Figma did it for design. Slack did it for team comms. Zoom did the same for meetings. Salesforce - CRM.

Every once in a while, a tool comes along that pushes the envelope of our imaginations and brings our presumptions crashing to the ground. And reinvents how sh*t gets done.

In 2023, user research and testing aren’t quite the same anymore. And for that, we have Maze and Jo Widawski to thank.

And if you’re reading this and thinking “What do I need usability testing for?” - you’re not alone. But you probably will be.

Jo started up in 2018 with a mission to democratize testing. Within 3 years, Maze had built the foundations of a new category, washed away the demons of complexity it was mired in, and put a new weapon in the hands of - not just researchers, but designers, product managers, marketers, and many others.

Today, over 60,000 brands ranging from Uber and HP to McKinsey and GE use Maze for user research and usability testing.

Building a new category is no easy feat. Jo will be the first to tell you:

“Building a company is a lot about shooting arrows and then during targets around them afterward, and saying it was your vision all along. When we started, we really believed that we just needed to build better research.”

With the targets now drawn, we thought it’d be worth getting to the bottom of how the hell Jo and Maze did it.

This is the story of how.

00:00 Price against value

D’Arcy spent 11 years at Oracle, selling database management systems on either side of the dot-com bubble bursting.

00:00 The Dropbox Problem

 Superhuman: The platform that monetized time!

Superhuman - the fastest email experience ever made. In a world where more than a billion people spend three hours a day reading and writing emails, Superhuman enables them to fly through their inboxes twice as fast as before.

Gaurav is one of the founding team members who set up many of the company's key functions (onboarding, success, delight, growth…), scaled them from 0 to 1, built repeatability, and moved on to build the next function.

Today, Superhuman enjoys a waitlist of over half a million users and was recently valued at $825M! 🚀

Catch our in-depth breakdown of Superhuman’s growth story here.

We cover a lot of ground here with Gaurav, including:

❤️ Product Superhuman derives inspiration from: Apple 

🐦 Twitter shoutout: @hubermanlab

Connect with him at :

🔗LinkedIn

💙 Twitter

OpenPhone is an app to which you can add all your work numbers. It can live on all your everyday devices and, on top of calls and messages, offers a full suite of integrations to your work tools.

Daryna is on a mission to rewrite the future of the business phone, bringing it back from the dead and into the 21st century. 🚆

With an impressive 200% + Net Revenue Retention (NRR), OpenPhone is loved by teams at Sonder, Linear, AirGarage, Soon, and Avalon, among others.

Catch our in-depth breakdown of OpenPhone’s growth story here!

We cover a lot of ground here with Daryna, including:

And more!

🛠 Tool: Zapier

🙌 LinkedIn Account: Devin Reed

🔗 LinkedIn

💙 Twitter

Steeve Vakeeswaran, Head of Sales & Expansion at Zapier; Zapier offers over 5,000 app integrations and powers automations ranging from central workflows at Fortune 500 companies to such side projects as Seinfeldtext and Kanyetext. Zapier's growth from $0-$140 million has been largely driven by their bottom-up self-serve engine🤩. In early 2021, with Steeve Vakeeswaran at the helm, Zapier started testing a Sales motion.💥

Zapier's growth levers unlocked: https://www.topofthelyne.co/p/happier-with-zapier

Learn how Steeve scaled sales at Zapier and how sales can be layered into your PLG motion on this podcast hosted by Toplyne.

Mario Araujo, Head Of Growth at Softr; the world’s largest ecosystem for building no-code apps. The product makes enables anyone without prior experience in coding to build an online presence in the form of communities, portals, stores, and even CRMs. 🤯Softr has zoomed organically from 0 to 50k users in less than 15 months, picking up Product Hunt’s Product of the Year 🥇at the 2021 Golden Kitty Awards. 🤩

Softr's growth levers unpacked: https://www.topofthelyne.co/p/softr-l...

Qwilr is a way for sales and marketing teams to create all of their customer-facing collateral - proposals, quotes, pitch decks, presentations, and contracts - as web pages, rather than PDFs or PowerPoint decks. Read more about Qwilr's growth story here: https://www.topofthelyne.co/p/cause-t...

Mark Tanner is the co-founder & COO of the Sydney-based company that is now scaling the US, Europe, and other geographies.  Here's how Mark Tanner supercharged Qwilr's growth to be a user favorite! 

❤️  1/ Murder your darlings🔪 Mark and the team scrapped their v1 to build a v2 with a reduced barrier to entry. It was the best product decision they'd ever make.  

2/Finding product market fit 🎯 Mark accurately compares PMF to gears in a car. Kicking into high gear slowly but surely, step by step. He put this into action at Qwilr, when they started targeting sales & marketing teams instead of the originally targeted SMBs.  

3/ Free Trial FTW! ❤️ Mark found that the activation rate among users of Qwilr that tried the 14-day free trial was A LOT MORE! & they ditched freemium immediately.  

4/ Founder-led Sales 👩‍💻 Mark insists that founder-led sales are essential because these help one understand the "why" behind every rejection which becomes crucial for the roadmap.  

Learn these and many more lessons from the rockstar, Mark Tanner himself on the webinar hosted by Toplyne.

Canva, Stripe, Substack, Replit, Freshworks as flag-bearers of Product Led Growth (PLG) as a force for cultural change in the world.

For more exciting stories from the world of product-led growth, join us on Substack

Click here for a free interactive demo of Toplyne.

The growth levers and GTM strategies that drove Deel's hockey stick growth and a $5.5B valuation, while making remote hiring a walk in the park.

To take Toplyne out on a test run: Request access

The product-led and build-in-public ethos that enabled Copy.ai's tremendous growth from 0 to $2.4M in ARR in just one year

To take Toplyne out on a test run: Request access