Today, I’m excited to announce $9 million in Series A funding led by Crosslink Capital with participation from Founder Collective, Afore and Next Frontier Capital. VentureBeat covered our Series A announcement here.
TL;DR: The B2B tech landscape keeps growing every year, making it even harder for buyers to navigate. Good tools do exist that solve real customer problems. But with so many different options to choose from, good tools can get lost. That’s why we built UserEvidence: to automate social proof for go-to-market teams and create authentic customer stories at scale. We help B2B companies show off the success of their own customer base to boost buyer confidence, shorten sales cycles, and increase win rates.
A quick moment to reflect
It’s pretty freaking cool to announce our Series A fundraising as first time founders. It’s a major milestone for any startup. And for us, it’s awesome validation of getting to product-market fit with three years of hard work.
Fundraising announcements like this feel a little weird though. It’s almost like celebrating a chef for shopping at a store and getting a bunch of ingredients – without actually cooking the meal yet. The majority of the work, on the way to a great outcome, still lies ahead.
But as any Chef’s Table fan will tell you, ingredients matter. And we’ve done our Mise en Place with some high quality ingredients.
This moment is a good time to reflect on the changing market we serve, why we’ve had traction to date, and our vision for the future of GTM teams.
Internal scrutiny is way up and vendor trust is at an all-time low
It’s really hard for B2B vendors to win deals right now.
The C-suite keeps telling GTM teams to consolidate tech stacks, remove redundancies, and cut costs. Budgets are tight, the number of people involved in buying decisions has grown, and buyers don’t want to buy tech that flops.
Sellers at B2B companies must prove the value of their product to various personas: champions, decision makers, influencers, and executive sponsors. They need to present a clear narrative that shows the product’s overall value to the entire company, not just a single buyer.
The reality is there’s a huge trust gap between buyers and software vendors.
Vendor claims and messaging are biased and hard to understand, so buyers have shifted their focus to more trusted sources: their peers.
Buyers ask their network for recommendations, post questions in slack communities, and read reviews on third-party sites. They listen to what expert influencers have to say. They need unbiased, credible validation so they can be confident they’re making the right decision.
In order to get internal approval from higher ups, buyers have to show rock-solid, quantifiable proof the software they want will deliver on the promises being made by vendors.
Hearing directly from customers, in their own words, has always been the most powerful form of marketing.
One big problem: software companies never have enough customer stories
Buyers want to see relevant proof points from customers that look just like them.
Marketing teams know how critical social proof is. They struggle to create success stories at the kind of scale needed for the way modern GTM teams sell today.
Between interviewing, writing, editing, and getting external approval, publishing customer stories is a long and labor-intensive process.
Getting customers to talk is hard and when they do, many customers can’t publicly share success stories on-the-record. This is especially true at larger companies and companies that work in sensitive or regulated industries.
For complex, high-consideration products – there are simply too many permutations of personas, new use cases, and an always expanding list of industries to create customer stories for.
This creates a serious dilemma for Marketing teams
Marketing teams think they have two options to tackle the social proof problem:
- Create high-value content for a handful of customers
- Manually create customer content in-house
Option #1 usually requires working with agencies, video production teams, and analysts in order to create the content. The output might look and sound impressive, but it’s very expensive and only captures stories for a very small percentage of your total customer base.
Option #2 saves you money, adds more to your already overworked Marketing team’s plate, and creates different challenges across your entire GTM team. The output creates more internal bottlenecks, more manual writing and design work, and more wasted time to get everything approved.
Both options are risky and neither option is scalable.
The cheat code for scaling the voice of the customer
UserEvidence is a customer voice platform that automates social proof for GTM teams, generating verified case studies, testimonials, and stats in minutes.
Industry-leading B2B companies like Pendo, Workato, Gong, Jasper.ai, and Ramp rely on UserEvidence to create authentic customer stories at scale.
Our customers have created tens of thousands of social proof assets with our platform, and thousands of new customer reviews on sites like G2, TrustRadius, Gartner Peer Insights, PeerSpot, and Capterra.
Our NPS score for 2023 is +85. You can check out what our customers have to say about us in our own UserEvidence research library.
We’re changing the game for GTM teams in three ways:
1. Always-on customer feedback loop
UserEvidence delivers surveys at key moments throughout the customer journey to continually capture customer feedback and uncover insights, while giving customers the option to participate anonymously or publicly.
2. Unbiased, third-party validation
UserEvidence collects and independently verifies feedback from your customer base, showcasing the value your product delivers with quantifiable stats and information from your end users.
3. On-brand creative automation
UserEvidence instantly turns customer insights into branded, ready-to-use marketing content with a Canva-like design editor, automatically refactoring each content asset for microsites, slides, and social channels.
Turning feedback into customer stories is just the beginning
While we’re focused on scaling social proof today, we have our eyes on the future too.
Collecting customer feedback is a very static process right now. Feedback sits in silos like call recordings, reviews, surveys, and NPS scores – rarely making it back to the right teams to take action on. This process needs to evolve so it’s more dynamic, more organized, and more prescriptive.
Positive feedback is great, but negative feedback is equally valuable too. Getting feedback, positive or negative, to the right internal teams can help you improve the customer experience, reduce churn, and build a stickier product.
Our goal is to build the customer insights platform for GTM teams. A unified platform that constantly collects customer feedback across more channels, delivers relevant insights to each internal team and proactively makes recommendations on which actions to take.
Humans can do this well but technology hasn’t gotten there yet. We’re on a mission to change that.
We’re creating the new modern work culture to make it happen
UserEvidence is headquartered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. A town known more for skiing, freezing cold winters, and its proximity to the Tetons and Yellowstone.
There aren’t a ton of software companies, or even people, in Wyoming. So why am I writing this?
We’re focused on building the new modern work culture at UserEvidence. A culture where our employees don’t have to choose between having a meaningful career or having a life outside of work. They can have both. We want our employees to have it all.
We’ve embraced this mentality since our early days in Jackson, where many of our employees love the outdoors. Having a fulfilling career and a balanced personal life aren’t mutually exclusive. They actually enhance each other.
When you’re fulfilled at work, it positively impacts your personal life. When you’re happy in your personal life, you perform better at work.
