Meet Ciclo, a French startup developing a collaboration tool for product managers to collect data from different tools, work on the next iterations of the product and close the feedback loop with the most engaged customers.
The company has raised a total of $6 million in two funding rounds, including a recent funding round led by Boldstart that closed late last year. The startup is backed by eFounders, the European startup studio focused on SaaS products. Base Case, The 20VC Fund, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Hummingbird Ventures and 60 Angels have also invested in the company – that’s a long list of investors*.
Like many software-as-a-service products, Cycle initially acts as a single source of information. Many product teams rely heavily on products like Confluence, Notion, or Google Docs. But they should also check for GitHub issues, intercom messages, and more.
“The problem we are trying to solve is one that every product manager faces. Product information is spread across many different products,” said Mehdi Boudoukhane, founder and CEO of Cycle. “As your business grows, you get feedback from users, the sales team, the customer success team, and the marketing team.”
Nevertheless, in most cases product management becomes a black box. Other teams at the company really don’t know when something will be released, or even worse, whether their feedback will affect it in any way.
Cycle has built integrations with popular entry-level products such as HubSpot, Intercom, and Slack. Once everything is in the loop, product teams can organize the feedback to group everything related to a feature.
Product managers then use Cycle to write their product requirements documents using a rich text editor that supports embedding. It is a collaborative editor with the ability to name your teammates.
“Designers produce images, developers code, and product managers produce documents,” says Boudoukhane. The idea is that product managers can spend most of their day in the cycle; On average, product managers using Cycle spend 3 hours per day on the product. And product managers don’t have to manually export their documents to other tools because Cycle offers integrations with Linear, GitHub or Notion.
photo credit: cycle
The worst thing that can happen when you read feedback from customers who have decided to end their contract with you is when they say that your product is missing a feature when… the feature is there. They just didn’t know.
When something finally arrives, Cycle will help you close the loop with your customers and employees. This way the sales team gets a notification in HubSpot. “Sales teams can reach out to customers who have spoken about the feature that just launched,” says Boudoukhane.
A clear line of communication with your customers is a great way to avoid customer churn and keep your customers engaged with your product. According to Boudoukhane, some companies, such as Captain Train or Superhuman, have been very good on this front.
Cycle competes with Productschap or even Jira. But with its lightweight, collaborative approach, Cycle expects everyone in the company to interact with their products in some way to provide feedback and contribute, making it easier to start a product-focused business.
*Investors in Cycle include Scott Belsky (Founder of Behance), Shreyas Doshi (former Head of Product at Stripe), Kelton Lynn (Director of Product Management at Google), Youcef Es-skouri (Head of Product at Dropbox), Omar Pera (Meta Product Lead), David Hoang (VP Webflow Design), Jonathan Widawski (CEO of Maze), Mark Pundsack (former VP Product at GitLab), Antoine Martin (Founder of Zenly), Marie Gassée (former VP Growth at Confluent), Mary Nelson (CCO at Aircall), Olivia Teich (former Product Director at Dropbox), David Apple (former Head of Sales and Customer Success at Notion), Eric Wittman (former CRO of Figma), Sriram Krishnan (former Director of Tinder Growth), Jeremy Le Van (Founder of Sunrise), Brad Menezes (Former Product Director of Datadog), Guy Podjarny (Founder of Snyk), Nick Candito (Co-Founder of Flatfile), Romain David (Former Product Manager at Uber), and Kyle Parrish (VP of Sales at figma). I said it was a long list.
photo credit: cycle
Source: La Neta Neta
Jason Jack is an experienced technology journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in computer science and engineering, he has a deep understanding of the latest technology trends and developments. He writes about a wide range of technology topics, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, software development, and cybersecurity.
