Jul 13, 2021
Jul 13, 2021
by
by
Alex Bilmes
Alex Bilmes
Announcing Endgame (and funding)
Company Updates
Company Updates
tl;dr - We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised over $17 million to power product-led sales. Endgame makes it easy to observe what’s happening in your trial or free motion, prioritize sales-ready accounts and users based on behavioral signals, and act on them to drive more revenue faster. Our product is being developed with incredible design partners like Figma, Loom, Airtable, and Retool.
“Traditional software sales is dying. The modern sales motion looks at what users are doing in a free plan or trial and then applies sales pressure to the highest value accounts that are most likely to convert.” - Kyle Parrish | Head of Sales, Figma
In the past, software was sold over steak dinners and TopGolf. Today’s customers buy software by self-serving, seeing value, then doubling down on the products they like. As a result, product-led growth (PLG) is exploding—startups are product-led from the start and established businesses are trying to add a new motion.
PLG is how Zoom, Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox, Datadog, MongoDB, Figma, HashiCorp, Airtable, and some of your other favorite and wildly successful technology companies build their flywheels. They combine bottom-up tailwinds with high-velocity sales to deliver the best possible customer experience AND build an incredible revenue engine. PLG flywheels are also what salespeople prefer, since their sales opportunities include rich customer data to understand the unique value their product provides for each company.
At Endgame, we believe this is how the next generation of breakthrough companies will build out their GTM motion—blending the low cost and velocity of B2C customer acquisition with the high contract values of B2B sales. We call this brave new world product-led sales.
Traditional GTM stacks weren’t built for product-led motions
My co-founder, Graham, and I spent the last decade trying to force existing tools to work for PLG. I started doing this as a designer, then a product leader, then a first-time sales CEO at my last startup—where I drove our engineering team crazy trying to build DIY Endgame. We hacked together one-off customer data tools, using Segment, ETL scripts, spreadsheets, Google Data Studio, and an ever increasing number of Zapier workflows. Then we had to do this again during my time leading growth at Puppet. It was rough.
The issue with tools like Salesforce is that they are ineffective for high volumes of users or seeing behavior over time. Tools like Marketo don’t look at how users interact with your product. In PLG you want to deeply understand what people are doing in your product: who signed up, how many teammates they invited, what features were used, who the champions in the account are, and so much more.
With nothing on the market that did what we needed it to do, we decided to create the product we always wished we had.
Endgame is designed from the ground up for product-led sales
We’re building Endgame specifically for companies that have large self-service funnels and want to layer in sales to better monetize them. We make it easy to see what the most valuable accounts are, which users in those accounts are the strongest champions and buyers, and how to best engage with them in a repeatable and scalable way.
The thing I’m personally most excited about solving is the underlying data challenges that existing GTM tools don’t really consider—mostly because they’re not focused on PLG. We take whatever raw or messy data you already have and bend it into a shape that is meaningful for modern revenue teams. As an example, if you want to see when a VP of Engineering logs into your product, we can take the product events from Segment and enrich it with customer data from Salesforce to create an actionable signal for your sales rep.
As Endgame learns more from your data, we start to identify which signals are highly correlated with conversion and what behaviors in the customer journey lead to the best long-term outcomes. This makes Endgame infinitely powerful—we can tell you who’s most likely to convert with a nudge from sales and who you should leave alone because they’ll do just fine on their own.
Our solution is being validated by businesses that feel the pain
I could not be more thrilled about our incredible design partners who are helping shape the vision of Endgame. These PLG legends include the likes of Figma, Loom, Airtable, Mode, Retool, Algolia, Clubhouse, and others. They feel the pain we’re solving acutely and deeply understand our problem space.
While we’re initially focused on companies that have a large user base, we want to enable the same efficient product-led sales motion for all businesses, no matter where they are on their PLG journey.
Sandhya, Alex, Graham, Kara, and Naomi at a recent Endgame board meeting
Our vision is supported by world-class investors
The interest we’ve received from the investor community has been humbling. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised over $17 million from some of the world’s leading funds and operators. Money's important, but the true value is in the relationships we’ve been able to develop with thoughtful partners who understand the market and are deeply invested in our success.
Kara from Upfront Ventures led our seed round earlier this year and has been pivotal in building the foundation of Endgame, as well as our leadership team and culture.
Sandhya from Unusual Ventures also participated during our seed round and has been invaluable in honing our product strategy, having recently served as a senior executive at Amplitude.
Naomi Ionita from Menlo Ventures led our Series A—which closed just a few short months ago—and brings a wealth of product-led growth experience. Naomi previously ran the growth functions at Invoice2go and Evernote in its early days. She’s also advised many of the world’s leading product-led companies and speaks on the topic as part of Reforge.
We’ve also been lucky enough to get the backing of many incredible operators who have lived the problem we’re solving. This includes visionaries like Nick Mehta (CEO of Gainsight), Des Traynor (Founder of Intercom), Olivia Nottebohm (CRO of Notion), Joe Morrissey (CRO of Segment), Zhenya Loginov (CRO of Miro), Kenny Van Zant, Guillaume Cabane, Elena Verna, and many others.
Get started with Endgame
To try out Endgame, please sign up for our beta today.
We can’t wait for you to check out our product! That said, the response we’ve had so far has been incredible, and we’re trying our best to keep up with demand. Getting your name on the list now means you get to claim a place in line and try Endgame sooner—which will of course lead to your inevitable success ;)
Come work with us
Our team is growing quickly. In fact, we’ve more than doubled in the last month. We’re currently hiring roles in engineering, marketing, design, operations—more information can be found on our careers page or you can just shoot us an email.
Exciting times!
tl;dr - We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised over $17 million to power product-led sales. Endgame makes it easy to observe what’s happening in your trial or free motion, prioritize sales-ready accounts and users based on behavioral signals, and act on them to drive more revenue faster. Our product is being developed with incredible design partners like Figma, Loom, Airtable, and Retool.
“Traditional software sales is dying. The modern sales motion looks at what users are doing in a free plan or trial and then applies sales pressure to the highest value accounts that are most likely to convert.” - Kyle Parrish | Head of Sales, Figma
In the past, software was sold over steak dinners and TopGolf. Today’s customers buy software by self-serving, seeing value, then doubling down on the products they like. As a result, product-led growth (PLG) is exploding—startups are product-led from the start and established businesses are trying to add a new motion.
PLG is how Zoom, Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox, Datadog, MongoDB, Figma, HashiCorp, Airtable, and some of your other favorite and wildly successful technology companies build their flywheels. They combine bottom-up tailwinds with high-velocity sales to deliver the best possible customer experience AND build an incredible revenue engine. PLG flywheels are also what salespeople prefer, since their sales opportunities include rich customer data to understand the unique value their product provides for each company.
At Endgame, we believe this is how the next generation of breakthrough companies will build out their GTM motion—blending the low cost and velocity of B2C customer acquisition with the high contract values of B2B sales. We call this brave new world product-led sales.
Traditional GTM stacks weren’t built for product-led motions
My co-founder, Graham, and I spent the last decade trying to force existing tools to work for PLG. I started doing this as a designer, then a product leader, then a first-time sales CEO at my last startup—where I drove our engineering team crazy trying to build DIY Endgame. We hacked together one-off customer data tools, using Segment, ETL scripts, spreadsheets, Google Data Studio, and an ever increasing number of Zapier workflows. Then we had to do this again during my time leading growth at Puppet. It was rough.
The issue with tools like Salesforce is that they are ineffective for high volumes of users or seeing behavior over time. Tools like Marketo don’t look at how users interact with your product. In PLG you want to deeply understand what people are doing in your product: who signed up, how many teammates they invited, what features were used, who the champions in the account are, and so much more.
With nothing on the market that did what we needed it to do, we decided to create the product we always wished we had.
Endgame is designed from the ground up for product-led sales
We’re building Endgame specifically for companies that have large self-service funnels and want to layer in sales to better monetize them. We make it easy to see what the most valuable accounts are, which users in those accounts are the strongest champions and buyers, and how to best engage with them in a repeatable and scalable way.
The thing I’m personally most excited about solving is the underlying data challenges that existing GTM tools don’t really consider—mostly because they’re not focused on PLG. We take whatever raw or messy data you already have and bend it into a shape that is meaningful for modern revenue teams. As an example, if you want to see when a VP of Engineering logs into your product, we can take the product events from Segment and enrich it with customer data from Salesforce to create an actionable signal for your sales rep.
As Endgame learns more from your data, we start to identify which signals are highly correlated with conversion and what behaviors in the customer journey lead to the best long-term outcomes. This makes Endgame infinitely powerful—we can tell you who’s most likely to convert with a nudge from sales and who you should leave alone because they’ll do just fine on their own.
Our solution is being validated by businesses that feel the pain
I could not be more thrilled about our incredible design partners who are helping shape the vision of Endgame. These PLG legends include the likes of Figma, Loom, Airtable, Mode, Retool, Algolia, Clubhouse, and others. They feel the pain we’re solving acutely and deeply understand our problem space.
While we’re initially focused on companies that have a large user base, we want to enable the same efficient product-led sales motion for all businesses, no matter where they are on their PLG journey.
Sandhya, Alex, Graham, Kara, and Naomi at a recent Endgame board meeting
Our vision is supported by world-class investors
The interest we’ve received from the investor community has been humbling. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised over $17 million from some of the world’s leading funds and operators. Money's important, but the true value is in the relationships we’ve been able to develop with thoughtful partners who understand the market and are deeply invested in our success.
Kara from Upfront Ventures led our seed round earlier this year and has been pivotal in building the foundation of Endgame, as well as our leadership team and culture.
Sandhya from Unusual Ventures also participated during our seed round and has been invaluable in honing our product strategy, having recently served as a senior executive at Amplitude.
Naomi Ionita from Menlo Ventures led our Series A—which closed just a few short months ago—and brings a wealth of product-led growth experience. Naomi previously ran the growth functions at Invoice2go and Evernote in its early days. She’s also advised many of the world’s leading product-led companies and speaks on the topic as part of Reforge.
We’ve also been lucky enough to get the backing of many incredible operators who have lived the problem we’re solving. This includes visionaries like Nick Mehta (CEO of Gainsight), Des Traynor (Founder of Intercom), Olivia Nottebohm (CRO of Notion), Joe Morrissey (CRO of Segment), Zhenya Loginov (CRO of Miro), Kenny Van Zant, Guillaume Cabane, Elena Verna, and many others.
Get started with Endgame
To try out Endgame, please sign up for our beta today.
We can’t wait for you to check out our product! That said, the response we’ve had so far has been incredible, and we’re trying our best to keep up with demand. Getting your name on the list now means you get to claim a place in line and try Endgame sooner—which will of course lead to your inevitable success ;)
Come work with us
Our team is growing quickly. In fact, we’ve more than doubled in the last month. We’re currently hiring roles in engineering, marketing, design, operations—more information can be found on our careers page or you can just shoot us an email.
Exciting times!