Marty Kausas’ Post

NEW: Search in Chat Widget 💬 Your customers can now search for knowledge base articles directly in our In-App Chat widget. This is a BFD for our customers, especially those that have many self-serve or prosumer customers as well. Have fun with this one!

We're only selling Pylon to good companies now. Selling to low-performers has only hurt us. Low-performers... 1/ Don't grow 2/ Waste time optimizing 3/ Try to cross-sell you their product 4/ Eventually churn to cut costs Your team loses so much time on educating them on best practices, getting them setup, and providing proper support. You're much better focusing on the companies that are more likely to have a successful future. -- Notes -- - A "good company" in this case really just means either a) a great team or b) obviously good business based on their growth. - This advice should often be paired with the advice folks give on not selling to non-ICP customers. Both only hurt you in the long-run.

NEW: Insanely powerful federated search in Pylon. No other support platform has this. Search across any Issue, Account, Contact, Article, Page, and Command all at once. Intelligent surfacing of the correct type of data. Accessible anywhere in the app with CMD+K. -- In just a second you can... 1/ Find a KB article 2/ Fuzzy search for a customer issue 3/ Change a setting (e.g. Dark Mode) -- Let's take a look at existing platforms. Zendesk ❌ Search Anywhere (no CMD+K) ❌ Global Search ❌ Jump to pages 😢 Separate search sections for different data Intercom ❌ Global Search 😢 Separate search sections for different data ✅ Jump to pages (via CMD+K, but no search across data) Salesforce Service Cloud ❌ Don't get me started 🙃

Last December we had a perception problem. Larger support teams hesitated to replace Zendesk with Pylon. I don't blame them. Although we had a product could do the job, no one knew who we were. We needed to fix our perception. What I hear from prospects now, is that it's fixed. Perception went from "6 dudes in a garage" to "you're a Series B company right?" What's helped: 1/ Rapid expansion of the platform 2/ Rapid team expansion (3x in 8 months) 3/ Ambitious goals (that get everyone excited) 4/ Multiple website overhauls And being very loud about all of the above^ 📸: Our Company page on the website, which is 100% for signaling -- Notes -- 1/ Perceptions matters way more for some products than others. If you're an add-on to an existing system of record, it's easy to try you out. If you're an internally facing tool, it's easy to try you out. Unfortunately for us we're fighting an uphill battle... trying to both replace a critical system of record that is also customer-facing. 2/ Some people have signaled to me that they think raising money or growing team quickly could be a negative sign. I think in most cases, especially in this funding environment, this is a really really positive sign.

WE'RE HIRING: Join Pylon as our second AE. Our founding AE Sergio Sicairos is crushing quota... ...there's plenty of pipeline to share 💸 ...and almost all leads are inbound 💸 -- Our product is incredibly easy to sell... 1/ No one likes the incumbents (Zendesk, SFDC Service Cloud) 2/ Our focus, B2B support, is completely unserved 3/ Pylon is best-in-class, and getting better every minute -- You'd be working with: - Co-Founder (me) - Founding AE (Serio Sicairos) - Founding Growth Marketer (Richard Lee) - [hiring] Field Marketer -- Application in comments!

Come to Pylon during SF Tech Week! We'll share all the secrets on how to raise a Series A. Speakers will include Han from Mintlify, Anh-Tho from Lago, and myself. Registration link in the comments 👇 TECH WEEK by a16z

Thanks for a great August! 🫶 Featured Customer Love 🫶 "I WOULD FREAKING RON-SWANSON MY COMPUTER INTO THE DUMPSTER if I had to go back to life before Pylon" "Our median first response time is 3 seconds … fucking locked in thanks @usepylon" "Pylon is one of the best tools I’ve used" "HUGE!! Congrats team 🥰, I can’t remember (read: have blocked out) how we managed supporting our customers before Pylon ❤️" "I’m rooting for you all and literally tell every single B2B company I run into about you guys 😂" "Legendary stuff man" "Amazing product" "have heard great things about Pylon" "You guys should probably get Pylon!" "if an alarm went off every time ya’ll shipped a new feature, one might mistake the new Pylon office for a fire station" "The in-app chat widget works fantastically, as does the support email!" "I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking for something like this" "biked past the new @usepylon hq. just got me really excited about sf again" "we’re quite excited as you might be able to tell" "Status detection based on the message is sick" "oooooh very nice feature!" "You guys are awesome, thanks again" "logo on the building looks sick!" "I must say I’m slightly infatuated with the way you position [Pylon]" "You guys have done such a good job with the KB, it looks so good…its also super intuitive" "What can’t this platform do? 🤔🤯" "This is amazing. Thank you so so so so so so much" "That is really cool" "Kudos to whoever is responsible for UI/UX in your team :)" "We love the Pylon product 😎" "love @usepylon <3" "new website is 🔥" "You guys are killing it, happy customer" "Very clean design, well done!" "Beautiful man" "Killer upgrade" "Looks amazing!" "the new Pylon website looks 🔥🔥🔥" "looks amazing" "this looks very cool! the whole website is awesome" "it’s sooo well done! 😘" "now that looks like a cool af Enterprise Level SaaS Website" "Website looks nice!" "new landing page looks so sick" "Soooo beautiful!!" "NO WAY! this is amazing " "Have been loving Pylon so far" "bro your new site is FIRE 🔥" "which tool do you use to create these nice product update gifs? Looks nice always" "congrats, friends!" "Yess!!! Dude congrats. So well deserved" "Heck yes!!! Congratulations!" "Yesssss congrats!!" "Woohoo, fantastic news! Congrats to you all 😀" "Congratulations guys! Extremely well-deserved. You've built something super valuable. We're very happy customers and are excited to see you guys continue to improve/expand on the product 😊" "You’re all awesome and your product is slick af 💜" "congrats guys! great product!" "You guys are truly building a great product!" "Your product is seriously impressive and how it is getting better with the great work you are doing. It’s awesome to see it getting the recognition it deserves." "you guys have a great product" "we’ve been very happy with pylon btw. nice work 👏" 📸: Offsite in Korea

We send a monthly investor update for Pylon. Here's what we include: """" Subject: [Confidential] Pylon Investor Update: August 1, 2024 Hey Pylon friends & investors, Welcome to our monthly investor update. We’re very thankful for your support on this journey. The following are private details about the company. Please do not share them with others. **Monthly Metrics** - ARR: $XXX - MoM ARR Growth: +XX% ($XXX) - Cash in bank: ... - Net Burn: ... - Runway: ... - Team Size: ... **Asks** - Help us hire these roles... - Intros to these prospects... **Highlights** - Brought on new hires... - Released ... **Lowlights** ... **Goals for next month** - XX% ARR growth ($XXX ARR) - Release these things... - Hire these roles... **Customer Love** ... Thanks, Pylon Team """

Announcing Pylon's $17M Series A led by a16z. We founded the company under 2 years ago... Since then hundreds of the fastest growing companies have adopted Pylon as their customer support platform. Why? Existing support platforms were built for B2C, not B2B. B2B-specific needs have never been prioritized. Teams end up stitching together the same set of tools: 1/ Ticketing System 2/ Customer Success Platform 3/ Chat Widget 4/ Knowledge Base 5/ AI Support Bots 6/ Omnichannel Integrations 7/ Customer Marketing Products 8/ Product Feedback Tools ...and more. Pylon will bring them all into one platform, built for B2B. -- What about AI? -- A lot of our customers have tried AI support tools with high hopes - most have fallen short of expectations for B2B use cases. We believe AI features have to be tightly integrated with the core platform to deliver on their potential. -- Thank you -- Advith, Robert, the Pylon team, and I are so grateful for your continued support. We'd like to thank our earliest supporters... Harj Taggar from Y Combinator. Our Seed and ongoing investors... Niko Bonatsos, Andrea Wang, Zak Kukoff from General Catalyst. David Ongchoco and Adarsh Bhatt from Comma Capital. Sandy Kory from HorizonVC. Our first customers... Teresa Nesteby from Hightouch Lukas Köbis from Causal Andrew Luo & Christina Gilbert from OneSchema Ben Odom from Aptible Andrew Dooley & team from Panther And our newest investors... Jennifer Li & Zeya Yang from Andreessen Horowitz. -- What's next? -- We have 6 open roles across Sales, Marketing, Support, Engineering, Design. Learn more about the fundraise and our future (blog post link in comments).