Arrows
Easy high-touch customer onboarding. Create, share, track, a
We decided Arrows needed more resources to really accomplish the goals we had for it and what our customers wanted us to provide. So we set out to raise seed funding and decided to work with Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture firm) and 48 awesome angel investors.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/29/arrows-raises-2-75m-to-build-out-its-customer-onboarding-software/
We spent a few weeks rebuilding our website and adding a free trial to the app. Our goal with launching was to build awareness and try to get in front of more people. We've learned that people usually aren't ready right away to start using Arrows, so letting them see it and try it helps us more than getting them to pay right away.
We also ran a unique marketing campaign where we wrote personal letters to friends who'd been helpful to us, published them on our website, and asked them to share their own custom URL for our launch. https://twitter.com/DanielZarick/status/1371894292713775107
One by one, we got each customer. Some were referrals, some were from Twitter, some were random website visitors. It was difficult to predict. We did a little bit of everything to get here.
We recorded a whole podcast about this too: https://overcast.fm/+eDn1YKMnc
Since the beginning of 2020 we've had a vague website, on purpose, so we could easily change our product without feeling the need to change how we referenced it publicly. It had just enough keywords that a possible customer would feel validated, but nothing specific about the product 😂
So we finally changed that, now that the product is live. We added screenshots and a "Book demo" button. 🥳
We had a sales conversation a few months ago with this customer, and they told us to follow-up after the product was live. They didn't want to preorder.
So after we had our preordered customers using the product, we followed up again and this customer purchased right away. Super encouraging!
Back in February we took preorders for our new high-touch onboarding tool for customer success teams.
After a few challenging months (covid-19, lots of client work, plus building the v1 all at the same time) we are finally onboarding those initial customers!
They seem really happy so far.
Our last product didn't work out, so we shut it down and started from scratch. This time we started with research into customer success teams. We saw a lot of the same workflows and spreadsheets, and decided to make UI mockups of a product based on the problems we heard.
With those mockups, we started asking for preorders and eventually got 4 total. And off we go building the v1!
We're currently in 8th and climbing (at 9:15am Central). Bootstrapped team with their first launch... hoping we can get in the top 5!
Honestly, we didn't plan this one very much. We just wanted to launch and get it done. We're going to launch a lot more things in the future, so this is all just about being fast-and-loose.
I scheduled the post last night and added the Product Hunt badge to the site in case that'd help.
This morning I fired off emails to my personal list (~96 people) and our Arrows list (~54 people) to ask for help. I also texted a few friends who were early users and asked them to write comments, which seems to help.
Let's hope it works!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/arrows-outreach
Honestly it'd take a long time to explain how we got to where we are, but long story short we launched a new tool today!
It's called Arrows Outreach, and it's the easiest way to e-mail a list of people.
When we talked to customers everyone had lists like this floating around—people they had been meaning to reach out to, customers they had been meaning to contact, press they want to share their story with, etc.
Most people kept these lists in a spreadsheet, Airtable, etc. We've had our own lists as well: Daniel was trying to sell an app he worked on called Housecraft, and Benedict had emailed hundreds of press contacts when he helped release the indie video game TumbleSeed.
But both of us used spreadsheets and the error-prone process of copy+pasting emails and messages between a bunch of different apps to do this.
Arrows Outreach makes this whole process a snap. Upload a CSV and you'll receive emails with pre-filled drafts that you can send in a snap. Receive these drafts at whatever cadence you like, and start mailing the emails you know you should be sending.
We're taking a swiss-army-knife approach to Arrows, and are trying to build small tools like this that help people get their communication done.
What tasks are you working on that a CRM is too bloated for, but you want to be easier?
We'd known Gmail was changing their rules for API integrations at some point this year, but this was the day we found out it was months sooner than we'd expected. The new rules required that you get a 3rd party security review, quoted between $15,000 and $75,000. But that didn't even count whether or not you'd get approved! As indiehackers we weren't able or willing to put up that kind of money, and we weren't ready to launch yet either.
This is when we started planning a new strategy... what is Arrows if we can't use a Gmail mail integration??
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That's been a thorn in Startups-for-the-Rest-of-Us's @MikeTaber's side for a while, and I heard @patwalls say on https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/102-quick-chat-with-pat-walls is going to stump up for the review for https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pigeon-for-gmail. You don't mention it, but I think the security review is an annual requirement.
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Yes, the security review is an annual requirement.
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