LaunchNotes, a startup founded by the team behind Statuspage (which Atlassian later acquired) and former head of marketing at Jira, announced today that it has raised a $ 1.8 million seed round co-led by Cowboy Ventures and Bull City Ventures. Moreover, Tim Chen (general partner, Essence Ventures ), Eric Wittman (chief growth officer, JLL Technologies ), Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan (VP product, LinkedIn ), Scot Wingo (co-founder and CEO, Spiffy ), Lin-Hua Wu (chief communication officer, Dropbox ) is Steve Klein (co-founder, Status page ) are participating in this round.
The general idea behind LaunchNotes is helping companies communicate their software updates to internal and external customers, which has become increasingly important as the speed of software developments and launches has increased.
In addition to announcing the new funding round, LaunchNotes also said today that it will renew its free tier to include the ability to communicate updates externally as well via public embeds. Previously, users had to have a paid plan to do this. The team now also allows businesses to further customize the look and feel of these public streams and has eliminated subscriber limits.
"The reason we're doing this is largely because [...] our long-term goal is to drive this change in how release communications are done, "LaunchNotes co-founder Jake Brereton told me." And the easiest way to do that and engage as many teams as possible is to turn down the barrier to entry. Right now, that barrier to entry is asking users to pay for it. "
As Brereton told me, the company has gained around 100 active users since it launched three months ago.
"I think, more than anything else, our original thesis has been validated far more than I expected," added co-founder and CEO Tyler Davis. "This problem scales with the size of the team and very linearly and the interest we have had has been largely on the much larger business team side. It has become very clear that that specific problem, although it is a problem for smaller teams, it's much more of a critical issue as you grow and scale across more teams and more business units. "
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the next elements of the team's roadmap include features large companies would want from a tool like this, including integrations with problem trackers, starting with Jira, single sign-on solutions and better management tools. of the team.
"With that initial cohort in the larger team size and more towards the enterprise, integrating the problem tracker is a natural first step in our integrations platform, because many states of change currently live in all of these different tools and all of them. these different processes and LaunchNotes is a kind of extra layer, "explained co-founder Tony Ramirez. "There are other integrations with things like feature reporting systems or git tools, where we want LaunchNotes to be the only place people can go. And for these larger teams, that pain is more acute."
The fact that LaunchNotes is essentially looking to create a registration system for product teams was also part of what attracted Cowboy Ventures. company founder Aileen Lee.
"One of the things I thought was a little exciting is that this is potentially a new registration system for people of the product who use that kind of life in different places right now - you might have some at Jira and some at Trello, or Asana, and some of them in Sheets and some of them in Airtable or Slack, "he said. He also believes LaunchNotes will become a useful tool when engaging new team members or delivering a product to another developer.
He also noted that the founding team, which he believes has the ideal background to build this product, were quite ahead of the fact that it needs to bring more diversity to the company. "They recognized, even in the first fight, 'hey, we know we're three guys, and it's really important for us to actually build [diversity] on our cap table and in our investment team, but also in all of our future hires so that our company is able to attract all kinds of people, "he said.
