Have you ever been part of purchasing software for a company? Today, most SaaS vendors have two strategies for selling their products. The first is to get a prospect to start a trial (if you're lucky) and the other is to get a prospect to schedule a sales demo (ugh!). From there, it gets even more convoluted -- negotiations, contracts, procurement, and so on. Wouldn't it be great if you could cut through some of that as a buyer and try the product without having to start a trial or schedule a demo?
Arcade is a new way to showcase products. Short term, Arcade makes it easier for growth marketers and PMs to show off their products. Prospects can be taken on specific journeys right where they go to discover new products. In return, the vendor gets valuable data that they can use to make more relevant experiences. Long term, Arcade is building out a new CRM to connect marketing and sales teams across disciplines.
Arcade is focused on a $1B opportunity, with product-led growth companies becoming the new form of SaaS purchasing and selling. We raised a Seed round led by Upfront Ventures, with participation by Sequoia, Bond, and a group of angel investors, including Mathilde Collin, Laura Behrens Wu, Jaren Glover, Eric Wittman, Jonathan Widawski, and Lenny Rachitsky.
It's started by two ex-Atlassians who saw firsthand how product experiences can be better. Caroline Clark (CEO) is a former product marketer who implemented experiments with interactive products to drive more leads into the funnel. Learn more about her aspirations for servant leadership here.
Rich Manalang (CTO) built many key features and integrations across Jira, Confluence, HipChat, Trello, and the Atlassian Developer Ecosystem still in use today. He was also a frequent participant (and sometimes winner) in Atlassian's quarterly ShipIt Days (Atlassian's hackathon).
Since our soft launch in August 2021 — our customers have created, shared, and embedded over 2,300 interactive demos (we call them Arcades). We're seeing very high engagement from visitors (+40%) which suggests something is working.
We recently launched more broadly on Product Hunt on January 11th, 2022, and did very well — #4 for the day. On the same day, TechCrunch wrote about us! And about a week after, Product Hunt featured us in this article. We've also had a trickle of mentions in newsletters, blogs, tweets, and LinkedIn posts... all organic.
But more importantly, we 10x'd our goal of leads/users as a result of that launch. And now that we're out in the open, people are discovering us daily. Since then, we've had some bigger names publish Arcades on their sites: