A new startup that aims to take the error out of the trial and error process that so many companies endure has just launched in Boston.
Parlay – which bills itself as a “customer collaboration platform” to help build better Web-based products – marked its official start earlier this week.
Parlay lets teams – such those creating features for mobile apps – first validate ideas before writing “a single line of code,” said co-founder and chief executive, Keith Frankel. “We believe that the time it takes to test the idea should be zero.”
The secret to Parlay’s strategy, he said, is to get in touch with users. Too many companies, he said, have come to depend too heavily on analytics software, marketing and sales teams, and consultants when evaluating app features, while failing to actually work with customers before launching new products.
“When’s the last time you were contacted by someone [designing] the product you’re actually using?” said Frankel. “There is something these analytics tools can’t replace, and that’s empathy. You cannot get into the mind of the person unless you talk to him,” he said.
The brains behind the subscription-based service Parlay offers are familiar to the startup scene: Frankel was at HubSpot until it went public and was more recently chief product officer at Firecracker, until it was snapped up earlier this year by Wolters Kluwer Health; Jason Zopf, the technology chief, was a former senior engineer at Firecracker; and Jonah Stuart, the chief design officer, was a previous senior product designer at Smarterer.
So far the startup has been cruising on funds raised from Firecracker’s sale, said Frankel, and has not needed to raise venture capital. “We have had conversations with VCs, but right now, we have turned those down.”
But, he said, an announcement about funding should be coming in the next several weeks, though he declined to elaborate.
Parlay’s subscription model has three tiers, a free model for student ventures and small startups, a mid-rate offer for business teams that’s “less than 100 bucks a month,” and a specialized service with varying prices.
The idea for Parlay came up while Frankel was at Firecracker, he said, and the team developed a “patchwork” system used for evaluating products that allowed for working with customers to see how they liked what they were creating.
“Parlay,” he said, “really started out of necessity.”
Parlay is also one of 10 semi-finalists pitching at the Collision Conference – a tech conference – in New Orleans next month.
