NPLG 3.9.23: PLG as a Horizontal Product (Feathery)

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Mar 09, 2023

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NPLG Startup of the Week: Feathery

For the next generation of technology companies, the product is the epicenter of the company. Product and engineering teams quickly become the most important builders. I believe that there will be many big businesses built serving product teams, often what I refer to as “PLG enablers.” One of the most critical areas for a product to be successful is onboarding. We have all tried out a new app and likely given up during the onboarding flow because of too many screens or annoying questions. Mastering onboarding is both an art and a science and requires cycles of iteration. Agility is critical, yet collaboration between product and engineering contains a lot of friction. PMs desire more ownership while engineers don't want to be tweaking forms.

Feathery is a powerful form builder for product teams to build in-app forms. Common use cases include forms for signup, onboarding, payments, and more. Feathery empowers the business user to rapidly build and iterate on core product forms while providing the developer with a friendly and customizable integration process.

For this edition of Notorious PLG, Founder & CEO Peter Dun shares how to master PLG selling a horizontal product to product teams across different verticals and industries.

PLG as a Horizontal Product

“Feathery is a product that is both suited especially well for the PLG motion and also enabling PLG for our customers. As a horizontal platform, Feathery serves a number of compelling initial use cases depending on the customer and their needs. Furthermore, many personas are involved in creating an in-app form – product managers, developers, and designers.

The PLG motion allows Feathery to naturally meet our users at their point of adoption and minimize time-to-value, an important metric for evaluating product infrastructure. For Feathery specifically, an important milestone is when the user launches their first form. Once they’ve seen success and have a live form connected, their likelihood of churn drops dramatically.

PLG Tactics

Beautiful templates

Beautiful, pre-built templates are a powerful way to organically attract and convert new users. A well-crafted and relevant form template both clearly showcases Feathery’s capabilities and allows prospects to discover Feathery via keyword searches.

A relevant template eliminates many early learning and building hurdles for the user, and they can launch their first form in a fraction of the time.

Powerful integrations

Feathery maintains a powerful set of native integrations that our forms can be enriched with. Similar to our templates, integrations showcase the powerful logic that Feathery supports and are sources of strong organic traffic. For business users, having the right integration can be the difference between a conversion and a churn – it saves users a ton of custom code they would otherwise have to write themselves.

We further leverage our integrations by doing comarketing with our integration partners. Ranging from joint blog posts and newsletter publications to directory listings, we’re able to access each other’s audiences in a synergistic way.

Trust-building content

Feathery places a strong focus on generating high-quality content that top-of-funnel users discover and engage with. By building brand awareness and trust from the first interaction point, users are much more likely to commit when they actually engage with the product. Content that we prioritize include:

Thorough guides and best practice articles on topics that product teams care about and frequently search for
Great public developer and platform docs for building trust and developer buy-in
Directory-style resources such as https://forms.work, which engage prospects much earlier in the funnel and builds authority for Feathery within the form-building space

Investing in Design

Since Feathery serves user-facing, in-product use cases, it’s paramount that our customers have confidence in Feathery’s ability to create the types of form designs that they would want to serve to their users.

This starts at the very beginning of their journey, when they land on our homepage. Aside from answering their questions about Feathery, it’s also important that our marketing design system matches our target persona and that they’re wow’ed by the presentation.

Once the user enters the product, our design system transitions to a more functional approach that focuses less on eye-catching gradients and more on clear hierarchy and ease of use. This approach minimizes the friction of learning our controls and creating their first form.”

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 Benchmarking (Startups):

This is a new section! I will continue to update these metrics and add new metrics. I would love your feedback on what else I should track.

Conversion rate (website → free user):

Best: 10%
Good: 5%

Activation rate (free user → activated user):

Best: 60%
Good: 30%

Paid conversion rate (free user → paid user):

Best: 8%
Good: 4%

Enterprise conversion rate (free user → enterprise plan):

Best: 4%
Good: 2%

3-month user retention (% of all users still using product after 3 months):

Best: 30%
Good: 15%

Conversion from website to free user:

<1 month on waitlist: ~50%
>3 months on waitlist: 20%

For more detail on acqusition rates by channel (Organic, SEM, Social etc), please refer to this prior NPLG.

PLG Financial Benchmarking (Public PLG 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.

Recent PLG Financings (Private Companies):

Early Stage:

Typeface, a startup developing an AI-powered dashboard for drafting marketing copy and image, has raised $65M. Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, M12 and Menlo Ventures.

Series A:

Attio, a CRM platform that combines a performant data model with the collaboration capabilities typically found in no-code software, has raised $23.5M. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Balderton Capital and Point Nine.
Qwak, an Israeli ML ops platform, has raised $12M. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, and was joined by Leaders Fund, StageOne Ventures and Amit Ventures.

Series B:

Bonusly, a recognition and rewards platform intended to motivate employees by using peer-to-peer bonuses, has raised $18.9M at a $80.9M valuation. The round was led by Ankona Capital, with participation from FirstMark Capital, Access Venture Partners, Next Frontier Capital and Operator Partners.
Temporal, an open source microservices orchestration platform designed to build and operate resilient applications at scale, has raised $75M. The round was led by Greenoaks, with participation from Amplify Partners, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Madrona, and Addition Ventures.