This is a summary with commentary on what I took from it. You can grab the full report for free (41pages, PDF)

The era of a pullback from Covid - General Findings

It wasn’t quite clear whether the pullback from Covid would lead to an overall decline in digital product usage, the report has a relatively clear message for that:

• 16% YoY product usage growth despite everything

  

• HR/Staffing and upskilling/continuing education tool industries showed the most growth

  

  • Both industries are directly connected to people switching jobs. Voluntarily or not. I would expect this trend to be even more amplified now due to the recent layoff waves. While these overall might not have a huge impact, they indicate a trend that the market is seriously doubting that any of this is over yet.

• Product-led growth is doubled downed on.

  • Surprise, surprise. The most cost-efficient method is still gaining more and more traction. Connected with the clear shift that we saw from the downturn to focus more on efficiency it makes perfect sense.
    2 otherwise equal businesses will be ultimately judged by their efficiency so this makes perfect sense.

• SaaS isn’t dead despite what your gurus might have told you on LinkedIn

Growth in a downturn

All of these 3 snippets are connected with each other, retention fights churn, and that’s what they are afraid about. The solution is to shift product strategy to increase retention and so forth.

So where are businesses cutting costs? As always it hits sales and marketing first. That’s interesting in the context of what they’re doing instead. It’s product-led growth.

2 Distribution channels are getting pressured while the third one (PLG) is prioritized. This should tell you all that you need to know. We’ve been droning on about this forever: cost efficiency is built in PLG. Its influence is also growing to address your TAM.

Not because it’s a fad, but because it’s genuinely better for your customers. They get a better product. You’re measured on it, and that leads to long-term, defensible growth. You can think about it what you want but in these commoditized markets, choice means customers will go for the best. So build the best.

Cost efficiency also means that you can focus on what matters: product development through your distribution. PLG is an extremely valuable feedback cycle used well.

Retention is in the end a fancy word for "a good product”.

The hottest 30 products coming up

For this list Amplitude selected

• privately held products with more than 10k MAU

• >40% YoY growth

Last year they selected by the way 20 products, whereas 3 of those went on to $100+ million funding rounds. That’s a better hit rate than the average VC fund :D
What did stick out to me is how many of them are directly or indirectly connected to health and well-being.

Here are a few that stuck out to me from that list:

Capsule’s value prop is to turn your phone into a same-day delivery for prescriptions. I personally love convenience apps like this as picking up prescriptions is not exactly a fun task you do on a Sunday afternoon. Chances are since you are on a prescription you might also not feel that well.
Love the use case and their simple messaging. +105% growth in MAU

Gong. If I had to bet on one company from that list then it’s Gong. I discovered them earlier this year due to their published research on sales calls. I even wrote an article on it:

Leah’s ProducTea Newsletter

When Sales discovers that you can measure customer centricity

I absolutely love it when you look at adjacent teams and they suddenly start to develop an insight into how to measure customer centricity. The below example is from Gong, an AI-based tooling company that can listen in on sales calls for analysis. If you think about it, this is how we also structure product flows. We try to distribute the friction as much…

Read more

5 months ago · Leah Tharin

Gong records customer conversations and the AI analyzes them and turns them into actionable business intelligence. Highly recommend reading their blog on revenue intelligence. A total treasure trove. And the name is cool.

Paired. A relationship app for couples. Instead of finding a partner, it’s about keeping your current one. The value prop is so simple I wonder why no one else yet made it. 636% MAU growth over one year. I can’t speak to the efficiency of it as I’m not in the target market but I love the simple problem-solution fit.

Pitch. I don’t know whether Pitch really requires an introduction - at least in Europe almost everyone I know has tried it out. A platform around this very particular form of a document I wouldn’t have bet on. Not in the market with google slides. But it works. It focuses very specifically on this use case which means so much for so many founders and adjacent users.

WeMoney. Pay down debt. Faster. That’s their value prop. They do it with community, actionable goal setting, and simply telling users how to do it better. From consolidation loans to tracking your bills, it looks like they tap exactly into what this particular user group needs.
That’s especially impressive since they specifically target a group with low buying power. They grew their MAUs by 167% last year

Browserstack. Kinda old and surprised to see it on this list, but for some reason, it started to grow in recent years quite a lot. It enables you to test your stuff on different browsers. The numbers are staggering. Over 3’000 browsers/devices. When did we let that happen?

Industry-trends

The new year boost for wellness apps:

Looking at this I wonder though how to create a sustainable business on top other than one-off, non-subscription services. Maybe I should do an “Innovation Wellness” course and sell it for a premium on the 31st of December?

Adult Education, Language Learning & Skill Coaching:

It’s awesome to see that the desire to become better and grow has not followed the Covid pullback at all. Recession fears might fuel this trend of course but I choose to believe here as well that this is an effect of ever-increasing quality and access to learning tools.

Summary

There are no big surprises here in that there is another new big thing coming up like SaaS or PLG overall, but it’s reaffirming to see that we’re on the right track. Despite the pullback, despite all the naysayers against SaaS and PLG. We see you in your ivory towers :D

And as they say in the report reassuring:
”[…]It is possible to drive growth even in a downturn.”

Some really cool insights from the report, I highly recommend reading it in full and not just taking my word on it.