We've raised $1.1M seed funding

Hey Indie Hacker community, today I've some fantastic news from UserGuiding.

We've raised $1.1M as seed funding from VCs and angel investors from Turkey and Europe. If you'd like to read the details, you can check the announcement article I've written on our blog.

For this community, I'd like to mention three milestones that helped us get to this point:

• Our Product Hunt launch in April 2019. We've become #3 product of the month, and 22nd of the year. Wow. That's so cool!

But honestly, we didn't think it was that cool at the end of April. It's true that lots of people signed up for UserGuiding. We've also received some backlinks and PR coverage. But that we had to grow and needed actual paying users. And PH didn't seem to have a good audience for that.

Now, after 18 months, I can gladly tell you that every second we've prepared for the PH launch worthed it. We are still getting attraction from this launch, and it has opened some possibilities we didn't think of, such as partnerships, investor relations, and an enterprise customer.

• Our partnership with Product School on an ebook and virtual summits.

Our target audience are mostly product managers. And Product School was the perfect candidate for us to do partnerships. Luckily, we had gained their attention as well (thanks to milestone #1).

• Setting up an OMTM (One metric that matters, aka, north star metric)

It's so hard to set up analytics accurately when you are just a handful of people. You better keep creating content, develop the product, talk to users, etc.

But setting up our OMTM and working on iterations to increase it accelerated our growth. Instead of counting everything, just focus on counting this.

Here's our OMTM:

So for our free trial users to get the value of UserGuiding, they have to build a product tour on their website and embed a small JS code to their website so that it'll be live for their end users.

We thought that, if 20% of our users' end users interact with these tours, then these trial users will understand the value of UserGuiding and will be more likely to buy.

And we were right. Such users are 70% more likely to become our paying users. So we've set OMTM to % of such very active free trial users.

And based on their OMTM status, we personalize their onboarding experience with UserGuiding, send them emails with different CTAs, and retarget them on Ad platforms to nurture them.

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PS: Uh, this post is much longer than I thought. I want to write the whole growth story of UserGuiding, even though if it's not supersonic growth like Twitter VC, it might be helpful for some people.

Would anyone read?

Thanks for reading, have a great week ahead
Mert

https://userguiding.com/blog/seed-funding-2020/