Thought waves on seed venture

Today, we are thrilled to congratulate TheLoops co-founders Somya Kapoor and Ravi Bulusu, and their entire team on a remarkable milestone: their acquisition by IFS, a global leader in enterprise software. This landmark achievement is not just a testament to the team's incredible vision and execution, but also a powerful validation of a shared belief in the transformative power of AI to revolutionise customer experience operations.

For us at Tidal Ventures, this is a moment of immense pride. We are honoured to have been a partner to TheLoops since their 2020 Seed round, and this outcome is a brilliant success for the founders, the team, and our investors.

Investment principle: Backing founders with domain expertise

When we first met Somya and Ravi, we saw an accomplished, product-led duo with deep domain expertise. Somya's experience leading product management at ServiceNow, combined with Ravi's background in AI at Splunk and as a multi-time founder, immediately stood out. They had identified a critical and growing pain point: customer support operations were overwhelmed, and existing tools weren't fit for purpose.

As we wrote in our original investment notes, our conviction was rooted in bringing the principles of observability to the front office. For too long, customer success and support had been a black box. We saw a powerful opportunity: what if you could make these operations observable, turning a traditional cost centre into a company's primary growth driver? TheLoops was the answer. Their platform was designed to bring the context, collaboration, and intelligence needed for true observability, empowering teams that had been left behind by modern data tools. We knew this approach would deliver a true step change in the customer experience, and that founders Somya and Ravi were the killer combination with the deep domain expertise to make it happen.

A shared vision realised

TheLoops has executed on this mission with passion and precision, evolving into a leader in AI Agents for the next era of Customer Success. Their platform doesn't just assist agents—it amplifies their expertise. By delivering intelligent routing , proactive insights, and knowledge that evolves with every interaction. Imagine knowing what happened in a customer product interaction when a ticket is opened without them having to explain it! TheLoops has empowered businesses to resolve complex cases faster and more consistently and in turn scale customer operations.

This journey culminates in today’s acquisition by IFS. The strategic fit is undeniable. As a customer of TheLoops, IFS experienced the power of their AI-driven platform firsthand. IFS shares TheLoops' vision for the future of Autonomous AI Agents and provides the global scale and resources to accelerate this mission.

Validating the AI-driven strategy

This successful exit demonstrates the power of Tidal’s investment strategy. Software and AI startups can create immense value and generate strong, early returns with differentiated, AI-driven products that attract significant buyer interest. TheLoops built a platform with compelling intellectual property that delivers tangible ROI, proving that a company with a distinct technology advantage can achieve a great outcome.

This is a formula we believe in, and it is just the beginning. We are proud to see our Seed II portfolio company's successes and are actively replicating this strategy in our Seed III fund, backing companies with cutting-edge AI, real technology advantages, and rapid global potential.

We want to extend our deepest gratitude to Somya, Ravi, and the whole team at TheLoops. Thank you for your relentless hard work and for including us on this incredible journey. We are delighted to have partnered with you and will be cheering you on in your next chapter with IFS.

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Orkestra is revolutionising the energy industry with its game-changing platform that enables critical decision-making throughout the lifecycle of renewable energy projects.

The Tidal team is excited to share our investment notes from our second investment in Orkestra to give you a glimpse into our decision-making process. At Tidal, our investments across various markets, models, and products are guided by our core foundational principles that help us define a great Tidal Seed Investment.

Markets with tailwinds

The global transition towards cleaner, more efficient energy sources is no longer a mere aspiration; it’s an imperative driven by environmental factors, regulatory pressures, and evolving consumer preferences. By 2030, this burgeoning sector is poised to become a colossal +$2 trillion global market. As we stand at the cusp of a transformative shift away from fossil fuels, we look to navigate the intricate landscape of clean energy and uncover promising opportunities within renewable technologies, energy storage, and the broader sustainable ecosystem. At Tidal, we look for markets ripe for disruption, and it’s clear that the market Orkestra exists within fits that mould. A few of the factors we’ve taken into account when assessing this opportunity include:

• Bloomberg declared that the energy sector must collectively deploy five times more wind power, three times more solar energy, and a staggering twenty-six times more batteries annually until 2030 to meet basic clean energy targets.
• There is a critical need for enhanced controls in generating and distributing clean power to the grid.
• The future of the power grid is set to be substantially more decentralised in contrast to the conventional centralised fossil fuel-based grid.
• Batteries will emerge as an indispensable component, seamlessly integrated into every renewable energy deployment.
• Virtual or Distributed Power Plants (VPP or DPP) aggregate and scale distributed power generation to normalise supply based on demand to the grid. There is a significant opportunity for a data player to emerge in orchestrating VPP’s power distribution to the grid by improving yield and, in turn, potential margins.

The magnitude of this opportunity is immense, and the race to meet these ambitious climate targets will largely depend on innovation from industry disruptors like Orkestra that empower the industry with much-needed tools that help drive quick and accurate decisions about renewable energy projects at scale.

Products that change the game

Orkestra’s B2B feasibility platform is helping drive the transition to clean energy by providing modern energy companies with the tools they need to analyse, sell, and manage their energy solutions and projects.

Historically, Excel was the go-to tool for analysing the feasibility of clean energy projects, demanding extensive hours from skilled analysts. However, as the urgency of achieving the net-zero targets intensifies, there’s a need to arm sales teams with easy-to-use and accurate tools to quicken the time to a decision. Orkestra’s software is pivotal in the renewable energy transition, enabling teams to set up and evaluate 250 solutions in just ten minutes, compared to the days it would have taken with Excel and expert analysts.

The platform seamlessly integrates its user-friendly interface with sophisticated algorithms and analytics to significantly reduce the time and expense associated with assessing project viability while also enhancing project outcomes from both economic and sustainability standpoints. Orkestra Co-Founder, Chris Cooper, summarised their strategic vision:

We aim to be the intelligence layer that underpins clean energy projects worldwide. Teams that previously used Excel spreadsheets or outdated software instantly see the value in Orkestra’s offering.

Founders that hustle

Co-founders Chris, James, and Michael have deep domain experience, having met at a new energy consultancy, where they worked together on innovative solutions for leading energy and property companies. The team has used their industry expertise and mathematics and data science background to develop sophisticated modelling capabilities for the Orkestra platform. They are deeply data-driven, and their passion to help drive the world towards its climate targets is second to none.

They have built a powerful and capable team that has proved that they can build world-class technology that is loved by its customers and is delivering real-world impact by unlocking clean energy solutions for businesses all around the world.

A compelling business model

The Orkestra team has created a mission-critical product and currently offers subscription plans across three tiers that appeal to a broad spectrum of customers, from small-scale businesses to some of Australia’s largest energy retailers.

Driven by a strong commitment to unlocking the potential of the renewable energy sector, Orkestra is dedicated to enhancing its capability for precise site feasibility modelling. This enhancement will play a pivotal role in facilitating the implementation of a greater number of renewable projects.

Customers have successfully modelled numerous projects and conducted over a million solution simulations through their innovative platform, solidifying their status as the industry benchmark for energy feasibility assessment. With an ambitious goal of sustaining its remarkable growth rate exceeding 200% since the start of this year, Orkestra is poised for substantial expansion.

As time progresses, Orkestra envisions numerous opportunities for further growth by introducing new products that assist energy companies in assessing, tracking, and managing energy assets throughout their entire lifecycle.

Global appeal

Orkestra’s solution addresses a universal problem, which is why they’ve set their sights on further international expansion beyond Australia, New Zealand, and Japan and are eyeing Europe’s thriving renewable energy markets.

By achieving critical mass in their various markets, they can secure a significant data advantage, tapping into a broad spectrum of primary data sources. This wealth of information, combined with Orkestra’s top-tier AI capabilities for modelling, benchmarking, and offering optimisation insights, positions them for excellence in overseeing existing and newly established sites within a multi-site portfolio or virtual power plant (VPP).

The Seed phase and beyond

In its Seed Phase, Orkestra has assembled a highly capable team, demonstrated strong product-market fit, and built a global-ready product. The funding from this round will support their global expansion, enable them to build exciting new product features, and implement a scalable and repeatable go-to-market approach. We see a significant opportunity to ramp up growth efforts with all product and sales activities working in harmony and provide customers with different maturity levels with the opportunity to either self-serve or tailor their offerings with a higher degree of support.

Thanks to Kieran O’Neill for his help in drafting these notes.

If you’re a visionary founder ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.

Loopit’s mobility platform drives car subscription management and billing solutions for automakers, dealerships, fleet leasing, rental companies and startups.

The Tidal team recently made an investment into Loopit, and we're publishing our investment notes below. We invest across a range of markets, models and products. There are core principles that we live and die by in our investment decisions. For more information on the pillars that make a great Tidal Seed Investment, see how we invest here.

Markets with Tailwinds

With the transformation to cloud, consumers and businesses alike are consuming software online using subscription as the standard arrangement. This transformation is occurring across many other industries, and the automative industry is undergoing its own digital transformation that is set to change the way:

• consumers or businesses interact with car brands (e.g. Care by Volvo)
• consumers obtain the vehicle (e.g. subscribe to an EV through your energy provider)
• consumers experience the entire lifecycle of acquiring, running, managing, and selling a vehicle (e.g. subscribe to a car, maintained by the vendor, only fill fuel, return it when done or swap they vehicle if the plan allows it)

We believe that there is a compelling case emerging for the growth of car subscriptions as a viable alternative to long term rental, leasing, and ownership in many cases.

This transition is aligned with changing consumer behaviour that seeks greater flexibility and convenience around mobility. There is waning interest in owning physical products, particularly among younger generations; hybrid and remote work is changing the way cars are used, and climate consciousness and improving infrastructure are driving a shift to electric vehicles. In addition to being highly flexible, vehicle subscription programs are also perceived as being more cost-effective than traditional car leases, rentals, or outright purchases. The experience of buying and selling a car can be tedious, and, factoring in on-road costs, registration, taxes, servicing, and depreciation, the total cost of ownership is often under-estimated by more than 50%.

In parallel, the auto industry is undergoing its own transformation. Tesla has led the way, disrupting the industry through both its car and its go-to-market approach. Newer micro-mobility categories (e.g. e-bikes, scooters) were born online and have been early adopters of a subscription model, and now the traditional car industry more broadly is transitioning to online retail, which will emphases personalisation and better customer communication.

We expect the subscription market to continue to grow at pace through improvements in price competitiveness, the customer experience, and consumer awareness. According to market research, the current vehicle subscription market is US$4.1B and will grow at 22.8% CAGR to 2030 to a market size of +$31.7B. Over the next eight years, BCG estimates that up to 15% of new car sales will be via a subscription.

Products that change the game

Loopit provides a turnkey subscription management solution that helps automakers, car dealerships, fleet rental companies and startups to introduce car subscription offerings to their own customers.

Loopit’s SaaS platform facilitates the end-to-end subscription process, providing mobility companies with the ability to control, configure, and provide a subscription offering quickly and easily. The platform handles the customer-facing touchpoints such as onboarding, billing, and ongoing customer management, as well as back-office management features such as management of inventory, pricing, and utilisation.

This is game changing for both new entrants who wish to get to market quickly, and existing automotive players who largely run their businesses on legacy platforms that are tailored to other customer models.

Loopit not only powers the shift to subscriptions, they improve the overall customer experience, back office management and economics through software.

Founders that Hustle

Co-founders (and brothers) Michael and Paul Higgins have lived their customers’ problems and built the industry-leading solution to solve it. They initially built Loopit’s software to support their car subscription marketplace HelloCars, before realising the opportunity to provide it more broadly across the mobility industry.

Michael, Paul, and the broader management team combine both strong functional capabilities in building a software business with extensive domain knowledge in the automotive industry. They have demonstrated strong execution, building a healthy and scalable business that has won several key automotive brands as clients and expanded globally prior to any venture backing.

A compelling business model

Loopit have built out an attractive business model and demonstrated strong unit economics. They earn both a subscription fee for ongoing use of the platform, as well as consumption revenues through a clip applied to the underlying subscription payment of the end consumers.

Over time, we see the opportunity for continued growth through expansion into new markets, and further influencing the economics and experience of car subscriptions through the product. With critical mass they can obtain an unfair data advantage with access to inventory, pricing intelligence and a future opportunity to launch their own aggregation play via a marketplace.

The Seed Phase and beyond

Loopit is in its Seed Phase. It has demonstrated strong product-market fit and built out a highly capable team, having bootstrapped the business to date. This round is intended to support with global expansion and implementing a more scalable and repeatable go-to-market approach. We see significant opportunity to ramp up growth efforts with product and sales / marketing activities in harmony, providing customers with different maturity levels with the opportunity to either self-serve, or to localise and tailor their offering with a higher degree of support.

We look forward to continuing to support the Loopit team as they enable the transition to car subscription models.

Thanks to Max Kausman for help in drafting this post.

If you're a visionary founder who is ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.

Get to know Tidal's Max Kausman

What drew you to Seed investing and in particular, the Tidal Team?

I have always been interested in startups and technology. I love great products and I’m fascinated by the way tech businesses and business models re-shape markets. I thought deeply about why I wanted to be in venture, not only about why I would find it interesting and purposeful, but also about whether the role would match my attributes, capabilities, and personality. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but I get energy from the role - it’s hugely people-centric, there’s a lot of autonomy, and a lot of intellectual breadth. There are new learnings - business models, technologies, sectors - every day. It requires curiosity, comfort in ambiguity, and a long-term perspective.

The Seed Phase in particular is an extension of that. It’s people-centric, but still with real analysis and deep thinking involved in understanding markets, products, and business models. It’s such a formative stage that the impact we can have is enormous, and I relish the opportunity to work very directly with founders in this stage as they build out their teams and find product-market fit.

When I joined, I felt (and continue to feel) like I could learn an enormous amount from the Tidal team. I was drawn to the diverse backgrounds and unique skills and capabilities of the team, and I spoke to a number of founders who raved about Tidal as investors. I liked our portfolio, our investment mandate and philosophy, and how we have the conviction to lead Seed rounds and are genuinely active operational partners to our founders.

What’s a day like in the role?

It’s enormously varied. Broadly, my time is split across deal-flow, supporting our portfolio companies, and helping to build Tidal itself as a funds business. Within each of those, there are lots of different jobs that need to be done. It’s fast-paced, and there’s lots of context switching.

What's the first question you ask when you come across a prospective investment?

I generally start with the origin story of the business. I love unpacking how a founder realised there was a problem, and why they then decided that they cared enough to dedicate their time and energy, over what could be decades, to solving it.

What is something you believe that others don't?

I believe that ‘weird’ is a compliment. There’s a lot of social and societal pull to conform and be normal - but I have a lot of time for people who are authentic enough to let their weirdness emerge. Those who make the greatest entrepreneurial strides are often eccentric, unconventional, and willing to be wrong.

What is one thing that inspires you every day at Tidal?

I think all venture investors have a healthy scepticism. We say no a lot, and there is always a reason why a business idea won’t work. What gets underplayed is the underlying optimism that goes into figuring out why a business idea could work, and how exciting and inspiring it can be to then do the deep thinking and get to the point we ultimately say yes. When that happens, we get to partner with some incredible founders and work closely with them to realise their vision for the future of the world.

At a macro level I’m also excited by the amazing compounding momentum we’re now seeing in the start up ecosystem in Australia, and its potential to create jobs and reshape our economy.

What do you think is the most important qualities or characteristics a business founder should aspire to have and never lose?

A great founder should have binary qualities. What I mean by this is that founders should deeply understand the problem they are solving, but also be able to zoom out and see the bigger picture. Founders should have humility and be open-minded, but ultimately be decisive, relentlessly believe in themselves, and be willing to create buzz and draw others to their mission. When those binaries interweave, and there is a clear sense of hustle, I feel we have found a great founder.

What are you passionate about outside of work?

I have a broad range of interests and I love trying new things. I’m an avid traveller. I love sport, especially Basketball, AFL, and Cricket, and I’m a good skier and a wannabe surfer. I enjoy music and live gigs, good food, getting outdoors, and being social. I’m a voracious reader, particularly on tech, psychology, geopolitics, and macroeconomics. I’m both self-aware and shameless enough to use the word ‘voracious’ unironically.

What advice do you live by?

Advice is easy to give and much harder to receive.

How do you think the world would change in 10 years?

The rate of change - in technology, and in society, is enormous, and I believe it will only continue to accelerate. There’s a convergence of amazing forces going on - in AI, Robotics, Clean Energy, Biotech, Blockchain, Space, Remote Work - the list goes on. I’m optimistic about what this means for the world in terms of better living standards, and I hope this ultimately results in vastly more people doing creative things and working for themselves. I would temper my techno-optimism with a bit of macro-pessimism though. There are some big societal problems to be solved - a big economic deleveraging, Western populism, decarbonisation, the risk of great-power conflict. It's going to be an interesting decade!

How do you measure success?

I measure success by the quantity, calibre, and depth of relationships I have. Success to me is in having people for whom I’d go the extra mile, and feeling confident knowing they’d do the same for me.

The Loops platform stitches data from diverse tools to help reps identify customer issues with contextual insights and recommend resolutions or actions.

The Tidal team recently made an investment into TheLoops, and we're publishing our investment notes below. We invest across a range of markets, models and products. There are core principles that we live and die by in our investment decisions. For more information on the pillars that make a great Tidal Seed Investment, see how we invest here.

Markets with tailwinds

For many companies the load on customer support has increased significantly due to a number of factors including a wider push to self-serve, reduction of bricks & mortar presence, number of contact channels (phone, email, chat, social etc), and more recently due to pandemic induced work from home conditions.

This acceleration of digital transformation strategies has led to increased volumes that overwhelm customer support operations. The current resolution methods lack the tools to give adequate signals to agents to understand the customer issue thus burning precious time to get to a resolution.

The Future of CX

Traditionally, support representatives have not been empowered to own the resolution process. But having an intelligent customer support strategy that bring context, collaboration and workflows by harnessing data across a range of systems reaps huge benefits such as increased sales conversions, decreased service costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

Companies recognise that leveraging automation and analytics is the best approach to reducing handle time thus securing the life-time value of their customers.

Products that change the game

TheLoops brings observability capabilities to front office teams and can truly provide a step change in the customer support experience by accelerating a collaborative path to ticket resolution. The product aspires to be:

A data and analytics learning engine with point-and-click integrations providing insights and collaborative process flows to improve the support team’s efficacy.

Support operations span multiple levels and often sit across support and product teams. However information silos exist where front office teams have not had the same instrumentation as product or engineering teams. This often results in increased handle-time, unnecessary escalations and decrease in agent efficiency.

Our thesis: by empowering front office teams with similar observability capabilities as back office teams, TheLoops will unlock material improvements in CX by transitioning companies from thinking about customer touch points as a cost centres to growth drivers.

It's very clear that the co-founders of TheLoops understood the importance of storytelling through demos as they provided a complete end to end portrayal of how they will positively impact the customer experience with their intelligent support platform.

Founders that hustle

Somya Kapoor and Ravi Bulusu are accomplished operators spanning product and engineering. They truly embody a product-led dynamic founder duo. Their experience spans decades of senior leadership experience in high growth companies giving them deep domain expertise in the customer service and support space. Somya was a VP of Product at ServiceNow and SAP and makes a capable CEO with product chops. Ravi met Somya at a previous startup, forging a strong working collaboration which led to genesis of TheLoops. Ravi was also Chief Architect at Splunk and had multiple startup roles building state-of-the art ML platforms. Their shared learnings through all of these past roles led them to the realisation that bringing product context to support teams will have significant benefits. Together they make a killer combination and they are the right team to solve the problem.

A compelling business model

TheLoops straightforward subscription business model aligns well with the participants that benefit from the improved interactions their platform offers:

• Team plans help agents or reps have contextual insights right inside the support tools they current use today rather than having to switch. This includes Zendesk for Service, Salesforce Service Cloud, Atlassian Jira or Intercom.
• No-code or low-code connectors to key tools in the product stack such as Splunk, Amplitude, Pager Duty, Pendo, Kibana, CloudWatch and much more, pulls in all the data to stitch and synthesise the insights.
• Workflows help make escalations simple by seamlessly bridging systems and providing the same context to all parties so everyone is on the same page. This applies to helpdesks like ZenDesk, issue trackers like Jira or group chat like Slack, it's about keeping the context in the systems that these teams work in.

Intelligent customer support is just the initial offering for TheLoops. There will be more exciting news on the horizon as they progress their platform roadmap.

The seed phase

TheLoops sits firmly within the Seed phase - and the team is currently rolling out their platform to several well known customers, hiring an awesome US-based team, and developing many patterns from the machine learning engine that will benefit all their customers in turn serving their users better than before.

We are delighted to be partner with Somya and Ravi to bring a step change to customer support interactions for the better. Stay tuned for updates on their website (they're hiring), Twitter, and LinkedIn.

A note on the observability thematic

Observability stems from engineering and control theory; it is a measure of how well internal states of system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. In a highly distributed cloud architecture your ability to predict failures is limited. Therefore the solution is observability (vs monitoring) which attempts to pull together Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces to provide granular insights and to answer why a system may have failed.

These systems are now best practices and part of a typical SaaS stack. They assist the "back office" like engineering and product teams to determine the root cause of an issue. But what about the countless issues that originate from the customer facing side? The lack of tooling for the "front office" like customer success or support creates a major bottlenecks in reporting, triaging, and resolving customer reported issues in a timely manner.

Customer Service tools (e.g. CRMs, CDPs, CXPs, Service Desks etc) are not equipped to provide this context, and observability tools are not built for front office teams. However, front and back office teams can each use observability principles to gain a shared understanding of the customer context to streamline the workflow of customer issues, and in turn, vastly improve the customer experience.

The Loops is building this new and exciting platform for the future of CX. If you're a visionary founder who is ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.

Carted is building an API that can power universal commerce experiences anywhere on the internet, allowing developers and creators to build a checkout anywhere.

The Tidal team recently made an investment into Carted, and we're publishing our investment notes below. We invest across a range of markets, models and products, there are core principles that we live and die by in our investment decisions. For more information on the pillars that make a great Tidal Seed Investment, see our investment criteria here.

Markets with tailwinds

E-commerce is an enormous market - USD$10 trillion - and is forecast to grow at ~15% p.a. to 2027 (Grandview Research). Covid-19 further accelerated what was already a clear trend towards online commerce, driving years' worth of e-commerce adoption in months. Tidal have had conviction around the e-commerce thematic for some time, and have made investments in a number of pioneering companies in the space, including Shippit, Search.io, and Drive Yello.

Universal Commerce

Today, the online retail world resembles the physical one, in that we purchase products from a "store", offering a collection of products for sale. Regardless of where customers discover a brand or product - be it search, content, social, or friends - they are taken to the online store to transact.

Universal commerce presents a way to attach a transactional capability to a product, instantly creating a commerce experience. Why does this matter? By enabling a buyer to seamlessly purchase a product or service, where it is discovered, it permits contextual commerce. There are a range of new contextual commerce experiences that could be created - including collaborative, social, conversational video, and voice commerce.

Products that change the game

Enter Carted - who closely embodies our thesis around the next generation of e-commerce, by embedding commerce within the online experiences that users value the most. Carted's vision is to build the API that powers commerce experiences anywhere on the internet, allowing developers and creators to build a checkout anywhere.

The Carted API connects the fragmented players across the e-commerce ecosystem. This enables platforms, creators, influencers, and developers, who previously would need to integrate with brands and retailers one by one, to sell products directly on their own platform, retain customers and traffic, monetise their audience, and build new e-commerce experiences.

Our thesis: if Carted is able to deliver this important infrastructure, it will shift the relationships between buyer, intermediary, and seller across the value chain; and will enable developers to build contextual commerce experiences in entirely new and interesting ways.

In the spirit of The Art of the Demo, the Carted team have this skill in spades. Carted's demo examples are here and here.

Founders that hustle

Holly Cardew and Mike Angell are the team to solve this problem. They are multi-time company builders and accomplished operators with deep domain expertise in the e-commerce space, complementary skill sets, and relentless hustle. Holly has built four Shopify apps and founded Pixc, helping merchants organise their product catalogs, whilst Mike has experience at Culture Kings, Shopify, and Fast, and is a self-taught developer who founded his first e-commerce business all the way back in 2004. Their unique insight and clarity of vision for Carted is borne from their shared frustration of the experience uncovered when they set out to build Vop, where they created a shoppable Tik Tok feed, and realised no single checkout experience could integrate products from multiple vendors.

A compelling business model

Carted's business model is compelling as it simultaneously drives value for stakeholders across the e-commerce value chain:

• Platforms can earn revenue for their content, own their customers, and build new e-commerce experiences.
• Customers benefit from superior commerce experiences created through contextual commerce, including ease of use and a shorter path to conversion
• Merchants/brands benefit through increased revenue opportunities, gaining new customers and increasing product visibility across a range of platforms.

By providing the infrastructure, Carted has the potential to clip the ticket on e-commerce sales and take a slice of a very large pie, with significant volumes. Revenue opportunities for the API include interchange fees, affiliate commissions, promotional codes and product markups, FX conversion, and API calls.

The seed phase

Carted sits firmly within its Seed phase - and will be turning its focus to building out its product, hiring a stellar team, and beginning to connect a vast product index to a variety of integrations to form their infrastructure. They will be striving to build out the core API and demonstrate value across a few platforms - earning the right to connect parties across e-commerce and then building out a compelling product roadmap.

Our experience and thinking on the future of commerce is how we gained conviction at Tidal to back Carted. We are incredibly excited to partner with Holly and Mike on the journey ahead. Stay tuned for updates on their website (they're hiring), Twitter, and LinkedIn.

A note on the future of commerce thematic

There are a number of components in the broader e-commerce value chain. In this context, we observe the transactional aspect of the e-commerce experience evolving across a spectrum:

• Firstly, a centralised model of aggregation and scale, embodied by Amazon
• Then, a decentralised model of platforms & services for vendors, embodied by Shopify
• Next, a universal commerce model blurs the lines of what a traditional store, merchant, affiliate and more is, and therefore opens up entirely new experiences that are defined by a creative ecosystem.

Carted is building this new and exciting infrastructure for the future of commerce. If you're a visionary founder who is ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.

Thanks to Max Kausman for help drafting this post.

Demos help us experience the product in a way that's not lines of code or marketing bullet points or concepts.

To help us unpack why demos are an essential craft that needs to be honed in start-ups, we talked to four product legends to get their insights, thoughts, and opinions.

• Sherif Mansour: Distinguished Product Manager at Atlassian.
• Mindy Eiermann: Director of Product Management at Intuit.
• Jens Schumacher: Chief Product Officer at Search.io.
• Somya Kapoor: CEO & Co-Founder at TheLoops.

All were kind enough to share their take on The Art of the Demo.

Demos simulate the customer experience

When we asked why they think demos are important, Jens and Somya both spoke of demos as breathing life into projects. Jens believes they make the abstract tangible and provide an opportunity to clearly demonstrate how specific problems are solved. Somya thinks of demos as "windows into the vision", where you distil the idea potential and capture the audience.

Sherif and Mindy agreed. For Sherif, the demo audience simulates the customer, so the presenter has to be very aware of the customer experience during delivery, more than with other modes of presentation. He added that "it’s much more effective to have a meaningful discussion and make prioritisation decisions when you use your demo as a shared language, rather than using a bunch of text and bullet points". Demos simulate reality, whereas bullet points abstract it.

Demos are an opportunity to tell a story

Mindy puts it beautifully when she says that "giving a demo is so much more than showing someone your product. It's about telling a story and doing so in a way that marries customer insights, data, and a product experience to take your audience on the journey." We love this and we wholeheartedly agree.

Demos are a story. A very important part of your product story. They allow you to empathise with customers, understand their challenges and see how to solve their problems. You can't get this effect with a slide deck. Empathy is built when you can put yourself in the shoes of the customer. As Mindy says, "the more effective you can be with creating that empathy and understanding, the more likely you will be to get the support you need to be successful".

Three key demo use cases

1. Transfer knowledge to internal teams
   Demos show how a customer problem has been solved and explain the steps taken to arrive at the solution. This is valuable knowledge that can be used to impact other customer problems, and enable marketing and support teams to explain features more clearly to customers.
2. Drive customer sales
   Demos are a visual and engaging way for the target audience to understand a feature, a whole product and the experience they will receive. The old adage of 'show don't tell' applies here, because it enables the customer to 'see themselves' using a product, achieving a task, solving a problem. Demos create a connection which (hopefully) leads to sales.
3. Show investors your value
   Demos are essential for telling the success story of your product, what it does now, what it can do soon, and where it fits in a customer's life and the market. Investors look for ideas that loudly communicate potential, have a clear purpose and reflect a better reality. Investors want to put their money in a product they can see, not a bullet list of nebulous benefits.

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Our experts share their demo stories

Sherif's demo story

Sometimes demos reveal something that has not been noticed before. Sherif recalls when the team building software for mobile showed how they solved a particular customer problem. But only on mobile. The same problem existed for desktop users, but the solution approach had not been discussed with the desktop engineers. Sherif remembers that "the demo highlighted that we were letting our internal team structures influence the customer experience." The demo showed the need for better information sharing and highlighted a creeping silo problem between teams.

Mindy's demo story

Never underestimate the hunger of a demo audience. Mindy tells us how she was preparing for a huge public product launch and the engineer who was running the demo did a rehearsal with her beforehand. She thought it might be too detailed and make people bored. "Boy, I was wrong" she reflects. "The accountants in the audience were sitting on the edge of their seats that night. They wanted all the detail so that they could understand exactly what impact the new experience would have for them and their firm."

Jen's demo story

You can talk it up all you want, but you've got to show people how things work. "In a world where AI has become a buzzword appearing on every marketing website, it was important for Search.io to demonstrate how easy and practical it is to implement a personalised search experience". Through demo storytelling, Search.io could highlight the personalisation and focus on the "benefit to customers". Jens believes their simple but effective demo has closed the majority of customer deals.

Somya's demo story

During our Seed round raise the product was nascent, but our vision was crisp. While it wasn't quite fake it, till you make it, the demo we shared with Tidal and other investors was expressive enough to convey a rich end to end experience. It communicated the land value proposition, the hook for our target audience and even hinted at our future potential. Akin to Jens, Somya was able to successfully complete her raise in quick time as the demo was a key part of investor conviction.

Expert tips

There is always a before and after

You can demo anything, even if it’s an API change or a bug fix. Make sure to start with the problem and why it was worth solving and make sure everyone is aligned on why the solution is designed in that way.

- Sherif Mansour

Tell a story that people can relate to

Don't just run through the motion and explain what's happening on screen. Focus your energy on a couple of key highlights that you want the viewer to remember.

- Jens Schumacher

KISS - Keep it simple, please!

Not more than one minute and engage the audience every 30-45 seconds - especially in the zoom world or else you are just another screen they are looking at for hours.

- Somya Kapoor

Know your audience

When demoing to senior stakeholders, spend less time on the nitty-gritty and more time on the customer insights, data, and the story. This will help the audience connect the work. For sales team type demos, focus on the customer benefits and concerns to help guide those conversations.

- Mindy Eiermann

In conclusion

If there is a downside to demos, we haven't found one. Demos take concepts and make them real for your teams, your customers, and the people you want to draw in as investors. Keep them short, purposeful and relevant for your audience, and you can't go wrong.

Big thanks to Charlotte Jiang for helping me draft this post and to all our demo experts featured.

The art of the demo is an essential craft that needs to be honed in start-ups as its used in so many high-impact moments. It could be a founder pitch, planning a new feature, creating a new product horizon or (re)defining your vision to stakeholders. But there is a big difference between going through the motions of demoing your product versus developing a demo muscle that forms the cultural identity of your company.

Demos are the higher-order bit of story-telling for startups. It is a compass for authenticity and its value cannot be underestimated. A great demo is priceless.

During my time at Atlassian we productised many of our operations or rituals. The result was the Atlassian Playbook. My contribution was co-creating the Project Poster and Demo Trust. We developed these plays (and many more) as scaffolding to scale during a period of hyper growth for the company.

The plays gave us a common language when working on feature proposals, new initiatives and offered a dedicated forum to refine and improve the product experience via demos. They served as guardrails for our freshly minted teams.

However these plays were not optimised for startups that are running fast and could benefit from a more streamlined approach. So I wanted to provide a guide that's a short and sweeter remix optimised for seed stage companies. It contains the essentials that will illuminate a path to a solid demo.

The best part is there are opportunities to demo around every corner. Each moment is a chance to build this muscle and make it a part of your company culture.

Overview

One of my formative experiences as a founder was early on in my first startup. I showed a rough demo of a shortcut feature at a conference and I unexpectedly heard ooh's and ahh's from the crowd. Boy did it give me conviction about our direction. It was validation of how powerful a demo is for storytelling and we were acquired less than 3 years later. But what was it about that demo that cut through to make a difference?

In his book The Macintosh Way, Guy Kawasaki wrote a chapter called “How to Give Good Demo,” where Kawasaki suggests that good demos should be short, simple, sweet, swift, and substantial, and that starting with a script that satisfies these requirements is the foundation for success.

This advice is still valuable today, but I'm going to argue that above all it needs to be authentic. Why? Because often you are continually tuning different aspects of your demo and so it's okay to compromise on some of these points early on. But when you give an authentic demo you really:

1. Focus on what matters to your audience and in turn your company. We talked about drift in the Connected Roadmap. An authentic demo is validated by your users, stakeholders and teams and is a practical tool in finding and retaining product-market fit.
2. Expedite how you communicate value through a shared understanding. How many times have your users or stakeholders had a different thought bubble about how they interpreted your explanation or email? A demo is a tangible way to share an idea, reduce ambiguity and get alignment.
3. Fast-track team velocity as you cut to the essence of intent. If you are doing the first two things well, in my experience it also unblocks the typical hurdles in reaching stakeholder alignment and decision-making. While this may not be as big a deal as a seed stage company, it sure as hell gets more difficult as you scale up. It empowers the team to make difficult trade off decisions whilst holding true to the core idea.

How to get started

I recently finished reading Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda about his takeaways as a software engineer and designer at Apple in the early years. One of the core concepts in the book is they often used demos, dog-fooding and continual refinement as tangible expressions of ideas from creators and stakeholders and let natural selection decide which would thrive or go extinct. While this book focuses on an insiders' experience at Apple, this culture was certainly not exclusive to Apple. I had similar experiences as a leader in prior companies.

Similarly you have opportunity to integrate the practice of demos neatly into your existing learn, build, measure cycles. The steps below are a guide in developing that muscle 💪

Demos should fit neatly into your development lifecycle

Define your hypothesis

Conduct preliminary research: Clearly articulate why you are doing this.

What problem are we solving?

Impact of the problem?

What data to we have to support our thesis?

Expected Outcomes

Explore your assumptions: Document what you know, don't know and must achieve.

What additional data do we need to obtain?

How do we judge success? Quantitative metrics & qualitative observations.

Possible solutions:

• List all approaches in very briefs paragraphs.
• Select best approach and build a prototyped demo (ideally code, but early stages can be as scrappy as you need to convey the ingredients below).
  

Validate your hypothesis

Synthesise the demo: Create a compelling narrative for your demo.

• Scene setting: Target audience, context & motivation which could be framed as a Job To Be Done (JTBD), epic level user story etc.
• Problem / complication: Describe the pain points that eventually translate to some form of better, faster, cheaper; always make it familiar and relatable.
• Intro solution: Talk about the why; if it's faster, make it about how you'll save time, if it's cheaper, talk about how you'll save money (this is ok, but hopefully not your only benefit), if it's better, show me how I'll enjoy doing it, at least more than compared to today.
• How it works: This is the core part of the demo and communicates the workflow, interaction or journey the user is likely to experience.
• Highlight and delight: Touch on the key aspects of the flow, and between each highlight drop-in a delighter ✨ that is an aha moment or better yet, mind-blowing 🤯
• End scene (optional): Close with summary with respect to their Return on Investment (ROI), or likely outcomes by the numbers.

When developing your demo DNA ideally embody your product and customer facing teams such that there is a shared accountability of authenticity. In other words, call bullshit when a demo does not fulfil the promise of your mission or what you are setting out to do in your regular planning cycles. But always make sure you do it thoughtfully.

Demo Formats

A demo can take many forms such as live presentation, video, or storyboard. They each have their purpose and can be useful, particularly as organisations accept flexible work arrangements. Practical examples I've adopted in the past:

• Live: When you want an active way to develop your shared accountability of your demo authenticity, there is nothing like presenting live. This is generally face to face for workshops, design sparring, but perfectly fine over video screen-sharing.
• Video: This provide a passive way to develop a culture of demos and sharing with teams to assist distributed teams where timezone or async check-ins helps flexibility. Videos are easy to create and really force you to consider the script, flow and delivery. Silent demos (no talk track) can also work if the flow is self-explanatory. I would suggest titles and spotlights to assist the viewer.
• Storyboard: For teasing out conviction of early stage concepts, you can't beat a storyboard. The key frames help you structure their thoughts into bite-sized ideas before investing any engineering or other effort. Yes, anyone is capable of drawing shapes and stick figures!

Demoing API's

But hold the fort! I hear you hark "I have an API or platform that does not have a traditional user interface". Fear not, all of this is still very much applicable. In fact you should be even more invested in a demo. But the difference is about expressing the possibilities and/or seeding with one or more examples to inspire your audience which is often a developer. In these cases I tend to lean on great documentation, live samples and lowering the barrier to getting started.

• Stripe: Probably the most referenced example and for good reason. The simplicity, quality and comprehensive coverage for their developer audience is incredible and it all started with helping developers quickly transact using their recognisable checkout experience.
• Search.io: How do you demo a search engine that specialises in e-commerce? Well you provide a complete "kitchen sink visual demo, to a fictitious store where a dev can kick the tyres.
• FrankieOne: KYC and AML got a little more exciting by allowing an institution to understand how they might incorporate RegTech into their existing apps, backend, workflows.

Inspirational Examples

Here are some inspirational demos or experiences that invoke some or all of the ingredients we seek in a great demo and loosely follow the narrative flow above:

• Superhuman: Well known for their white-glove onboarding demo via their customer success that truly make you wonder where has this email client been all my life. Best to actually do the 1:1 onboarding to experience it for yourself.
• MmHmm: Phil Libin makes a really personable video that is just down to earth and really expresses all the frustrations we've been having with video calls while in lockdown or potentially as the new norm. So why should we settle?
• Descript: This may be a meta example. While it is a very orchestrated marketing video, it still hits all key points in a great demo with some really next level experiences for making video editing easier. Descript could even be your next tool for making awesome demos.

Demo outcomes

As founders and product leaders, you strive to tell meaningful stories that are authentic. This virtue must shine on in your demos too. If you are nailing all the points above you should be achieving the following outcomes:

• Validation: You are always experimenting, so every learn, build, measure iteration is a chance to validate your thesis and assumptions.
• Excitement: Acknowledging user pain points and motivations in every story you tell creates an emotional connection to your audience.
• Alignment: Each time you share your story, you refine through validation, replace scepticism for excitement and tie back to your purpose and vision.

The sum of these parts results in conviction for you and potential investors. In short it represents a path to unlock funding and provides a succinct and tangible communication tool.

Proactively developing your demo DNA will benefit you and your startup as it is a powerful mechanism to cut through so many things that often get lost in translation. Think of it as a vital part of your founder or leadership arsenal.

An authentic demo can be truly game-changing. After all, isn't that what we are all striving for?

Roadmaps serve as a powerful communications tool for product leaders.

They aim to:

1. Build a shared understanding between stakeholders
2. Show areas of investment
3. Bridge strategy to tactics

When you think about it, that’s a lot of stuff to put into a single visual. Making a stellar roadmap to solve all these problems creates a concentration of pressure. As a result, we see many teams fumble while trying to tick all these boxes.

In a world where there is growing specialization in skills, techniques, and in turn software, why are we still trying to squeeze all this information into one tool?

Recently, I had the pleasure of (virtually) meeting Marty Cagan from the Silicon Valley Product Group and author of the seminal product management book, Inspired. One of his key messages during a Q&A session was that product teams waste so much time developing and estimating feature roadmaps, when they should be focused on build, measure, learn cycles. That is, focus on product outcomes, their priority, and buy time until you have data-informed tactics.

This does a couple of things:

1. You learn what really matters to users faster
2. You avoid unwanted feature bloat

You can read more about Marty’s thoughts on this here and here.

Bottom line: the intent of a feature in a roadmap can be interpreted subjectively, and as a result we have seen teams drift from their original goal during execution. Whereas an outcome on a roadmap is unambiguous, offering a constant reminder of your desired goal throughout your delivery cycle.

Examples of drift range from:

• Anecdotal thesis: starting a project without success metrics
• Product bloat : having clear measures for success, but deviating due to over investment and sheer momentum
• Goal posts: feature scope shifts yet the measures unchanged
• Never ending story: delivery time extends with no recognition of the original desired result and in turn checks and balances for incremental delivery

We spend a lot of time reviewing product roadmaps with our portfolio companies at Tidal and many more in review sessions over my lifetime a product leader. We tend to run into this issue consistently. So we created a practical guide on developing a connected roadmap that leans on complementary artefacts to address the goals above.

Overview

Here is a visual map of how we will progressively leverage a set of common artefacts to achieve a connected roadmap:

Goals pre-flight check

Before getting started on a roadmap, we need some guidance from leadership. Your company goals form this guidance. We will use the OKR (Objectives & Key Results) format to frame them with a business lens.

This is what it might look like:

Use this checklist to inform your roadmap:

• Focus Areas: Does the OKR call out your team(s) as a dependency to achieve the goal? We recommend defining Focus Areas per OKR to set expectations for accountability and provides an opportunity to have a conversation about resourcing.
• Focused Key Result: Does each Objective have one primary Key Result? A secondary Key Result should only be used to help qualify the effort. This helps reduce unambiguity and will align behavior. An example of a primary key result would be improving sales efficiency from $x to $y, with a complementary qualifying objective that maintains your conversion rate at a floor of z%.
• Ordered Objectives: Are the OKRs an ordered list? This forces leadership to prioritize the bets the company is taking; just like you need to prioritize your roadmap. Guaranteed these priorities will be tested throughout the time span and it’s best to understand those trade-offs early.

Finally, are the company OKRs you are accountable for grounded in rational optimism? You want to be ambitious, but it needs to be coupled with a reality check that considers cadence, dependencies, and the timespan for achieving the result. While this is not specific input into building a roadmap, it's worth asking if you are set up for success?

Posing the checklist and your own situational questions helps develop a shared understanding with stakeholders and is half of the solution for aligning on value.

Now that you have tightened up the business OKRs, let's connect them to your product roadmap.

Outcomes not features

The fundamental challenge with most feature-based roadmaps is they are used to convey product strategy to stakeholders but are rarely self-explanatory. They require a talk track to explain how tactics (features) ladder up to strategy (outcomes), rather than stating the strategy itself and making it accessible. This way, your feature doesn't get in the way of your outcome. If your feature fails the goal, you can pivot without changing your high-level roadmap.

Outcome-oriented roadmaps help you defer and switch tactics while maintaining the original intent that stakeholders are aligned on:

Feature roadmap

• Improved onboarding (frames it from the user's lens; push this down one level)
• Establish a baseline conversion rate of at least 4%

versus

Outcomes roadmap

• Increase unassisted user adoption (frames it from the product lens)
• Establish baseline conversion rate of at least 4%

This is what it might look like:

Here are the ways to convert typical roadmap elements into an outcome-oriented roadmap:

1. Swimlanes: Use the business OKRs that require a direct contribution from product teams. Traditionally you would use themes, but they only serve as a narrative to your feature grouping rather than being an effective way to remind stakeholders how product strategy connects to your business objectives.
2. Timeline: I recommend using quarterly intervals if you are having some delivery cadence challenges or you are a time-driven organisation; alternatively Now, Next, Later may provide a more flexible structure for fluid development.
3. Bars: Cards should be represented as outcomes instead of features. Leave features for your Scrum or Kanban boards to build more conviction in your tactics through rapid iteration.
4. Milestones: this is an optional element, but should tie to a series of major stages

You may be thinking an outcome-oriented roadmap lacks the depth of the feature roadmap. But what you lose in detail you gain in clarity of purpose. It is the other half of the solution for aligning on value and illustrates how you intend to prioritise value delivery.

Now that you have expressed your product strategy using outcomes, let’s connect your strategic outcomes to your feature tactics.

Make it epic

In agile development, epics encapsulate a set of related stories. Often a few epics may be required to achieve a desired outcome through gradual iterations. The simple use of a progress bar within each (outcome) bar connects strategy to tactical delivery. It also enables stakeholders to track progress in delivering user value, associated with the outcome, and finally the business OKRs.

This is what it might look like:

We do not prescribe a specific agile methodology. That is very much a team decision. However techniques like User Story Mapping or Jobs to be Done are a useful methods in curating what actually gets on your backlog.

The mindset of having a groomed epic backlog should be strong opinions, loosely held. Each epic merely represents a way to capture your thesis of the user value impact for a given feature; and why it is a suitable leading indicator to the outcome's lagging indicator in your roadmap.

Here are ways to tweak a typical Scrum or Kanban board elements to connect your roadmap:

1. Columns: our recommendation is to capture select stages of your delivery cycle per column. Consider this as a more precise snapshot of a feature's delivery using a common language of your product team. For example we have seen teams track Backlog, Discovery, Build, Test, Beta, GA and added steps in between to suit their path to production. The use of a time-scale is less relevant at this level and you are better off aligning the team to your roadmap for time.
2. Cards: are simply the epics or stories/tasks that progress through each of your stages. Again it's important to iterate that having a rapid test & learn culture means not all things get to production. Being deliberate about this will help you forge a better product.
3. Tags: using tags (aka labels) helps connect an epic to an outcome. By doing this it should control the progress bar on each outcome's bar on your roadmap.

By tuning your board elements this way, you have connected to your roadmap, and in turn the company goals. Congratulations, time to celebrate.

Adopting a connected roadmap may resolve unwanted pressure by allowing each artefact to have a clear purpose. Everyone in the organisation should have more clarity as they can cascade up or down through each view and see how value is aligned, prioritised and consistently defined at each level.

Let’s recap the benefits of using a connected roadmap:

• You have a self-serve document that better communicates your strategy.
• Reducing communication friction allows you to spend more quality time debating the things that matter.
• Deferring tactics till slightly later in the planning cycle reduces feature bloat and speeds up your path to validating if a feature will actually deliver on a given outcome.

Thanks to Tash, Andrea, Georgie, teams at Bonjoro, Shippit, and Secure Code Warrior for contributing and reading drafts of this article.