It’s been 10 months since we founded Toplyne.

We set out on this journey when we noticed the emergence of some groundbreaking trends in the market and in the world: the rise of the developer, the growth of the creator economy, and the explosion of data teams and platforms. And at the center of it all - the rise of the individual contributor.

The locus of software buying decisions has moved from the ivory towers to the bustling trenches. From the C-suite to the end-user.

And there’s a new sheriff in town - product-led growth.

Just look at the early stages of the SaaS market. Over 90% of newly minted founders in 2022 are building for a PLG motion. The SaaS GTM default has changed. PLG is in, boring old sales and marketing-led growth are out.

B2C phenomena like virality, referrals, and free usage have exploded the B2B top-of-funnel. SaaS companies today have more users than ever before. Canva has more users than Robinhood and Airbnb combined. The days of worrying about top-of-the-funnel are over.

However, the new sheriff has rolled into town with a new villain on their tail. The battle for SaaS companies has shifted from the fields of acquisition to the plains of monetization.

Most hyper-growth product-led companies have sub 1-2% conversion rates.

It’s been just under a year since we set out to build Toplyne, but the pain point we solve is far more relevant than ever. SaaS multiples are at all-time lows. ARR is back in vogue. PLG SaaS companies need their free users to convert to paid plans. And they need it to happen yesterday.

Toplyne lets businesses monetize their product-led growth flywheel.

We’re committed to giving growth teams at PLG companies a platform to tap into the goldmine of product analytics data at their disposal, to rapidly hypothesize, experiment, test and deploy GTM levers available to them at scale.

10 months in, customers of Toplyne leverage the platform to orchestrate a wide variety of GTM activities. Be it sales-assisted conversions with a high-velocity inside sales team, self-service team expansions through a chatbot, product-led conversions through a smart paywall (more on this later 😉), or good old targeted email campaigns to convince high-intent users to convert.

And today, we’re thrilled to announce that we have raised $15M in Series A funding to turbocharge that mission.

We’re partnering with some of the world’s best venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global who co-led this round, with participation from existing investors Together Fund, Sequoia India’s Surge, and angel investors from Canva, Vercel & Zoominfo.

Pretty cool right? 15 million. But before we go any further… let’s address the elephant in the room.

What is a 10 month old company to do with $15M of capital?! 🤯

Here are 15 reasons why we raised $15M 💵

As we look ahead to the future, and our new investment, our focus will be on a few key themes:

• Building our own PLG motion
• Executing our long term product roadmap
• Scaling our content engine
• Building growth communities
• Setting up our GTM team. Sales, growth, product marketing, you name it.
• SKUNKWORKS 🦨  making progress towards our real hidden ambition 😉

That’s a LOT! So let's take it one at a time.

Launching our own PLG motion

It’d be super weird if we aren’t product-led ourselves right?

We’re committed to not being hypocritical losers. Here’s what that means:

#1: Going freemium

SaaS is evergreen. We’re fortunate to be in a market that will roughly grow 30% YoY forever. Taking this compounding worldview into account, simple math dictates that 99% of our future customers haven’t been born yet. We want to catch ‘em young.

If you’re starting a PLG company today, Toplyne should be able to render you your PLG GTM infrastructure right out of the box.

We’re committed to launching a freemium product in the next quarter that you can take out for a test drive before you decide to fully deploy.

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Get early access - It's free!

#2: A delightful onboarding

SaaS is getting consumerized and gone are the days of wrestling with shitty enterprise UX. We want our product experience to be as seamless as hailing a cab on Uber, buying stocks on Robinhood, or designing a creative on Canva. 🎨

We want teams to be able to use Toplyne off the shelf. And a big part of that is the ability to get started in seconds, with minimal friction, and human intervention only if you need it.

#3: Always go full self-serve

We’re laser-focused on launching a self-serve product within the next quarter to onboard our growing list of 1000+ waitlisted customers. We’re super close! Just hold on for a few more months. 🙈

#4: Zero to Revenue. Immediately.

If PLG is a sport, the best players have the lowest TTV (time to value) stat.

We’re working on reducing our TTV from a couple of days to a few minutes. We do the engineering heavy-lifting so you don’t have to. Be it through in-product nudges (chatbots, paywalls, promos) or sales-assisted conversions through high-velocity inside-sales teams, we want growth teams to see results through Toplyne immediately.

Executing our long term product roadmap

#5: Our next product

The way we think about it, Year #1 was our first act.

Our second act is all about going deeper in the growth stack and closing the loop on conversions. In-product nudges, sales assist, enterprise sales, you name it. Sounds vague right? Unfortunately, my colleagues haven’t allowed me to say much more 🤐

Okay shh… don’t tell them I said this.

We’re building a DPaaS. Dynamic Paywall as a Service 🤑

F*%K! I’ve said too much… they’re gonna kill me ☠️

Let me get back to the teleprompter 👇🏻

#6: Templates… with a Toplyne twist 🌪

Growth templates from the best PLG companies. User conversions, Team expansions, selling ELAs.

Click and shoot. No more DIY hell of figuring out a new tool from scratch.

So what’s the twist? Coming up in T-3 months 🔜

#7: We’re hiring nerds at a global scale 🤓

Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, Data Scientists, DevOps, you know the drill!

Explore the hidden world of B2B SaaS but at B2C scale. Work with trillions of clickstream events, 10s of millions of users, and a few unassuming terabytes of data from the likes of Canva, Grafana, and Gather.town

Click this for a PLG job 💯

Culture

#8: Building a culture of experimentation 🧪

“One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.” - some famous guy named Jeff

We hear you, Jeff.

We’re here to build something enduring and legendary for the decades to come. And a culture of experimentation is going to be at the heart of that ambition.

Content

#9: Do more 🏃🏻‍♂️

In the last ten months, we’ve broken down the growth stories of ~50 product-led giants and covered the hottest news in the space every single week. As we build for the product-led world, we aspire to be narrators and storytellers of this glorious movement - shouting stories of success from the rooftops.

On the back of this latest round, we hope to take our content to new heights - the battles fought at our engineering desk, our lessons from designing a consumer-grade product in the B2B space, and more.

“Do more!” That’s 2022 in a nutshell at Toplyne.

#10: Distribution. Distribution. Distribution 🏃🏻‍♂️

If 2021 was all about content creation, 2022 is when we shift some of that focus to actively pursue a broader distribution. We want to reach you where you are, wherever you are - Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, TikTok, you name it.  Get ready to see a whole lot more of us 😎

Community

#11: A home for the growth scenius 🏡

The greatest feats of human creativity have all been feats of “scenius”, or communal genius. Toplyne is a sandbox for your most creative GTM experiments. We want to build a community of growth professionals to combine the potential of the Toplyne sandbox with the power of community.

#12: The world needs more growth teams 🚀

Within the next year, we aim to launch a combination of owned and partnership first cohort-based courses (CBCs). But more about this towards the EOY.

Down to serious business… go-to-market 📊

#13: Further investment in customer success 🏃🏻‍♂️

If our customers succeed so do we. It’s as simple as that.

We’re hiring. Click here to work with some of the best PLG businesses in the world.👇🏻

#14: Sales 🤑

“Revenue solves all known problems” - some smart dude called Eric... Schmidt? Probably.

We’re a revenue first company. Shocking, right? A startup that wants to make money 😱

We’re hiring salespeople, SDRs, and BDRs to set up the printing presses in Toplyne HQ. If you enjoy smashing past your sales quotas, signup for your next gig below👇🏻

Skunkworks 🦨

#15: Make meme-led growth the SaaS GTM default 🤡

Our hidden ambition.

B2B marketing has some of the most boring people on the planet squatting in its corridors. You know who you are 😒

As SaaS products gets consumerized, so will SaaS marketing.

It’s high time B2B SaaS got a fresh new coat of paint. One that isn’t eggshell-white boring. The physical walls of separation between our work lives and personal lives were razed to the ground by a bat, or a pangolin, or gain-of-function research, who the f^&K knows anymore.

The mental barriers are next. People consume all of their content in one location, and the antiquated legacy of boring old B2B SaaS has no place in that location. We love a good meme here at Toplyne. With this new round of funding, we hope to test the limits of that love. Brace yourself. The low-effort, high-cringe, recycled, 80-IQ, crap-resolution memes are incoming.

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