👋 Hi, I’m Kyle from OpenView and welcome to my newsletter, Growth Unhinged. Every other week I take a closer look at what drives a SaaS company’s growth. Expect deep dive takes on product-led growth, pricing, benchmarks, and much more.

I first met the founder of Supermetrics—the hottest PLG company that you probably haven’t heard of—in the most unusual of places: at a poker party in the Helsinki suburbs. 

It was five years ago back in November 2017 at a Slush after-party. Supermetrics was fresh off a small €3.5 million funding round from OpenOcean, the organizer of said party, and the team consisted of only a handful of people. 

Back then I wrote a note to myself to keep an eye on the company. They had been bootstrapped and continued to stay profitable for four years to get to that point, a rarity for software companies. Supermetrics managed to scale to tens of thousands of users and more than €1 million ARR with no sales people and no outside funding. The product was primarily a reporting automation tool for PPC, SEO, social and web analytics—but the founder, Mikael Thuneberg, had grand aspirations for where it could go. 

Fast forward to today. Supermetrics is now one of the biggest stories in this new era of PLG well outside the echochamber of Silicon Valley. 

The company generates north of €50 million ARR, has 500,000+ users, and is the No. 1 add-on for marketing data in both the Google Sheets and Google Data Studio marketplaces. While Supermetrics has raised additional outside capital, they’ve remained hyper efficient and in control of their own destiny. And the company has an audacious product vision, broadening from being a reporting automation tool to the “easiest way to move your marketing data.” 

I spoke with Zhao Hanbo, the first business hire at Supermetrics, and early Marketing Leader Edward Ford to go behind the scenes on Supermetrics’ unconventional growth story—and what comes next.