Obie
The fastest way to find and build knowledge at work
Since launching our brand new browser extension ~60 days ago we've accumulated a modest 234 users.
I surveyed these users, performed some user interviews and analyzed the user data we have from Amplitude.
I wrote this post that explains, in detail, how I collected this feedback and what the data is telling me so far:
Could it be? 2 MAJOR milestones in one day? Well, the rumors are true!
In light of a lot of organizations shifting to distributed work during the pandemic, today we are ALSO announcing..
👉 Personal Free
👉 Personal Pro
What this means is, even if your organization hasn't adopted Obie, you can start to use the product free, for personal use.
Individuals in sales, support, marketing, product or even founders like me can now connect all of their tools into one searchable source of truth and accelerate work.
Today, we are announcing the biggest product advancement we have made since first appearing in the Slack App Directory a few years ago..
👉 The Obie browser extension
Starting today, new and existing Obie users can use the browser extension (available on all Chromium-based browser's) to accelerate support and find knowledge within the flow of work.
Our mission at Obie is to make company knowledge universally accessible and more useful. The Obie browser extension is a huge step towards realizing this mission as teams no longer have to have Slack in-order to benefit from our technology.
Removing this platform dependency and friction from adopting the product is a product of many iterations, customer interviews and onboarding data.
We'd love to hear your thoughts:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/obie-for-chrome
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Hey Product Hunt launch day buddy! (my newsletter Remotely Inclined got hunted on Product Hunt today too!) Upvoted you.
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Boom! 🔥 Upvoted!
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We've been busy here at Obie.ai! First, we just launched a brand new website. It's been a long time coming—we've been neglecting out main site since we started the company and never really put any effort into SEO, content etc. and stuff with a minimal landing page. We decided to go with a "topic cluster" format while keeping it as clean and succinct as possible.
We also iterated on our pricing (again) based on learnings over the last year. We simplified the plans, and made them more accessible to the types of companies that typically find value in Obie.
Lastly, we launched a brand new product called: Obie Access
Access is specifically exciting for us because when we first built the MVP for Obie we thought we'd be catering to product teams and startups like our own (who doesn't like building for themselves), but as time went on product market fit took us in a different direction. Today we are finally launching the most powerful Slack-first wiki solution for teams to create one single source of truth for their knowledge to fill this void. With Access, I think we've managed to design a price sensitive, intelligent and robust solution for startups to prioritize knowledge management.
Having almost no-luck raising venture capital after graduating from 500 Startups in 2017, we decided it was time to raise a modest amount of funding to double down on in-bound growth strategies we have been experimenting with and solidify product market fit. This money brings us just shy of $700,000USD in total funds raised, which after almost 5 years, isn't a lot of money to work with!
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Congrats!
How did you got about raising the money?
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Good question! Learning from past failures in this department, I took a very calculated approach. I'll try and disseminate below:
- Made a list of prospective investors who had made investments in complimentary companies and ordered them by most to least desired
- Began asking "advice" about a potential of a raise with existing angel investors on our cap-table and angel investors that I knew from tech circles
- Polished up my investor deck (10-slides) and shared it with the "friendly" angels
- Convinced 1 angel to open up the round with a 100k check (most important step)
- This took a month or two 👆then I began to setup meetings (via warm-intros) with my list of prospective angels
- Tactically, I used a SAFE convertible note to limit friction in the process and ran a "rolling-close"—meaning I told investors I needed them to wire me the money before I considered it "committed"
- 👆this was critical for momentum to avoid the "my check is too small to move the needle, so I'll wait until it's all committed" objection
- Got 60% of the money committed before getting a micro-vc to commit the rest of the money—angels move faster and more freely than vc's.
It's a relatively small amount of money, but ended up "oversubscribing" by setting the bar much lower than I had in the past.
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As momentum begins to build we brought on @altruly and Kristen for growth and customer success to help us further solidify the early product market fit we've established. There is still a long way to go, but we are placing a priority on having robust SOPs and processes to be prepared for scale.
After a rough 2018, we decided focusing on a few key channel partners would help our focus and get us closer to product market fit. We did $41,000 in revenue in Q1 of 2019, up from $20,000 in Q4 of 2018. For the first time in awhile, we started seeing the light again. This traction is predominantly due to gating the product, doing in-depth discovery calls with prospective customers and iterating based on their specific feedback.
We used a BANT (Budget/Authority/Needs/Timeline) call structure and focused on key questions like:
- What is your single greatest challenge?
- How do you currently solve this problem?
- What are your expectations of a solution?
We were out of cash and unable to pay our team and amicably parted ways with 2/4 teammates. Just @alexsopinka and I remained optimistic about the product and more importantly the problem we were solving. User traction began to plateau while efforts of monetization and paid plans were hardly successful.
We shut down the freemium version of Obie and put up a landing page prompting any prospective user or customer to speak with us before proceeding. We were fortunate to be able to leverage existing in-bound traffic from the Slack App Directory at the time.
By the end of 500 Startups, we reached over 1,500 teams who had installed Obie spanning more than 100,000 users! At the time, we hadn't found a monetization strategy that worked and cash was getting sparse again. Our user traction was bitter sweet, knowing that as a bootstrapped company we hadn't unlocked the most important part of starting a company: generating revenue.
Early 2017 we found out that we had been accepted into Batch 20 of 500 Startups (we really need a 500 logo in here!). It was like a dream come true. Not only was a small-town Canadian team getting a shot at the big leagues, we were literally weeks away from running out of money after bootstrapping the company for the past 2 years..
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