NPLG 11.18.22: Dev-Centric PLG Best Practices
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NPLG Startup of the Week: Airplane
Every company relies on a plethora of internal tools to do their best work. Internal tools can be difficult to build and maintain and often require significant engineering time which takes away from developing customer-facing products. Developers need better tooling and infrastructure to build internal tools. Enter Airplane.
Airplane is a developer platform that helps engineers rapidly build internal tools, i.e. internal dashboards, admin panels, scheduled operations, long-running scripts, or multi-step workflows. This is in contrast to low-code or no-code platforms that are targeted towards helping non-engineers create software. Due to Airplane's approach of targeting developers, every single thing someone builds in Airplane is something they could have built without Airplane by writing code themselves. So Airplane has to provide immense advantages in terms of speed, quality, and safety of creating internal tools in their platform vs doing so without it, and these advantages have to be incredibly obvious to developers.
For this edition of Notorious PLG, Co-founder Ravi Parikh shares with me his approach on Airplane’s dev-centric GTM motion:
Why PLG for Airplane?
“Airplane's adoption model is more complex than pure application software like Figma, and there are compelling arguments for both a top-down sales model as well as a PLG model. When a company adopts Airplane, two things have to happen:
Individual developers have to decide that Airplane is a better approach to developing internal tools than building things in-house (or using another platform).
Engineering leadership and security teams have to approve Airplane, since it tends to require write access to production data.
Airplane could choose to tackle these in either order. A top-down strategy might involve getting engineering leadership bought in first. However, Airplane saw that the challenge of getting engineers to make an active decision to choose Airplane for a project was the greater challenge, and decided to put that as early in the customer journey as possible. So Airplane has optimized directly for a PLG strategy where engineers directly signup for and test out the platform themselves, before evangelizing it internally in their organization, rather than a top-down sales strategy.
How Airplane does PLG
There are a few parts of the customer journey that Airplane has optimized greatly to drive their PLG strategy.
Acquire users who have specific use cases in mind
PLG isn't just about what happens in the product. One of the main ways Airplane acquires customers is through use-case specific marketing campaigns. For example, one of the most common use cases for Airplane is using it as a scheduled jobs platform that's both simpler and more powerful than cron. Airplane has published several blog posts and run ad campaigns about this use case.
When a customer signs up through one of these campaigns, they're primed with a specific use case in mind and can use Airplane directly to solve that problem. This is a lot simpler and more linear than onboarding a user who thinks of Airplane as a general-purpose internal tooling platform. While the end goal is for an engineering organization to adopt Airplane for a multitude of use cases, the initial goal is to target a single use case.
Gradual introduction of complexity
Airplane often gets compared to low-code/no-code "app builder" platforms. All of these platforms promise fast time to value. But by being a developer platform, Airplane can take a unique approach to deliver on this promise and make it much faster.
While Airplane can support complex apps, the onboarding path in Airplane is optimized around creating a "Task," which is a single-function, lightweight app. Examples of Airplane tasks are things like "issue a refund" or "delete user data." Users can create an Airplane task by specifying a single JavaScript file, Python script, or SQL query. Airplane automates the rest: UI, permissions, audit logging, notifications, etc with minimal user configuration.
The onboarding process asks users to build a simple task in minutes, rather than setting aside a few hours to build a more complex app like "customer dashboard." These tasks then become the building blocks for more complex apps. This gradual introduction of complexity is a key part of Airplane's PLG strategy.
Templates to speed up creation
Sometimes users want to create complex apps from the get-go. This is where templates come in. If a user wants to create a complex admin panel with tables, charts, buttons, tons of read/write operations, on-page data fetching etc–they can one-click clone Airplane's admin panel template to start with a lot of the work already done.
Since Airplane is a general-purpose internal tool creator, it's not possible to have a template for every single use case. But their templates are designed with flexibility in mind and made to be broken apart and reassembled as needed.
Templates are also woven into every part of the product experience. They're emphasized during onboarding. Also, any time a user creates a new task, view, or workflow in Airplane, they're also reminded that they can start with a template.
First-class support for multi-user flows
After an individual developer is bought into using Airplane, it's still not very useful until multiple people are on the platform. To that end, Airplane has built features and content that are well-optimized for multi-user use cases to encourage virality within an organization.
One example of this is the approval flow. Often, sensitive internal operations have a flow where one person can submit a request (e.g. "I'd like to delete the data for user 123") and another person has to approve or reject this for that request to get processed. In many internal tooling platforms, building a flow like this is possible, but requires a significant amount of work to model this exact flow and handle all the edge cases (who do we route the request to initially? What if they don't respond? Who and how should we notify if the request is denied? etc).
Airplane instead provides approval flows out of the box as something that can be added to any task or workflow with a single click. This means that as soon as an engineer has built something in Airplane that requires an approval, they can add the approval flow immediately and start inviting their teammates.
I would love feedback. Please hit me up on twitter @zacharydewitt or email me at zach@wing.vc. If you were forwarded this email and are interested in getting a weekly update on the best PLG companies, please join our growing community by subscribing:
PLG Tweet(s) of the Week:
Recent PLG Financings (Private Companies):
Seed:
Alter, a bank payments platform designed to connect banks and automate money movement, has raised $4.9M. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from La Famiglia and Cocoa VC.
Kalder, a web3 tooling platform intended for brands and creators to drive meaningful engagement, has raised $3M. The round was funded by Indigo Fund, 8VC, 500 VC, Human Capital, Soma Capital and Accel.
Plain., a startup that wants to reinvent support tools, has raised $6M. The round was co-led by Connect Ventures and Index Ventures.
Series A:
Coefficient, a data analytics platform designed to allow business teams to work with real-time data directly from their spreadsheets, has raised $18M. The round was led by Battery Ventures, with participation from S28 Capital and Foundation Capital.
EdgeDB, a startup looking to modernize databases for cutting-edge apps, has raised $15M at a $55M valuation. The round was led by Nava Ventures and Accel.
Equals, a San Francisco-based startup aiming to challenge Excel’s dominance with a supercharged spreadsheet, has raised $16M. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Craft Ventures, Box Group, Worklife and Combine.
Series B:
Macrometa, an edge computing cloud and global data network, has raised $38M. The round was led by Akamai Technologies, with participation from Shasta Ventures and 60 Degree Capital.
Recent PLG Performance (Public Companies):
Financial data as of previous business day market close.
Best-in-Class PLG Benchmarking:
15 Highest PLG EV / NTM Multiples:
15 Biggest PLG Stock Gainers (1 month):
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.