Notorious PLG 12.14.21
Notorious PLG 12.14.21
Weekly update email on the most important product-led growth ("PLG") companies and strategies
Current subscribers: 1,401
Notorious PLG will take a short break over the holidays, but I will pick back up in January. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and New Year! I am grateful for the Notorious PLG community.
Notorious PLG Startup of the Week: Simplified
As our world becomes increasing digital and as companies compete for our fleeting attention, great design is more important than ever. As consumers, we subconsciously decide if we want to click on an ad or stay on a site in less than 50 milliseconds. That’s not a lot of time! Thus, attractive digital design can be the difference between building a category-defining company and getting lost in the noise. Furthermore, we are all designers aka the “content creation generation” — whether creating digital content for a Fortune 100 marketing campaign, designing a logo for a new Substack or putting together an Instagram video from a holiday vacation, design plays an integral part in every piece of digital content. Unfortunately, many of today’s design tools can be intimidating to new users as they cater to professional designers.
Enter Simplified. Simplified’s mission is to make content creation fast, automated, and affordable with more templates, one-click video tools, and no-code design features. Brands and content creators around the world are using Simplified to create multi-channel marketing campaigns at lightning speed. Simplified is the first design platform to be AI-powered. Thus, Simplified can end “content creator’s block” by recommending content formats and then auto-designing various options. Users can then select their favorite designs, share with teammates and even publish their content all through the Simplified platform. Simplified is building an end-to-end design workflow platform (#oneapp) that is both easy-to-use and robustly powerful. I am excited about Simplified, so much in fact that I invested in their seed round.
For this edition of Notorious PLG, Cofounders KD Deshpande (CEO) and Ajay Yadav (COO) shared their thoughts with me:
“From day one, we've known we wanted to build a product people loved and couldn't live without so we developed a truly user-first approach to our product development. We stay close to our customers, keep an open dialogue with them, and action on their feedback immediately (which means we're always shipping something new #shiponfridays). The end result is that we've garnered a loyal community of customers who are patient with us through our growing pains and stick around for the long haul. Just check out our Wall of Love — the stream of positive reviews from customers who try us, talk to us, and switch to Simplified.
To jumpstart our communities, we met creators where they were: social media and Fiverr. We really leaned on our audiences on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. After we exhausted our lists of friends and family (shout out to our family for listening to us for months), we had to think about real, serious growth. So we decided to start building in public and sharing our stories—the good and bad— with our followers. Both of us had founded businesses before, but this time, we wanted to build the Simplified with our community and for the community. It ended up being the best decision we made. The community we built converted into customers who are invested in our growth, care about our company, and spread the word.
Another thing we realized really fast is that our goal wasn't to build the perfect product. Instead, we're always listening, building, and iterating— with our customers leading the way. We stayed close to our customer feedback and created faster, shorter feedback loops so we could build and ship faster. We read every support ticket, tweet, DM, and feature request as a product development opportunity and delivered it fast. Our speedy attention to every small request lets our customers know that their feedback matters and they are happy to spread the word about it online. So even if we don't have every feature they need right now, they will stick around until we do. People come for products but they stay for Simplified experience.
The third growth factor is that Simplified is, by default, built for teams. Collaborative features like commenting, real-time editing, preview sharing, and asset storage systems are integrated into every part of the app. Naturally, if people are enjoying the experience, they're inviting friends and team members through the app and new users are signing up with less lead time. Referrals are everything!
Finally, organic growth has helped our growth exponentially. We worked really hard to build the right on-page and off-page SEO, build relevancy, and create content our customers care about so we show up where people are searching. We're ranking for thousands of keywords in a very short time for topics like AI copywriting, YouTube description generator, and design Instagram reels. And we're optimizing our strategy every day. So far, we've surpassed 2.5 million impressions on Google and it's only going up!”
Please email any Notorious PLG of the Week suggestions to me at zach@wing.vc
PLG Tweet(s) of the Week:
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Recent PLG Financings (Private Companies):
Seed:
FlyFinAI, a platform to help freelancers with tax deductions, raised $8M. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Falcon Edge.
Gadget, a developer of eCommerce application development platform, has raised $8.5M led by Sequoia, with participation from Bessemer.
Series A:
Airplane, the creator of a developer tool for automating internal workflows, has raised $8.5M. The round was led by Benchmark.
Mio, a startup that helps enterprise teams collaborate across messaging services, has raised an $8.7M. The round was led by Zoom and Cisco Investments, with participation from Goldcrest Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, and Khosla Ventures.
Connect the Dots, a startup that aims to build personalized relationship graphs for sales, has raised a $15M at a valuation of $50M. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Cloud Apps Capital Partners and Velvet Sea Ventures.
Dragonboat, a smart and responsive portfolio collaboration program intended to align strategy and resources with execution to accelerate product to market, has raised $12M led by Insight Partners with participation of existing investors Act One, Roble Ventures and Gingerbread Capital.
Fable, a web-based designing tool designed to make motion design intuitive, collaborative and accessible for all, has raised $15M led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Collaborative Fund, SIP Global Partners, Harrison Metal, Third Kind Venture Capital, and LightShed Ventures.
Passbase, a identity verification infrastructure company, has raised $13.5M at a $40M valuation. The round was led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from Lakestar, Eniac Ventures, and Cowboy Ventures.
Circle, a community platform for content creators and their fans, has raised a $24.7M at a $200M valuation. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Box Group, Notation Capital, Brendon Burchard and Scott Belsky.
Series B:
Nearside, an online bank for SMBs formerly called Hatch, raised $58M. The round was led by Valar Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Foundation Capital, Breyer Capital founder Jim Breyer, Creative Artists Agency founder Michael Ovitz, Flexport founder Ryan Petersen and Eventbrite founder Kevin Hartz.
Buf, a developer of a protocol buffers technology intended to make usage of client independent protocols easy to use, has raised $68M. The round was co-led by Lux and Tiger Global, with participation from Greenoaks Capital Partners, Lightspeed, Addition, and Haystack.
Synthesia, a video synthesis technology designed to replace cameras with code and make everyone a creator, has raised $50M at a valuation of $265M. Kleiner Perkins led the round with participation from GV, FirstMark Capital, LDV Capital, Seedcamp, MCC Ventures.
Series C:
Pleo, a developer of expense management tools aimed at SMBs, has raised $200M at a $4.7B valuation. Coatue Management led the round, with participation from Alkeon Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Thrive Capital, Creandum and Kinnevik.
Series D:
LogDNA, a cloud-based log management software designed to aggregate system and application logs in a single platform, has raised $50M at a $370M valuation. The round was led by NightDragon with participation from Emergence Capital and Initialized Capital.
Heap, a customer data tracking software designed to power business decisions with the truth, has raised $110M at a $960M valuation. The round was led by Sixth Street Growth and included new investment from the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
Recent PLG Performance (Public Companies):
Financial data as of Friday market close.
15 Biggest Stock Gainers (1 month):
Best-in-Class PLG Benchmarking:
15 Highest EV / NTM Multiples:
Complete Notorious PLG Dataset (click to zoom):
Note: TTM = Trailing Twelve Months; NTM = Next Twelve Months. Rule of 40 = TTM Revenue Growth % + FCF Margin %. GM-Adjusted CAC Payback = Change in Quarterly Revenue / (Gross Margin % * Prior Quarter Sales & Marketing Expense) * 12. Recent IPOs will have temporary “N/A”s as Wall Street Research has to wait to initiate converge.