SaaS Strategists,

We all love a juicy strategy that can elevate our product into the clouds. ⛅

But here’s what many miss:

Oftentimes, removing will bring you more than adding.

Here’s what Rows.com removed to look Google Sheets right in the eyes, and not even blink. 👇️ 

📊 SaaS Breakdown - Rows.com

First off, let’s start with something absolutely wild.

It’s the domain name.

I don’t even want to get into how expensive acquiring rows.com was. 🤑

But I’m always justifying these investments as it’s the best way to get a user curious about your product without even showing them your platform.

It’s simply a status symbol that brings trust. 🤝

You immediately know you’re up for something credible - Rows.com, simple as that.

🔓 Loginless experience

When you’re going against Google Sheets, Excel, or Airtable, you need a strong weapon in your arsenal. ⚔️

Rows’ weapon of choice was simple.

They targeted users who need to get sh*t done. Fast. 🏎️

They noticed that if you want to create a new Google Sheet, you have 4 steps:

1. Open up Google Drive

2. Open / Create a new folder

3. Create a new Google Sheet

4. You’re in

For Airtable, it’s even more complex. You probably don’t even have an account, so:

1. Open up Airtable

2. Create an account

3. Go through the boring process of 10 pages of explainers, welcome emails, etc.

4. Create a new project

5. Go through the tutorial

6. Actually start building

So here’s how Rows solved it:

1. Open up Rows.com

That’s it! You’re in. You’re able to solve your problem just by navigating to Rows.com.

No complex tutorials, popups, or prompts asking you to create an account before you start doing actual work.

They store your progress inside a browser’s localStorage, so even if you close the browser, the next time you open up their platform, your progress is saved. 💾

Rows’ loginless experience alone helped them increase their sign-up conversion by 72% (from 11.1% to 19%)! 🚀

This shows that new generations of users want to use your product, not read about it. 🤓

New buyers make buy-in decisions based on whether they like the product or not - they don’t have time for tours, and most importantly, they don’t want to read!

They just want to get their hands dirty. 🧼

Keep it simple stupid is the motto.

💎 Product strategy & USP

🤖 AI Analyst

Finance bros, I have bad news.

You just got replaced.

Patagonia sweaters aren’t cool anymore. Telling AI to populate your tables is. 😎

Rows is playing a completely different game with its AI Analyst embedded into the platform. 🤖

With one prompt, you can now replace hours of manual work.

I’m sorry to tell you that your Excel shortcuts won’t cut it anymore.

And I’ve tried it myself.

“populate the table with conversion rates between USD and EUR in the past 3 months using exchangerate-api.com”

Boom - it’s there!

AI handles all of the heavy lifting.

Henrique showed me an even better use case, creating a user engagement report for the past 30 days, extracting the real data from his Google Analytics account.

Truly a great feeling when you see AI populating the correct data, right before your eyes. 👀

💵 Key revenue drivers

Rows discovered that combining AI with integrations, especially the OpenAI integration, had a 10% upgrade rate, compared to just 0.3% when users didn’t use AI at all.

That clarity helped them double down on the AI + integrations direction as the strongest lever for activation and product adoption.

AI users converted to paid at 2x the rate of non-AI users. 🚀

The platform’s focus has shifted from entry-level to a more mature audience, proficient in working in similar tools, but who won’t spend hours learning a new platform, rather just tell the AI what to do for them. 🤵‍♂️

Focusing on this audience has been one of the key revenue drivers for Rows.

🎨 Free canvas & Rows vision

First thing that you’ll notice about how Rows differentiates from Google Sheets is that you can place multiple tables, charts, or simple plain text notes on screen.

Great for holding complex presentations or data monitoring, overall being able to handle more data at a glance. 📊

Recently, they launched Rows Vision, a feature that extracts structured data from PDFs, charts, screenshots, and even whiteboards, unlocking workflows like invoice parsing and competitive research.

Rows Vision perfectly plays into their product adoption focus, allowing 2 clear entry paths into the software:

1. Create spreadsheets out of your documents 📄

2. Chat with your data 💬

They don’t have to compete anymore. They’ve found PMF.

🧩 Growth playbook

Rows’ first 10k users came through a waitlist.🫸

I know, wild right?

But I’d say it’s justified, as Henrique said they launched on Product Hunt multiple times, and allowed batched access of 5-15 users at first.

You can read all about how they managed their product waitlist here.

The first explosion happened when they dropped the homepage, where they jumped from 300-400 converted signups per week to 6000-7000 per week. 🤯

After this jump, they started experimenting. 🧪

The next thing that was a hit was billboards. 🪧

This viral billboard campaign drove 5k new signups.

The second one followed shortly:

They even created a landing page for this campaign! So brilliant!

But the biggest leap happened with their AI Analyst announcement.

In June 2023, they had the most viral campaign ever!

It got over 30 million views on social media and more than 50,000 sign-ups!

And the wildest part is that it happened by accident. 💥

Rows’ next move was to partner with influencers on social media to promote the product further.

They prepared the copy and sent it out - but one individual just changed one thing - the hook. 🪝

It exploded.

Just this week, they ran a new campaign #BreakTheAnalyst.

(I had to wait to publish this issue, not to spoil it lol)

Safe to say Rows is at the edge of growth marketing innovation, testing new strategies every month, thanks to Henrique & the team. 💡

It’s always great to see SaaS companies implementing and experimenting with out-of-the-box growth and GTM strategies. 🧩

These ones are the ones who are really going to make it.

Hope you enjoyed this breakdown and that you pulled a few nuggets out of the box! 🍗

I’ll catch you in the next one.

Ognjen Gatalo

Chief SaaS Strategist ☁️ 

P.S. Do you have a wild growth strategy to share? Reply to this email and I’ll reach out to cover it.