Announcing Cycle 1.0 and our $6M Funding
We’re excited to share that we are publicly launching Cycle 1.0 out of beta, and we raised $6M from Boldstart Ventures, eFounders, Base Case, The 20VC Fund, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Hummingbird Ventures, Script Capital, Tokyo Black, and 60 operator angels. To co-create the future of product management, we’ve brought on some of the world’s best product leaders: Scott Belsky (Founder at Behance), Shreyas Doshi (ex-Product Lead at Stripe), Kelton Lynn (Director of Product Management at Google), Olivia Teich (ex-Product Director at Dropbox), Youcef Es-skouri (Head of Product at Dropbox), Omar Pera (Product Lead at Meta), David Hoang (VP Design at Webflow), Jonathan Widawski (CEO at Maze), Mark Pundsack (ex-VP Product at GitLab), Antoine Martin (Founder at Zenly), Marie Gassée (ex-VP Growth at Confluent), Jeremy Le Van (Founder at Sunrise), Brad Menezes (ex-Director of Product at Datadog), Guy Podjarny (Founder at Snyk), Kyle Parrish (VP Sales at Figma), and many others.
Built by product people for product people
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Seven years ago, as a result of asking the “why” question a little bit too often, I ended up becoming a product manager – you know, that dream job at the intersection of business, technology, and design. Ever since, I’ve been obsessed about using technology to create experiences that matter to people.
Like most product folks, I try to fall in love with problems (not solutions) and commit myself to solve them with delightful software. However, I quickly realized that the product job was far from an easy one. You don’t just get to build cool stuff with designers and engineers, you also have to manage stakeholders, build trust with customers, and make sure that your product is not seen as a black box. It’s hard.
As a product manager, I always felt frustrated not because I was lacking tools but rather because I was overwhelmed with so many of them. I was thinking to myself: designers have Figma ; engineers have GitHub ; why is it that I’m still getting lost in tabs to get my most basic work done?
As I was lacking a single source of truth for all things product, I decided to build one. In 2019, I joined forces with eFounders – the startup studio that has launched several successful SaaS companies, including Front, Aircall, and Spendesk – with a mission to reinvent product management from the ground up.
“Product management is at the core of everything we do at the startup studio eFounders. We love shipping extraordinary products like Front or Spendesk but behind the scenes it's usually a mess. Three years ago, after trying every product management tool out there, we decided to join forces with Mehdi, Cycle's CEO, to end the chaos and build our very own platform. Cycle was born.”
Thibaud Elzière, co-founder of eFounders
Designed to drive product-led growth
We’ve entered a new era of software development. As people have easy access to amazing products everywhere in their lives, they now demand much more of the tools they use at work. The bar for user experience has increased and it caused the center of power to shift from the sales org to the product org. Product-led growth has become existential for software companies.
Being product-led means that the whole organization needs to be focused on shipping extraordinary user experiences to drive growth. It can’t be done without deep collaboration between product and customer-facing teams. Yet, today’s product management tools aren’t built with cross-functional collaboration features. As a result, it dissuades other personas from getting involved in the product management process.
“In high growth B2B, cross-functional collaboration with customer-facing teams is vital. Product management is a team sport, by definition. This means that The Product is not just the Product Manager’s concern. That’s why Cycle’s vision to build for product management, not product managers, is very appealing to me.”
Shreyas Doshi, ex-Product Lead at Stripe
Introducing Cycle 1.0
The core insight of Cycle is that product management is larger than just product managers. Product management is all the conversations between PMs and customer success about what users need. It is product-led sales. It is the collaboration with designers on mockups and prototypes. It is the hand off of specs to engineers. It is writing the release notes with product marketing. Cycle builds for this entire process and makes product management more accessible.
“Excited about how the Cycle team has reimagined product management and empowered product leaders to raise the bar on how they build and what they ship.”
Scott Belsky, Founder at Behance
More than 70% of Cycle users are outside of the product management function – they are designers, engineers, founders, and customer-facing folks.
“I’ve been waiting for a tool like Cycle for years. Existing product management tools create silos for product managers instead of enabling collaboration. Cycle is flipping this paradigm on its head. Instead of building for product managers, Cycle builds for product management, and it’s refreshing.”
Youcef Es-skouri (Head of Product at Dropbox)
Every product team is unique
properties, hierarchy rules, workflows, and content templates.
Cycle was built as a flexible No-Code framework that adapts to any team’s unique needs. Cycle is a horizontal platform made of flexible building blocks that teams can use in customizable workflows.
”Cycle’s framework is very powerful. Flexible yet opinionated on product management. It solves years of frustration trying to hack No-Code tools together with the intention to build my ideal product feedback systems and source of truth for roadmap project status.”
Omar Pera (Product Lead at Meta)
“The beauty of Cycle is its flexible data model with a natively collaborative doc as atomic unit. That way, product teams can make it theirs. They are empowered to build their own solutions.”
Ed Sim (Managing Partner at Boldstart Ventures)
Close the loop with customers at each release
If you've ever opened a support ticket with a software company, you know how frustrating it can be to have them tell you: "This is on our roadmap," or "I'll tell the product team." 🤔 But in many companies, communication between support and product teams is broken. The support team rarely gets an update from the product team... and neither do you.
This changes with Cycle. When the product team marks something as “shipped”, all the related customer insights are automatically updated with the new status. Cycle’s integrations will show this to support agents who can then easily close the feedback loop with users. Without even leaving their support tool.
“What hooked me on Cycle is the ability to close the loop with users. With Cycle, teams can communicate with customers in the right source with the right message when they shipped something they asked. On top of making customers feel special, it leads to higher NPS and increased Net Revenue Retention.”
Alana Goyal (Managing Partner at Base Case)
The journey ahead
In July 2022, we soft launched on Product Hunt and ended up Product of the Week, which generated thousands of signups. Since then, the number of companies actively using Cycle went from 50 to 500.
“Cycle is the gear that keeps our product feedback management running like clockwork.”
Alexis Toyane (Head of Product at Figures)
We also received a lot of love from our users who can’t live without Cycle anymore 🥰 It shows in the product’s stickiness. Product managers spend an average of 3 hours per day in Cycle and 40% of users log onto Cycle more than 4 days a week.
“Cycle makes it easy to contact the most relevant users whenever I need feedback on a new product initiative. It helps me capture all the necessary customer context without friction.”
Léa Hugon (Product Manager at JeudiMerci)
“Cycle is the single source of truth for everyone when it comes to product feedback.”
Luuk De Jonge (Product Manager at Contrast)
With today’s funding round, we plan to work our way towards becoming the reference for all things product management, the same way Figma became the reference for all things design. But there’s even more. I believe that one day, Cycle will become every product person’s CV. A GitHub profile shows the projects an engineer contributed to through pull requests. A Cycle profile, in future, will show the features a product person contributed to releasing 💎
Don’t wait, get started with Cycle today and let’s enjoy the ride together! ⚡️🚲