(2024-02-16) How Linear Got So Popular

How Linear.app got so popular. Linear was just there one day and everyone loved it.

Linear’s mouthwatering traction: More cash in the bank than they ever raised in venture capital, a reported valuation of $400m and a lifetime ad spend of $35k.

Linear has an aura. Even social posts about fun little details (their words, not mine) can get massive engagement:

founder/CEO Karri Saarinen’s posts on Twitter and LinkedIn regularly garner thousands of interactions.

While it’s comforting to believe everyone toiled in obscurity for 10 years before seeing breakout success, it’s not true for Linear. According to a Forbes article, Linear’s announcement of a private alpha generated to 10,000 signups in two months. When Linear opened to the public in 2020, it already had 1000 customers.

this has two main reasons:

• The product started as a Chrome extension that simplified Jira for Karri (then at Airbnb). The extension became so popular that many in the company were using it.
• The founders Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo and Tuomas Artman were known in Silicon Valley circles

A founder brand and initial traction help, but that doesn’t build a brand as strong as Linear’s. Even the Instagram founders’ new app failed!

Nico’s tweet above gave me a clue. In fact, I think it goes further than a framework or methodology.... Linear controls a narrative.

Silicon Valley growth culture stands for “fail fast”, A/B tests, OKRs and clear team structures. Linear stands for craft, taste, directional goals and evanescent teams. Each side pitches its system as the superior way to build a product.

This creates soft power. From The Generalist’s Soft Power in Tech: Sometimes, you can get the outcomes you want without tangible threats or payoffs.

Linear makes tech workers want their way of building product. This means they can grow rapidly with little overt marketing: Once you adopt Linear’s narrative, Linear becomes the obvious choice.

*Linear isn’t alone in this. Basecamp’s founders espouse a narrative of calm work, Stripe advances a narrative of societal progress through entrepreneurship. Y Combinator insists entrepreneurial success is no accident.

That doesn’t mean you can manufacture a cultural belief and supercharge your brand. The culture needs to offer fertile soil for your narrative.*

Narratives are bigger than storytelling in two ways:

First, Y Combinator’s narrative can contain Tom Blomfield’s success story about a company achieving millions in ARR and feel inspired.

Additionally, a narrative stakes a claim on the external world.

Linear’s narrative expands its reach: Software should be well-designed. We shouldn’t let data decide everything. Design and engineering should lead projects, not product managers.

there’s no “playbook” for narrative construction. Unlike with other growth strategies, there are no secret ranking algorithm insights or click-here-then-there instructions. But we can show you what we learned from Linear at CommandBar.

The CommandBar manifesto (and how to write yours) explained:

Our recently-published manifesto is an example of us constructing our own narrative. While issue tracking & project management is different from user assistance/UX work, we believe there's an important narrative shift that's needed to happen

More intrusive pop-up ads were brilliant in comparison: They pulled in from 3 to 5 percent of users.

pop-ups aren’t dead. They litter the products we pay for to “help us”.

By explaining how pop-ups came to be, we accomplish three things:
The manifesto becomes more interesting because the reader learns something.
The manifesto becomes more believable because we show proof.
It shows that things haven't always been that way—meaning they don't always have to be that way.

We identify pop-ups as the culprit of products being annoying

To wrap it up, I want to highlight the components both Linear and CommandBar use to construct their narratives:

Perhaps the best summary comes from Seth Godin, who describes good marketing as: “People like us do things like this”.

Who it’s for: Most people (even in tech) don’t care about the craft of building software. Linear builds for those who do.

Moral judgment: Narratives are ultimately about values. What do we believe is good? What do we consider bad?

Personifications: It’s hard to relate to abstract concepts like taste, feature bloat and bad management. That’s why it’s important to define how these good and bad things manifest. Linear does this well:
Bad: Jira, Agile, PMs
Good: Apple, Scandinavian design, Inter (typeface), changelogs

The promised land

CEO Karri Saarinen often describes envisioning a world where management tools inspire, not constrain us.

The same way a strategy memo does nothing unless it specifies projects, few will make the effort to derive action steps from your moral judgments. Spell them out! That’s what Linear does in its Method: It tells software teams concretely what to do and not to do (thou shalts not included).

Charismatic leader(s): Narratives need evangelists. Linear’s founder and CEO Karri Saarinen is active on LinkedIn. and Twitter.

Like every good movement, Linear has a manifesto. They call theirs Method. (2021-01-29 LinearMethodIntroduction)