Investment Notes
Investment Notes: Upflowy
We are thrilled to invest in Upflowy, a low-code signup engine that empowers marketing teams to optimise their lead sign-up flows.
16 Oct 2020 · 4 min read
Upflowy is a low-code signup engine that empowers growth leads to build and test lead signup flows without needing to utilise the scarce resources in their engineering teams.
This month the Tidal team made an investment in Upflowy and we're publishing our investment notes below. Although we invest across a range of markets, models and products, there are core principles that we live and die by in our investment decisions. For more information on the pillars that make a great Tidal Seed Investment, see our investment criteria here.
Markets with tailwinds
We are in the midst of a customer experience movement and trend toward self-service online. Businesses need to respond with slick and more efficient / high converting digital products. To achieve this, testing and iterating on new products has become the norm and businesses that look to acquire customers online understand that the user experience and journey through the funnel needs to be continuously optimised.
But there is a problem and it is two-fold.
- Growth teams that are looking to optimise the customer journey through the online acquisition funnel are constrained by the product roadmap and tech availability of the business. We have experienced this issue directly in our own portfolio companies. One of the Upflowy founders was previously solving this problem at his last business using a complex array of 90 online forms. We know early stage product-led growth companies with teams of 10+ people trying to solve this problem by stitching together basic tools.
- It is exceptionally difficult for most teams to set up and track an end-to-end customer journey funnel, with all the relevant metrics. Tools like Hubspot are doing a good job of owning the Top of Funnel metrics piece, but there are limited options to track the user journey from discovery through onboarding and offboarding and data & insights into this critical part of the acquisition funnel is limited.
Products that change the game
Upflowy provides a SaaS product for growth teams to build user flows and test and iterate against those in an easy to use, low code environment. This significantly alleviates the burden on the IT side, and democratises the ability for low-tech users to move forward with continuous user flow updates. The product also opens up access to end-to-end funnel analytics, which gives instant insights into the performance of the funnel and arms the team with the data they need to make changes to the user experience.
The 'hook' for the customer is the ability for marketing/product teams to build sign-up flows without needing to divert resources from the engineering team. The 'currency' of the product is the data and insights around customer journey through the funnel, which is directly correlated to converted revenue.
Our thesis: if Upflowy is able to demonstrate clear improvements to sign-up flows right at the point of the customer's customer transaction, it will be sticky and defensible within its customers day-to-day test and optimise workflows.
Founders that hustle
The Upflowy founding team is the one to solve this problem. All three co-founders have successfully built and exited multiple startups. Guillaume Ang is a serial entrepreneur and B2B SaaS growth expert. Matt Browne is also a serial entrepreneur with exit success from Whispli and DoneSafe. Alex Girard is leading product and engineering, having built 20+ SaaS products and held technical co-founder roles. The team has come together with a mutual frustration for the problem at hand and the necessary skills across ops, growth and product to build a globally scalable solution for the market.
Covid-style team photo.
A compelling business model
The great thing about low-code products is that they are easy to use by design and are usually built with a specific target user archetype in mind. This lends itself well to a product-led growth model, which we know creates compelling business value over time. This is a great starting point, but the real amplifier of value creation comes from layering on top immense value creation for the customer itself. By 10X-ing the customer's online conversion rate through better sign up flows, Upflowy earns the trust of its customers right at the point that matters to them the most: revenue generation. This gives them the right to further monetise that customer relationship with better product, data and insights over time - that is the beauty of the next evolution of SaaS businesses that unlock valuable primary data that didn't exist before.
The seed phase
We loved the speed with which the Upflowy founding team were able to get an initial test product in market, validate it with early customers and build a business case and growth plan around it for their Seed Phase. Whilst the core focus early on has been around the 'brute force' part of working closely with early users and hitting the phones, the founders have done this with an eye toward their scalable path to market and are building for a frictionless growth plan from day 1. Next step will be to make a beautiful product easily accessible to customers and start testing growth channels.
Using these core principles, we gained conviction at Tidal to back the Upflowy team early in their journey and we look forward to welcoming them into the fold and supporting them as they pursue their world domination plans through their seed phase.
A note on the low code / no code thematic
Business users want access to the productivity, workflow automation and data accessibility that they have become accustomed to in their consumer experience of technology. But they don't want to have to learn how to code to get it and nor should they. The low code / no code movement is about democratising the ability of business users to build the tools they need, alleviating pressure on core engineering teams and drawing on their unique knowledge of the problem to be solved. This will speed up the capacity for teams to innovate and create.
Upflowy is just one of many tools that we see emerging in this category. If you're a visionary founder who is ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.
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