Founder Update #2: Making the Product Slippery
Howdy neighbors! I'm currently in Chicago getting ready to pitch at Technori Startup Showcase, but I wanted to quickly keep you all in the loop with a second company update. First and foremost, we've passed 100 investors and $120k in committed capital (half through Republic & half through private placements)! This alone covers a year of full-time development effort for our offshore development team, and is a huge milestone. Thank you for joining us on this journey.
Beyond this, we've made progress on our core platform, and are in the process of negotiating our first major enterprise customer, Athenahealth. Full details below:
- Our team attended a 2-hour in person meeting with members of Athenahealth's management and product design teams late last week to discuss the possibility of them using Parlay across their product lines. They currently spend more than $200M annually on R&D efforts and have developed a significantly robust process for user testing and research. Moving forward, they will be piloting Parlay in their newer products, and we are in the process of finalizing requirements and service level agreements. Given their size and sophistication, this is the most notable external validation we've received to date and view it as a substantial milestone in our development.
- We continue to learn from our current and prospective beta companies and are actively updating our platform to address their concerns, suggestions, and ideas. Based on this feedback, we've made significant progress across multiple feature sets and new value props:
- Dramatically simplified onboarding & feature preview creation.
- Expanded inbound user feedback tracking.
- New in-app user engagement motivation mechanisms, i.e. incentivizing users to participate in Parlay by displaying notifications of other users' collaboration activities.
- Instant feature previews, allowing product teams to instantly collect feedback from all users in app, regardless of screen.
- Standalone collaboration boards, allowing product teams to use Parlay's functionality completely outside of a product experience – perfect for both early-stage, pre-product teams, as well as large enterprise customers particularly concerned with not disrupting users in-app.
- Given the quality of feedback we're receiving from beta companies, as well as our ongoing efforts to research and understand pricing tiers which are appropriate moving forward, we've made the decision to allow all non-enterprise companies participating in our beta to continue doing so for free until we ultimately transition into our fully-launched stage. We're confident this is the right move strategically given that the short-term revenue gained would be less valuable than the feedback potentially lost. We're running a marathon, not a sprint.
- KingsCrowd, an online investment recommendation site covering early-stage startup deals, covered Parlay in depth in a recent piece, ultimately giving their global network of investors a 'Buy' recommendation. In their own words: "Parlay is a smart product with a strong founding team that knows how to build and sell product at scale in an efficient manner. The opportunity to efficiently sell to tens of thousands of startup product teams a customer collaboration platform that doesn’t yet exist is an intriguing opportunity... We also like that the team cares about investor dollars more than most... Overall, at a $6M valuation, the product offering and founding team are intriguing enough to garner a BUY rating..."
- VentureFizz, a Boston-based media outlet focused on technology and innovation, recently covered Parlay and its origin story in a fun little piece.
Those are the highlights for now! Thanks again, and we'll talk soon.