Notorious PLG 7.29.22: The Strong Case for Community
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The Strong Case for Community
I spoke to the Head of Community at a prominent, late-stage PLG company this week and she told me an amazing statistic that I need to share with you. She said that on average, a visitor spends 53 seconds on their website, but spends nearly 3 minutes on the community page! If this doesn’t make the case for investing in community, I don’t know what does. In a prior NPLG writeup, I explored the characteristics of the best PLG websites (here) and Community was on my list, yet <10% of PLG companies I researched feature Community on their website. Miro and Figma are two prominent PLG companies that offer digital venues for their users to share their work, questions and feedback with the rest of the community. I am seeing more startups hire a “Head of Community” or “Community Manager” much earlier in the startup journey as investing in community can help drive and improve new sales, upsells, retention, product roadmapping and customer support.
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PLG Tweet(s) of the Week:
Recent PLG Financings (Private Companies):
Series B:
Snowplow, a behavioral data management platform designed to serve data teams, has raised $81.51M. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Databricks, Cloudflare, DataRobot, Atlantic Bridge Capital and MMC Ventures.
Zededa, an edge device management software startup, has raised $26M. Coast Range Capital, Lux Capital, Energize Ventures, Almaz Capital, Porsche Ventures and Chevron Technology Ventures funded the round.
Series D:
Crunchbase, a business information platform, has raised $50M. Alignment Growth led the round, with participation from OMERS Ventures, Mayfield, and Emergence Capital.
PE Growth:
TextExpander, a San Francisco-based maker of text shortcut software, has raised $41.4M in new funding. The round was led by Summit Partners.
Recent PLG Performance (Public Companies):
Financial data as of previous business day 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.