The Future of Product Success and Our $15M Series A
TLDR
Today we’re proud to announce our $15M Series A, led by Insight Partners, with participation from Atlassian Ventures, The New Normal Fund, Essence VC, and a roster of product, marketing, and engineering executives from some of today’s fastest growing software companies, including Atlassian, Block, Gainsight, 6sense, Alloy, and others. We’re also thrilled to have our seed investors, Cowboy Ventures and Bull City Venture Partners, returning to participate in the round. We couldn’t have asked for better partners in the first chapter of our journey, and are thankful for their continued conviction to our mission.
During our years at Atlassian and now LaunchNotes, Jake and I have had the opportunity to interact with thousands of software and product development teams. Through these experiences one thing has become painfully clear: the tools and technologies powering engineering teams have been far outpacing those available to the rest of the product organization. We see a massive opportunity for LaunchNotes, and what we’re calling Product Success, to close this gap.
With this additional capital we have the resources to double down on LaunchNotes’ growth and continue building out a world-class team. Most importantly, these resources will allow us to accelerate our expansion of offerings from a dedicated solution for product change communication to a full platform for Product Success.
Product teams are under more pressure than ever
In less than one lifetime, software has gone from a handful of basic applications to the driving force powering nearly every corner of the economy.
Today, we’re living through the rapid acceleration of some fundamental, drastic trends impacting the ways software is built and delivered.
- Agile & CI/CD: Developers who delivered large updates once or twice a year now ship multiple times per day.
- SaaS: Instead of a customer updating to a new version on their schedule, the vendors ship production changes instantly.
- Product-led growth: Building products that attract and sell themselves has upended the way software is built, packaged, and purchased.
- Remote teams: Product development happens at an around-the-clock, global scale.
These trends have powered incredible growth. But they’ve created chaos for the millions of customer-facing teams whose job it is to release, sell, and support all this software. Product marketing teams are unaware of what’s reaching users and when to communicate updates. Revenue teams are in the dark about what new functionality they’re allowed to sell. Customer success teams are learning about new features for the first time from angry users. And product managers, fighting to connect all the dots, are stretched to impossible lengths.
Our journey so far: Connecting millions of users to the products they love
In May of 2020, LaunchNotes—a personalized, automated, and secure way to connect your teams and users to your product development cycle—was born.
Over the past two years LaunchNotes has led the charge to help leading product and marketing teams make a successful transition into a world of continuously communicating with customers and closing the loop between the builders, the customers, and the rest of the business. By leveraging LaunchNotes, teams from some of the world’s fastest growing companies have reported phenomenal results:
We’re happy to call some of the biggest names in tech our customers and partners on this journey; including Loom, MURAL, Flatfile, Grafana, SpotOn, Amplitude and many others. And we’re pleased to share that, driven by this incredible adoption, over the last year alone the business has seen 650% revenue growth and 300% new customer growth. Additionally, LaunchNotes-powered product updates are now reaching over 500,000 users per month!
Propelled by enterprise-readiness and end-to-end flexibility, coupled with industry leading customizability, security optionality, and communication standardization, LaunchNotes continues to revolutionize the way leading enterprises across the software industry–including leaders in the PLG movement–are communicating updates: past, present, and future. Making it possible for businesses of all sizes to communicate with their users in a streamlined, personalized, and secure way has been a core focus of ours from day one, and we plan to double down on these capabilities in the months ahead.
But becoming the leader in product change communication is only LaunchNotes’ first beachhead. We raised our Series A to conquer the second.
Building the world’s first Product Success Platform
Our goal is to provide everything product teams need to succeed and excel in the modern world. As such, we’re excited to announce the future of LaunchNotes as the world’s first Product Success Platform.
Our vision for a Product Success Platform is to connect the core parts of the development cycle—such as comms, feedback, and planning—into one platform. Advancing and accelerating the product teams of today, so they can build the great technologies of tomorrow.
We believe unlocking Product Success and PM productivity is the key to getting the entire organization aligned, coordinated and moving at the same speed as their engineering and revenue teams.
To read more about our thinking on Product Success, and the massive opportunity we see to solve some of the most frustrating and costly problems faced by every software organization today, head over to our companion essay on this topic: It's time for Product Success.
How we’re going to get there
Our Series A capital has unlocked our ability to move even faster as we build out the Product Success Platform of the future. In the months ahead we’ll be relentlessly focused on three major areas:
- Deep integrations with developer, customer feedback, CRM, and collaboration tools
- A new Slack app that will revolutionize the way LaunchNotes is powered and automate much of the internal stakeholder alignment
- Additional Enterprise features and functionality that will unlock even greater value for LaunchNotes users at scale
To follow along with our progress, head over to our roadmap page and subscribe to the items you’d like to follow!
Join the movement
We’ve gotten this far with the help of our amazing team and the support of hundreds of incredible customers. And if you’re as fired up about what we’re doing as we are, we’d love for you to join us!
- Try LaunchNotes for free or schedule a 1-1 demo
- Join our Launch Awesome community and engage with other product and marketing leaders from around the world
- Grab a seat on the rocket ship! See our open roles on our careers page and help us build the future of Product Success
