An overnight success, after 8 years
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.
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.
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.
10k to 50k users: Two years of rapid experimentation
The journey from 10k to 50k users was all about channel experiments. In 2021, we set up a Growth team consisting of a couple of developers, a data engineer, and a product marketer. We focused the growth engineering work on user onboarding, sharing flows and other app-wide experiments, while our Product Marketers did everything from lifecycle communications to creating new spreadsheet templates.
After the experience of running the waitlist and getting a couple dozen thousands people using the product, we were clear on two things:
1. Our North Star metric: As a productivity tool, we expect (and see) that our most engaged customers use the product multiple times a week. As such, we crystallized that ambition into our north star metric, that we call Power Workspaces (3LD7), which measures the number of workspaces (accounts) that are active (see or edit a spreadsheet) in at least 3 of the last 7 days. It works as a barometer for the whole team:
It’s an honest metric, less susceptible to PR events or one-off acquisition swings.
It is very resilient, meaning that people who use the product 3 days or more are very sticky, and if they churn, it is absolutely critical we know why.
2. Our ideal customer profile (ICP): Rows is best used as a tool for teams to analyze data and share their results. We saw again and again that the prototypical power user of Rows were marketers — inside companies or in agencies — who used integrations to easily import data from their marketing channels (e.g. Facebook Ads, GA-4), crunch the numbers in the spreadsheet, and then share the results in a beautiful report, either shared as a standalone spreadsheet (like this Investor dashboard), or embedded into tools like Notion.
Armed with these insights, we needed to move the needle to attract more users in our ICP and ultimately inflect growth in the North Star metric. We stress-tested various acquisition channels, running more than 10 experiments across four channels in eight short weeks:
Podcasts and newsletters: We did placements with Packy from Not Boring, Lenny’s newsletter, tried the ATP Podcast, Daring Fireball and +10 others. There were mixed results: there were a couple of big wins, including this placement on Packy’s Great Online Game, which landed us >1.5k sign-ups, or the ad on Daring Fireball, which led someone to post about us and land us on the front page of Hacker News. But most had underwhelming results.
Community: We launched rows.com/community, a public directory for users to share spreadsheets, which boosted engagement and visibility. This had a double positive effect: first, it incentivized customers to share spreadsheets with their audience. Second, it gave us an opportunity to work with content creators in spreadsheets that they could share as part of the ad segment. Like this partnership with Lenny, where he shared his favorite roadmap templates.
PR: Traditional PR had mixed success. While we had a couple of good wins there — like this example from TechRadar that generated 4k new sign-ups and this article about us on Wired — getting good coverage on relevant media publications is an uphill battle. If you’re not announcing a funding round, then you really need to have a compelling story that is relevant in that moment for that particular journalist. Unless at Notion-like scale, getting pieces on how great your product is, are very hard to get. We tried a mix of PR agencies and doing it ourselves, and looking back, I’d go with the following mix:
Work with a PR agency to amplify funding announcements. You’ll often get an outsized return on your investment: PR firms have good relationships with the relevant news outlets, and journalists are typically open to reporting funding news.
For everything else, go direct. Tell your story to the world, find unconventional ways to tell your point of view. We’re doing this in two intentional ways: sharing a lot of inside stories at Twitter and publishing a weekly CEO diary in our blog.
One of our most successful marketing campaigns involved buying billboards outside Google and Microsoft and using them in a social media campaign.
Lesson: Podcast and newsletter campaigns are more like brand marketing than performance marketing. While a single campaign can occasionally go viral and deliver outstanding ROI, these channels typically require a consistent presence over several months. This sustained exposure ensures that leads receive enough touchpoints to be nudged into trying out the product.
To effectively invest in newsletters or podcast deals, ensure they target a very narrow ICP. Be prepared to run the campaigns consistently for at least one quarter. Finally, the placements should integrate the product directly, either by featuring product artefacts, such as the spreadsheet templates from Lenny, or through educational content that demonstrates how to use the product to solve specific problems, like this Matthias Frank's video on using Rows in Notion.
50k to 1M users: Striking gold with AI
June 2023 marked a turning point for us. Two features, launched within three weeks, exponentially increased our user base.
The first major breakthrough was the AI Analyst✨. Recognizing the growing influence of AI, it became clear to us that data analysis would be one of the most impacted fields. We decided to build an AI Analyst because a data analyst's role involves blending interpretation, analysis, and reporting—tasks that are commonly performed in spreadsheets. We launched the AI Analyst in June, and the response was overwhelming. In less than a week, the announcement garnered 30 million views, and we added over 50k new users to the product.
Our communications strategy was straightforward but effective:
We created a no-fluff, clear video that demonstrated the feature.
We conducted cold outreach to AI content creators, offering them an exclusive demo ahead of the launch. If they replied, we did the demo; if not, we provided a media package with assets they could share on the launch day.
This approach worked exceptionally well with content creators but not with journalists. Consequently, we decided to focus more on direct engagement with content creators. We sponsored a handful of AI content creators, and a few of their posts went viral, creating significant momentum within our target audience.
This resulted in a snowball effect where everyone in the industry was talking about us—and they still are. Examples of our successful placements include platforms like TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Two weeks later, we launched Instant Rows⚡. Unlike the AI Analyst, the idea of removing our homepage was not new. We had discussed it several times before, but the timing had never been right. With the launch of Rows 2.0 in February, we felt the world was ready for more Rows, faster.
The decision to build a ‘loginless’ experience was driven by two factors:
Market Size: The larger the potential audience, the more variability there is in how people use the product. A traditional homepage struggles to communicate the right value to the right person. This was certainly the case for us, as people use Rows to create lists of leads, run PPC campaign reports, build mortgage calculators, and hundreds of other long-tail jobs.
Prior Knowledge: Some products are hard to grasp, while others are either incredibly simple or so ubiquitous that the audience already understands them. Spreadsheets fall into the latter category—everyone has seen, used, and shared them. This meant that homepage or not, our audience already knew enough of the product that they didn’t need a lot of extra context.
Although removing the homepage seemed like a significant decision, it was less binding than it appeared. In the words of Jeff Bezos, Instant Rows was a ‘two-way door’ decision. If it didn’t work well, we could always reverse it the next day and restore the homepage.
The project was a resounding success. It almost tripled our conversion rate to sign-up—from approximately 11% to 27%—and quintupled the number of new activated users per week. The big lesson here was that taking big swings can lead to transformational impact, not just marginal gains. We could never have A/B tested our way from a 6% sign-up conversion to 30% with traditional CRO methods; we had to try something completely different.
1M to 1B users: The steps to ubiquity
I acknowledge that the journey from 1 million to 1 billion users will be (even less) predictable. Still, this is our secret-no-so-secret master plan:
First and foremost, we will continue to bet on the product. Spreadsheets are here to stay, and the need for people to make sense of their business data, present it compellingly, and make better decisions faster is evergreen. We will double down on improving our product superpowers: importing data from any source, analyzing it with AI in increasingly flexible ways, and sharing the results in beautiful, shareable reports.
Next, we’ll add a second sustained acquisition channel after word of mouth. In 2024, we will experiment with different approaches to scale one of these acquisition channels by tenfold:
Product virality: Increase the number of people who share spreadsheets with their teammates (intra-team virality) or with the outside world (inter-team virality).
SEO: Expand our non-branded traffic through templates (à la Canva), tools and calculators (à la Ahrefs), and our blog. We've already doubled non-branded traffic to Rows in 2024 and are confident there is still infinite growth to capture.
Paid channels: We’ll stress test other paid channels such as Google Ads and Meta Ads, which are also part of our growth agenda for 2024.
Lastly, we’ll build additional product-led distribution channels that bring more people to add data to a Rows spreadsheet. This journey started with RowsX, the Chrome extension born out of a hackathon that simplifies moving data from a website to a spreadsheet. In the next 12 months, expect Rows to explore other ways to be in environments conducive to opening spreadsheets including third-party apps like Zoom and an embedded editor to plug into other products. And more—a lot more.
The TL;DR:
First wide, then narrow: Experiment with various customer acquisition channels to identify your ICP. Once you understand how and why they use your product, double down on those channels and those customers.
Take a hard look at the value of your homepage: Consider if you really need a homepage. Test a different approach. Removing ours tripled our sign-up rate, something we never thought was possible. Sometimes you have to invent the playbook.
Take a page from what’s working: But most of the time, you don’t have to invent the playbook. Find out what’s working in the industry, see how you can apply those principles, and get to work. Our SEO strategy is our interpretation of what other PLG companies have mastered.
Find your exploding market: This is the hardest of them all. Every once in a while, a technological or social shift gives new companies a chance to target what seemed like solved markets. In the words of a young Marc Andreessen, find your ‘exploding market’.
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