At almost every board meeting we attend with our B2B companies, we hear the same concern: time, money, and developer resources are needed to build and tweak onboarding and activation flows for SaaS applications. Everyone wants to provide a delightful and personalized product onboarding experience for their customers. But today, no one has built tools to enable customer success teams, product managers, and marketing teams to close the gap that exists between customer onboarding (activation and initial product install) and learning (deepening usage, feature adoption, etc.).
When we met Candu, their solution clicked with us right away. Candu is a native, no-code platform that arms teams interfacing with the customer to dynamically edit and update onboarding flows and tailor context and documentation within the SaaS applications they support. They identified that to actually bridge the gap, they couldn’t just build a light layer that sits on top. Unlike other products, Candu is built such that it can be deeply embedded within the code and render in app.
Broadly speaking, customer-facing teams have no control over the user experience for the products they are working to get people to adopt—existing solutions are limited to surface level pop-ups. Instead, developer resources are needed every time a product manager or customer success manager wants to test training materials and quick start guides to drive activation, turn on or off modules for a specific account, or trigger content at key moments for the customer (e.g. to prevent churn and drive adoption through learning). Moreover, material that sits within the learning management system or content management system can get stale fast, especially as devs prefer not to spend time updating materials and content triggers as the app evolves.
Candu’s founders, Jonathan and Michele, experienced this pain point first-hand. Jonathan from a business and customer-facing angle at InsightSquared and LaunchDarkly and Michele from a technical and UX perspective at Coursera and TransferWise. For customer success teams, product managers, and marketing teams, we believe this is a force multiplier in product enablement. We believe every B2B SaaS application should be enabled by Candu, and that the ability to dynamically embed editable user experiences within SaaS applications has the potential to be a game changer in B2B software. In our view, Jonathan and Michele are the perfect team to tackle this problem, and we are thrilled to be leading Candu’s $5M seed and partnering with the team on the journey ahead.