Keep Going... with Arrows.to

Things have been busy here at Arrows HQ, but we made time to get the team together for the first time. Most of us had never met each other before. On this episode, we have Kim and Matt on discuss the experience of organizing and attending our team retreat.

Arrows is launching its second podcast today, called Happy Customers. So we have Stuart Balcombe on the show, the host of Happy Customers and the head of product marketing at Arrows. We talk about why we're launching a podcast, what the goal of the podcast is, and some tips he learned after creating multiple podcasts now. Please subscribe to Happy Customers! https://happycustomers.transistor.fm/subscribe

We're joined this week by the first Arrows employee, Shareil Nariman. Last week we launched the ebook that was written by Shareil, and it was a smashing success. Much better than we'd expected. Shareil tells us what it was like to write the book, and we talk about the strategy of writing it. You can find the ebook here: http://arrows.to/resources/books/startup-ceo-guide-to-customer-success/ Email [email protected] if you have any thoughts!

Today we're joined by our friend (and Arrows angel investor) Justin Duke. We talk about building Arrows, how we try to balance building features vs foundations, and what we get anxious about when prioritizing features. Justin is a super talented developer who runs Buttondown and Spoonbill on the side of being an engineering manager at Stripe. https://twitter.com/jmduke https://buttondown.email https://spoonbill.io

We've always cared about marketing at Arrows.to, and really think it's critical to our success. But we've never had a full-time marketer who can help us really excel at everything we're doing. In this episode we run through a lot of the things we're doing from a marketing angle and why we think a full-time marketer will help us out.

We recently realized one of our early employees was in the wrong role in the wrong environment for them. Neither of us was happy. So what do we do to fix it? How do we communicate it to them? To the rest of the team? Come hear our thoughts.

Today our internet friend and listener of the podcast, Ben Orenstein (CEO of Tuple.app), asks us questions he wished we talked about on Keep Going. He asks why we chose to take VC funding, what our equity breakdown is, what the biggest thing we need to focus on is, and more. This one is long but good! Ben's company: https://tuple.app Ben's twitter: https://twitter.com/r00k

After a couple of weeks off, we discuss why "working in bets" feels like it's not working for us as well as it used to when we were smaller... and how we're trying to focus everybody on the team around their own One Big Thing.

This week we talk about all of the Arrows funnels and the tools we use to organize them... our sales funnel, our marketing funnel, and our product development "funnel".

Growing the team brings new challenges that we hadn't expected. How do we stay open and allow people to be involved in decision-making while still staying focused?

Arrows has two new engineers starting next week. So we discuss how we're preparing for them to join by getting our plans together for the next big iterations of the product.

This episode is an interview with Kathy Osborne, founder of Kamel PR, who we worked with to do PR for our seed funding announcement. We talk about how we got connected, why we decided to spend money to hire a PR consultant, and more. To be honest, when we first took funding we assumed we'd do all the press ourselves. Oh boy, were we wrong... Working with Kathy was fantastic and helped us get great results from our announcement. We'd do it all over again. https://www.kamelpr.com https://www.instagram.com/kamelpr/ https://twitter.com/kathy_m_osborne

In a surprisingly fast turn of events, we hired 2 developers since the last episode! We talk about how that happened, how we structured our take-home project, and more.

As of today, we now have 5 employees at Arrows, and we still have a few more to come (https://arrows.to/jobs). This week we talk about this process and the new challenges we're experiencing as we scale.

Now that we've raised some funding, we can afford to hire a few people to join Arrows sooner than we expected. We dive into how that's going and what that means for the next few months.

This is an unusual episode for us. We recorded most of it back in April, when we decided to raise venture capital money for Arrows. This episode was recorded on April 12th, the day we first started speaking to investors, and on April 14th, which is the day we signed the term sheet. It all happened very quickly. Special guest at the end: we talk to Darian Shirazi, who is our lead investor at Gradient Ventures.

We explore some of the bigger questions around what Arrows actually is, why the timing is right for us now, and how a big new customer is starting to integrate Arrows.

We talk about some feature updates we made, and how we're trying to improve the product to better solve the job customers expect.

We're trying some new things with demos and how we encourage people to take the next steps at the end. We also discuss our new features that we built on the fly for a trial customer.

After a slow week or two post-launch, we've starting to build up our momentum again.

This week we're really feeling the post-launch grind... website traffic and new trials are settling down to their new baseline and there's just a lot of work ahead of us. We detail how the launch trials went, what content and marketing we're testing and more.

We do a full update on all of our launch numbers (tweet impressions, website pageviews, free trials started, paid conversions). We give some details on our "Friends of Arrows" launch strategy. We discuss why the content series we planned to launch today didn't feel right. And finally, we detail our plans for post-launch.

Our launch went really, really well. This episode is two guys who are tired trying to make sense of it all. And actually... the numbers end up really out-of-date even by the time we edited the episode! We also discuss: launch day is only the start, not the end, so what's next?

We've committed to adding a free trial and actually... it's already built! We also cover how we're adding educational videos to our onboarding process. And overall just covering the last few things we need to do before... 🥁 we launch next week!

Daniel delivers some lessons from the 2000 Brendan Fraser movie, Bedazzled. Benedict discusses naming concerns as they relate to the API. And together we discuss free trials as we gear up for a launch.

Since we're planning to launch Arrows soon, we decided to check in with each other to see how we're feeling about everything. Benedict woke up in the middle of the night worried that we hadn't launched and mentions some surprising feelings about it all.

This week was busy! We had a lot of customer demos, received some great feedback, and work on the API/Zapier launch is super close. And finally..... Daniel is almost finished with the new website. But at least some people have seen it now.

The new website has a progress update, the API+Zapier integration has a more defined structure, and we both recount the calls we had this week.

Daniel is finally close to being finished with the new website... sort of. Benedict lays out our newest plans to go all-in on Zapier for the near term. And Daniel wraps up the episode by sharing his latest thinking about what this year has in store for Arrows as a business.

Daniel moved into his new apartment in Los Angeles this week, hopefully ending the long nightmare of living out of a suitcase. Benedict talks to customers about their needs from an API and tries to balance the options. We lost a customer due to a new VP coming in and changing the tools, as we predicted.

After a rocky first week of the year, we try to get back on track with our marketing launch + API development plans. We share a little about what we've learned from customers so far about our early API, and we discuss how we're thinking about the marketing site.

The boys talk about their new year, the Arrows launch plans, how we're rolling out the API, and more.

We've started considering options for how we'll get to our break-even point, which could include client work or possibly taking on investors. We also discuss our early strategy for the Arrows API and rollout.

We dive into our launch + marketing plans as we head into January, when we're planning to roll out Arrows access more broadly.

A surprisingly exciting week for such an understated episode. We successfully rolled out our self-serve signup process, and had our first customer go through it today! Plus some discussion around our launch plans.

We talk about the final steps we need to take before rolling out our self-serve signup process, and what self-serve might mean for Arrows as a product as we move forward.

We formed the LLC for Arrows 🥳 We also started to take note of all the SaaS tools we currently use to run Arrows, which leads to some conversation about how Arrows can be a must-have tool.

This week Daniel talks through some thoughts that have been swirling around his mind as the guys figure out how they should transition into a new phase of Arrows.

This week the boys lay out their plans for incorporating Arrows and enabling self-serve signup for the product.

After a few weeks of heads-down product development, the boys check-in to talk about the work they've been doing to redesign parts of the UI to accommodate future complexity in the product.

We decided it'd be interesting to share how we organize and plan our product development based on the customer research we do. Enjoy!

We reconcile with a tense conversation we had at the end of last week, and discuss the positives and negatives around one of us being more optimistic and the other being more generally conservative.

The boys talk this week about how we've been spreading ourselves too thin across too many initiatives. And now it's time to refocus on the most important and highest leverage things we can do. Find out more about Arrows at https://arrows.to

Arrows finally reached 10 paid customers! It's an exciting milestone for us. We discuss the new product feedback we received from an early customer, our exciting onboarding calls, hiring a content marketer, and more. Find out more about Arrows at https://arrows.to

Both Daniel and Benedict are back together this week. We talk about how Benedict's blog post performed, how getting more demos doesn't necessarily turn into more sales, and nailing our ideal customer profile. Find out more about Arrows at https://arrows.to

Benedict has a solo episode this week where he runs through the big list of our marketing experiments from last week. Then he breaks down the blog post he wrote for the brand new Arrows blog. Find out more about Arrows at https://arrows.to

This week we do a follow-up on last week's cold email goals, discussing how they've been going and some details about how we've been structuring the emails. We also started testing some small Google Ads, and talk through our thinking there. Find out more about Arrows at https://arrows.to Spoiler for next week's episode: about 45 minutes after we recorded this episode, we had a payment come through from one of the customers we discussed. Then a few hours later we had another one!

This week we recap how our sales efforts from last week are going (hint: not as we'd hoped). So we make some new plans for how to move forward. Find out more about Arrows at https://arrows.to

We discuss our plans for hitting our upcoming sales goals of 10 total customers! It's a follow-up to last week's episode, where Daniel spoke about how we're doing follow-up demo calls with companies we've already talked to. So this week is about how we're planning to find new companies who don't yet know Arrows exists. Enjoy!

This episode is a solo with Daniel. He gives rundown of the sales work we're doing now that we've onboarded our first customers and are trying to get more people to use the product. Find out more about Arrows at https://arrows.to