Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Jackson, thanks so much for joining us.
Jackson Noel, Appcues
Hey, Keith. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Likewise, I'm excited to talk to you because we're talking about Appcues, which, if you look at your tagline, Appcues is product adoption made easy. So let's unpack that. What does that mean?
Jackson Noel, Appcues
Well, what we've seen is that for our customers who are software companies, particularly product and marketing teams, within software companies, there's all this amazing tooling to attract people to the product, to engage people outside of the product. But when you want to drive adoption, you know, onboard users drive adoption of new features within the product. It's really hard to do that it takes a lot of time, you have to go through your engineering team, it takes weeks to, you know, even bring simple things to life. Ask is is a solution, a no code solution to help our customers build beautiful and product experiences that improve activation, conversion, retention, help our customers collect feedback, all without having to go through their engineering teams. And we've been around for a little over eight years and have about 1800 customers using us in production today.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
That's amazing. 1800 customers, because you talk about the company's been around for eight years. You guys are at the epicenter of this massive wave with the acronym product lead growth P LG. So how did the idea come to fruition?
Jackson Noel, Appcues
I think the idea came to fruition well before the acronym plg ever even existed. And so in a way, we've we've kind of benefited from the world growing up around us. But I think like a lot of entrepreneurial journeys, it started because we needed to solve a problem that we had ourselves. So, you know, my co-founder was an engineer at HubSpot, he grew frustrated that users weren't discovering the features that he was working on. At the time, HubSpot really relied on its services and support team to hop on calls with customers, walk them through all the functionality of the product. And he just imagined that there had to be a better way of doing that. And in parallel with that, I was at a small edtech company in you know, I guess what is what is today now known as a growth roll. But back then was just kind of a mix of product and marketing. And I started off by doing a lot of user acquisition stuff built our website did a lot of ad optimization and a lot of email marketing. And then when we started working on activating users in the product, just kind of felt this frustration firsthand that unlike everything I was doing top of the funnel, everything took weeks to get done inside of the product. And it was those frustrations that brought Jonathan and I had to get together to get apples off the ground.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So there's a lot that goes with the Appcues platform. So what are some of the common use cases?
Jackson Noel, Appcues
Yeah, common use cases. We have about 1800 customers today, about 80% of those are b2b companies. You know, they are using Appcues to onboard users drive adoption of features among existing users reduce the support burden of their products and collect contextual feedback along the way. And they're really using Akyuz throughout that user lifecycle, to drive deeper engagement and, and drive better user outcomes.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So there's a lot happening at Appcues, like what's the current stage of the business number of employees or whatever you can share?
Jackson Noel, Appcues
Yeah, so we're, we're about 110 employees. We raised a series B in January of last year. And we are completely remote. So we started the company in Boston. That's our home. That's where we had an offense up until COVID. And then we made the decision to pivot to a fully remote model. We now have 110 employees distributed across, I believe, 27 US states and nine countries, if you can believe that. And we were growing quite a bit, we recently just introduced our mobile product. So historically, Akyuz has only been used within Web applications. Now we're being used within mobile applications that moved out, or that got pushed out in September, and is turning into big growth vector for the business about how we ultimately help our customers in new places as well.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So you mentioned that you're remote first now as a company, so what's it like working there? What's the culture like?
Jackson Noel, Appcues
Yeah, absolutely. So there are a few different ways I describe it. First off, one of our company values is always be learning. And it's one of my favorite things about AP kids. I have the benefit of hindsight, of course, but I get to look around and see a bunch of people who sometimes joined in very entry level roles, and are now leading to Games or otherwise just having like a really big outsized impact as individual contributors. And I think hopefully that means that we've done things right as, as a company, creating a culture where that's possible. But I also think it's because we have done a really good job of attracting the right people who have a growth mindset, who want to take on a lot of ownership, we want to challenge themselves and, and just kind of always operate on the frontier of their ability level. And those are the type of people who, who thrive here for sure. So we really, you know, encourage people to take on a lot of ownership, encourage people to challenge themselves. And then the last thing that I would say is, you know, we, we take our customers in our business very seriously. But we don't take ourselves very seriously. So we do like to have fun and enjoy the journey. And, you know, make sure that we're investing in relationships and investing in the bonds that we form across the company. Actually, in a couple of weeks, we are going to our next company wide retreat. So it is in Mayakoba, Mexico. And even though we're fully remote company, it's just so important to get everybody together in person, break bread across the table, and, you know, invest in those relationships.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
That sounds absolutely amazing. Sign me up. So, in any economic cycle, great talent always has multiple opportunities in front of them. So why is now the perfect time to join Appcues?
Jackson Noel, Appcues
Yeah, well, it's funny, you know, even though there were eight years, and I still feel like we are in the early stages of the impact we want to make within our customer base within the world. And, you know, if you, if you care about user experience, ask us helped our customers deliver over 1 billion end user experiences last year. You know, these aren't within the Appcues application, these are within our customers applications. And so we have the opportunity to create a really, really big impact in terms of how people are perceived how people are using the products that use ask us. If you care about data, right, we've collected over hundreds of billions of events. We're working on, I think, an exciting new product strategy, new opportunity. That really a lot, like really digs down into that data layer a little bit more. I can't say too much more about it right now. But you know, we, we have a lot of exciting things going on within the business right now in the way that our product is going to evolve over the next year. So that I think make joining ABCYa is a great opportunity right now.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So Appcues is an ideal opportunity for someone who's looking to join a company that has a great foundation, an amazing list of customers that is very large. And at this epicenter of product-led growth. So you probably hear about plg all the time. It is something that is an absolute must for companies to be thinking about. So join the company that is powering that that's Appcues. Go to their company page on venture fizz to check out their job listings as they are hiring. Go to venturefizz.com/appcues, and you'll see all their job listings there. Jackson, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at the company.
Jackson Noel, Appcues
Keith, I appreciate it. Thanks so much.
