As an early-stage investor, it is, of course, important to invest in great people and great teams. This, more often than not, is the biggest driver of a company’s success. Similarly, however, we believe you should invest in great ideas. Ideas that both excite you and are linked to a problem/solution pair with which you can personally identify.
Given my past operational experience for two decades at software companies, I personally resemble the comment that “software is eating the world.” Over the last five years or so, I have been consumed with the idea that with all of this “software” out there, how do we ensure 1) that software companies are actually building terrific software? and 2) that organizations can properly consume all the software they have purchased?
On that first question, one of my favorite personal investments (and board affiliation) is with Pendo. I met the amazing Todd Olson six years ago when he was first looking to start his company. His idea was simple but big at the same time: software companies had no easy way to both understand how their product was being used nor how to best to help their end-users use their product. Six years later, Pendo has emerged as a clear leader in offering a Product Cloud to software companies to ensure that they are building the best possible software they can.
As to that second question, we feel the very same way about Melanie Fellay, Zari Zahra, and the team at Spekit. They are addressing a huge increasingly intractable problem.
Which is - when you combine the on average 20+ SAAS applications that companies have now deployed + the monthly product releases of those applications + the monthly process changes and customizations a company’s admin attempts to deploy to users, we have created something between user fatigue and complete chaotic madness. As I speak to my peeps in rev ops and sales ops and sales enablement, they are increasingly concerned about how best to ensure their employees know best how to use their deployed software.
We all know that this is NOT solved by a two-hour session during the five-day boot camp when employees have no context. We also know that a portal or online class is not something users will alt-tab to when they are in the middle of their operational process flow. We also know that deploying complicated service-heavy “walk-throughs” isn’t the right answer either - users just click and don’t learn + the guidance tools break down with every customization.
Enter Spekit - understanding that people “learn while doing”, they offer within salesforce.com and companies’ other applications, embedded assistance directly within the applications employees use every day. The assistance/training is contextual and easy for employees to consume, easy for administrators to deploy and change, and easy to maintain and keep up to date. Their deep API integration with salesforce.com provides content creators real-time updates on new changes to fields, field value, etc that could use a Spekit.
After talking to Melanie and Zari and their early customers, we could feel the energy and deep emotional attachment. We were also very much drawn to the power of the value they deliver with a product that is so simple to understand and deploy.
We believe this team is a winner as it is the answer to this all-important question - if software is eating the world, how do we ensure that our employees eat the software?
Check their announcement out today at https://spekit.co/2019/10/01/spekit-raises-2-5m-to-enter-next-stage-of-growth/ and more importantly, if you are in my extended sales operations and sales enablement posse, give them a try. Tell em Brett sent ya :)
