Study after study has shown that returning customers can have a big impact on the top line. But ensuring an engaging process for bringing aboard new customers has traditionally been a complicated ordeal - which can create challenges for companies that don’t have a ton of tech experts on staff. That’s where Appcues comes in.
The Cambridge-based startup creates a personalized onboarding process that aims to improve the crucial first experience a customer has with a new product or service, thus ultimately boosting their loyalty. And now that the startup has raised $1.2 million in seed funding, they can forge ahead with developing a platform for non-technical staff to create those flows, without even changing the code.
The funding came from Cambridge's Atlas Venture and angel investors Ty Danco, HubSpot co-founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, former HubSpot executives David Cancel and Elias Torres and Nanigans CEO Ric Calvillo. The money will go toward supporting the launch of a mobile version of the Appcues service sometime this spring.
Appcues' co-founder and CEO is Jonathan Kim, who previously was in charge of front-end development for HubSpot’s Social Inbox. The startup is being incubated out of the Atlas Venture office —which is located in the same building as HubSpot, on First Street in Cambridge.
Background
While working for inbound marketing software company HubSpot, Kim realized the problem that Appcues could potentially solve.
While marketing professionals had the most insight into customers, they were too dependent on developers to implement their ideas. Meanwhile, co-founder Jackson Noel became acutely aware of how important the onboarding process is while working as a growth marketer at the edtech startup Testive. And he, too, noticed that it took far too long to implement any changes.
And thus, Appcues was founded in 2013 - its mission being to give marketers the ability to make changes themselves. Now, Appcues has been honing in on a platform that empowers devs to easily integrate tutorials on how to use an application, product sign-ups and notifications - even if they don’t have a ton of technical experience. That means a continually improved user on boarding experience and also greater loyalty. In fact, in one case study, an Appcues customer reported an 82 percent improvement in conversions after just five weeks of using the toolkit.
