An overnight success, after 8 years

Rows' Head of Growth on the long path to 1 million users and 20x growth

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups. Today, I’m bringing you the 12th installment of my popular Zero to One series where I unpack the early growth of startups like folk, 11x.ai, Copy.ai, and Pinecone.

Up now: Accel-backed Rows’ incredible eight year journey to one million users as told by Head of Growth Henrique Cruz. Henrique joined Rows — the next-gen spreadsheet company — extremely early and has been on the front-lines experimenting with new channels, going loginless, and striking gold with AI.

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How many software categories can you think of that are dominated by a 40-year-old product? Probably a handful, maybe less. Odds are that one of them is Excel. Together with Google Sheets, these are the giants we at Rows are up against.

Humberto Ayres Pereira and Torben Schulz founded Rows (formerly dashdash) in 2016 after years of building spreadsheets as consultants and at their previous company, a Rocket Internet food delivery startup. I joined as Head of Growth a couple of years later. With $8 million from a round led by Accel, our mission was clear: take the product from an alpha release with zero users as far as possible, as fast as possible. 

We never expected that it would take eight years before finally striking gold, hitting one million users and 20x year-over-year growth. I’ll walk you through exactly what we did – including (lots) of failed experiments and unexpected learnings. 

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0 to 10k users: The three year waitlist

Our first 10k users started with the prototypical friends, family, and network. This happened in 2018 when we raised our first significant round of funding and needed a place to gather emails from interested people. Enter the waiting list. We gathered around 10k people on the waitlist and launched on Product Hunt, winning product of the day.

From 2018 to 2021, we ran a waitlist, moving from individual qualification calls to releasing a few accounts daily and finally removing the waitlist altogether in 2021, coinciding with a $16 million Series B led by Lakestar. This taught us the nuances of managing a waitlist and onboarding, which we explained in great detail in this behind the scenes blog. If I were to it again, this is what I’d do differently:

• Release accounts faster: Emails have a short “expiration date” and delaying the release of the accounts means that people who would otherwise become engaged users will never get an account because they left the job. The conversion to sign-up of accounts who were on the waitlist for more than 6 months was almost 0%. Besides, the marginal value you get per additional onboarding call decreases fast. It is very comfortable to hold on to the manual onboarding process. It self-selects people with higher intent, and leads to artificially high activation and retention rates. The real fun starts when anyone, anywhere can use your product.

• Run your email list through an email validator: Emails on a waiting list, especially company ones, become invalid fast. Assuming an average tenure at a job of 12-24 months, if you have a few thousand company emails on your list that are waiting to be released for a few months, hundreds will bounce. We learned this the hard way. The day we released a good chunk of the list many emails bounced, landing hundreds of account release emails on spam folders and preventing people from signing up. In the middle of the launch day we had to set up a parallel process of re-sending confirmation emails manually to avoid falling to spam. Not the stress you’ll want on the big day. 

Timeline of Rows’ product waitlist

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10k to 50k users: Two years of rapid experimentation