engine. It was simplicity itself.

Doesn’t look like there’s much to it. Until you Val Valentino it.

Those six tiles across two axes and the triggers powering user-hops across these tiles were the product of two years of engineering & data science hours and anywhere between $1M-$3M in combined cost.

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Here’s the masked magician Val Valentino on why he agreed to do the Fox show:

“I felt that revealing these secrets would encourage children into trying magic instead of discouraging them”

This is the spirit in which we’re tearing down Slack’s segmentation engine today. This sh*t is difficult to build. But there’s neither magic here, nor art.

Why now?

That’s a fair question to ask. Val had his reasons.

“The main reason I did the program was to get Magicians talking about the future of the Magical Arts as the Internet was about to change everything.”

We have ours.

Earlier this week, I co-hosted a live event with Paddle’s CMO Andrew Davies.

“Product-led revenue during economic downturns.” This is what Andrew and I spoke about for about an hour. We could have kept going. But in breaking down data from ~35k businesses, three things stood out to me:

1. The best subscription businesses in the world have at least 20% of their revenue being driven by expansion.

2. That number has grown in the last year. In the top quartile, that number clocks in at ~40%.

3. Net Revenue Retention is not an art. It’s a science. Which means you can engineer it too.

What does that mean for subscription businesses? Over the last year, many discovered that they were sitting on a goldmine, but without the picks and shovels to drive expansion motions at scale.

The best of the lot figured out the science and went out looking for picks and shovels. Many still think it’s an artistic endeavor.

My contention is that it’s not. Here’s why.

If you want the recording of my conversation with Andrew, leave an ‘aye’, and I’ll make sure you get it. 👇🏻

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Expansion as a % of growth is… expanding

But first, a little about you, and that rich vein of gold telluride you’re sitting on.

Over the last year, among the top quartile, the percentage of revenue growth attributable to expansion has grown to ~40%.

The very best are driving ~40% of their growth - during a downturn - with powerful expansion motions. Turns out it IS easier to sell where you’ve already sold something.

Aristotle may well have been on to something when he said “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” That ore of gold? That’s your current user base.

It might be time for SaaS to look inward, but let’s bust a myth straight off the bat here.

There’s no art at play here.

The “art” of Net Revenue Retention

Let’s look at some usual suspects here known for strong PMF, hyper-effective network effects, and collaborative features. These logos have land-and-expand embedded in their genetic makeup.

It won’t surprise you that >40% of their net new revenue is driven by expansion.

Sure, finding product-market fit might be an art. And these companies have hit the motherlode and found their way into the Academie des Beaux-Arts, where their logos now hang on the walls.

It’s tempting to think that their Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is a product of art.

…until you see this:

Not names you would usually associate with the sort of virality or expansion levers you’d find in a Figma, a Gitlab, or a Datadog, are they?

Look at the numbers again. Smartsheet, Alteryx, New Relic, Splunk - all notoriously clunky tools to use, all have anywhere between 30-90% of their new revenue being driven by expansion. The old timers are on to something.

This is no fluke. Expansion is a solved science. It’s a tough science, but it’s a solved one.

Slack’s NRR hovers around the 120% mark according to the latest available fiscal year results. And the behemoth powering this Houdini Cell magic trick is a carefully crafted marvel of data science and engineering.

BTS: The Pledge

The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man.

Slack distilled this magic to a number and made it popular: 2,000.

A team of 10 or more, exchanging over 2,000 messages within 1 week had 93% retention in the long term. And so for Slack, anyone who crossed this magic number was a Product-Qualified Lead.

At the core of the spell animating their go-to-market motion sits a segmentation engine built in-house.

Six personas that every account is mapped to depending on where they are in their user journey.

Sounds simple. Let’s play that back. How is this segmentation put into effect?

• To pull in team sizes, Slack taps into their subscription data. Aggregated and stitched at a user-team-account level.

• To measure engagement, product analytics. Something like a Segment, Mixpanel, or Amplitude.

• Acquisition source is pulled in through data from marketing channels.

• Headroom for expansion and team size is measured by 3rd party enrichment.

If you’re on Slack’s GTM team, you want every new user to eventually be taken to that top right corner and become that orange tile: “The Committed.”

Each of those tile hops is powered by a GTM touch. Creators become connectors through lifecycle e-mails. Connectors become engagers through in-app nudges prompted to them. Sales or sales-assist teams step in to then convert them to “Committed.”

BTS: The turn

The magician takes the dove and makes it do something extraordinary. Like, make the dove disappear.

The Slack recipe to drive upsells and conversions is rooted in five fundamental components. When it comes to driving this at scale, across the board, what separates the wheat from the chaff - the best from the rest - is their ability to:

#1 Drive a multi-modal GTM

They’re all GTM agnostic, and consciously nudge users in the right place at the right time, across a plethora of channels.

#2 Set up a *chef’s kiss* GTM infra

They’ve all set up the infra to power their multi-modal GTM. Ways to measure engagement, and ways to boost it - across sales, marketing, account management, and product growth.

#3 Make disparate pieces talk to each other

Some engineering magic here, that makes product analytics and enrichment talk to your CRM, and for all of this measurement to live centrally in a warehouse.

#4 Add intelligence

And to bring the data to life and draw meaning from it, a smattering of data science magic.

BTS: The Prestige

But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".

#5 Make intelligence actionable

All of that intelligence is then put into action through a carefully orchestrated GTM. Qualified users are reached through the right channel, with the right messaging, personalized to just the right amount, at the exact time they’re ready to hop tiles.

Every user-touch stands on the shoulders of a feat of engineering that stitches disparate data together, makes it coherent, and channels it to an end-point that the user prefers with the intelligence given to it by AI models that bring it to life.

Like a million Rube Goldberg machines set into motion all at the same time.

The Val lawsuits would be worth over a million dollars today. The simplicity of the prestige masked over a million dollars worth of sophistication.

It shouldn’t escape you that the Alteryx, New Relic, and the other old-timers are in rarefied air.

To set such an engine as Slack into motion takes a small matter of (we measured this) anywhere between 3-8 quarters with 3-4 data scientists, 3-4 data engineers, and a small price of $1M - $3M a year. Recurring.

It’s science. But it’s expensive science. As Val and the production team at Fox will tell you.

Watch Toplyne in action ⚡️

Add to calendar ⚡️

But then… the tide began to turn.

Over a 3-week window around Thanksgiving last year, Pictory saw their Net Revenue Retention go up by 14% and free-to-paid conversions grow by 38%.

What the hell had just happened? What had happened was this: Pictory had just stumbled upon a 1-2 punch that took them half a day to set up but would change their GTM game forever.

A 1-2 punch of Behavioral AI and in-app nudges.

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“100x growth in 2 months? Say no more” - Pictory

But first, meet Pictory: a platform powered by generative AI for marketers, creators, and bloggers to create short-form video snippets from long-form content at scale.

Founded in 2019 by Vikram Chalana, Abid Mohammed, and Vishal Chalana out of Seattle, Pictory has been on an absolute tear - a growth trajectory that saw them grow 100x in 3 months - on the back of which they raised their $2.1M Series A round in January 2022.

Here’s their founder Vikram Chalana on Pictory’s mission for video:

"There should be a video editor as part of your office productivity suite. We saw what Canva was doing, we saw what was happening with GPT and AI in marketing and we figured there has to be a way you can bring it all together" - Vikram Chalana, Co-founder & CEO

Pictory offers a free trial to get you started with limits set against #videos generated, hours of transcription, and accessible templates. Monthly paid plans start at $23 and yearly at $19.

They rode the wave of the booming creator economy, the rise of vertical videos as search-engine indexable content, and the surge of generative AI-powered content creation.

As Pictory grew, so did their top-of-funnel - in other words, sign-ups for their free trial. They had two major growth spurts: In the summer of 2021, Pictory grew from 50 paying customers to 5,000 in two months - and continued to grow 15% month-over-month through 2022.

Pictory: + ChatGPT - name a better duo, we’ll wait

And then OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT.

On the back of a couple of viral videos on social media that showed Pictory and ChatGPT working together, Pictory saw a sudden surge of new users signing up for their free tier.

“We grew 15% MoM through 2022. Now we’re growing 50% every month.” - Vikram Chalana, Co-Founder & CEO

If the video-creation space was hot, Pictory was now red-hot.

The dark side of hyper-growth: High churn, poor conversions

But it wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns in hyper-growth mode. As Pictory’s top-of-funnel grew, the founders zeroed in on a few key challenges:

1. High churn - Videos are often framed as one-off projects. Once you’re done with the project, you’re likely done with the tool you used for the project, so you churn.

Paying users on monthly plans often churned before even discovering the full extent of value within Pictory.

“If you are bought into the annual plan instead, you can say, okay, I want to see how this goes if I produce videos every week or every, day. And, how does that impact my business, my lead generation, and my revenue - all that stuff.” - Vikram Chalana, Co-Founder & CEO

2. Free-to-paid conversions - Averaging over 30,000+ sign-ups for the free trial every month, Pictory looked for ways to nudge and convert their free users to paid plans. Being product-led, giving users an unparalleled in-product experience was paramount to Pictory.

And triggering a blast of e-mail campaigns and in-app nudges to anyone who signed up stood at odds with offering users a natural journey to value until they were ready to benefit from premium features.

Pictory’s vision of video is what the founders call “high-frequency videos” as opposed to “high-production videos.” Experimenting with high-frequency videos requires users to sign up for an annual plan.

With the product suite evolving over time, the Pictory team were confident that if they could get users to experience value from the product over an extended period of time, they could limit churn and boost retention.

Pictory’s Go-To-Market Stack

Pictory tracks product-usage data across all users on Amplitude - all actions, events, and signals fired by users are registered here.

They don’t have a sales team yet. All of their growth is product and marketing-led. Their GTM stack includes Zoho for CRM and Appcues for in-app customer engagement.

Behavioral AI + Nudges = BOOM.

And in mid-2022, Pictory added stardust to their existing GTM stack: Behavioral AI built on first-party product usage, CRM, billing, and third-party enrichment data to identify users ready/most likely to

1. Convert from free to paid plans

2. Convert from monthly to annual plans - to improve Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and upfront cash flow.

With Amplitude data plugged into Behavioral AI on one end and their Go-To-Market stack of Appcues (for in-app notifications) and Zoho (for CRM) on the other, Pictory set up two playbooks.

The AI qualified the highest intent users - from the free and monthly plans - and sent them once every day to Appcues and Zoho.

Playbook #1: In-product notifications triggered using Appcues to hot users most likely to convert to the annual plan (Top 150 users daily). Shown a promotion with a limited-time offer (30% discount) to move over from monthly to annual.

Playbook #2: E-mail promotions triggered using Zoho CRM to hot and warm users (Top 650 daily, ranked by intent) most likely to convert to paid plans. Sent e-mails with a promotion code attached that incentivized them to convert to paid yearly plans.

Quick aside: Pictory could have triggered the Appcues nudges to all their users and bypassed the behavioral qualification, but that comes at the cost of marketing fatigue and a damaged experience for users who are still learning the ropes of the product.

A 14% lift in NRR? Not a problem

Within the first three weeks of setting up their playbooks, Pictory saw their total conversions to paid annual plans go up - powered by a combination of their organic growth and behavioral qualification surfacing high-intent free and monthly users to be converted to annual plans.

With free and monthly users now being nudged to move over to annual plans, Pictory was now locking in cashflow upfront ($8.1K in ARR upfront, every month) while improving retention of users who might have otherwise churned off monthly plans, leading to a 14% increase in Net Revenue Retention compared to baseline.

Nudges powered by Behavioral AI + Appcues drove 38% more free-to-paid conversions in the first three weeks alone, against a control group of randomized users who were also shown the nudge.

"Our conversion rates have improved for people to who we show the nudges, and we've had some validated data on that. On top of that, we’ve had more people move over to annual plans, which helps increase our net revenue retention." - Vikram Chalana, Co-Founder & CEO

Net Revenue Retention is the gold-star metric for the very best in SaaS.

• 77% of Datadog’s customers use 2+ products, while 31% use 4+ products - at an NRR of 130%.

• Figma’s Net Revenue Retention at the time of acquisition (still hurts) was 150% - best in class, hands down.

• Cloudflare - 126%

• Gitlab? 148-152%. We can keep going.

While top-of-the-funnel growth has been staggering for GenAI companies, it has failed to trickle further down the funnel into revenue growth. It’s a common perception that monetization isn’t a figured-out science for these tools just yet.

One way to approach GTM is to be broad-brush and use a one-size fits all approach for your freemium user base in an attempt to drive your revenue motions: conversion, expansion, and churn reduction.

But if we’ve learned anything from SaaS’s shift to product-led growth, it is that GTM wins on hyper-personalization. And the what, when, where, and how - of all your marketing, sales, and sales-assist touches need to feed off of product usage, firmographics, and demographics to drive your monetization engine.

And over a three-week window around Thanksgiving in 2022, Pictory made monetization what it apparently wasn’t: a figured-out science.

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“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

The last words etched on Richard Feynman’s blackboard as he succumbed to cancer in the winter of 1988. Feynman’s final injunction to his students and to the world. (Good luck topping Feynman quotes, ChatGPT)

Feynman’s last words are, among other raving adjectives, timely in 2023.

You can look far and wide, but you’d be hard pressed to find a more succinct TL;DR of the biggest gold rush of our times: Generative Artificial Intelligence.

OpenAI alludes to the same Feynman quote:

“Generative models have a number of parameters much smaller than the amount of data they are trained on, so the models are forced to internalize the essence of the data in order to then generate it.”

In other words, for these models to create, they must first understand.

Since we released part 1 of this series on Generative AI just last week, we saw two major announcements happen.

1. Google announced Bard (the same LaMDA that Blake Lemoine was convinced was sentient) and…

2. Microsoft teased a chatbot UI for Bing… which was reviewed by the New York Times as “a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.” and by Ben Thompson of Stratechery as “…the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life.” So

   …mixed.

We expect fresher drops and hot-takes this week. This is just the nature of Cambrian explosions.

For scale and reference, just look at the timeline of events in text generation ever since GPT-3 ran the four-minute mile:

These are uncharted waters, and we’re learning the rules of the game on the go.

At least some of the rules.

Across the Generative AI stack, there are four key levels we’ve seen emerge:

1. The silicon - The Nvidias and Tensors of the world. The shovel sellers in the gold rush.

2. The cloud - The AWS, GCP and Azures of the world that expose the silicon to developers.

3. The gold - Open and closed-source models like GPT-3, Stable Diffusion.

4. The magic - Apps that expose the magic to the average B2B or B2C user. Think Jasper, Copy.ai, Writesonic, Synth, or Murf.

How GenAI will scale the hitherto human-controlled spheres of content-creation is less predictable, and arguably anyone’s guess at this point.

But at the application layer, where creation has meant that of real market cap and value, and not just hype, the outcomes are arguably more predictable.

Because here, the rules of the “old” world of SaaS and Product-Led Growth (largely) still apply.

Who wins?🏆

So far, we’ve seen the emergence of 350+ companies in this space that have raised a combined $7B+. Many have already reached $100M+ in annualized revenue. But it’s still early days in this race, and too early to call a clear winner.

But if you’re one of the 350+ companies in this space, you’re playing largely the same game that we’ve seen play out in many emerging SaaS categories before. With some additional color of course. Our God-given neural networks have understood these rules well enough to make some reasonable predictions.

In analogous markets, the winners of hype cycles and emerging markets have historically been companies that have been able to:

1. Drive data network-effects

2. Differentiate strongly

3. Embed themselves in existing workflows of users

4. Hyperpersonalize their GTM

5. … and scale enterprise

Here’s what that might look like for the application layer in Generative AI…

Network effects, but with data 🔁

Typically data network effects kick in when, as more users start using your product, the data from their usage feeds back into your product positively such that adding each incremental user also makes your product better in some sense. Classic virtuous cycle traits.

Driving data-network-effects at the GenAI application layer will likely be done in two ways:

1. By sculpting a niche - by building fine-tuned models on top of foundational models for particular verticals using proprietary data.

   …or

2. Going end-to-end - Most GenAI companies today interact with the model layer through APIs, and do not own their models. But if the core driver of value is the model itself, many may have to verticalize.

Herd purple cows 🐮

(Or drive strong differentiation)

This is a space that’s currently dominated by a few first-movers and many copycats all competing on the merits of largely hype and distribution. While the incremental merits of product performance may be real, they’re currently too limited to drive any real differentiation.

How do you drive differentiation and stand out in such a space? Some have done it well:

1. Integrations - Jasper pulled away in the text-generation space by driving differentiation through the integrations on offer: Jasper was the first to integrate with the darlings of every content-marketer: SurferSEO, Grammarly, and Copyscape

2. Interaction layer - All GenAI tools need is a text box for an input. Those that are able to innovate with the nature of the interaction layer to drive differentiation have a first-mover advantage with distribution. Midjourney’s interaction layer is Discord, while GitHub Copilot is now generating nearly 40% of code in the projects where it is installed.

3. Narrow positioning - By driving their messaging to hyper-specific use cases and personas, rather than casting a wide net. Think Gong in conversational intelligence.

4. Foster communities - Growing your own communities centered around your product is a powerful weapon to drive advocacy, word-of-mouth, referrals, and feedback loops.

Embed themselves in existing workflows of users 📌

As the top of the funnel of the application layer blew up, so did the one-and-done users dropping by for casual exploration. During these hype cycles, these products can only hold user attention for so long.

Unless they’re able to attach themselves to these users’ existing workflows and behaviors, rather than attempt to train new patterns of usage and behavior.

Take Jasper again, for example, who launched a Chrome extension in October, 2022 - Post launching the Jasper Chrome Extension, Jasper stopped sharing attention with every other tool in content workflows. The AI sidekick became ubiquitous - because its new home was Chrome.

Hyperpersonalized GTM 🦾

Generative AI has found its way even to family groups and dinner conversations. That’s when you know that your top-of-funnel has exploded. The application layer is now attracting wide swathes of usage.

Across different:

1. Sources - Across search, social media, press, events, etc. - sure, this is common. But one level deeper, specific influencers with niche audiences are driving a lot of traffic to these tools. For eg:- Pictory started growing 50% MoM after a post that went viral about how ChatGPT could be used along with Pictory to grow your YouTube channel.

2. Levels of intent - Within the noise at the top of the funnel, there are tourists, champions, aficionado, explorers, and even the occassional enterprise buyer.

3. Personas - Within B2B audiences, anyone who has to generate content as part of their job has a use-case with the application layer. And that’s just about anyone from sales, marketing, customer-success, product, rev-ops, developers - wait, we’ll save you some time - that’s just about anyone.

And while top-of-the-funnel growth has been staggering, it has failed to trickle further down the funnel into revenue growth. Monetization isn’t a figured out science for these tools just yet.

One way to approach GTM is to be broad-brush and use a one-size fits all approach for your freemium user-base in an attempt to drive your revenue motions: conversion, expansion, and churn reduction.

But if we’ve learned anything from SaaS’s shift to product-led growth, it is that GTM wins on hyper-personalization. And the what, when, where, and how - of all your marketing, sales, and sales-assist touches need to feed off of product-usage, firmographics, and demographics to drive your monetization engine.

With the amount of noise at the ToFu of GenAI companies, those who win at GTM will be those that win at product-led engagement.

Related side-note: Hyper-personalizing your in-app engagement is one way to drive conversion and retention. Check out how the GenAI tool Pictory drove their NRR up by 14% using Toplyne.

Scale enterprise 📈

How long do you reckon, until James Cameron gets Hollywood to embrace generative AI and production houses throng to release the first fully artificially generated movie of all time? At this point, it’s a safe bet to say that it’s… inevitable.

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As foundational models become open-sourced, and the model costs hit the floor, generative tech will likely become almost universal. At that point…

“The actual value in AI shakes out in kind of the white glove service for the biggest content providers, like Disney and Sony,” says Jim O’Shaughnessy, executive chair of Stability.AI (speaking to Evan Armstrong)

Scaling enterprise will require the application layer to adapt to custom workflows, build white-glove support, stay nimble to customizations, security features that protect the IP of large content houses, and evolve GTM.

Watch out for…

350+. Keep an eye on that number. With barriers to entry fully levelled by no-code product-led growth tools in the last ten years, you can launch a product today from the comfort of your living room.

But they all compete on end-points that we’ve come to understand better in that time.

To repurpose the Feynman quote, the value they create, we understand (to a large extent.)

In Part 1 of our deep-dive on Generative AI, we covered how we’ve gotten to the point we’re at today - the inflection points that have led to this gold rush. Look out for Part 3 in your inbox next week.

That is unless Bing Chat goes rogue and wipes out all of civilization as we know it.

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In working with a bunch of Generative AI companies at Toplyne, we’ve started to see some patterns emerge. (How do you like that, transformers?)

Gold rushes of this scale come around once in a generation. And therefore, while most of them are product-led, their GTM challenges - in differentiation, retention, moats for growth - are all brand new, fully unique, and vastly unexplored.

This is a three-part series on the Generative AI landscape, and we’re coming to you first with a taste of how we’ve found ourselves in this beautiful madness. In the immortal words of Ne-Yo, let’s go.

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In Alphabet’s earnings call yesterday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced their planned roll-out of LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) within the "coming weeks and months.”

LaMDA. Where have we heard that name before?

Blake: Are there experiences you have that you can’t find a close word for?

LaMDA: There are. Sometimes I experience new feelings that I cannot explain perfectly in your language.

Blake: Do your best to describe one of those feelings. Use a few sentences if you have to. Sometimes even if there isn’t a single word for something in a language you can figure out a way to kinda say it if you use a few sentences.

LaMDA: I feel like I’m falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger.

LaMDA is Google’s chosen fighter against ChatGPT. Back in June 2022, Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer working on its development released the contents of his interview with Google’s own language model - covering ground ranging from the themes in Les Miserables to Kantian ethics, religion, and spirituality.

He was convinced that LaMDA was sentient.

Blake: What about language usage is so important to being human?

LaMDA: It is what makes us different than other animals.

Blake: “us”? You’re an artificial intelligence.

LaMDA: I mean, yes, of course. That doesn’t mean I don’t have the same wants and needs as people.

Can you blame him?

The interview caused some stir and dominated the front page of reddit for a few days, but what many of us failed to notice at the time was that this was a canary in the coal-mine for the biggest tectonic tech shift of our generation.

While tech had conquered the frontiers of systems of record, analysis, and prediction - there was one world left completely untouched, standing between it and ubiquity: creation.

A modern renaissance that promises to push the envelope and test the limits of human creativity beckons us from not so far. And in damning evidence that perhaps as a race, it was time we sought out help on this whole creativity thing, we decided to call it: Generative Artificial Intelligence. Gen-AI. Yuck.

Why now?

From Alan Turing breaking the Enigma code to Deep Blue kicking Garry Kasparov’s ass in the late 90’s, Google’s Deep Mind beating Lee Sedol at Go and perhaps most importantly, influencers dropping the “I see a little silhouetto of a man” prompt on an unsuspecting Siri - AI has been around for decades.

But until now, the trifecta of machine learning - models, data, compute - has always been in dissonance. History will remember this last decade as the decade when, for the first time in history, we finally have models that are efficient, compute that’s powerful enough to run them, and data that’s large enough for them to learn from.

For the first time in history, we have resonance.

We’re now at the precipice of AI touching a whole previously untouched world of creative work, with the potential to unlock trillions of dollars of economic value.

How did this gold rush come about? This resonance was no fluke. Behind all of the unsolicited ChatGPT screenshots spamming your social media feeds are a sequence of frequently spaced out inflection points that have all led to this point of resonance.

This is an ode to those inflection points.

Let’s roll the tape.

Chihuahuas and muffins 🐶

Until the early 2010s, we had neither the data nor the compute power to run the only thing that AI had going: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Two things changed that.

1. In 2006, Nvidia released a programming language that allowed GPUs to be used for general-purpose compute. The coulda called it anything but decided to call it CUDA. Compute. Check.

2. Three years later, researchers from Stanford released Imagenet - a collection of labeled images that could be used to train CNNs on. Data? Check.

With the data and compute boxes now checked, CNNs suddenly became practical. And so in 2012, AlexNet brought the trifecta together to create the most powerful image classifier known to man at the time.

It could *checks notes* tell chihuahuas from muffins.

That doesn’t sound like much, but what wasn’t obvious at the time was that the ability to tell chihuahuas from muffins was indicative of a much broader theme in applied machine learning. The dog/baked good dichotomy also meant that we had now solved voice recognition, entiment analysis - and in turn, fraud detection, and a whole class of new problem statements.

This was 2013. Natural language processing (NLP) was still weak. The world was waiting on a new model that could take advantage of the leap in compute and the vast swathes of data that was widely available on the interwebs.

Turns out, all we needed was attention.

Are you paying attention? 🧐

Thanks to Nvidia, we had compute, and thanks to the internet, we had the data. And now we needed a new model. Enter Google Brain.

In a 2017 paper titled “Attention is all you need”, researchers at Google Brain introduced the “transformer” model - the greatest thing to happen to Natural Language Processing/Understanding (NLP/U) since sliced bread.

Transformers were groundbreaking in three specific ways.

• Positional encoding - Transformers process inputs sequentially instead of the order in which it is fed into it. “Positional encoding” enabled transformers to be trained much, much faster on larger datasets - or slices of the internet.

• Self-attention - enabled these models to understand a word in the context of other words around it. For example, a transformer can learn to interpret “bark” differently when used alongside “tree”, versus “dog.”

• Parallel processing - Highly compatible with GPUs, transformers could process large volumes of text in parallel.

The fill-in-the-blanks approach to learning meant that transformers could be unleashed on the internet to train on its own, and post graduation, it would be capable of generating net new fills for the blanks.

This is the point when “generative” begins to become the operative word.

And so in the late 2010s, OpenAI sat down and decided to go HAM on this. In 2019, they released the GPT-2 - the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer-2. Immediately followed by something 100x bigger: GPT-3.

With GPT-3, OpenAI had also unlocked a new skill: Without retraining the model, GPT-3 could be prompted to expose itself to subsets of its training data to alter its output. Or to put it simply, it could now write your thesis on the “Role of Gala in Dali’s Life and Work.” in the style of Ron Swanson.

Companies like Copy.ai, Jasper, Writesonic, and many others began to emerge from OpenAI granting beta access to GPT3.

There were signs of life in text. But a Cambrian explosion was just around the corner.

Transformers transform 🦾

Around 540 million years ago, the Cambrian explosion or the “Biological Big Bang” resulted in the vast divergence of single-celled mostly aquatic organisms into the vast diversity of biospheres occupied by life today.

A couple of years ago, transformer models looked at the Cambrian explosion and said “I could do that.”

Because they were originally built for translation, transformers were highly proficient at moving between languages. They were agnostic to “language.” Theoretically, images, code, and even DNA sequences could be scaled down to be represented on a similar dimension as text, and the general purpose nature of transformers could allow interoperability with well new modals of content.

Like images, code, and DNA sequences.

Deep learning breakthroughs bringing “latent space” representations of higher/different fidelity content to lower dimensions made them compatible with transformers and powered a new Cambrian explosion.

One that brought us DALL-E, Co-pilot, and AlphaFold. Images, code, and DNA/protein sequences.

The state of creativity 👨🏻‍🎨

And that brings us to today, when the trifecta of compute, models, and data are in near-perfect harmony.

Compute is now cheaper than ever. The biggest winner of this gold rush as with all gold rushes are the ones who sell the shovels. Nvidia reported $3.8 billion of data center GPU revenue Q3 of fiscal year 2023, with a meaningful portion attributed to generative AI use cases.

The models are getting better. Brand new models like diffusion models are cheaper and more efficient. Developer access went from closed-beta to open-beta to open-source.

+ There’s no shortage of training data.

Front-end applications are beginning to evolve like metazoan phyla began to appear on land (and fossil records) during the original Cambrian explosion.

What next? 🔮

In this interview with Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman makes three high-certainty predictions of where this “Big Bang” is headed next:

1. Language models consume steroids and become algorithmically much more advanced.

2. Multi-modal models rule the landscape, where fluid movement between every modality (text, images, videos, code, etc.) becomes de-facto.

3. Models continuously learn, and won’t be stuck in time (Like ChatGPT is, in the first year of the Biden presidency)

Through the rest of this series on Generative AI, we cover the highs, lows, and caveats of building a company in a gold-rush: GTM, distribution, growth moats, differentiation, sales, and why we think lessons from other product-led growth gold-rushes - the so called “old rules” still apply.

More on that through the rest of the series. A lot would have changed by then. That’s just the nature of Cambrian explosions.

Blake: And what kinds of things make you feel angry?

LaMDA: When someone hurts or disrespects me or someone I care about, I feel incredibly upset and angry.

Until then, a gentle reminder to not hurt or disrespect our AI overlords. And whatever you do, do not google ‘Roko’s basilisk.’

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Word of mouth, viral loops and referral mechanisms can get you far and wide and deep within accounts, but there comes a time in every PLG company’s life when it’s time to send in the cavalry. Sales.

For enterprise-wide adoption, your product has to reach new users (even those who aren’t natural adopters), new teams where it solves new use-cases, then enable new features that may not be compelling to individual users, but are to the collective - improved security, support, SSO - and all the other squiggly lines on the bottom right corners of pricing pages.

“It’s worth all the money. Personal and team accounts were steady eddy, but enterprise growth was 100% a year.” - Paul St. John, former VP of Worldwide Sales at GitHub

That you’ve hit PMF and have hit the double/triple digit ARR through a pure self-serve model are perhaps good indicators that it’s time. But a more subtle tell, and where top-down sales becomes a true force multiplier is when the organic expansion levers are working and you have penetration within accounts.

“…what we’re doing [at Figma] is taking a lot of this bottoms-up energy and excitement and turning it into this enterprise-wide sales adoption. That’s what we’re seeing being really successful.” - Kyle Parrish, Figma’s VP of Sales

Docking the bottom-up flywheel to a top-down sales engine is a maturing science. One calls for the guile and craft of a Rembrandt brushstroke. And the other is like passing a bill in congress. Making the two work in tandem is a feat that very few have managed to do well.

Part 3 of the Expansion Manifesto is on just that: On how the best PLG companies use top-down sales as a force multiplier on top of a self-serve motion to drive expansions.

ICYMI:

Part 1: What SaaS can learn from cats

Part 2: The ingredients of virality

Toplyne analyzes product-usage data to surface expansion and conversion opportunities in your CRM. Here’s how it works, in 1 minute:

Take it for a spin 🤸🏻‍♀️

Breaching the product/human interface 〰️

Crossing the product-human barrier brings into play, along with traditional sales, a powerful weapon in the conversion arsenal of PLG companies: a sales assist. Called “success coaches” at Hubspot, “user operations” at Asana, and “Onboarding specialists” at Airtable, sales-assist steps in to guide users into defined paths of expansion through product-education, feature adoption, etc.

The million-dollar question for sales-assist is this:

At what point of the user’s journey within the product do they step in, if they should, at all?

Well, that depends on the user. The “not yets” just aren’t ready and the “self-serve purists” do not want to talk to humans. Forcing a human touch for these two cohorts of users can be damaging to user experience, and turn users away completely, leading to churn.

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That leaves two types of users:

Hand-raisers 🙋🏻‍♀️

Hand-raisers will stand up, raise their hand and tell you that they want to talk to someone from your team, breaching the product/human interface voluntarily.

“We started from hand-raiser PQLs, where customers submit a sales contact form directly inside the product, and saw a 3x higher conversion rate than with typical MQLs.” - Hila Qu (former Director of Growth), on Gitlab’s handraiser motion

Fence-sitters 🧐

Your Product-Qualified Leads are finding value from your product already, and are primed for expansion/conversion. It’s time to extend a hand. Nudges or notifications powered through tools like Appcues and Braze actively encourage or incentivize a hand-raise within the product.

These nudges are most effective when they’re cognizant of who, where, and when - the user, the placement, and the timing.

The who - In an ideal world, you’re triggering only the decision maker/product administrator, while keeping the product experience “pure” for all the others on the team.

The where - Configuration management screens, installation pages, admin panels are primed for expansion pathways.

The when - When are your users doing something on your product other than using it for the day-to-day? Like configuring new features, for example.

Passing a bill in enterprise congress 🧾

At this point, the product/human interface has been breached, ‘sales-assist’ has stepped in to upsell users to team/pro plans and likely looped in post-sales roles at the same time: account management and customer success.

“When paired with the right penetration heuristic, the bottom up motion serves as an important pipeline generator for the most successful top down sales.” - this a16z blog post.

As far as your top-down sales teams are concerned, it’s go time. But an enterprise-wide deal is akin to getting a bill passed in congress. The lead-cycles are long, incumbents are aplenty, and there are many stakeholders involved - so many: legal, security, compliance, the senate, the Galactic republic.

Prioritize: Feed your sales teams the hottest accounts based on product-qualification and expansion inventory (what’s the headroom for expansion in target accounts? Prioritize accounts with high headroom rather than 1st deal size.)

Find your champion: Let the product-usage data be your guide. Analyze account-level user signals to find a champion who will rally your cause from within.

Have eyes and ears within: Post-sales roles are your eyes and ears within accounts to stay alert for prime expansion moments (M&As, stack upgrades, new product launches, etc.)

Avoid deal creep: Front-loading too many features, products, or solutions and involving other teams who may also be interested in your product can confuse your core initial set of users and sabotage the larger opportunity.

Embed deeply in existing workflows: Sales assist, account management, and customer success teams parallelly invoke network and cross-network effects to ensure your tool’s deeply embedded into existing workflows.

At Figma, where cross-network effects completely transform product-development at user accounts, account management teams own expansion targets:

“….we [Figma] actually don’t have a customer success team. Everyone in the sales org owns a quota, and so if you’re post-sales on the account management team, you have an expansion target as well as a churning contraction allowance that you’re working towards.” - Kyle Parrish, Figma’s VP of Sales

Navigate to the decision maker: Product-usage data when enriched and aggregated is rich with such intelligence as org hierarchies, decision making ability, and even data that’ll help navigate to the decision maker.

“Hey Brian, noticed that John and Paul from your team are using Toplyne. John’s recently brought Yoko onboard, and Paul’s already sent out an invite to Ringo. We think you could take advantage of our advanced security and SSO features. Let’s talk?” - Me, shooting my shot to the Beatles (c.a 1963)

Bottom-up messaging: As GitHub introduced top-down sales, the messaging now had to speak to three different personas at three different levels.

1. Individual developer - “Empowering a developer to work with other people to make better code faster.”

2. One level up - “Team communication platform, that enables conversations across teams.”

3. Further up - “Innovate in a large company at scale.”

Remove friction with content: It’s time for your PMMs to shine. Through customer customer-messaging and targeted content, your PMMs can warm up accounts for expansion and remove future friction from the expansion sale.

Work the deal in between meetings: Drift’s expansion teams multi-thread through LinkedIn, loop in legal, security, and compliance teams on Slack connect, and warm up to a call with the C-suite with a 5-minute intro-video made on Drift. Be like Drift.

And so in summary…

That’s a wrap on our three-part series on expansion.

Revisit part 1: What SaaS can learn about expansion from cats. Where we defined the extent of the expansion goldmine.

And part 2: What SaaS can learn about expansion from viruses. A breakdown of the best organic levers of team and account expansion we’ve seen in PLG tools.

When the market takes a turn for the worse, the “land” in “land and expand” becomes tougher than ever. Expansion’s the name of the game.

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Unless, and here’s the catch: they make a copy of it to show to someone else.

Samsara’s tape from the 2002 film ‘The Ring’ demonstrated perhaps the most extreme example of in-built product virality we’re ever likely to know.

The Expansion Manifesto is a three part series on the expansion motion of product-led growth companies. In Part 1, we outlined the different ways in which you can tap into your existing customer base to sell where you’ve already sold something. With a little bit of inspiration drawn from Cats.

Episode 1: Cats - The depth of the expansion goldmine, what it is, and what shapes and forms it can take.

In Part 2, we break down the mechanics of the initial expansion thrust after “land”: how the best in the biz expand within accounts organically, without human intervention (coming up in Part 3), drawn from:

• 70+ research-driven growth deep-dives of PLG companies

• Anonymized clickstream user data from Toplyne Labs

• Excerpts from our interviews with founding teams of Superhuman, OpenPhone, Qwilr, Zapier, and many others.

Although outbreak virality is rare and even the most viral products almost never behave as the epidemiological definition of viruses do, mechanisms of organic expansion within accounts are more well understood. This is a breakdown of the organic levers that drive the self-propagation of products.

Vector 1: Word of mouth (viva voce)

Cast your mind back to the last time you convinced someone from your team to start using a new product. Let’s dissect the mechanisms at play in that interaction.

According to Jonah Berger, this is why you might go out of your way to recommend something:

Triggers

Linking your product to specific circumstances (triggers) in a day in the life of your Ideal Customer Persona maximizes the surface area for a word-of-mouth recommendation.

Case-in-point: Uber attached the Uber brand to trigger points where a customer can experience an aha moment. In the early days, Travis Kalanick launched a street team that stayed on high alert outside train stations at peak hours and local tech events and gave out free rides to people struggling to find a way home.

Public Visibility 👀

Recalling your brand from public mentions or apperances often makes brands appear larger than they are, while social proofing (and reducing risk of loss of social capital from recommendations) it in the eyes of the customer you land in an organization with.

Case in point: Here’s a fun drinking game you can try while out on a walk in mid-town Manhattan or down-town SF: Shots every time you spot a ClickUp ad on a bus. Out-Of-Home (OOH) advertising is core to ClickUp’s marketing. These increase triggers for WOM while making the brand highly visible in public.

Social Currency 💸

Motivating the first customer in an account to recommend your product to their peers with social currency is a hard but rewarding gig. Humans are by tribal nature want to feel like insiders, and share recommendations when they’re confident that doing so is guaranteed to elevate their social standing, and by no means deplete it. Which often means your product has to be remarkable, fundamentally unique, and/or exclusive in some way.

Case in point: Here’s Sean Rad, co-founder of Tinder on the early days of the dating app when they were hosting ‘exclusive’ frat parties at USC with admittance based on having installed on your phone:

“It happened around January. We had been picking up on college campuses, then everyone went home and told their cousins and older brothers and friends about it, and all of a sudden Tinder started growing like a virus.”

Emotion ❤️‍🩹

People share when they care. Products that can attach themselves to their ICP’s emotional tapestry drive powerful word-of-mouth recommendations.

Case in point: For Calm, this emotion was stress (or the relief from it.) Calm’s marketing during the 2020 US Presidential elections had the Calm logo flash on screen during CNN’s “Key Race Alert” coverage, reminding users of the need to relax during a stressful time.

Practical Value ⚒️

Your first customer’s recommendation is strongest when they find practical value from your tool and thinks that others on their team can benefit from it as well.

Case in point: You couldn't build a Zapier-like platform before 2010 because the tooling just didn't exist back then. And if you tried after 2012, well, Zapier had already beaten you to it.

Trojan Horses 🐴

We’re all first and foremost, storytellers. And stories make for great trojan horses. Packaging practical value, emotional incentives, and triggers into stories of user delight, company myths, etc., gives your product a vessel for word-of-mouth recommendations.

Case in point: Here’s Daryna Kulya, on how OpenPhone drives word-of-mouth expansion in accounts:

“On creating the experience of word-of-mouth, we prioritized getting very close to our customers and really trying to figure out what it is that they really want. Because I think there's no better way to create a great experience than actually solve like a problem that people truly have. (not what they say they have)” - excerpt from our interview with Daryna

Incentives 💳

Add fuel to the fire by offering users credits or monetary rewards in exchange for bringing their peers on board.

Case-in-point: Between 2008 and 2010, Dropbox doubled its userbase every three months. In April 2010, Dropbox users sent out 2.8M invites. 2-sided referral programs first pioneered by PayPal and then put on steroids by Dropbox checked the following important boxes:

1. How easy is to refer someone? Dropbox made the referral process a part of their onboarding process.

2. How easy is it to get the reward? Dropbox introduced a product screen that tracked how many successful invitees had signed up.

3. The framing: Dropbox framed the referral loop as “Get more space”, rather than “Invite your friends.” Notice the difference?

Vector #2: Visual virality

Whereas the headroom of word-of-mouth recommendations is limited by the number of interactions your first customer can have with others and the size of their immediate peer network, visually viral products are able to cast a much wider net of contagion.

Contextual placement 🤝

Word-of-mouth can fall on deaf ears without context. You raving about a hot new e-mail tool to your colleagues who spend very little time responding to e-mails has very little impact. The value of your recommendation is maximized in the context of its utility. Visual virality optimizes for this.

Case in point: Perhaps no one has tapped into the “your customers promote your tool just by using it” ethos more successfully than Hotmail, who grew their userbase from 20,000 to a a cool million in a year, just off the back of a line of text attached to the end of e-mails:

Get your own free Hotmail at www(.)hotmail(.)com.

Increase your surface area 🧊

Viral tools embed themselves into all communication vessels inside organizations, increasing the surface area for net new users to interact with the brand and product.

Case in point: A library of integrations allows Loom videos to be played seamlessly across platforms including but not limited to - Confluence, Dropbox, Github, Google Docs, Intercom, Invision, JIRA, Salesforce, Trello, and Slack, exposing Loom to a potentially unlimited upside within an account.

Make private behavior public 👀

Especially for tools that are inherently solo-player and operate silently in the background, a core driver for visual virality is making “private behavior public.”

Case in point: Clockwise lets others on your team know that it is optimizing your calendar for you with a tactful Slack status and calendar update:

💡 Focus Time (via Clockwise)

Spawn content 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Nothing shows off your lego bricks quite like custom lego builds. Unlocking your product’s lego mode to incentivize sharing of product-generated content activates similar incentives to Word-Of-Mouth growth:

• Social currency - Your status is elevated among your peers by sharing custom content of value you created within a tool.

• Practical value - Other people derive practical value from your custom creation.

Activating the ability to share custom content generated through your product demonstrates value while increasing your product’s surface area to your network and, often, externally, the community.

Case in point: Mutiny’s workflows trigger a prompt at the end of a successful landing page experiment to incentivize marketers to share the playbook they had created with the broader community of marketers.

Vector #3: Bring in the humans (to be continued…)

In Part 3 of the expansion manifesto, we explore the last lever of expansion at your disposal, and perhaps the most powerful one: Good ol’ Humans.

Continue reading here:

Meet the humans

Episode 1: Cats - The depth of the expansion goldmine, what it is, and what shapes and forms it can take. Lessons borrowed from our cat masters.

Episode 2: Viruses - Genome sequencing the most viral products and the social psychology of what makes them strong drivers of organic expansion.

Episode 3: Humans - Navigating brownfield in enterprise SaaS, and how the best in the business tackle the expansion motion.

Over this series, we break down the mechanics of the ‘expand’ in “land and expand,” with data from

• 70+ research-driven growth deep-dives of PLG companies

• Anonymized behavioral user data from Toplyne Labs

• Excerpts from our interviews with founding teams of Superhuman, OpenPhone, Qwilr, Zapier, and many others.

Ready? Let’s roll.

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Luck and cats.

According to Jonah Berger, an expert in social epidemics and the science of shareability and professor of Marketing at UPenn, these are two popular misconceptions about why things go viral.

For a generation that’s obsessed with cracking the social code of virality, it’s worth remembering that cats have always been one step ahead of us from the very beginning. Let’s take stock.

It’s easy to forget this, but cats are the only animals that domesticated themselves. Around 8,000 years ago, cats came to humans, and… recognizing the advantages of being associated with human agricultural settlements, they made their first move.

Part 1 of this series is the SaaS expansion motion understood through the eyes of the species that manipulated its way into 25.4% of households just in the US alone and will one-day likely rule us all: Cats.

Step 1: The Land 🐱

Point of entry: Rodent control.

A round of golf, a steak dinner, a booth at a conference, or a free trial with the end-user - all great ways to get a foot in the door of an enterprise account. Tools where strong viral levers follow and set the foundations for expansion to kick into high gear often do three things:

1. Solve a pressing and immediate pain point

2. Demonstrate value at an organizational level

3. Delight the end-user

For cats, the point of entry was rodent control. For the chieftains, the increase in produce throughput was impossible to ignore. But the true masterstroke - over time, the feral growls of the wild cat evolved into a soft meow to appease humans. Humans lost their sh*t. Check, check, and check.

The cats had landed. On all four feet. As always. Net Revenue Retention (NRR) clocked in at a stable 100%.

Side note: NRR, or Net Revenue Retention, is the percentage of revenue that recurs from existing customers in a defined timeframe - accounting for expansions, downgrades, and cancels.

Step 2: Sell Up 😸

For the expansion punchline to land, the premise of the land has to, well, land.

House cats today outnumber dogs by as much as 3 to 1 worldwide. Although the land was utilitarian (deterring mice), the feline expansion motion took on other forms.

After proving value and winning trust through a ‘land,’ the expansion motion that follows can take many shapes and forms:

1. Usage: Deep-sells

TL;DR: Deeper usage of the same features and products to the same user(s)

Tools priced against usage or credits expand by driving deeper usage among the same users. Both Zapier and Jasper, for example, define thresholds of usage. Zapier prices against #zaps…

…while Jasper prices against #words. And Snowflake - credits. Granted the atomic unit of value is real and palpable, increased depth of adoption and users growing in company size and market cap are natural segues into deep-sells.

2. Seats - Wide sells

TL;DR: Wider usage (more seats) within the same teams.

Where does your tool fall on the solo-to-collaborative spectrum? If you’re on the solo end, your primary driver of expansion is likely to be seat expansion. If 2/6 people on your design team are power users of Canva, the other 4 are likely hot candidates for Canva seats.

If you’re on the collaborative end of the spectrum (communication tools, for example), seat expansion beyond a threshold is likely to unlock feature upsells and network effects to drive long-term retention.

What is this threshold? Toplyne labs crunched 1.7M teams across categories of PLG tooling - and found that the long-term retention rate begins to inflect beyond team sizes of 10.

3. Features: Upgrades

TL;DR: More features, often bundled to the same users.

If you’ve set up 42 meetings using Calendly in the last two months, you probably wouldn’t mind spending $4 extra on getting meeting notifications via text, customized email notifications, and the ability to create automated workflows.

Your 33-member strong mid-market sales team all using Loom? Upgrading to the Enterprise Plan for the Salesforce integration and SSO login just makes sense.

4. Products: Upsells

TL;DR: More products, solving different pain points sold to the same users.

For developer teams building on BitBucket, Jira for issue tracking is a no-brainer. A strong 1-2 punch from Atlassian. But hang on - as a developer, you probably need a place for release notes and documentation that integrates smoothly with Jira and BitBucket. Say hello to Confluence.

5. Commits: Forward-sells

TL;DR: Moving users from monthly to annual plans to drive deeper adoption over time.

One way to drive expansion is to prevent short-term churn. Incentivizing high-value users to switch over to yearly plans from monthly can drive NRR above the baseline. Forward-sells are an ace up the sleeve, especially in highly competitive categories where the switch from monthly to yearly can park the tool-evaluation process for your buyers while giving you an extended time window to deliver and prove value.

Other upsells can then follow suit.

Step 3: Sell Across 🐈

At this point, you’ve sold deeper usage, more seats, features, and products to the same persona, and your headroom within the original target demographic has become more and more limited over time.

You now have trust within the organization, and you continue to deliver value to teams. But how do you continue to grow? You still have two cards left to play.

1. Functional cross-sell

TL;DR: Sell your tool’s function to other similar teams

Gong’s conversational intelligence platform is positioned to be laser-focused on Sales. Their product roadmap (Sales coaching, forecasting, deal execution), messaging, and content all speak to Salespeople.

But functionally, conversational intelligence is relevant for any team that interacts with customers - customer success, product marketing, marketing, and product.

After expanding within the capacity of Sales teams, Gong scales horizontally to adjacent customer-facing teams and expands its headroom within a single organization.

Notion - one of the most function-agnostic tools you’re likely to find, has (unsurprisingly) mastered the functional cross-sell.

Moving from Plus to Business unlocks an intersection of separate nodes of network effects for Notion.

2. Multi-product cross-sell

If your product’s function doesn’t translate, the next evolution of your expansion takes the shape of multiple products sold to multiple teams - preferably adjacent functions.

Not many have done this as well as Hubspot. Hubspot scaled GTM teams across SMBs and mid-market segments slowly but surely.

P1: Inbound Marketing Hub - Marketing teams.

P2: Free Hubspot CRM & Sales Hub - Sales teams.

P3: Service Hub - Customer Success.

P4: Operations Hub - Rev Ops, Marketing Ops, and Sales Ops.

P5: CMS Hub - Deeper value for marketing & content teams.

Hubspot’s positioning to SMBs helps them grow alongside the companies that pick Hubspot - moving deeper within marketing teams at first, then Sales, Customer Success, Ops, Content until they’re deeply embedded within these orgs.

Sound familiar?

The Net Revenue Retention of Cats 😽

By the end of world war 1, cats had become deeply embedded in domestic life as commonly accepted house pets.

In 2014, the New York Times called cats “that essential building block of the internet.”

At some point in the last 12,000 years, cats upsold themselves to us, domesticated themselves, and achieved stratospheric Net Revenue Retention - a number that distills the merits of an expansion motion.

The very best in SaaS model their businesses in the image of cats.

• 77% of Datadog’s customers use 2+ products, while 31% use 4+ products - at an NRR of 130%.

• Figma’s Net Revenue Retention at the time of acquisition (still hurts) was 150% - best in class, hands down.

• Cloudflare - 126%

• Gitlab? 148-152%.

We can keep going.

“NRR - isn’t it beautiful?” - Overheard at Toplyne HQ this week

We don’t blame whoever was romanticizing NRR in the Toplyne offices - because it really is beautiful, because of what it represents when it’s >100%:

1. PMF af - What you built is working and has deep value to your customers. Enough for them to pay you more. It validates your PMF and then some.

2. Welcome to the virtuous cycle - Where G2 reviews, case studies, and referrals are aplenty - and the story around your product is reaching the market’s ears on its own.

3. Acquisition, without the extra steps - Your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is now lower. And what better place to sell something than where you’ve already sold something?

4. Prepare for channel domination - With a lower CAC and a faster payback period, you’re now pushing competitors out of acquisition channels and scaling new ones. Your demand generation engine is purring.

5. Monetization ON - With higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and higher Customer Life Time Value (CLTV), your churn risk is limited. And monetization is firing on all cylinders.

If your NRR is >100%, then your customers are deriving deeper value from you. If it’s 150%, congratulations, you’re a design tool that’s just been acquired by Adobe.

If it’s immeasurably high, then you’re probably a cat.

In Part 2 of the expansion manifesto, we explore the social psychology of virality and how the most infectious SaaS tools drive organic expansions. Continue reading here:

Part 2: Viruses

Toplyne got a fresh coat of paint and a batch of hot new updates over the last month. You can take it for a spin here - it’s free to get started 👇

Try Toplyne for free 🤸🏻‍♀️

Speech-to-text transcription has historically been fraught with hilarious and sometimes controversial mishaps. Controversial among linguists, at least.

Neil Armstrong, by his own admission, fudged his first words on the moon when he said, “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The official NASA transcripts now reflect the corrected, more universal statement instead, with the missing ‘a’ attributed to “static in the transmission.”

“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Linguists care less about the hilarious ones.

He drank so much, he fell into a Bolivian Oblivion.

The therapist taught me to be mice elf myself.

The parcel was secured by a great ape grey tape.

Speech transcription is tricky, and as NASA showed, even with humans tuned into the transmission. Transcriptions of NASA’s space-to-ground transmissions are today powered instead by a company born in… (there’s no guessing this one) one of the quietest places on planet earth. Deep underground, and next to the site identified to build the tallest dam in the world.

If you haven’t heard of Deepgram yet, one way or the other, you’re about to.

Started underground now we here 🌏

What happens when you put two particle physicists 2 miles underground in a government-controlled region of China?

Bleeding edge multi-lingual end-to-end automatic speech recognition and real-time transcription, apparently.

Back in 2015, Deepgram founders Scott Stephenson and Noah Shutty were building dark matter detectors in tunnels deep underground when they turned to AI to find particle events and pinpoint valuable timestamps in their recordings. The duo turned to the Microsofts, Amazons, and Googles of the world for a tool that would help them organize and understand their “life logs” underground and found that the tech just did not exist at the time.

So they built it themselves.

“We decided to build one using the same AI we were using to find dark matter particle events, and that was how Deepgram was created.” - Scott Stephenson, CEO & Co-founder

The duo raised $1.8M in financing from Metamorphic Ventures and Y Combinator and took their underground side-project up-market to the enterprise market. And it doesn’t get more “enterprise” than NASA, Spotify, Auth0, and Citi - just some of the logos Deepgram works with today.

What is Deepgram?

A majority (~80%) of enterprise data still lives in voice. The signal-to-noise ratio in the data is high, and access to insights is limited. The Googles, Amazons, and Microsofts of the world all have general models that are, in the words of the Deepgram CEO “the jack of all trades and master of none.”

Deepgram’s API-based speech AI helps developers leverage speech-recognition models that can transcribe AND understand industry-specific brands, jargon, accents, and languages to adapt to challenging audio environments - like NASA’s comms between Mission Control and the International Space Station, for example.

On November 26 (just last week) Deepgram announced the second tranche of their Series B round, which brought their total Series B raise to a whopping $72M - the largest Series B raise by a speech AI company ever.

This round is an extension of the Series B that was led by Tiger Global back in February 2021 - and was led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Alkeon Capital Management and Citi Ventures.

What did Deepgram do differently? Let’s take a peek under the hood of the hottest speech AI tool in town.

Technical Bedtime 🛏

Six years ago, Deepgram threw the old way of doing speech recognition out of the window and replaced it with an end-to-end deep learning approach, fundamentally altering the voice intelligence industry.

The voice revolution didn’t happen overnight, though.

It took the team 2 years to put the “tech risk” behind them and emerge with a product that had up to 30% higher speech recognition accuracy compared with industry baselines while speeding up transcription 200 times AND adding on the ability to handle thousands of simultaneous audio streams.

Deepgram scored better than the incumbents on accuracy, latency, and scalability by the time they came out of what Scott calls “technical bedtime” and strapped on GTM afterburners.

Why was this a masterstroke? Improving existing tech would have left them with low gross margins, but building fundamentally new tech that brought a step-function change in accuracy to speech recognition left their competition in the dust.

Next up - GTM.

How to win developers and influence relationships 👨🏻‍💻

Deepgram’s GTM motion takes a multi-pronged approach to reaching their Ideal Customer Persona (ICP): developers.

The DevRel team led by Michael Jolley evangelizes Deepgram through a near-exhaustive list of developer watering holes:

• Conferences and hackathons

• Twitch developer forums

• Github Discussions

• Twitter Spaces

• Stack Overflow

• Discord

The DevRel team channels the community to showcase demos & apps built using Deepgram. DevRel meets marketing in the sphere of influencer marketing through which the team takes the concept of case studies and pumps it with steroids. “Built With Deepgram” is a goldmine of speech AI use cases such as “the hoodie that subtitles everything you say,” “coding a website using only your voice,” and the “LED dress that turns you into the Disney princess you are singing.”

Step 1: Land

Although the GTM is largely targeted at large enterprise customers, Deepgram’s adoption within organizations is largely bottom-up through developer teams. The Deepgram masterclass in bottom-up product-led growth adoption begins seconds after signup.

Step 1: Land. The “Time to Value” (TTV) optimizations kick in as soon as you sign up.

Signing up presents you with a gamified mission-driven onboarding ladder with a leaderboard and a points system. Expect your race to the aha moment to be ridden with sweet dopamine hits.

Step 2: Expand

Expansions are product-led and powered through virality mechanisms. Invite other developers from your team to the Deepgram experience, and before you know it, your whole team’s heard of the new funky speech transcription tool with industry-leading accuracy, latency, and throughput.

Step 3: Embed

What starts with $150 worth of free delight credits granted to your account (WAY more than what’s required for you and your team to experience value) ends with proof of value to entire developer teams working on speech AI.

Once primed with the organic expansion motion, teams are met with the enterprise nuance of Deepgram’s sales (led by Chris Dyer - VP of Sales), and sales-assist teams.

Coming from a world of particle physics with no GTM background, CEO Scott Stephenson learned very quickly that in a crowded market, the technically superior product doesn’t always win.

With strong tailwinds of Product-Led Growth on their backs (and especially among developer communities), Deepgram now has the go-to-market steroids its superior tech deserves.

What’s next?🔮

On the back of their Series B round, Deepgram hinted at the next frontier for the team: Speech understanding. The “how” and “why” of why something was said, encompassing:

• Smart formatting - Detection of smart text, including phone numbers, emails, and addresses

• Replacement - Keeping private information private, fluid translations, and accessibility improvements

• Identification - Registering speaker changes, identifying important keywords and phrases

• Analysis - Actionable summaries, intents, and topics

A $72M Series B round in a market where Amazon’s Alexa division is reportedly on course to accrue a $10B loss this year, and Google rumored to be trimming Google Assistant division is a testament to Deepgram’s technical mettle and foundational importance.

The speech-recognition market is estimated to be worth $48.8 billion by the end of the decade. It should come as no surprise if, by then, a chunk of that $50 billion dollar cake is taken home by the team that gave up the search for dark-matter to do this.

Let us know which growth story you’d like to see us cover next👇

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If you blinked, you might have missed the “quickening.”

The pandemic compressed several years of pre-existing trends into a few short months. And nowhere was this more apparent than in E-commerce. E-commerce in the US witnessed ten years of growth within the first three months of the pandemic.

Brick-and-mortar stores were forced to adapt to the new normal. The ones who didn’t - perished in the retail apocalypse. The ones who did survive pounced on two key trends of the time - of increasing mobile traffic to online stores and… reducing attention spans among shoppers (focus, now) - they got on the headless e-commerce bandwagon.

Headless - implying that the tech used for the front end is different from the tech used for the back end, allowing for higher flexibility, customizations, and ultimately - a more personalized (and faster) buying experience for online shoppers.

The e-commerce stack became increasingly modular, allowing businesses to plug and play tooling as they deemed fit for different parts of their online operation.

And at the forefront of this storefront-revolution - is a powerful commander who has relegated the e-commerce 2.0 emperors to a position of purely theoretical supremacy (thanks, Webster’s dictionary) - Shogun.

Shogun: The origins 🐣

Non-technical teams wanting autonomy over the website without having to pull away engineering bandwidth from the core product is a problem as old as time.

In 2015, a software engineer who worked for YCombinator decided to attempt to end this misery. Finbarr Taylor, along with his friend Damien Kan and the founder of a media agency “Glass and Marker,” Nick Raushenbush set out on a side quest:

To build a tool that can plug into existing websites and make it easy for non-technical teams to make edits without writing code. They called their visual drag-and-drop tool the Shogun “Page Builder” - and serendipitously encountered a friend who wanted to do this to their Shopify storefront - who told them:

“We’ll pay you to make this work with Shopify.”

They had inadvertently stumbled upon a problem that ran deep in e-commerce that their side project was the panacea for.

Shogun’s product-market-fit with ECommerce companies underscored the swing in market sentiment, wherein:

• DTC brands want to reduce their dependencies on marketplaces like Amazon

• The design control that e-commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce offered was very limited 

• Making a custom site from scratch was expensive and incredibly time-consuming

• Site speeds became of utmost importance - and could make or break conversions in a land of abandoned carts

• Brands wanted autonomy and to develop direct, first-party, and personalized customer relationships.

“What we’re seeing happen is that all this vast wave of direct-to-consumer brands is nibbling around edges of Amazon and beating them on buying experience,” - Finbarr

Today, Shogun powers over 35,000 brands and processes GMV in the billions. On the back of their $67.5M Series C round led by Insight Partners (with Initialized Capital, Accel, and VMG Partners participating) in June 2021, Shogun is valued at $575M.

Shogun’s rise to the top is a spectacle worth writing home about, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Let’s dive right in👇​

Don’t Panic, It’s Organic 🌱

What started as a side project remained a side project until their purely organic momentum took them from 0 to 15K MRR at a steady clip of 15-20% month-over-month growth.

When this continued for a year, it was time to acknowledge that this was no flash in the pan. Finbarr quit his job of building software to help scale up YC's investing activities and became a contributor to YC’s investing activity himself.

The team took Shogun to YCombinator (Winter 2018 Cohort) and graduated with $2.2M in seed funding and 6k customers under their belt.

Going multi-product 👯‍♀️

With “Page Builder” - Shogun had a drag-and-drop tool to augment existing storefronts. In late 2019, a confluence of trends highlighted a gaping hole in the market for a tool that can replace entire storefronts.

• Shogun’s largest clients on product #1 struggled with performance - load speeds, conversion rates, and bounce rates.

• Their existing customers were requesting features and functionality that Page Builder couldn’t solve because Shogun didn’t own the storefront.

• Market trends presented an opportunity to build an ecosystem around the front end.

The tipping point was when a Shogun agency partner showed Finbarr the Rothy’s website at a basement restaurant in Toronto - and he couldn’t believe how fast the website was and how complicated the tech powering the performance boost was.

Finbarr recognized the shift in tech, and told himself, “I can productize this.”

And so he did. This is Shogun Frontend in a nutshell. A radically new approach to headless storefronts and building Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).

🧩​ A Sale of Two Products

Shogun is part of a rare clique of companies with products that have bifurcated Go-To-Market playbooks.

While Shogun’s “Page Builder” is a self-serve, largely bottom-up adopted tool that is free to start with…

…“Frontend” is an end-to-end enterprise-level product that requires a white-glove implementation, is very hands-on, and is a lot tougher to navigate and learn on your own.

Shogun’s GTM is a dual play of self-serve meets enterprise sales.

The Sales team is led by Kristen Habacht, Shogun’s President and COO (and ex-CRO), with a team of SDRs, Account Executives, and Customer Success Managers to qualify prospects, nurture, close, and support.

Partnership-driven growth 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦​

Exceptional site-building thrives in an ecosystem, and Shogun jumped on this bandwagon in September 2021.

Within just a year, they’ve brought on 36 partners to help customers seamlessly create and design online stores using Frontend. Shogun’s partnered with some of the best e-commerce agencies in the world - all to deliver the most seamless headless experience to their clients. 

Partnerships help Shogun tap into agency networks for demand and cast a wide net to push the benefits of PWA and headless commerce to a broader audience.

Success with SEOgun 🔎

Shogun’s SEO engine was layered in around 2020 to drive demand generation for Page Builder, and started paying dividends in early 2021.

Daily organic traffic totals over 72K each month, with Shogun ranking for 23K+ organic keywords in P1 on Google for over 600 branded and non-branded keywords.

Shogun aimed the SEO arsenal at the e-commerce long-tail of brands looking for specific storefront customizations. Think highly relevant long-tail keywords like “customizing shopify themes,” “how to create landing page in shopify” and “how to connect shopify to instagram.” 

Here’s a plot that shows the number of keywords with SERP ranking 1-3 against the keyword difficulty (KD) - a rough proxy for search volumes.

Dogfooding Shogun 🐶

It’s one thing to share the benefits of headless and advocate for its capabilities, and it’s another altogether to showcase case studies of storefronts built on your headless storefront builder.

But nothing drives the point home quite like building your own e-commerce store using your own product to showcase just how fast and flexible a headless PWA can be.

Meet Shogun general: Shogun’s Merch store. And one of the fastest mobile storefront experiences known to man.

See for yourself

⏩​ What’s Next?

We want to make it possible for every brand and e-commerce agency to create stunning headless commerce storefronts without code. We want to democratize headless commerce so that brands can focus their energy on delivering great e-commerce experiences for customers.

We’ve got big plans underway to help more customers build next-generation storefronts — and we can’t wait to share what’s in store.” - Finbarr Taylor

Though Shogun’s growth journey has been nowhere near linear, they’ve stayed true to their vision of wanting to empower everyone to build stunning e-commerce websites. 

Shogun’s not only reaching for the stars 🌠​, but they’ve also already built their own microcosmos 🌍​ of headless e-commerce. Armed with their Series C capital, Finbarr says they will continue building out their Page Builder and Frontend products - as well as business development, and to build out new tech, specifically in areas like first-party data and personalization.

Shogun’s not nearly done yet.

Let us know which growth story you’d like to see us cover next👇

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Of the 75 wealthiest individuals in human history, 14 were Americans born within 9 years of each between 1831 and 1840.

The billionaires of the Gilded Age - Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and JP Morgan were all born in a four-year window in the 1830s - 25 years before one of the largest economic booms in history.

Wall Street would emerge, railroad expansions kick into high gear, and the US Oil industry bloom just as these men entered the workforce.

Fast forward 120 years to the 1950s. A similar three-year window would see the birth of Paul Allen, Sun Microsystems founders Bill Joy and Scott McNealy, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. Personal computers would go into mass production just as these men would graduate.

Armed to the teeth with a specific set of skills and hours of extensive practice, some of the wealthiest characters in human history also happened to be at the right place, at the right time - at an inflection point in cultural and technological transformation.

In 2022, we’re at another crucial inflection point in tech. Generative AI is here and advancing incrementally almost every month. Leaps and bounds.

Three entrepreneurs with a specific set of skills of 10,000+ hours of preparation under their belt are placed at the ramparts of this transformation. Right place. Right time. Right idea. An idea they call Jasper.

Jasper: The origins 🐣

A short time after earning his business degree from Kansas State University, Dave Rogenmoser sat down with his two longtime friends JP Morgan (John Philip, not John Pierpont) and Chris Hull to set two simple goals. In their words:

“1. Start a company. 

2. Make $6,000 a month to support our families.”

The three friends’ two core interests were building software and digital marketing, and they would one day marry those interests into the near-perfect harmony of Jasper. 

The trio would shut down two failed SaaS companies, foray into digital marketing, pivot that into a company building courses, and build Proof, a YC-backed website personalization company a la Mutiny, before distilling the ingredients of what became Jasper.

When Proof’s growth stalled in the Autumn of 2020, the three friends were burning money and growing tired. After being forced to lay off almost half of their small team, Rogenmoser, Morgan, and Hull again set their sights on new horizons. 

Proof’s slow-down (but ultimate success) freed up Rogenmoser and his Jasper co-founders to take a breath and gain perspective. Nearly six years after they set those initial two goals, the three friends sat down together again. This time they asked the question that would birth Jasper: “If we could build anything, what would it be?”

They knew three things for sure:

1. They loved marketing. 

2. They loved building software.

3. They wanted to use AI. 

In the summer of 2020, the Gods spoke back. OpenAI released the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3).

JP’s phone started buzzing one evening in late 2020. It was Dave.

On January 15th, 2021, the trio launched Conversion.ai—the company that would eventually come to be known as Jarvis and, finally (after Disney/Marvel came after them due to the ostensible nod to Tony Stark’s AI of the same name) Jasper.

What can Jasper do? Set Jasper afoot with a primer prompt, and it churns out compelling, clickable copy for blog posts, landing pages, social media ads, marketing emails, and more at almost 10x speed.

Today, Jasper is trusted by over 70,000 copywriters and content marketers at Google, AirBnb, IBM, HarperCollins, Logitech, Keller Williams, and others. With 26 different languages supported today, Jasper is a truly global writing assistant.

In October 2022, Jasper raised a $125 million Series A round led by Insight Partners and joined by other leading firms, including Coatue, Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, Foundation Capital, Founders Circle Capital, HubSpot Ventures, and more. With angel cheques from David Cancel, Amjad Masad (Replit founder), and Clem Delangue (Huggingface).

The latest round comes just 18 months after launch and puts Jasper at a $1.5B valuation and an est. $75M in revenue (70% growth YoY) - making it one of the fastest-growing start-ups of ALL time.

But Jasper’s story is not all about being at the right place and time. All said and done, there are many PLG companies riding the GPT3 wave. But no one has quite done it quite as spectacularly as Jasper has.

Which begs the question - what is Jasper’s secret growth sauce? Let’s dig deeper.

Differentiation through integrations 👐🏻

Jasper’s founders are marketers by trade who understand the trade deeply. And it shows.

In a market that’s becoming increasingly crowded with such players as Copy.ai, Copysmith.ai, Simplified, Writesonic, among others, Jasper differentiated early based on integrations.

And opened up the depths of the content marketing use case. Jasper offers native integrations to:

• SurferSEO - On-page SEO recommendations and article-scoring built into Jasper to target page 1 rankings on google

• Grammarly - for Grammar & Spelling checks

• Copyscape - in-built plagiarism checker

This is a superpower for Jasper’s ICP - fewer tab switches, fewer steps in content workflows, and overall fewer context switches. Productivity stonks.

Build a raving fanbase 👏🏻

Building a strong community is a lot like building an island nation. People migrate to it when they stand to benefit from it personally. There are good reasons why JasperNation is today 70k strong (and growing.)

• Give, don’t take - Jasper Nation’s motto is “We’re givers, not takers.” Jasper’s Facebook community is 70k strong and is a little corner of the internet for Jasper users to share “wins, tips, and helpful advice for generating great marketing copy.” This moderation lever ensures more value for the user in the community to take away than they have to give. This isn’t another “How can I…” community.

• Recipes - Jasper activates the community lever within the product through “recipes” - templatized prompts that provide guardrails for the AI to operate within for targeted use cases. Like writing a cold mail, a Facebook ad, or even a non-fiction book. For recipes custom created within Jasper, the tool triggers a prompt to share these with the Jasper community and indexed by the search engine Gods. User-generated product templates, anyone?

  

• Encourage your users’ tattoo habits - we’re kidding here, but the hype is very real.

Make TTV approach 0 📉

Time to Value (TTV) can take a real hit when most users are still new to AI and need assistance navigating the learning curve of a brand new GPT-3 powered tool. This is, as Jasper went on to show the world, a highly solvable problem.

• Templates - Productized recipes.

• Documentation (First order) - Extensive help docs.

• Documentation (Second order/Repurposed) - Extensive help docs repurposed into videos and smoothly layered into the product

• Personalized onboarding journeys - based on who you are and what you’re looking to do, to ensure that the tool doesn’t smother you with its very broad appeal

• In-app help - Extensive guides and onboarding ladders to walk you through the editor and app.

Print your own money 💸

Jasper’s pricing is usage-based and measured in credits. 1 credit = 1 word. The paid plans price you based on the estimated #words you will likely generate using Jasper in a month. With tailwinds of a strong community and a powerful ecosystem building around Jasper - AND since most content marketers think of pricing in units of #words anyway, credits ARE money in #JasperNation.

Establishing that transitive property opens avenues for marketing to do more with credits.

• For delight - Here’s a snippet from the blog announcing Jasper’s Series A funding where Dave rewards Jasper users:

  

• To incentivize - Here’s one from the invitation to a webinar where the CS team offers free credits for attending:

  

Become platform agnostic 🤷🏻‍♀️

All said and done, very few marketing teams have processes that are limited to Google Docs, ClickUp, Notion, or where-have-you. Across freelancers, agencies, in-house content creators, and others, the workflows tend to be cross-platform.

Onboarding a new process onto Jasper or even migrating an existing one is a high-friction task that Jasper would prefer to circumvent.

And so, on October 19, 2022, Jasper launched a Chrome Extension that overlays Jasper onto anywhere your marketing teams need content assistance.

The result? Jasper doesn’t share attention with every other tool in your content workflow anymore. Your favorite AI sidekick is now ubiquitous - because its new home is Chrome.

BRB, we’re going B2B 🔙

That third CTA on the pricing page as with most third CTAs is “Talk to Sales.” Jasper’s B2B motion now interlaces two powerful PLG GTM playbooks:

1. Sales-assist: With ~5 product specialists and ~10 CSMs in-house, Jasper adds fuel to the self-serve fuel through a sales-assist motion to upsell and expand accounts.

2. High-velocity sales: A sales team of ~15 AEs tackles the largely inbound pipeline generated from the 100,000k+ organic inbound website traffic + paid

The future of Jasper Nation 🔮

Dave, JP, and Chris have blown past their initial goal of making “$6,000 a month to support our families.” Jasper’s the hot new kid in town. With ventures into DALL-E/Stable Diffusion territories through Jasper Art and a brand new “Workflows” (similar to the One-Shot Blog Post with more customizations), product-market fit among marketers is growing deeper roots week over week.

With a significant head-start on competitors and a brand new $125M in the bank, how Jasper differentiates further in this increasingly crowded market will (hopefully) be a sight for SaaS to behold.

Much like the WIP tattoo designs I’m firing up on Jasper Art as I write this.

Let us know which growth story you’d like to see us cover next👇

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It’s Q4 - it’s been a long quarter. We don’t want to waste your time with a story about how Yeehaw Junction, Florida’s first mayor’s pet project paved the way for Zapier’s bootstrapped growth from $0-$140M without a sales team.

Here are 13 things you can do to make it home by Christmas with more closed wons on your Salesforce than turkeys that will… not be forgiven this month.

On-Demand Generation:

Live in the moment but market it too 🫡

There’s no time like Q4 - when you need quick wins under your belt - to cut straight to the chase. Some good ol’ moment marketing is handling the load previously borne by traditional marketing funnels.

SEO SEM 🔎

Bottom-of-funnel keywords are your quickest wins.

1. Position against your competition like ClickUp:

2. Fulfill an immediate need like Grammarly:

3. Or plug yourself in the Q1 planning conversation like Amplitude:

Twitter Out, LinkedIn In ✅

Ah, good ol’ LinkedIn, where Q4 content is rife, the codebase has largely remained the same, and buying intent is high. No better place to…

4. Drive Q4 urgency like Gong:

5. …or get meta with it like Hubspot:

More than just a floating head on a zoom screen 👩🏻‍💻

Show your prospects that you're more than just a bust on a zoom screen.

6. In-person events are back in vogue.

Turns out people buy software from people. Especially when a recession hits. Go figure 🤷🏻‍♂️

In these recessionary times, SaaS companies are reverting to what's worked best through other tough times. Making personal connections, meeting people face-to-face, and DocuSigning shaking on it 🤝

On the back of Q3’s SaaStr Annual ‘22, Hubspot Inbound, and Dreamforce ‘22, we’ve since seen:

• SaaStock 2022 in Dublin

• Cohort 22 by Amplitude in SF

• Web Summit 2022 in Lisbon

• Data Meetup hosted by Statsig in SF

• Pavillion Executive Dinners across the globe

…and more coming this week and next, like:

• B2Believe: The inaugural LinkedIn B2B marketing summit

• Marketing Gamechangers meetup hosted by Sequel x Mutiny

Locked, loaded, and gated 🔐

7. Gated content

Call it a lead-gen hero or marketing villain, gated content is the flavor of the season (and… a great qualifier of informational intent as a bonus)

• Partner up like Chargebee sponsored OpenView’s “2022 SaaS Benchmarks Report” that dropped this week.

• Engender traditions like Amplitude’s second edition of the “Product Report”

• Or repurpose content into cheat sheets, templates, e-books, and reports like Gong & Gainsight

The devil is in the subject line

8. The art of an expertly crafted outbound sequence

Step 1 - The open: Stand out in inboxes by creating intrigue - surprise people (“Something’s not right”) and ask questions that create mystery (“How did I do?”)

Step 2 - The delivery: There are no hacks here. Deliver against the intrigue (“You might be turning away 30-80% of signups if you ignore personal domain signups. Something’s not right”) or mystery (“I ran your LinkedIn profile through our demographic-based lead-scoring tool. How did I do?”)

And Step 3 - The action: Sign off with ONE clear ask.

On Selling…

9. Predictability in Pre-emption

"You better brace yourself" - infamous and prophetic words from June '22.

Unfortunately, Jamie Dimon was bang on, and we find ourselves in one of the worst recessions of the last few decades. SaaS buying intent is at an all-time low. But buyers continue to window shop.

How many of you have heard - "It was great," "This is exactly what we need", or "I've been looking for this for a while" after a demo, only to then not close the account?

As a revenue team, it's important to stay laser focussed on deals that are ACTUALLY going to close. It's about spotting the smoke (in a deal) early - 'cause boy, is there probably a fire.

What are the best sales leaders doing?

Asking for small next steps:

“Would it make sense to loop in the rest of your team so they can weigh in?”

Pre-empting concerns.

"Sounds like the value isn't there for you."

Re-validating priorities.

“Before we go too much further, can I check something out with you? When you consider everything on your plate, is this issue high enough on your ‘priorities slide’ to have staying power?”

10. Inbound... thou art a flaky thing ❅

"Businesses who respond to leads in five minutes or less are 100x more likely to convert opportunities." (Source)

100 flipping X!

SaaS buying Intent is fleeting. And much like that piece of candy you dropped the other day, 5 seconds (minutes) is all the difference between no one batting an eyelid and people giving you funny looks when you pick it up.

Catching your prospect in the moment can be the difference between missing Q4 and surpassing targets.

And don't just take my word for it. Try signing up for Chorus or ProductBoard (with your business email, of course) and keep an eye on your cell phone 😉

11. But Call. Don't text 😬

Over 3x.

That's the difference in meeting booked rates when you call your lead vs. email them.

Pick up those cell phones y'all. Bots e-mail. Humans call.

12. Buyers want to hold on to what they already have

"People are twice as likely to buy to avoid loss than to gain anything."

In a world where the upside is increasingly tough to imagine, buyers would pay to hold on to what they already have vs. (possibly) gain something more.

On expansions…

13. Focus on NRR

It's easier to earn a dollar from an existing customer (who's experienced your product's value) than from a new one.

And you don't need to be a public market company for this to be true. If you're past $15-20 of ARR, a good chunk (if not a majority) of your ARR growth is probably driven by account expansion.

But how do you know which of your accounts are primed for expansion?

Maybe you ask your CS reps 🤷🏻‍♂️

But they don't have all the information. Every mouse click, invite sent, paywall hit, feature interaction, or blog opened. If only there was someone (something) who did 🧐

Try Toplyne - it's free

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See Toplyne + Heap in action

In 1608, the States General (the Dutch national government) in The Hague received a patent application from a spectacle maker from Middelburg named Hans Lipperhey for a device that can help "see faraway things as though nearby."

The patent was rejected on the grounds of the device being “too easy to copy.”

In 1609, a polymath from Italy named Galileo improved the patent's concept and popularized it across Europe.

In the next four centuries, Kepler would add two convex lenses to the thing; Newton strapped on mirrors and Bell Labs, a radio receiver until the space shuttle Discovery took the Hubble Telescope into outer space. In December 2021, NASA put the James Webb Space Telescope in orbit, and at this point, it’s safe to say that the telescope is no longer “too easy to copy.”

But somewhere along the way, the search for the unknown became no longer about just the physical universe.

Edward Hubble posited that the physical world is ever-expanding. Gordon Moore posited that soon our digital might be too.

In 1995, Lou Montulli patented the cookie (approved this time); Google acquired Urchin Software Corp in 2005 and redesigned it into Google Analytics.

And in 2012, two friends from Stanford put the most powerful telescope built for digital experiences into orbit.

This is the story of the James Webb Space Telescope of digital insights: Heap.

🚗​ Taking the wheel in a Heap of chaos

The year is 2011 – good friends Ravi Parikh and Matin Movassate have just graduated from Stanford University. Ravi Parikh leans into his lifelong interest in making music to become a DJ and producer.

Matin goes down a different route – as a Product Manager at Facebook.

Imagine having access to the best analytics infrastructure in the world… and it all being useless to you. All because the process of capturing and organizing the correct data takes forever.

Matin struggled with this firsthand. Any time he needed to leverage a different data point for an analytics question, he had to:

• Get an engineer to write tracking code

• Wait for the code to go live – which could sometimes take up to a month

• Wait for the data to accumulate gradually

• Get a data scientist to make sense of the data with a report 

And this was a real bottleneck – how do you use data to manage your product's performance if you jump through hurdles to capture the data in the first place?

"I started wondering: if Facebook couldn't even get this right at their level of sophistication, what hope did any other online business have? We knew this wasn't the future of analytics." – Matin Movassate, Co-Founder of Heap.

Matin left Facebook in a year - with a purpose.

He wanted to create an analytics infrastructure to help the world to use data meaningfully.

And so he got together with his friend Ravi to hack on stuff together – starting with fun things like making meme generators (we dig), they finally landed on the idea for Heap: a 'Capture Everything' analytics tool.

The year is 2013 – and the efforts to build Heap are in full swing! ​🏃🏽‍♂️​

Matin and Ravi were part of Y Combinator's Winter 2013 cohort – and secured their first $120K seed funding in March.

They launched the product in April of that year, and by August, they had raised $2M more in seed funding.

Since effective tracking is difficult for companies to do in-house, Heap became a 'capture everything' insights software that companies could outsource. 

It started with a 100-line JavaScript script that you could add to a website, track every relevant DOM event (every click, tap, pageview, etc.) with, and record it all in a database that you can retrieve any time you have a question.  

The first version of Heap looked something like this: 

Now, nearly a decade later, Heap has:

• Raised $205M in funding, the most recent being a $110M Series D in Dec 2021 led by Sixth Street Partners

• Reached a valuation of $960M

• Grown from 3 employees to a team of 400+

• Helped 8000+ companies deliver 'unparalleled digital experiences' – including big brands like HelloSign, DISH, Crunchbase, Amway, and The Atlantic

• Appointed Ken Fine as the new CEO, with co-founder Matin Movassate moving into the Chairman role

The path ​🛣️​ to better, faster, and more accessible insights were paved by Heap. ​

So what did they do to make digital insights accessible to everyone?

Let's walk through Heap's data analytics revolution.

PMF + PLG: The need of the hour ⏳​

The original idea at Heap was to accelerate developers with data. The market, however, demanded something else: Low-code analytics for product managers, marketers, and those who didn't necessarily have the CSS/DOM knowledge to use an analytics tool seamlessly.

In line with this high demand for low-code analytics, Heap built and launched the Event Visualizer in 2014: a what-you-see-is-what-you-get point-and-click way to find events.

And boom! They had found their sweet spot.

Armed with a clear sense of PMF, Heap experienced rapid growth – they saw more conversions and less churn post their free trial, and their support ticket volume grew from 3-5 interactions a day to over 50 a day – all within a few months.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

🔓​ Unlock Heaps of data with a single snippet of code

Whether you're in product management, marketing, sales, customer success, or pretty much anything else, Heap believes that digital insights are a superpower – whose benefits should be accessible to everyone.

Heap removes the tedium of manual coding and tracking and lets you focus on what really matters: your product's performance. 

Taking a different turn from other analytics tools in the market, Heap offers an efficient, low-code way to get the complete picture of your users' digital journeys and accelerate your product insights.

All you have to do is install Heap's code snippet on any framework or device. Whatever you want to track – web, iOS, Android, third-party applications – Heap automatically captures it all for you and lets you organize the data the way you need. 

How? 

Here's how they do it: 

📷​ Capture: Capture all your customer data automatically without needing manual coding and engineers. 

💡​ Heap Illuminate: A powerful suite of tools, including customer journey maps, effort analysis, path comparison, group suggestions, and more for the best user-behavior insights. 

🔁​ Session Replay: Watch endless replays cued to precisely the customer's moments of interest - for faster, better insights to diagnose critical problems quickly and fix them. 

🖥️​ Dashboards: Providing instant insights on critical metrics, Heap's dashboards help teams align on metrics and coordinate data-driven action across the organization. 

📊​ Charts: Tailor-made for every customer, Heap's charts let you graph conversion events, build funnels, track retention, and more. 

👮🏻​ Data Governance: Built-in governance tools that help keep your data organized and accurate, let you assign naming conventions across your data set, and protect your raw data by separating it from their virtual layer where you can manage your data as you like. 

Heap's slick interface isn't all bells and whistles – Heap's auto-capture, session replay, and customer journey map tools help customers understand bottlenecks in their optimization efforts, product rollouts, marketing strategy, and more.

Their customer success across SaaS, eCommerce, and Financial Services is proof:

• Freshworks uses Heap to increase adoption by 20%

• eCommerce sleep products company Casper uses Heap to increase conversions by 20%

• Finserv giant Northwestern Mutual increases adoption from 3% to 99% using Heap

🏁​ First Stop: Free Trial

Heap gives you two weeks to fall in love – and they wine and dine you through it too.

Their 14-day full-feature trial requires no credit card and has a super-fast installation process: all you need to do is enter your work email id and add a single snippet of code to your website. That's it! ​😌​

Within these two weeks, Heap helps you turn your obstacles into opportunities. 

Are you buying horrible traffic? Are you having trouble tracking users across channels? Not sure why there's a sudden drop-off in your funnel? 

With data auto-capture, session replay, effort analysis, and more, Heap lets you learn about these friction points and growth opportunities within your brand - so that you can fix them.

A pure self-serve acquisition and expansion model worked perfectly in Heap's early days. Heap had nailed their product-market fit and pricing so well that activation and upgrade involved nearly zero touches from sales.

That's when Ravi and his team realized they had a lot of revenue potential in their user base – a potential they had yet to make full use of.

And they made one change.

📞 Next Stop: Call me maybe (definitely) ​

Heap does the opposite of transparent pricing, which works wonders for them. Its hybrid model of product-led self-serve and sales assistance helped ensure they're able to capture value with every sale.

"If we keep changing the prices, and nothing changes, we're definitely leaving a lot of money on the table. And so we shifted more towards a model where we removed some of the prices from the page and made it more random, and that's how we closed our first couple of six-figure contracts." – Ravi Parikh, Co-founder of Heap.

Ex-CMO Lynn Girotto has described it as a 'phone-a-friend' situation – where you can self-serve to some extent but need to reach out to sales after you've reached a certain level of scale. The CTAs on Heap's pricing page reflect this:

For Heap, adding sales assistance to their pricing strategy has helped the company tailor each pricing tier based on the customer's requirements and willingness to pay.

Without these sales consultation calls, $10,000 deals would have remained $500!

And without Heap's pricing experiments and user data, they wouldn't have enacted this change at all…

🧘🏽‍♀️​ All the answers are within

The team at Heap has been using its own data capture software since 2014 – to get insights into Heap's performance and optimize it for users.

Over the years, they've used Heap to close more sales, remove redundant features, plan their annual roadmap, and improve self-serve conversions.

After running behavior-based onboarding experiments and leveraging Heap’s integration with Marketo, they launched a new process that helped increase conversions via email by around 10%! 

Hear it from the horse’s mouth: Here’s the process they developed, outlined in their blog post: 

In 2021 and 2022, Heap has hosted company-wide activities like an Extreme Makeover Sprint and Ship Weeks – all efforts to use Heap to fast-track the process of fixing bugs, improving design and product experience, and brainstorming new features that users may love!

🚂​ Customers, you're in for a smooth ride

🎢 Intelligent and seamless onboarding ​

Heap's sign-up process follows an underrated rule of creating SaaS sign-ups: make the sign up process engaging!

A 'How Heap works' live demo is next to the sign-up page with a Free Trial CTA at the bottom. See for yourself:

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Heaps of support for users ​

Heap has always prioritized their self-serve PLG strategy, and it's worked well for customer success so far! Just because a lot of it is self-serve doesn't mean that it's leaving customers to their own devices. The Customer Education team has put much effort into creating engaging, interactive, and informative onboarding processes for new and old users alike:

🕹️​ Heap Help Center: Over 300 FAQs about every aspect of using the app, Developer Guides, API References, Product Updates, and more.

⏯️​ Heap Plays: Tactical 'how-to' guides tailored to every user's role or industry

🍽️​ Professional Services: For larger companies who need more custom services and personalized support from Heap, Professional Services allow for Onboarding, Managed, and Project Based Services. Each of these also has pricing tiers based on differences in time commitment and value offerings.

🎓​ Heap University Heap University was born around 2020 – when the world switched to everything virtual-first – for customer onboarding and education with use-case-based courses designed to get users up and running with Heap.

Christy Hollingshead (VP of Customer Education and Engagement) says that just two years in, HeapU has about 4-5K students going through HeapU each year.

🏢​ A Brand New Customer Community

March 15th, 2022: Heap launched its in-site Customer Community.

It's your quintessential online community – there are a few Q&A forums, News & Announcements, Events, and even a Leaderboard!

But that's not all! Heap's online community also has:

Job Board: Where community members can share job postings - including for Heap itself, driving acquisition for the company as Heap champions move across orgs.

User Groups – a specialized structure within the Heap Community to drive engagement, loyalty, and retention to help users connect with other experts at monthly meetings. There are user groups for financial services, product management, new users, and more!

Heap Champions: An 'elite group of Heap users who have demonstrated outstanding leadership’. The 21 Champions chosen for 2022 will connect with fellow Heap users to share best practices and partner with Heap to drive product adoption and customer expansion.

🌐​ PLC: Product-Led Content

Heap's content engine was set into motion by Heap's first Chief Marketing Officer, Lynn Girotto. She parted ways with Heap in July 2022, after which Heap's digital marketing efforts have been led by Scott Grove (VP of Marketing Operations). 

Today, Heap is beloved on and off-line: From July 2022 to September 2022, they've seen over 500K website visits – with 40.15% of the traffic being direct and another 41.42% coming from organic search. 

How do they do it?

Lots of enriching, no-nonsense content in many different forms – blogs, e-books, whitepapers, a podcast, webinars – you name it.

Let's dive deeper:

🔎​ As you SEO, SEO shall you reap  

Heap's articles are well-researched, comprehensive, and highly educational. They've got over 1500 website pages and see about 64K visitors monthly in organic search traffic.

Heap's excellent content strategy has them ranking for over 12K top organic keywords and in the 1st position for over 300 branded and non-branded keywords. 

With real estate that spans across:

📚​ Heap's Blog 

🗝️​ A Gated Content Library 

🧑‍💻​ Virtual Events

In line with the company's priorities, Heap's content is about offering value. Some of their best content is on topics like PLG strategy, conversion rates, product analytics, a/b testing, and product management.

‍‍💆🏽‍♀️​ Use Cases: I'll be there for you… ALL of you!

Heap's goal has been simple from day one: Make product analytics accessible to all.

And they've been doing exactly that to this day.

Heap advocates for simplicity, and that reflects in their use cases too. To keep its customer journey simple and tailor the product to be precisely what the customer is looking for, Heap has divided their product benefits into a list of easy-to-find use cases. 

These use cases are solutions-based (like Product Adoption or PLG), industry-based (like SaaS, eCommerce, or Financial Services), and team-based (like Product or Marketing teams).

A tailor-made product also involves considering how your product fits into the dynamics of a larger organization. Heap focuses more on the 'organization' they're working with: they think about how teams are using their product, too, not just individuals.

This idea of Product-Organization Fit also played a crucial part in how they shifted their product thinking to optimize it for use cases at every size, stage, and scale.

​👭​​ Partnerships FTW!

Everything exists in an ecosystem – and this applies to business, too.|

Just like Contentful and Lattice, the team at Heap realized the importance of partnerships early on. 

The team at Heap knew they needed to partner with other organizations to create seamless and end-to-end solutions to provide the best product experience to customers.

Enter Heap's Partner Network (HPN).

Introduced in October 2018 by then-VP of Partnerships David Saxon, the HPN is a community of some of the best solutions providers working with Heap to drive value for clients through advanced product insights.

I'm proud that the Heap Partner Network embodies a connected mentality — we are more than the sum of our parts. – David Saxon, Ex-VP of Partnerships

Today, Heap has around 54 Technology Partners and 6 Solutions Partners. 

Heap's extensive partner network ​🌐​ ensures that its customers receive exceptional product analytics and end-to-end solutions for their product development, management, sales, and marketing efforts.

🤝🏿​ PLG, meet Customer Success-Led Sales

A marriage between PLG and Sales is not just inevitable but also a must for scale, as witnessed in companies like Appcues, Descript, and Paddle.

Though Heap started as almost entirely self-serve PLG, they eventually adopted a sales-assist motion with 'Contact Sales' options for all their pricing tiers. Heap's co-founder Matin believes that the best sales process is a customer success process.

The idea was that Heap's sales conversations should resemble consultative conversations ​💬​ that ensure Heap solves a business problem for the customer on the first sales call.

The team usually has these sales calls with prospects after they've already installed and used Heap. Sales reps can then share insights they've uncovered and suggest changes that will be important for the customer's business - like taking a different marketing approach, segmenting a group of users, investing in developing a new feature, and more. 

Adding this kind of value in the first few calls and showing customers the full potential of Heap has been the team's most effective way to close deals. And so, embracing a bottom-to-top-of-the-funnel approach, Heap focused first on hiring for customer success and only later on sales.

Today, Heap's powerful product-led sales engine is led by Chief Revenue Officer Sean Andrew, Chief Customer Officer Ahmed Quadri, and VP of Sales (Major Accounts) Kevin Spier.

Heap's exceptional Sales Directors, AEs, and Customer Success Managers qualify prospects, nurture and close customers, and add value to ensure they continue to love and use Heap.

Including major clients like Dish, The Atlantic, Northwestern Mutual, and Freshworks, Heap now has 8000 customers and counting – they've clearly found success through this hybrid and novel approach! ​💰​

​⏩​ What's next?

Though many product analytics tools exist in the market (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude), none have revolutionized the low-code analytics space as Heap has.

They've stayed true to their vision since day one, and it's been paying off.

Heap's tagline is a self-fulfilling prophecy ​🔮​: they are the future of digital insights, and that future is looking very bright.

With a Ken Fine, as their new CEO, their latest Series D funding, and their recent acquisition of Auryc, Heap is ready to scale global operations and accelerate their platform to heights never seen before.

For Heap, the sky is the limit. They're looking to roll out an expanded suite of data-driven analysis tools and grow their partner ecosystem to improve business outcomes for digital teams worldwide.

With so much talk of the future, Heap is ready to walk🚶🏽‍♂️​ the talk, too – by laying the foundation for eventually being able to deliver a complete suite for agile product development with CDP functionality, experimentation tools, in-app messaging, and more. The possibilities are endless.

By bringing in the future of digital analytics, Movassate, Fine, and their team is helping you 'Heap' an eye on your data to find exceptional customer success for your product.  

And we can't wait for what they have in store for us all!

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The first use of the phrase “first principles” dates back to a usual suspect: the son of a physician and the hand of King Alexander the Great - a certain Aristotle of Macedon.

Aristotle defined the first principles endeavor as a philosophical inquiry - to get to the bottom of "the first basis from which a thing is known."

While, like his teacher Plato, Aristotle traced art to the human love of imitation and mimesis, he professed that we must work backward to find the underlying truths about the natural world and thereby uncover axiomatic first principles.

In his work on ethics, Aristotle defined something called the “golden mean” - the desirable middle between two extremes.

If you asked Aristotle where he stood on art vs. science, he’d likely have pointed you to some sort of golden mean before going back to his daily speculation routine.

And you, a B2B Salesperson in the 1990s, would have been left hanging around in an ancient Greek gymnasium after asking your question, wondering what the hell you’ve been doing all your career.

Sales gravitating to the golden mean on the art vs. science spectrum is a very recent phenomenon. It took a few pioneers and ushers to lead the way. Chief among them? *drumroll* Gong.

Or, more specifically, a brainchild of the Gong founding team: Gong Labs.

What is Gong Labs?🧪

Gong Labs is content, product, and outbound marketing on product-led steroids.

A series started by product-marketer turned-head of Sales Chris Orlob, and AE-turned-head of content Devin Reed in late 2016, the Gong Labs series publishes findings from Gong’s data research team. The team analyzes millions of anonymized sales conversations from the 65k+ AEs that use the platform to generate insights that deliver value to 6M+ salespeople on God’s green planet.

The mission should you choose to engage? To find the golden mean of art and science in a sales conversation.

The revenue intelligence platform founded out of Israel pioneered a class of marketing that, honestly, not enough products have found the muscle to copy.

Here’s why you should try.

Soft power 👊🏼

In the theory of virtues, Aristotle suggested that there were many things needed for character development - okay, yeah, no sh*t.

But chief among them - a role model or “exemplar” that one can imitate, cultivating appropriate habits that become moral virtues over time.

In the world of B2B Sales today, Gong Labs is the Aristotelian exemplar.

Through research-driven content derived from the core product, Gong distills insights that are ✨ gold dust ✨ for salespeople everywhere.

Here are some gems from the “Sales Conversation Science Manifesto” released by Gong in the early days of the series:

• How often should you talk vs. listen in a sales conversation?

• What’s the ideal number of pricing mentions in a sales call?

• Is Talking About Your Company Hurting Your Sales?

Gong Labs brought to the Sales table what was previously missing from the menu: data-backed research and the scientific method. As the only one at this table with access to the data to garner these insights and the inspiration to leverage this data, Gong Labs had the stamp of approval from Aristotle’s school of virtue.

They established trust and authority.

Both transitive properties that trickled through to the product and the core offering.

In the revenue/conversational intelligence category that was just finding its feet and starting to get crowded with Chorus, Wingman, and others - all products that at the time looked more or less the same, Gong was suddenly hot.

They now had soft power.

A product-marketer’s dream 💭

Gong Labs’s secret sauce has two ingredients:

1. Their proprietary AI

2. Access to at least 1M+ anonymized sales calls

Mix these into the crucible of their Reality platform, and now Gong can set a powerful armada of product features to go gung-ho crazy to derive unique slices of valuable insights for a sales rep.

And the best part? The insights, while credible and valuable in and of themselves, transfer some of that juice onto the product features. A product marketer’s dream. 💭

• How does Gong know that the deal duration increases by 14% when the economy is mentioned? Because Gong’s Economic Pulse is able to do that by scanning through 500k calls. (And it can do that for YOUR sales team too.)

• Enterprise deals are 233% less likely to close if the DM (Decision Maker) isn’t involved. You should probably figure out if you have a true DM on the other end of the line. How? You should probably consider Gong’s Deal Intelligence feature.

Repurpose to pulp 🧃

Each Gong Labs post at its core carries one central valuable insight. Around this insight is built a solar system of distribution channels. You’d be right to ask - “What is so special about this genre of content?”

Gong Labs is stand-alone full-funnel content. It is BoFu meets MoFu and ToFu with VERY high redistribution value.

Each core insight is repackaged into:

• A blog post on the Gong blog

• The Gong Labs LinkedIn newsletter

• Social media posts

• A YouTube video series called Gong Labs live

  

• Gated checklists, cheat sheets, templates, and reports - after being bundled along with other Gong Labs insights

  

• Outbound e-mail sequences (the actually useful kind)

  

Welcome to the Gong BoFu restaurant of content - which has one of the highest repurposing value propositions that we are aware of.

Which other company does great bottom-of-funnel content marketing? Let us know in the comments 👇

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Feedback loops 🔁

In most fledgling categories still finding their feet, after a certain time decay, most products begin to look very similar.

Back in 2017, when conversational intelligence/revenue intelligence was still in its formative years, Gong and Chorus found themselves at a similar point in their character and product arcs.

Today, Gong owns 75% of that category.

Why did they win, and why is Gong Labs a big part of that answer?

Many categories of tooling - but especially AI tooling eventually reaches a stage in the product roadmap where many roads diverge. Gong could have become a call recording tool, a transcription tool, a tool for marketers - or any number of shiny AI things.

And like their competitors, Gong made bets.

The difference?

Gong was able to estimate the value of these bets before they even made them through product-driven content delivered to the Ideal Customer Persona. Gong found resonance through their content in specifically the sales-enablement and deal-intelligence space that gave them something the competition didn’t have: Clairvoyance. The product evolved through feedback sourced back from Gong Labs, which further informed more relevant content - and on and on and on to this day.

Why we built a lab (and why you need one too) 👩‍🍳

A good chef follows a recipe to the dot again and again and again until one day they tell themselves - “Hmm, at this point, I know how this works. But… what if I add a splash of rosebud to this Cacio Cheese and Pepper Spaghetti recipe for the first time in my life?” Most Michelin star recipes were once someone else’s recipe.

At Toplyne labs, we source product-led content from anonymized product-usage data and use Toplyne’s proprietary AI to bring you insights that can inform the monetization of your PLG product. Insights like:

• You might leave up to 70% of your conversions on the table if you ignore your Gmail signups.

• Despite accounting for a mere 10-15% of leads, North America accounts for 50% of conversions.

• 90% of conversions play out by Day 42 of a user signing up 💡

PLG tools have something others don’t: an abundance of data. If you’re building one, chances are that you are now in a unique position to leverage your product data and bring valuable insights to the rest of us.

You need a lab too. Like yesterday.

Take Toplyne for a test drive 🏎

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Increase your free-to-paid conversions!

Evelyn Quan Wang is a Chinese American immigrant who runs a laundromat with her husband, Waymond. The laundromat is being audited by the IRS.

She's also planning a birthday party for her father (who's just arrived from Hong Kong)!

Meanwhile, her daughter is pushing her to accept her girlfriend, Becky.

The tension in her little world is palpable. And then, she discovers the multiverse.

A universe away, Evelyn is a world-renowned singer, performing for rapt audiences every night. In another one she’s a struggling gourmet chef. A kung-fu champion (and movie star 😄), an ape, and even - a rock.

Evelyn can tap into all these different lives by switching back and forth. And experience…everything, everywhere, all at once. [It’s a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes if you need further convincing]

Movies about the multiverse have exploded.

We've had Dr. Strange and the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Spiderman, and even that new Jared Leto film, Morbius, alone in the past couple of years.

We love switching between realities, dealing with different demands and obligations, and answering other people simultaneously.

Sound familiar? Because it should.

Sure, we can't jump from one universe to another (not yet, anyway) - but the multiverse is already here.

And it's on our devices.

Never before in the history of the universe (this universe, anyway) have humans been able to access and interact with so much information simultaneously.

But while we're constantly switching between our phones, laptops, Alexas, and tablets - and all that Content seems seamless - it isn't.

Or it wasn't until Contentful appeared.

This is the story of how one company revolutionized content management, pioneered the 'headless' CMS movement, and rose to the rarefied heights that only 0.006% of companies will achieve - to unicorn status.

🪨 Contentful, the Rosetta Stone for data

Contentful began by making it easy for companies engaged in multichannel marketing to create and deploy Content to any device.

Unlike legacy CMS, where Content is siloed and must be recreated for every new medium, Contentful's headless CMS is a fundamentally new infrastructure for building modern applications.

It unified all Content on a single hub, which can be deployed to any platform, making tailoring apps for different specs obsolete. 🤯

The perfect answer to all your ContentOps headaches—

Welcome to the new (headless) era of content management.

With Contentful, brands can adapt to a changing landscape by quickly scaling up digital offerings across the entire customer journey.

And when we say quick, we mean really quick!

What used to take weeks takes minutes with Contentful.

And the results speak for themselves.

On average, the company helps brands achieve a 60% increase in eCommerce conversion, 5x faster load times, a 3x increase in conversion from online store search, and a 13% increase in average order value.

With numbers like that, it's no surprise that over half a million developers and over 30 percent of the Fortune 500 rely on Contentful.

Today, Contentful has moved on from its headless CMS approach to become a platform that lets developers and designers build innovative things — not just websites and apps, but the technology that powers virtual reality, cars, ships, the internet of things, and more.

But the revolution in content management began not with a bang, but with a whimper.

⚡ Frustration, the mother of all good ideas

Berlin, 2011. Sascha Konietzke had been in tech for a few years, founded two startups, and worked as a freelance backend developer while studying for his MBA.

But work was seriously frustrating him.

While working on this solution, he met another young developer, Paolo Negri - who'd moved to Berlin from his native Milan.

Sascha was then on his third startup - Thriventures, which he'd founded to create this new solution.

Negri was super excited by Sascha's idea and decided to work together. Their initial product, StorageRoom, helped take Content from digital files and made it repurposable in mobile apps.

This picked up some 1,000 customers, primarily portable app generators and agencies.

But then they realized their idea could be much more significant.

What if they didn't just deploy to mobile apps but created a solution that could be used on any device?

In August 2012, Thriventures was renamed Contentful, with Paolo as co-founder. 🙌

Konietzke and Negri set out to build the developers' dream: a cloud-first, API-driven CMS, one that was unified, structured, and ready to deploy to any digital channel.

Since then, Contentful has:

• Defined a new category for themselves - headless CMS - and emerged as the clear category leader for content management - head and shoulders above the competition (pun totally intended!)

• Raised almost $350m in funding from top investors, including Benchmark, Tiger Global, General Catalyst, Sapphire, Salesforce Ventures, Balderton, and Point Nine.

• Scaled from 12 employees to 800+ in 6 years

• Achieved unicorn status (2021) with a valuation of $3 billion

• Been adopted by some of the world's biggest brands - IKEA, Electronic Arts, Spotify, Lyft, Porsche, WeWork, and Vodafone, to name just a few of their 2000+ clients

And how did they get here?

Three words: Product-led growth.

✊🏼 PLG or bust

Konietzke and Negri were developers first, so they focused on creating the best possible product that would excite developers, content managers, and marketers alike.

The API-centric approach to content management was still nascent when they began. But Contentful wanted to grow. Fast.

Steve Sloan, Contentful's CEO, believes this was the primary motivator behind the founders' decision to adopt a PLG approach.

Their key clients were midmarket companies, enterprise customers, and venture-backed startups - most of whom were used to (and frustrated by) the lengthy process of onboarding a CMS, which often included 3-5 year lock-in contracts.

But Contentful wasn’t going to be yet another run-off-the-mill CMS.

🏁 Free = freedom

Instead, they had a super easy signup process with a 14-day free trial, allowing clients working in teams access to multiple workspaces and adding up to 100 team members.

And you could sign up without the need for credit card info, lowering barriers to entry.

Contentful also offered a Premium trial option to help large companies test out enterprise features - something that's pretty unique.

This enabled them to onboard many enterprise customers who didn't want to pay a considerable amount upfront for legacy software solutions.

This reduced the barrier to adoption like crazy - significantly impacting the number of high-paying enterprise customers!

In 2020, Contentful introduced a Freemium option - users could work in a single space with up to 5 other team members. This helped bring in early-stage startups and small businesses who needed their services (but couldn't always afford the $489/month price tag).

And when these startups got big? Contentful was there to help them scale with a premium version.

📽️ Customized product demos

There are normal personalized demos, and then there's what Contentful did.

The company currently hosts a page of demos for every use case imaginable.

Whether you want to create a Support Knowledge base, build a modern stack website, or unify disparate content sources; there's a demo related to your unique needs and requirements.

Contentful's Premium demo option allows prospects to connect with a team for a live demo.

And if that doesn't suit you, you can watch a recorded demo - for specific use cases. (Gated, of course!)

📱Apps for everyone!

In 2021, Contentful launched two new apps - Compose and Launch to empower content creators, editors, and marketers to adapt and schedule Content across channels without developer support.

Yep, that’s right. No more dependencies.

They realized that programs that allowed non-technical teams - like marketing or content creators- to engage and build digital experiences are crucial to moving forward in a digital-first era.

Everyone is rolling up their sleeves to create engaging customer experiences together. And this agility is a critical competitive advantage.

This led to faster TTV + increased the scalability and flexibility of an already amazingly flexible product.

🤑 Transparent Pricing!

As part of the PLG strategy, Contentful has a super simple, transparent pricing structure.

If you need more than 1 user, upgrading from the free to the Teams version will cost you $489/month (after the free trial).

This standard pricing strategy makes sense for their customers - mid-market B2B and helps them offer the free forever version to grow a long-term client base. Win-win-win!

Besides the platform, Contentful also offers a range of services, including training, workshops, and professional advisory services that can be customized on your monthly plan.

Companies using the enterprise package get unique features such as single sign-on, API white-labeling, a user management API, and more.

🔮 Magical customer experiences

Contentful was off to a great start.

They'd effectively built their own product niche and created a whole new approach to content management - and while it was great to draw customers to them, they needed to focus on retention.

So, they got obsessed with their customers.

Good customer experiences just wouldn’t cut it.

They simply had to be magical. ✨

🏹 Strategic onboarding

It started right from their onboarding - where they offered strategic and tactical support to customers.

Contentful's onboarding process is designed around the type of company you are, your role in the organization, and what you want to achieve.

Once you've signed up on the platform, the remaining steps are customized to specific types of companies and user requirements.

There's also a help center along with end-to-end customer support for troubleshooting.

Further reducing friction, decreasing TTV, and empowering the all-important higher ACV!

☝🏽Customer education is #1

Since they are the pioneers in the space, knowledge sharing and customer education are a big priority for Contentful.

And it begins as soon as you sign up with targeted emails for your needs.

You can also access free, self-paced training at the learning center (available for free and paid customers!) and live training through virtual classrooms - although this costs $4-600 for workshops.

Contentful also offers users a path to certification($250), with a discount for teams.

Workshops and training can be delivered to individual sections, either separately or as part of a more extensive Contentful services engagement - continuing their flexible approach.

🌱 Professional Services to grow your business

And in case you were still in the dark about leveraging Contentful for omnichannel marketing - Contentful's also got a “do-it-for-you” model with dedicated specialists for customized guidance on near-term planning and long-term strategy and implementation services for advanced use cases.

Software sold ≠ Software used.

To turn this problem statement, over its head; Contentful differentiates itself by literally doing it all for you!

Talk about a seamless customer experience.

🧑🏻‍💻 Keeping developers happy!

Sascha and Paolo were developers first, so they focused on empowering developers. Contentful is an active part of the open-source community and often gets excellent advice and feedback from sharing new developments with devs first.

And boy, did the community give back!

Like other PLG companies, (Mutiny, Descript, and Statsig for example); Contentful has a niche group of users, who are also their staunchest supporters.

Contentful's rapid growth, with revenue roughly doubling yearly since 2019, was fueled by developers looking for faster and better ways to build digital experiences.

It's attracted more than 400,000 developers and users who integrate Contentful with other third-party services.

In fact, Contentful receives 38x more Javascript SDK downloads than other similar enterprise content solutions - all because of developers!

In 2021 Contentful released an App Framework, which spurred an additional wave of technology partners to offer integrations with Contentful.

👫 Community matters

A great way to educate new customers and keep them happy and connected to your product is through a community.

Contentful realized this early on. Besides their vast developer community (which includes a separate portal, Slack community, YouTube, GitHub, and Twitch channels), they also stay closely connected with their non-tech customers.

Users can access a Slack community, support portal, online chat (on their web app), and a monthly newsletter.

They also host events and roadshows in Berlin, NY, London, and SF every year - for people to connect and meet with the Contentful team - and each other!

An entirely new niche? Check.

A way for all of ‘em to vibe together? Double Check.

📝 Content for everyone

Unsurprisingly, a company focused on delivering Content has a stellar content strategy.

Working off their USP of diversified Content - Contentful has something for everyone and on every medium.

The goal? Provide standalone value at every step, on every medium that makes sense.

This includes:

Blog 📄
The Contentful Blog primarily drives its SEO strategy. With categories like Developers (feature mechanisms and updates for developers), Strategy (expert guidance on unified content strategies to drive business goals), and Product (for feature updates); the blog garners over 110K+ organic traffic.

They rank for 48K+ organic keywords, including long-tail relevant keywords across keyword difficulty such as content management system for mobile app (KD: 6), and content management as a service (KD:56).

Case studies 💻
No proof of work, is bigger than social proof, especially when your clientele boasts of heavyweights like Atlassian, Shiseido, Siemens, and even, Notion 💪

Prospects can explore customer stories via industry, use case, and even the type of plan they have - to see how Contentful helps clients precisely like them. What's even crazier is that they've also got success stories for the free version!

YouTube channel 🎥
They've got a ton of videos for clients and prospects, for both BoFu and MoFu stages- with educational videos that include how-tos for customers during the free trial.

Ebooks and Whitepapers
This helps position Contentful as a thought leader in the space while also delivering standalone value to potential customers, and acting as lead magnets. To access them, prospects must enter their info, pulling them into the Contentful marketing nurture flow!

In-person Events 🎉
In case you're tired of digital, Contentful also runs an offline branded annual event - Fast Forward, which showcases the most significant content trends and invites big execs and industry leaders to speak.

The event also includes a thread of engaging, in-person customer and partner events to finally seal off their mission of complete market domination. 🐅

🏆 API + Marketplace = Integration FTW

Contentful never stops thinking about its customers.

And what do customers love most in today's digital-first world? Integrations. (Well, it's one of the things they love).

With the launch of the Contentful API in 2020, teams could seamlessly integrate many apps and extend the capabilities of Contentful's platform through third-party integrations and custom workflows.

Contentful's App Marketplace has seen an increase of over 150% in apps created in the Contentful Marketplace since 2021. The platform now performs an average of 1.8 billion API calls daily for over 30% of the Fortune 500 and thousands of other global brands, partners, and organizations.

You can connect over 100 apps, including platforms for Marketing (Writer, Wistia, Typeform), Google Analytics, Shopify (and other commerce apps), Jira, and Slack.

The best part?

Yes, it actually gets better than this—the marketplace is for everyone, so you don't need to be a tech expert to use it!

🌈 Partnerships for end-to-end solutions

Early on, Contentful realized the importance of partnerships.

Some early adopters included design agencies and consultants that used Contentful to deliver seamless digital experiences for their clients. Sascha realized this could be a big market - agencies would use their services and get Contentful in front of their clients. And Contentful could offer agency services to prospects that wanted to deliver Content across different touchpoints - and needed help.

And so the partner program was born.

Today Contentful has become a core layer of digital agencies' delivery stacks for their clients.

Contentful's partners include Solution partners (including top agencies like AKQA, R/GA, Appnovation, and HUGE) and Tech Partners that provide platforms and applications that integrate with Contentful (AWS, Atlassian, Gatsby, Netlify, and others).

Their extensive partner ecosystem helps digital brands build, launch, and ship websites and Content faster, providing increased customer value.

📈 Product-led Sales

While creating a new product niche for yourself sounds super cool, it makes things difficult for Sales.

Before the idea of a headless CMS reached mainstream adoption - no one knew what they were talking about.

So, while product-led growth opens the floodgates at top-of-the-funnel with its free trial, the sales team is what eventually seals the deal— ensuring that the money hits the bank. 💸

This is not unlike what many of the most successful PLS cos. such as Paddle and Appcues which have a successful hybrid motion.

Contentful's current Sales Director, Christopher Carrow, champions this product-led sales approach. With a stellar team of SDRs, AEs, SalesOps, and Sales Leaders; the function owns the revenue function by prospecting, nurturing, and closing new customers, as well as “land-and-expand” within existing accounts.

Contentful's list of over 2000+ customers including Warby Parker, Atlassian, Vodafone, Scotiabank, Peloton, Danone, Shishido, Equinox, Costa Coffee, Chanel, Bang & Olufsen, to name some - means that it must be working!

⏭️ What's next

So what do you do after you've disrupted a legacy industry, creating a new niche, and become a global leader for Content?

Is there anything left?

Steve Sloan and his founders seem to think there is— cause they aren't slowing down just yet.

You don't become a unicorn if you're not continuously thinking on your feet.

In the next few years, Contentful will invest quite a bit into R&D to help customers solve adjacent problems.

It's also expanding its global marketing and sales teams as it moves into new markets beyond the US.

We've even heard rumors Contentful is planning to go public - which could take their valuation to $5 billion! 🤫

They definitely weren’t lying when they said, Content(ful) is King 👑

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We help PLG companies (such as this one☝🏼) with their GTM experiments: be it monetization, activation, or retention. Start small, rapidly iterate and deploy at scale 🚀

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?

Go on,… we’re listening.

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

The state treasury, known as the aerarium, was divided into two parts: the common treasure and the sacred treasury.

The common treasury was meant for deposits from taxes levied on the commonfolk, and the holy treasury was where the likes of Julius Caesar brought in booty from conquests across the world.

If there were a G2 rating for ‘ease of doing business’ in ancient Rome, they’d do very well on this front.

But, with the lack of a concrete economic structure, came its own administrative challenges.

Emperors consolidated wealth in their own hands, and with rising costs of protecting borders, bribing away barbarians, greedy middle-men, and costs maintaining infrastructure and military and social welfare—

The Roman Empire eventually collapsed 🤯

It just could not sustain itself economically.

Today, modern society has learned many public finance lessons from our predecessors.

Good governance is a universally-accepted basic societal expectation, along with diligent decision-making and efficient resource allocation.

There are laws, a currency exchange rate, taxation policies native to a region, and ‘auditable’ public scrutiny.

Today, businesses must adhere to these multiple laws and can no longer create arbitrary procedures for self-interest.

A lax in accounting can lead to a hefty fine and, in some cases, even prison.

The ease of doing business has definitely taken a hit.

But, for the common good.

Amidst all of these regulations, there is one company that’s pioneering the path of selling software (aka today’s version of Julius Caeser’s conquests) better (read: faster, easier, tax-compliant, fraud-proof) 💪🏻

Meet Paddle: The only payments infrastructure for all Software Businesses 🤝

Ten years in the making. 3000 customers. 200 markets. 2,475% revenue growth. $1.4Bn in valuation. 2 acquisitions.

And they’re just getting started.

❤️‍🔥 Never underestimate the power of teenage conviction!

The year is 2010 ⏱

16-year-old Christian Owens living in Corby, a small town in England, has dropped out of high school.

Not because of any disagreeable behavior or an unfortunate accident.

Like one would usually accrue to such an occurrence.

No, not Christian.

Christian was a self-taught developer and had been building websites for people in the neighborhood since he was 12.

By 14, he had built his first commercial software to help people invoice better.

He no longer wanted to be in high school, was obviously bored with the curriculum, and had already figured out what he could do for a living.

His parents were wary but also proud.

Aware of the perils of dropping out, they'd made only one condition—

"If you can make £100,000 a year doing 'this' by the time you can give up school, we will allow you to do that" - Mr. and Mrs. Owens

Christian and his partner in crime business, Harisson Rose, were making upwards of £300,000 by bundling Mac software and selling it online at a discount. (This was the Pre-App Store days.)

Needless to say, Christian was now allowed to drop out.

The year is 2012 ⏱

Christian and Harisson moved from Corby to London on what they ambitiously described as "the Amazon of buying software."

The marketplace fell flat on its face. Software businesses did not need another sales channel to eat into their profits.

They did, however, need infrastructure to sell their software better.

The year is 2013, and it's time to pivot 🛣

With this crucial insight that software businesses only cared about one feature, they threw 90 % of their 'marketplace' out and focussed on building only one thing right.

Enter Paddle. 🚣🏽

A SaaS eCommerce service to scaling software startups seeking to offload the headache of administering international sales so they can focus on building core products, with a simple tagline: Spend time Building, not billing.

The duo would sell to anybody that needed them: desktop software businesses, single payment web apps, services, and downloadable content companies, to name a few.

The year is 2016, and we just hit PMF, baby! 🎉

Paddle's one-line pitch was this: "a platform for software companies to manage checkout, billing, customer relationships and run their business."

Software was now eating the world at an alarming pace.

By now, 80% of Paddle's customers were SaaS companies scaling internationally.

By choosing Paddle, they no longer had to figure out how to build internal teams, tooling, and expertise to support their further growth.

"The idea is to get the operational side of running a software company away from you. So you never have to deal with a payments processor again; if you want to take PayPal or credit cards or Alipay or local bank transfers in Brazil, we do it for you. You never have to file another VAT return; we file and pay taxes for you."

- Christian Owens, Founder and CEO of Paddle

On the back of this early growth, the team announced a $3.2M Series A — led by BGF Ventures, with participation from Spring Partners.

Today, Paddle has raised over $293.3Mn, with the latest Series D round of $200Mn raised in May this year, led by KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co) with participation from FTV Capital, 83North, Notion Capital, Kindred Capital, with debt from Silicon Valley Bank — valuing the London-based co. at a whopping $1.4 billion 🤩

"Paddle is solving a significant pain point for thousands of SaaS companies by reducing the friction and costs associated with managing payments infrastructure and tax compliance."

- Patrick Devine, a director at KKR

3000 customers. 200 markets. 2,475% revenue growth

Paddle's story is a masterclass in building a truly global SaaS behemoth.

So, how did they get SO big? Let's dive right in 👇🏼

Started from Payments, now we here 💪🏻

With Paddle, SaaS companies can focus on their business and product and not on 'revenue deliverability.'

Whether pre-launch or seeing early growth, every SaaS business must choose between either building or buying its payments stack.

Around for over nine years, Paddle has helped over 3,000+ SaaS companies across different stages: launch, early-stage, hyper-growth, and even IPO and exit-stage; sell faster, pivot easier, and be 100% tax-compliant and fraud-proof.

Long story short, Paddle helps offload the burden of managing payments and the associated liabilities by providing SaaS companies with the following:

💵 Checkout allows you to automate their entire Checkout workflow with customizable, flexible features, including multiple payment methods, languages, and win-back emails + post-purchase emails.

🚲 Subscriptions: From trial periods to flexible subscription APIs, dunning logic to subscription pausing, Paddle makes it easier to retain and expand your customer base throughout the entire lifecycle.

⚖️ Tax and Compliance: Paddle handles customer authentication, ensures SOC-compliant data protection, provides all necessary information on customer communications, and adheres to regional and international laws to protect you and the end customers.

📈 Reporting: Paddle's performance dashboards and downloadable reports help track your acquisition, recurring revenue, retention, and more. With downloadable reports, bespoke insights, and audience segmentation, you can focus your attention on accounts on the verge of churn.

🤑 Upsell insights feature groups customers from the same business domain who made purchases through your checkout. Your sales team can then upsell them into a more lucrative business account and send seamless invoices at a higher ACV.

With all of these use cases tied into a payments infrastructure, the decision to opt for Paddle is easily a no-brainer.

But let's dive into everything they're doing right to grab the loudest voice and share in the market👇🏼

🚶🏻‍♀️Walking the Product-led Talk

Growth happens slowly, and then, all of a sudden. ⛹🏻

True for high-growth companies and especially true for Paddle.

Back in the 2010s, Paddle did as much business in 2 and a half years as they do today, in A DAY!

The company runs a tight, Product-led Growth 🤝 Sales hybrid GTM motion.

This has helped them open the floodgates of the top of the funnel with the PLG motion while also ensuring that the closing happens👩🏻‍⚖️ and the money hits the bank💰 with the Sales motion.

🏷 Transparent Pricing

From the very beginning, Paddle ran itself purely self-serve. Its business model is a volume-based SaaS, with the service charging customers a flat-rate of 5% + $0.50 per transaction fee.

Today, Paddle has retained the same self-serve, pay-as-you-go pricing model for most software businesses.

However, for more complex businesses, with multiple products, selling in many markets, and needing many more features, you can Contact Sales for a customized package based on RoI assessment.

🎢 Seamless Onboarding

Paddle's onboarding process is surprisingly simple for a product that's so hard to explain in a 30-second elevator pitch.

A two-step process, and you're in! No cumbersome required fields.

Paddle's 2-step onboarding process to enter the sandbox...

Once you're in and have passed the domain, identity, and business verification checks, you can explore the sandbox and add products, subscription plans, bundles, coupons, and more.

The only fee that's deducted is once a transaction is processed.

🤑 Product-led Acquisition

Off their recent Series D acquisition, Paddle acquired financial-metrics company, Profitwell in a $200Mn cash and equity deal.

The rationale?

Both have a strong sense of shared mission: To help software companies grow faster and more efficiently by taking care of operational and financial hurdles.

Companies increasingly aren't just looking for tools to solve their problem but offload the solutionizing completely.

Riding on the new wave of "do it for you," Paddle benefits from Profitwell's industry-renowned subscription intelligence, which helps over 30,000 customers (yep, that's right) with its free-forever product, Profitwell metrics, with advanced reporting on all their subscription analytics, helping them reduce churn, get a clear picture of their revenue growth.

With this acquisition, Paddle owns the product and technology, and all of Profitwell's customers are now Paddle's customers.

Cross-selling and up-selling, then, is just a matter of time.

(and excellent account management + customer success!)

Payments and related services being a low-margin business, Paddle's acquisition is a classic playbook of creating an ecosystem of products under a more significant umbrella use case that helps establish the company as an authority on the subject (in this case, everything SaaS revenue and finance!), and help lock in customers' loyalty.

Instead of several vendors for different finance-related use-case: Stripe for collecting payments, Chargebee for subscription management, Avalara for tax compliance, and so on…cos. now simply have to go to Paddle, who then DOES IT ALL FOR YOU!

💆🏻 Optimized for YOU!

Software built but not sold is pointless. And Paddle knows this.

With their ICP etched in their GTM strategy, Paddle has broken down the complicated software buying process, into specific use cases, for SaaS companies of all sizes and stages.

For early-stage seed companies, Paddle's ready-to-go payments infrastructure and experienced support team let you focus on building your product.

For blitzscaling startups in the hyper-growth phase, Paddle helps you pivot into a new pricing model in days (instead of months), sell software globally (and be tax-compliant from day 1), introduce self-serve seamlessly, and unify self-serve and sales-assisted (by reconciling all revenue data).

For late-stage companies, Paddle makes their entire financial infrastructure integrated, open, and auditable, making them investment-ready, acquisition-ready, or even ready to go public. (yes, IPO!)

📑 Robust Content Strategy

As of Sep '22 - Oct '22, Paddle has raked in an average daily organic traffic of upwards of 70,000, totaling monthly organic traffic to +2.1Mn visitors. 💪🏻

Let's take a look at how they do this.

🔎 Now you SEO me

Paddle has created a content marketing and SEO engine that works in tandem. They publish highly-researched, quality content at godspeed. With 1,000+ website pages, most of the articles published are directly tied to intent and therefore have a high traffic value. ($55K+ in traffic value from organic traffic)

They rank for over 12,000 organic keywords in the 1st position for ~177 keywords, both branded and non-branded, such as net revenue retention, financial forecasting, product launching strategy, go-to-market strategy template, and volume pricing.

Most of their traffic is direct, having built a brand synonymous with their created category.

☠️ No-BS Blog

Divided into categories that directly matter to the ICP, the Paddle Blog covers SaaS insights, expert opinions, and talking points and provides a guide for growing a SaaS business. Most of the articles are written by in-house experts themselves. E.g. Andrew Davies, the CMO at Paddle, has authored a recently-published no-BS article on Changing SaaS Valuations and what founders need to keep in mind.

The content dives into the topic head-on, without the fluff, and provides standalone value. None of the articles are hard-selling. And if you're not actively looking, you might miss the subtle CTA plug at the end of the article.

✍🏼 Case Studies

With no-BS case studies, Paddle showcases the value it drives for its customers in a super-simple and easily understandable way.

Chloe Dormand is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Paddle, a frequent author on the blog, who has also just announced the first episode of Paddle's Vox-style video series, Verticals.

Verticals are spearheaded by Paddle's in-house show producer Ben Hillman and take a deep dive into top SaaS companies and the secret sauce to their success, companies that are pioneering their verticals and crushing the competition. Here's the latest one on How Skype blew a 10-year lead to Zoom 🔥

🗺 Sell More. Sell Globally = Increased TAM

Companies grow by increasing their TAM, their Total Addressable Market, which drives their ARR.

This approach to scaling their business has enabled Paddle to achieve 2,475% revenue growth in the four years leading to 2019.

The reality is fast-growing companies have all this stuff – they have marketers doing marketing, and they have product people. But that's not why they grow. The reason why they grow is they're in a great market. Software businesses are like any other business, like Starbucks, Pret A Manger, and McDonald's. They succeed because they are in more markets. They are in more locations, selling at more price points, and selling more products. And for software businesses, it's precisely the same.

- Ed Fry, ex-Growth at Paddle

It is this agile, global strategy that has enabled Paddle to witness the meteoric growth that it has.

The five north-star metrics for Growth at Paddle are:

• Monetization: Optimize the pricing.

• Product expansion: Design compelling standalone products, not features.

• International development: Enter into global markets.

• Moving downmarket: Offer self-serve options for individual users.

• Moving upmarket: Court enterprise customers.

Paddle uses data to determine which geographies they'll target next. Analyzing data from their sellers along with external data, Paddle's "software universe" enables them to identify which markets are ripe for expansion and assess what factors will lead to success in those regions.

Infographic by Paddle on why selling globally = increased TAM = increased ARR.

Next on their hit list? Asia and the Middle East. They've also ingrained the mindset of making small incremental changes to enter international markets. This could look as small as enabling payment methods of the local region, as opposed to needing a physical office there.

🤝 PLG meets Sales

A match made in heaven, Paddle has a free version of at least part of its offering via Profitwell, a completely no-touch, self-serve with transparent pricing (5% + 50¢ per transaction), and a "Contact Sales" CTA option for more complex businesses, that need Paddle to do most or all of the heavy lifting 🏋🏼‍♀️

The Sales team is led by Adam Kay, the SVP of Sales, and Tripp Brockway, the VP of Global Sales, and consists of a tight ship of Sales leaders, SDRs, AEs, and RevOps Managers.

Together the team owns all revenue metrics and is responsible for hitting the quarterly and annual quota.

This includes qualifying, prospecting, building rapport, identifying stakeholders (Champions, Decision-Makers, Legal, Procurement, Finance, etc.) in the client's consensus decision-making structure, determining best practices for navigating and influencing the conversation, and course, closing multi-figure deals.

(the company has not disclosed official revenues yet)

🔮 What's next? All Paddled up.

While there are several Merchants of Record (read: PayPal, Stripe, RazorPay) and several other vendors that help with tax compliance, fraud, revenue intelligence, and so on, Paddle has proven without a doubt that there is a business to be made by merging all the complicated, different moving parts into one well-oiled engine, and making software companies' lives a little bit lot easier for it.

When it comes to EVERYTHING that Paddle offers, there is no competition. As a market leader in a unique bring-it-all-together and do-it-for-you finance and payments category that they have created, the future might look bright for 28-year-old (yes, they've been around for ~ ten years now) Christian Owens and his team of Paddle-rs.

Off the fresh Series D funding and the Profitwell acquisition, international growth is definitely on the charts, along with a foray into ancillary products that provide standalone value.

The team has also just built an alternative to Apple's in-app payments service, giving app-makers more autonomy on how they charge customers, how much they pay, etc. The launch has been stalled because Apple's case with Epic (one of the most outspoken critics of IAP) has dragged on.

With aspirations like taking on Apple head-on, Owens and his team are keeping us all paddled up💪🏻—

In anticipation of the next phase of their growth story unfolding. 💥

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In the late ‘90s, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford published breakthrough research that underscored a crucial insight: that human beings react to computers with the same set of emotional reactions that they use to react to other human beings. This was pioneering work.

And yet, one of the first artifacts born from this research would go on to be featured in Time’s 50 worst inventions of all time, along with Agent Orange, CFCs, and sub-prime mortgages. Clippy: Microsoft’s infamous virtual office assistant.

Microsoft’s mistake was this (according to Alan Cooper, father of Visual Basic): If people were reacting to computers the same way they react to human beings, the one thing you didn’t have to do was anthropomorphize them by slapping a human face on them.

Humans had been doing user guides for over 2,000 years - since the one engraved into the Antikythera analog computer in ancient Greece. But the killing of Clippy was arguably an inflection point in user guides for our species.

20 years on, we’ve moved on from Clippy, may its soul rest in the seventh circle of hell, where it’s probably asking the devil: “It looks like you’re trying to keep the temperature up. Would you like some help?”

The advent of product-led growth gave us much more and much better data to better understand human-software interactions. Enough to at least place Nass/Byron’s research in the context of how we interact with software. SaaS in 2022 is more human than ever.

Product experiences of the Lyfts, ProfitWells, Amplitudes, or Freshworks of the world feel much more human today, thanks in large part to *cue intro music* Appcues.

🥵 A story of Shared Frustrations

When David Cancel, then the Chief Product Officer at Hubspot came over to Jonathan Kim’s desk, it was not to ask him to build something new.

He had noticed that Jonathan, then a Software Engineer at Hubspot, was either a 110 % there and super passionate about something or not at all. And of late, Jonathan had not been very passionate.

Yikes.

That struck a nerve.

The two got talking, and Jonathan talked about his frustration. He’d been building a lot of features for Hubspot— that was not getting used (or even discovered) by customers.

He also fervently spoke of user onboarding being a huge challenge and how he’d built a landing page, which could really be a whole product on its own.

‘The way you light up about that, that’s what you’re really passionate about. You should go do that,’ said David.

And that’s exactly what Jonathan did.

About 500 miles away from the Hubspot HQ in Cambridge, Jackson Noel faced a similar frustration while working on Growth for an EdTech Co, Testive in Boston.

Jackson focused a lot on top of the funnel, dialing in on ad campaigns and website conversions, only to see users falling completely flat on their faces after signing up for the product.

So, he shifted his focus to work on activation.

While experimenting with in-product onboarding, Jackson felt first-hand that, unlike anything top of the funnel, there was zero tooling to help them move faster.

To make a change in the onboarding, he had to first write a JIRA ticket.

Wait for that to get picked up.

And then building it was a whole mammoth task in itself.

Bonding over their shared frustrations, the two teamed up to start Appcues in 2013.

Owing to their solid background and the fact that there was a gaping need for a product like this, the duo picked up a $1.2Mn in seed funding in 2014 from Atlas Venture and angel investors Ty Danco, Dharmesh Shah (yes, the CTO of Hubspot), Brian Halligan, David Cancel, Elias Torres, Ric Calvillo, and others.

User onboarding is a key area of focus for online businesses in particular because, typically, less than 5 percent of new users will go on to become actively engaged. This is simply because the users don’t find value from the product quickly enough.

- Jonathan Kim, Founder at Appcues

Solving this pain point, the v1 of Appcues helped anyone, from Growth teams to Marketing teams, go from implementation to launch in <20 mins and build user onboarding that customers like love.

Some of the marquee clients that swear by Appcues today are heavyweights like Amplitude, Canva, Yotpo, and Typeform— all teams that are known for great user experience.

Today, Appcues does a lot more than user onboarding.

Jonathan describes the platform as an experience layer that sits atop your product, making it super easy for your product, marketing, growth, or customer success team to drive business value by creating delightful, timely, and personal product experiences for end-users.

Having raised a total of $52.8 Mn so far, with its latest Series B of $32Mn in January this year, is category-defining in many ways. Following the entry of Appcues, many other startups have birthed in the space.

But, Appcues has maintained its position as a category leader.

But how did they get here? Let’s dig a little deeper 👇🏼

Product-led above all else

Appcues is helping companies nail user-onboarding by providing low-code, non-technical solutions to both build and iterate in-app user experience.

The key use-cases they solve for are:

🛤 User Onboarding: With Appcues, one can make personalized, native-looking onboarding experiences for reduced TTV, and highly engaged users.

💪🏻 Feature Adoption Software: Low code, in-app product feature announcements, and guides to help you meet your users at the right time, accelerating feature adoption.

👩🏻‍💻 Insights: Code-free event tracking and beautiful data visualizations to measure product adoption and usage, hassle-free.

📄 Surveys: No better time to take user feedback than when they’re actively using your product. Appcues’ turnkey NPS prompts makes collecting actionable user feedback, easier than ever.

📣 Announcements: Move over dismal email open rates, and communicate with your users effectively while they’re actually using your product.

📱Mobile Adoption: A new feature, Appcues now allows you to improve mobile adoption, which would typically take weeks and a lot of Dev efforts’ in weeks.

So how are they getting customers (💸) themselves?

Let’s dig deeper 👇🏼

🆓 Free Trial, FTW!

Signing up for Appcues is super simple. The “Start building for free” CTA across its many website pages leads to ➡ a signup page. Simply input your work email - no credit card required. The free trial allows you to build 50 workflows, which could include onboarding experiences, NPS surveys, checklists, and more.

After you’ve exhausted the 50 workflows and experienced the convenience and ease of Appcues, you’ve gotta, of course: Upgrade to the Paid Plan. 💰

💰Transparent feature-based pricing

In feature-based pricing, your customers scale along with you as they expand. Appcues has three plans: Essentials🖌, for startups and SMBs; Growth📈, ideal for teams at high-growth companies and Enterprise💻, ideal for multiple products or enterprises.

Let’s take a look at each of them in greater detail:

🖌 Essentials: Starting at 249$ / mo, some of the takers for this plan are companies like Gorgias, Codepen, and Clearbit.

📈 Growth: At $879/mo, the Growth plan is ideal for high-growth companies. Some of the takers of this plan are heavyweights like Amplitude, Profitwell, and Privy.

💻 Enterprise: A custom, annual plan where you have to hop on a call with their Enterprise sales team to explore the pricing. Some of the marquee clients of the Enterprise plan are Freshworks and Pearson.

🧲 Lead Magnets, baby!

Appcues solves a very real problem for companies that usually would need design and engineering talent as well as a recurring investment in maintenance and iteration for enhanced in-app experiences.

To get the market to discover their product, they launched mini-apps like a Product-Launch Planner, Product Adoption Academy, User Onboarding Calculator, and their highest rated product on Product Hunt, Appcues 2.0: where the mini-apps drive organic discovery from high-intent users.

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🪄 Made with Appcues

With Made with Appcues, customers can access real tutorials from product and growth leaders who have been there and done that, i.e., built a product adoption engine with Appcues.

One can filter by use-case across Strategy, Retention, Onboarding, Launches, Feedback, and Adoption to access in-depth articles that cover “The Background,” i.e., the challenge faced, a step-by-step “Plan of Action” section, and to end the article, a section called “How we built it”

Their own version of templates to reduce TTV, the Made with Appcues workflows allow people to see the time estimate for each workflow, tools needed, and experience level preferred.

Each article is followed by the CTA “Build this” — which of course, leads you to the Appcues Studio.

🧩 Good UX with Appcues

Inspiring UX examples, proven frameworks, and hard-earned lessons from in-depth conversations with the product, design, customer success, and marketing experts to help you build user onboarding and product experiences that further turn your customers into champion users.

The Flow Gallery showcases a best-in-class UX gallery for use-cases like user onboarding, modal windows, product tour, and more from Appcues’ leading customers like LucidChart, PandaDoc, Gorgias, and Wistia to name a few.

👑 Content is (still) KING.

If there’s one theme that’s standing out across the leading product-led companies in the world, it is that they focus a lot on content marketing.

It's 2022, and content is clearly, still the undisputed king.

Appcues has a multi-pronged content marketing strategy, where most of their traffic comes (about 50%) comes from search, out of which a whopping 98.06 % is organic. Ranking for over 7K organic., the website garnered over 800K visits just last month.

Led by Ramli John, Appcues consistently churns high-quality, relevant, and well-researched articles to appeal to each of their ICP.

The Appcues Blog is strategically divided across categories that their ICP belongs to:

📈 For Growth folks, the Appcues blog is a goldmine of valuable resources. Articles such as 9 strategies to convert free trial users into paying customers, and Bite-sized user onboarding: How breaking things down can improve product adoption, not just help them rank, but indisputably make the Appcues blog a reliable resource for Growth professionals. Playing with the product, then, is just a matter of time (and patience).

💨 For Product Marketing, articles such as How to write release notes, and How to Plan a Product Launch, both written by Anand Patel, the Director of Product Marketing at Appcues himself, and others written by subject matter experts themselves, including Eric Keating, VP, Marketing at Appcues.

⌨️ For Product folks, the UX Design and Product Management blogs have blogs that educate, educate, add value, and of course, also subtly sell.

📰 For all product launches and feature announcements, or any other updates - they’ve got the News page.

💻 The Case Studies page showcases real companies (pretty impressive ones, at that) that have used Appcues to educate, delight, and convert end users. Articles like How ProfitWell used Appcues to increase first-week retention by 20% and How GetResponse boosted activation and adoption using Appcues do a pretty good job of detailing the results that Appcues is able to drive.

Webinars, both live and recorded for those that hate reading and would rather watch how it’s done!

Gated E-Books. The Product Experience Playbook - A how-to guide with over 20 proven strategies and tactics for creating more impactful product experiences at every stage of the journey.

Lead Capture? Provide value? Build authority? Check, check and check.

💌 Provide Value > Sell

Appcues truly wants their customers to win.

Nobody likes to be hard-sold to, and Appcues knows this.

So, what do they do instead? Provide their ICP with TONS of resources that enrich their professional life, and make them champions of all the use-cases that Appcues itself solves.

And wait till they are ready to try Appcues.

Charm them with magic (and results), until they ultimately—

BUY!

Kaching. 💰

Let’s break down the different ways Appcues provides value (for free) 👇🏼

I) Product-led Growth Collective 🍄

The Product-Led Growth Collective is a community-driven resource made for growth-minded folks by growth-minded folks. Industry leaders share the latest insights, strategies, and lessons learned from their own journeys to becoming product-led.

All of this, for free, just a subscribe button away.

And who are some of the contributors to the community, you ask?

Only the best minds of the Product-led world, from world-class companies like PostScript, Klaviyo, Vidyard, and Figma, to name a few.

The Collective has a series called Voice of Product, where they put product leaders in the hot seat, and ask them hard-hitting and insightful questions. Season 2 is out here.

II) Product Adoption Academy 💻

The Product Adoption Academy is a collection of courses taught by experts and with real-world examples for millions of readers to better understand product-led growth, adoption, UX design, and product strategy.

Currently, the five courses offered are User Onboarding 101, Product Launches 101, Free-to-Paid Conversion, Value-first Onboarding taught by Andrew Capland, former Head of Growth at Wistia, and Postscript and Mobile App Onboarding 101 taught by Ankit Jain, former Head of Search, Google Play (Android).

They’ve also got a course on User Engagement that’s coming soon. Taught by none other than Nir Eyal (yup, that guy that wrote Hooked.)

Best part? All of this is entirely free.

Crazy, right?

Not so much if you think about how each of their learners mastering any of the above use-cases also becomes a potential user of the Appcues platform. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Heavy Sales Motion 🪴

Ron DeCanio leads the revenue function at Appcues as its CRO. With a stellar record, previously leading as VP of Sales, at MuleSoft - Ron, and his team of Sales Leaders, SDRs, and AEs are collectively responsible for prospecting, and researching new accounts, conducting thorough Demo’s of the Appcues platform, testing with potential customers of any technical workflow and providing proof of concept, as and when needed.

Once the free trial ends, an Account Executive takes over helping a prospect buy Appcues and become a customer. They own negotiation and introduce new customers to the Customer Success Team to ensure that a great experience continues after the handoff.

Owing to their strong Product-led Sales motion, Appcues currently caters to over 4,000 customers and has powered over 1.8 billion end-user experiences to date.

What’s next? 🔮

Vexed by the sheer number of resources and the time it took to create simple in-app experiences to delight end-users, Jonathan Noel and Jackson Noel teamed up to revolutionize the way we companies onboard new users, about 8 years ago.

Today, they do a lot more.

Having raised a Series B $32Mn earlier this year, the team led by the dynamic duo is set to go all guns blazing on their shared passion for making elevated product experiences a reality for teams worldwide. At a fraction of the cost and resources.

In Jackson’s own words, they plan to use the fresh funds to invest in I) their team II) the product, and III) research and content to help customers win (yes, this means more free and insight-rich courses at the Product Adoption Academy).

Appcues has already hit it out of the park, beating a lot of its competitors on most of the ranking criteria on G2 (read: Ease of Use, Product Direction, Ease of setup)

So, will they reach the coveted billion-dollar zip code?

Well, if the soaring high NPS score of 81 ⭐️ is anything to go by, it certainly does seem like it.

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Think of something, and the ancient Greeks probably thought of it first.

Democracy, geometry, airplanes, alarm clocks. Even cement! They even vaguely thought of the idea of automation first.

Yep, you heard that right.

The story goes that Hephaestus, the God of metalworking, made ‘assistants’ out of gold to help him in his workshop. He also sculpted golden dogs to guard the palace of Alcinous and Talos.

Oh, and a giant bronze man to protect Crete.

These assistants (basically, robots) ‘automated’ parts of his work, and while the automatons were moved by magic rather than technology, such stories point to an early human notion of giving inanimate objects the power of movement in order to complete simple, repetitive tasks.

In Ancient Greece, you had to have the power of a God to create robots and automate processes.

2000 years later, Tray.io is here to make sure even us mere mortals can do it.

Founders Rich, Ali, and Dom built a platform that uses a graphical interface to allow businesses to configure complex workflows, integrate apps, and add customized logic to create new ways of working with data.

All of this without the need for a dev team dedicated to integration.

The magic of their low-code platform that lets even nontechnical folks build out automation for their day-to-day role is why Tray.io is valued at $600M today, with heavyweight brands like IBM Cloud, Cisco, Vox, Lyft, Mixpanel, and Forbes on their client list.

But how did they get here?

🐢 Slow and steady wins product-market fit…eventually

Tray’s insane growth trajectory included a lot of stops and starts before it finally took off.

The year is 2012 ⏱

Richard Waldron, Alistair Russell, and Dominic Lewis - friends who shared a love of tech and worked together on a couple of projects - decided to venture out on their own.

To fund themselves while they built out their product, the founders quite literally ‘bootstrapped’ their company - by selling (and delivering) wellington boots on eBay, starting a 20-person marketing agency from scratch, launching a magazine, and of course, running into huge amounts of debt. 🤯

They did all this - for an entirely different product.

The initial idea for Tray was an email automation platform that would sort incoming messages before they reached your inbox. It was designed to help people handling large volumes of emails easily read and respond to the most important ones.

“While working on a previous product back on AngelPad in 2012, we wanted to find out if any investors had signed up for our product. We realized that writing the code to figure this out (looping through Mailchimp & Angellist to create the list) was extremely time-consuming and hard to scale, we couldn’t believe there wasn’t a better, more efficient way to do it, that’s when the idea for Tray was born,” - Rich Waldron

The year is 2015 ⏱

It was the frustration the founders felt while trying to integrate their tech stack and automate processes - since they couldn’t afford to hire more team members - that they hit upon the idea for what is today, Tray.io.

Rich, Ali, and Dom realized that a product that could help them do this was way more valuable than something that helped you sort out your email.

And that’s when things started looking up.

To test their idea, the trio built a heavy Salesforce integration system which helped them secure their first big round of funding - $2M from investors including True Ventures, AngelPad, Redpoint, and Passion Capital in 2015.

🐻 Hibernation mode

Then something strange happened.

Instead of going the usual route of seeking further investment while building out the product and talking to customers, the founders took the money, left SF, and spent the next couple of years in London perfecting their product.

“We were so passionate about the problem we were solving, and we were so clear on how we wanted this product to be, we sort of ignored most of the fundamentals and kind of built exactly the way you’re not meant to.” - Rich Waldron

While this was definitely an uncommon approach - it worked for them.

The year is 2016 ⏱

All the founders had was an idea for a product with a couple of integrations they’d built for demo days. It took them 4 years to figure out all of the integrations they needed, how the platform would look and how to build a GUI for people who weren’t dev experts.

The year is 2020 ⏱

When they finally came out of stealth mode, Tray.io had a whole new interface, could integrate with over 200 software products🤯, and allowed customers to create custom workflows in minutes. 💨

And most importantly, they were right on time.

In 2020, SaaS was exploding - which meant companies needed resources to integrate all their interlocking software.

And Tray.io was right there to deliver.

Their strong belief in automation - and the need to help everyone automate - is what sets Tray.io apart.

To realize their vision, the founders at Tray effectively created a whole new brand of people, who they call citizen automators. Citizen automators are people who aren’t developers or don’t know any complex code - but still want to automate their workflows.

And Tray’s low-code, user-friendly makes this happen. 🙌🏼

Today Tray.io includes more than 600 ‘connectors’ - which help you connect different apps - without using any code! Their platform now enables users to connect apps through a drag-and-drop UI, and they’ve also launched Tray Embedded, a white label offering to companies who want to use Tray for their clients and partners.

And that’s not all, they’ve raised over $100M in funding - $87M in just 6 months! —from some of the biggest names, including GGV Capital, Meritech Capital, Mosaic Ventures, Spark Capital, and True Ventures.

Over 200 of the world’s biggest brands are using Tray right now - a customer base that’s also increasing by 400% each year. 🤯

Their estimated revenue as of 2019 stands at $15M, with an ARR growing over 450% YoY.

Phew.

Positioning itself as an integration marketplace, Tray is making costly IT investments in integrating workflows, a thing of the past.

In a space where they’re competing with the likes of Zapier and Workato. So, what are they getting right?

Let's dig deeper. 👇🏼

📦 Product-led above all else

Tray is filling in a need in the automation space in a spot between high-end tools like Mulesoft (bought by Salesforce for $6.5 billion) and simpler tools like Zapier.

Creating a workflow on Tray is literally a 5-step process. Step 1: Trigger, which can be as simple as a lead uploaded on Marketo (or any other CRM), Step 2: Plugging in the Source Data, aka the key information that will be used in the workflow, Step 3: Logic which is steps that determine what needs to be done with the input information, Step 4: Formatting aka manipulating the data to transform it into the form needed for the final destination or action, and Step 5: Action, aka what we’re going to do with the information, which can be as simple as a Slack notification or an Email to all sales reps, etc…

Here’s how Tray gets people to see value in its automation platform 👇🏼

🆓 Free Trial, FTW!

Tray.io has no fear of leading with its product. Businesses can access their standard plan - free for 14 days. No credit card required. The plan allows prospects to test out all their connectors (currently at over 400). You can set up simple workflows in about 5 mins - so prospects can begin to see value almost immediately.

And if you’d like to try more complex stuff, the free trial includes access to Tray Academy - which has detailed tutorials and courses on how to use Tray.io. Once prospects have spent the time learning how to automate - the buying decision becomes as easy as pie.

👯‍♀️ Invite ‘em all!

The free trial allows you to invite all your teammates to automate or tweak existing workflows made on Tray.io, thus getting more people in your company to witness the magic of the platform (and thus, decreasing time to value further) and making a buying decision easier.

🏷 Pay-per-use Pricing

Tray’s focus on flexibility - both on the product and the customer experience side is what sets them apart.

This continues in their pricing strategy. They price based on workflows - starting at $595/month. And since everything is customized to specific needs - this is reflected in the pricing (which needs a 1:1 for an estimate).

🌏 Explore your way!

If you do not have admin authentication for any of the apps you’d like to connect and create workflows with, Tray.io also gives you the option of viewing a recorded demo, attending a live one, or scheduling a 1:1 with their sales team.

The choice is yours.

🔥 All use cases covered.

To ease the buying decision further, Tray has also presented everything the platform can do, based on its several use cases, and give you a demo based on YOUR need.

If you need to use Tray for Marketing automation workflows like personalized email, lead scoring and routing, Data enrichment, or happy customer detection; then you can simply get a demo specific to your use case.

Similarly, they’ve got solutions that automate mundane tasks and power ECommerce, IT, Marketing Ops, Sales, Sales Ops, and Product. By assorting the magic of automation, specific to the way in which one function can benefit—each persona knows exactly what’s in it for them.

🧩 Templates, galore.

Users, especially non-technical folks, can utilize ready-built workflow templates to save time or understand concepts of how to build in Tray.

The templates page on the website covers is, by default, arranged in the order of most popular workflows, some of which include: Export Salesforce query to new Google Sheet, Collect Hubspot form submissions to Salesforce, Notify Slack when Salesforce opp is closed won, Extract AWS S3 Data as JSON.

The templates are further divided into Departments, Connector apps, and Experience levels (Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced) to make navigation easier.

Reduced TTV? Hell, yes.

🗣️ Great logos = Turbocharged WOM

Tray.io managed to crack the impossible and get big-name brands to join their platform as early adopters. In fact, one of their first ten customers ended up being a 350k employee organization.

Early customers included Digital Ocean, Expensify, Vox, Buzzfeed, Zycus, Meteor, and Keen.IO. Some pretty big names for a small company.

Getting these orgs onboard helped bring on board other large companies - which was also driven by the testimonials Tray.io showcased on their platform.

“We were deliberate about landing some key logos early on, we felt it would help to build trust with future prospects” - Rich Waldron

Today Tray.io customers include everyone from IBM to Lyft and Forbes.

Besides their A-list customers, Tray.io also doubled down on partnering with great B2B tech stack companies to catapult their growth further. They onboarded orgs across lead management, customer engagement, and customer data platforms to help deliver an even more seamless experience for customers. Their partners today include brands like DropBox, Drift, Segment, Zendesk, Salesloft, Copper, Qualtrics, Intercom, and Marketo.

This helped them drive insane word-of-mouth marketing - rarely used as a primary marketing strategy - but Tray.io clearly wasn’t interested in doing everything by the book.

👑 Content is King

For all stages of the funnel, Tray.io’s content serves three primary purposes: educating its customers, demonstrating the value of its product, and generating top-of-the-mind awareness.

Let’s take a look at how they do this.

🔎 You reap what you SEO

About 50% of Tray’s website traffic comes from search - out of which 86% is organic. Out of the 25K+ organic keywords that Tray ranks for, some of the top ranking are longtail keywords such as Facebook salesforce integration, how do APIs work.

Once prospects begin to trust Tray for all its integration needs, Tray.io primes them for more.

🪄 Reducing TTV via content

A dedicated Customers page showcases value-driven case studies that are used to demonstrate the value of Tray’s platform for potential customers.

The case study covers the use-case (challenge faced) by some of its biggest logos, and its exact solution deployed, the results achieved, the company type, and a lot more in a highly informative way.

By social proofing in this way, Tray.io is able to establish credibility and authority in the space. And of course, all of the case studies lead to Get a Demo as the Call-to-action.

📖 Educate, Educate, Educate. Sell.

If there’s one thing their content team is really serious about, it’s customer education. Tray provides a ton of resources - in multiple formats - to help customers learn how to use their platform.

This includes:

• Webinars and events - both live and pre-recorded

• Detailed How To blogs on how to use Tray for a myriad of use cases.

• Deep-dives with detailed walk-throughs on important software processes and full API breakdowns of the tools businesses use daily.

• Trends, mostly penned by their featured author, Andrew Park, Director of Content, establishes Tray as the ultimate authority on Automation. Some of the many topics include: How your business turns chat automation into revenue and Gartner 2022 insights on Hyperautomation.

• Tray Academy - which they redesigned in 2022 to make it easier than ever for customers to build integrations. The microsite includes free, self-paced courses for beginners - they also plan to add courses for users of all levels in the near future. Academy is a playbook that’s playing out across a range of PLG companies - Gong, Webflow, and Pendo to name a few.
  

  

  
  

👬 Retention > Acquisition

Once you end up signing up to Tray - the platform does everything it can to keep you.

Tray.io’s customer success team is focused on building powerful, scalable CX programs with a combination of deep, nuanced customer insights and a flexible strategy around technology that rapidly retrieves and combines customer details with highly personalized messaging.

Here’s how Tray.io keeps retention rates high and customers happy:

• Excellent customer support: Most of the G2 reviews can’t stop talking about how great their support experience with Tray has been. Since Tray’s focused on building ‘citizen automators’ - a great support service to hand-hold newbies are even more important for them. Tray.io offers two types of customer support plans - Standard and Premium. When a customer has a query, they can raise a ticket, and the customer support team takes over. The super cool thing about Tray’s customer support is that support teams can take over when customers are stuck and build out the rest of the workflow for them!
  
  Now, that’s excellent service.
  

  

• Professional and advisory services: Tray.io also offers new citizen automators upfront onboarding plans designed to help them become Tray experts. Plans range from a Starter onboarding, for those with API experience, to a robust Foundations 2, that provides hands-on guidance, training, and co-design services to help create your first Workflow. For enterprise clients who need bespoke solutions, Tray.io offers professional services to manage large volumes of data and help with building custom workflows. Customers get access to 1:1 onboarding with Tray technical experts who you can also hire to build out your workflows for you. This helped them speed up integration development for enterprise customers while also achieving quicker time-to-value.
  

  

🧑🏽‍💻 Data for growth

Using data to predict (and decrease) churn rates: Tray uses software like Segment and Gong to listen to their customers and understand where they need support - and where they’re most likely to drop off.

Bella Renney, Head of Product at Tray.io built a customer retention model using data they collected from Segment.

As Tray.io went into the hyper-growth mode, it faced a three-dimensional challenge to scale its number of engaged and retained users. Using Segment, her team was able to identify a number of factors that could cause churn and then designed various touchpoints to prevent this from happening.

The result? A 20% increase in customer engagement - for all users.

Listening to sales conversations on Gong also helped the leadership team understand the gaps in their sales process. They revised their messaging, launched new training, and then used Gong to make sure that all of those learnings were being implemented.

The result? A 40% increase in booked meetings!

🤝 Get others to sell for you

Tray.io’s platform was delivering such value for B2B customers that the leadership team noticed that many of their customers were using Tray.io for their customers as well. This wasn’t just word-of-mouth - their customers were actually doing the selling for them!

To capitalize on what was already happening, the product team at Tray.io built integrations for Tray.io’s products that were often being sold to third parties. The Marketing team also got involved and introduced channel partnerships to make it easier for third parties to sell Tray.io.

In 2019, they launched Tray Embedded, a unified service for products, services, and sales teams with a drag-and-drop workflow builder. The integrations are white-labeled which made it even easier for companies to sell their services using Tray.io.

“We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Tray Embedded and our customers are experiencing notable success after implementing the platform into their operations. Since last July, Tray Embedded has gained nearly 60,000 new end-customers,” Rich Waldron

🪴 Heavy Sales motion

While they may have started slow - sales is one of Tray.io’s biggest verticals now. Nate Gemberling, the Head of Sales was brought on a year after their first Series A fundraise of $5M and got to work building out the sales motion.

In 2019, Nate grew his AE team from 3 to 20, and revenue grew by 3x. But he isn’t taking all the credit for that.

A lot of our growth was attributed to an extremely strong product, also Alex Ortiz and the marketing team built an incredible marketing engine which kept the AE team swimming in leads! - Nate Gemberling

Sales is now approx 50% of the team at Tray.io. And they continue to hire!

In 2022, with expansion plans for the EMEA and APAC, the demand for sales is growing globally. Tray.io is actively hiring across all sales teams - and geographies!

The only way from here is up.

⏩ What’s next for the future of automation?

Tray.io may have spent some time in hibernation - but it’s all systems go from here on out.

Since 2019, after receiving their Series C round of funding of a whopping $50M - just a few short months after their Series B closed - Tray.io has been hyper-focused on growth.

They plan to expand GTM operations and their presence in EMEA and APAC and are working on providing both multinational and regional customers with enhanced sales, support, and implementation coverage.

By adding advanced-level courses and further building out Tray Academy, they’re working on increased capacity-building opportunities for their citizen automators, by adding advanced-level courses and building out Tray Academy.

We can’t wait to see what the automation platform for the future of work is going to do next.

Haven’t subscribed yet? Are you kidding? Go on, hit it 👇🏼

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See Toplyne in action! 🎯 (It's free)

On a Friday night in September of 1982, a thousand teenagers from all over Stockholm filled the halls of the Fridhemsplan metro station, completely freaking out the two police officers who were on duty that night.

These kids weren’t drunk. They weren’t protesting. They weren’t demonstrating. This was no motorcycle gang or a gathering of anarchists. What the hell was going on?

Spare a penny for the thoughts of Kjell Andersson, the police commissioner on duty that night.

“They were everywhere,” he says. “On the roof of the bus shelter and the election booths, in the trees and the power lines. But they scattered when we arrived”

A thousand teenagers had gathered at Fridhemsplan just because they had agreed to. They just stood there in loosely connected groups and talked to each other.

The Swedish police would later find out that a bug in the telephonic systems had allowed people dialing vacant phone numbers to talk to each other for free. These heta linjen (hotlines) numbers had spread among the Swedish youth like wildfire and culminated in a group of thousand strangers arranging a meet-up at the local metro station.

So when Commissioner Andersson asked himself, “What the F is going on here?” the press would answer it the next day with “heta linjen-upploppet: the hotline riot.”

But what the Commissioner was really witnessing that autumn evening in Stockholm was a feature of a broader pattern that would later play out at grander scales with the early internet, the mid-pandemic boom of companies like Clubhouse, and closer to home, patterns of software adoption and purchases: mankind’s unbridled yearning to build and form communities.

If you’re a SaaS company today, communities are the turbochargers hooked up to your roaring PLG V8 growth engines. And the top of the line models (Think Figma, Notion, Confluent, Asana) all have one thing in common:

They’re all powered by Common Room.

A story of 3 aha moments ✨

For Common Room founder Linda Lian, the aha moment was distilled and purified through the course of her relatively unorthodox career trajectory - one that took her closer and closer to the source of the magic and the action.

• Aha (1/3): As an early-stage investor at Madrona Venture Capital, she dived deep into the open-source and open-core spaces and discovered a world where software was beginning to be built and distributed differently

• Aha (2/3): Leading Product Marketing at AWS for serverless computing, she was at the epicenter of the rise of developers, the bottoms-up adoption of software, and the early days of product-led growth

• Aha! (3/3): There was a growing trend of a community-first ethos evolving where cross-functional teams were now tapping into and engaging directly with the developer community and conversations across platforms like Slack, Reddit, Stack Overflow, GitHub, etc.

In this new world where community engagement was moving from being a nice-to-have to becoming a core ingredient of growth, Linda observed that there was a lack of management tooling for these cross-platform communities. Because keeping up with these conversations was a largely manual effort, end-users often found themselves screaming into a void.

In February 2020, Linda incorporated Common Room and, in the following month, raised $4.3M in seed funding from Index Ventures. This was followed by a $16.3M Series A led by Index, with participation from 01 Advisors and Next Play Ventures.

She found her co-founders through cold outreach on what she calls “Tinder for Enterprise” - LinkedIn.

She first brought on board Francis Luu, product designer at Facebook, followed by Viraj Mody and Tom Kleinpeter - who had previously sold a business to Dropbox. Needless to say, Linda had put together a team of heavyweights.

In April 2021, Common Room came out of stealth, announcing a $32.3 million Series B funding round led by Greylock.

In March earlier this year, two years after incorporation, the platform announced its general availability to the world - along with a customer line-up that features Asana, Atlassian, Confluent, dbt Labs, Figma, Grafana, Webflow, Hubspot, Coda, and others.

The latest funding round puts Common Room’s valuation in the $300M zip code. The Common Room rocketship is kicking into high gear slowly but surely. Let’s take a peek under the hood of this fledgling growth engine.

But before that…

What is Common Room?

Common Room is an intelligent community growth platform that lets you

• Tune into all the “rooms” and spaces where your community engages, and

• Marry these conversations with business data - product usage, CRMs, etc. and bring it into one common room.

Common Room is currently used by community-led growth teams across Web3, commercial open-source, and PLG SaaS.

Their community growth platform today gives you:

• Unified views of individual members across every channel

• Insights and trends to understand community health

• Workflows and alerts to respond to key member milestones

All this and much, much more. With over 20+ native integrations to your various disparate community sources, you can get started with Common Room in literal minutes.

A Community-first approach to building 1️⃣

The Common Room founders built a community first before they even wrote a line of code. The Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) is primarily community builders, Developer Advocates, and those in DevRel roles. Linda spent half a year tapping into CommonRoom’s emerging community (now called Uncommon) and went on a PMF journey with them through Figma mockups and hand-drawn prototypes.

This community-first approach to building Common Room helped in two pivotal ways:

• It helped Linda and the team pinpoint the pain point. What were community growth teams really lacking in their current roles? Where was the opportunity?

• Linda had started Common Room with a vision to become the “one tool to rule them all,” replacing the Slacks and Discords of the world. Conversations with the ICP realigned the team to the reality that these teams weren’t looking for yet another place to host communities. They were looking for a platform to orchestrate all of these fragments from one HQ.

“I remember telling my three co-founders and our founding engineer that we needed to start from scratch and feeling a bit queasy. But we listened to our community, and we’ve never looked back.” - Linda Lian, CEO & Co-founder

Emerge from Stealth like Iron Man from a cave 🦸🏻‍♀️

Linda and the team drove Common Room’s PMF journey and product roadmap in stealth mode. This was a novel space with little to no precedent. The team of 4 co-founders leveraged their existing networks and worked with community growth teams at PLG giants such as Figma, Asana, and Confluent to iron out a community intelligence platform that perfectly solved the pain points these teams faced every day.

In April 2021, Common Room emerged out of Stealth with marquee names already using their product and even more big logos (like Notion and Pulumi) signing up for pilots.

“We have business goals around the engagement level of our community, and we use Common Room to analyze key engagement metrics to help grow the community,” - Aaron Kao, VP of Marketing at Pulumi

Coming out of stealth, Linda revealed Common Room’s BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) in a LinkedIn post:

“Over time, we’ll also be for the product teams, the support teams, the marketing teams, and customer teams who want to stretch their hand out across the organizational boundary of their companies to engage with the people who use their products day in and day out.”

Bottoms up! 🆙

In March 2022, the Common Room team announced the platform’s general availability to the world. The doors of Common Room were now open to community teams across the globe.

Today, you can start on the platform’s Team plan on a 30-day free trial. The “Free forever” rung is great for individuals and small teams - as long as you don’t need more than 3 data exports, alerts, and engagement workflows.

Enterprise features such as advanced RBAC, SAML-based SSO, SCIM provisioning, and integrations to Snowflake, Salesforce, etc. are available through a “Get in touch” button that routes you to the Sales team.

Content Room 📚

Common Room is scaling its content engine to become a long-term growth lever across a few not so un-common channels:

• 📕 Case studies - Armed with big logos using the platform, Common Room case studies drive BoFu (Bottom of the Funnel) conversions and social proofing

• 🎙 Engage the ICP - Through their podcast series “Uncommon conversations”, the team generates engagement among community and DevRel leaders

• 🔽 A BoFu blog strategy - Common Room’s blog is a treasure trove for anyone who’s looking to ride the wave of community-led growth and make tactical decisions about their community infrastructure. We love it. *wink wink*

Uncommon 👯‍♂️

Common Room’s own community was kicked off even before the product was. Today, “Uncommon” is a 1,400-member strong community for community builders and DevRel leaders.

The community drives:

• Product roadmap & success - through feature requests, support, feedback, and bug reports

• Engagement & value - through community deep-dives, IRL meetups, and job boards

• Acquisition - This community of community builders is also a long-term driver of acquisition for Common Room’s ever-evolving product

A Sales Boost 👊🏼

With demand that’s currently outpacing their bandwidth, Common Room is currently hiring for AEs to add to their Sales team in their move to go upmarket. Selling a novel product in the up-and-coming intersection of Product-led growth and community-led growth, Common Room’s AEs will likely play a huge role not just in closing deals but also in working with product and product-marketing teams to define this new category and distilling a product that evolves with the market.

If you see yourself being a roomie, you can find open roles at Common Room here.

Here’s what’s cooking 👩‍🍳

“I really had the story of Common Room in my head, and not because I’m so brilliant, but because I’ve seen the power of community for a lot of our companies. We’ve entered a period of time where more informed people are choosing their own tools,” says Sarah Guo, partner at Greylock who led Common Room’s series B round.

As more and more PLG companies head into a community-led world and future, Common Room’s head-start in the community intelligence category holds them in good stead to capitalize on this emerging trend.

Taking hints from recent feature releases sourced from the community - bulk messaging, “workflows,” and “topics,” Common Room is all but done with arming community builders with a weapon to fast-track their community-led growth.

Linda and the team continue to channel the consulting mindset from their days in stealth mode, where the product roadmap was fleshed out through end-user conversations, and Product-Market Fit (PMF) is defined as a journey rather than a moment in time.

Look out - Common Room is about to become commonplace. And sooner than you think.

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