Introducing Arcade 2.0

Today, we’re excited to announce that after 8 months in private beta Arcade is now available to the general public. We’ve seen great traction since - we’ve been averaging 70% m/m growth for the past six months. In order to double down on this growth, we’re thrilled to share that we’ve raised a total of $7.5m in seed funding!

We’ve added Joanne Chen to the board from Foundation Capital, with participation by Upfront in addition to new investors Terrence Rohan, Christina Cacioppo from Vanta, Arash Ferdowsi from Dropbox, Chris Jennings from Sentry, Barry McCardel from Hex, Josh Browder from DoNotPay, Jane Alexander from Carta, and many others!

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On my first day at Atlassian, I was asked to go to a conference and represent Jira Service Desk. I was one of the first Jira Service Desk marketers and I didn’t know a ton about the product yet. I felt unqualified to attend the event, but I flew to D.C. and tried my best.

Later that week, I had my first 1:1 with my manager. I felt nervous, as I wanted to make a good impression. I handed my manager a list of ~250 names that we had captured at the event. He looked at me and paused.

He looked at me, horrified. “There’s way too many names!” He then continued:

“There’s no way 250 people got to know Jira Service Desk over the course of a few hours. You likely had a brief conversation with them and tried to get their email as fast as possible. Now, when we follow up with them, they won’t really do anything because they don’t know what they’re buying. You have to earn that trust.”

He was right. Even though we got a bunch of names, very few of them ended up trying out the product.

After that experience, I studied the customer experience of every campaign I ran in great detail. Was the copy too salesy? Did it overpromise and under-deliver? Did we show the product at every opportunity? Were we setting the right expectations? Most importantly, did our customers know what they are buying?

Fast forward to today — Jira Service Desk is one of Atlassian’s most successful products (Atlassian now generates $2.8B in revenue a year). Being in the front seat of that exponential growth taught me the importance of earning customer trust by showing how the product worked at each stage in the customer journey.

I truly believe that this is the best model for SaaS growth — earn customer trust every step of the way.

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Building for the product-led growth economy

That’s why Rich (a former Atlassian teammate) and I started Arcade.

Arcade is an interactive demo platform. Our mission is to empower the product-led growth economy and to help companies showcase their product to end users at every step of the customer journey.

We launched a private beta in January 2022, and since then 1k companies have published more than 4k demos. How did we get here?

Rich and I were intentional about building a product that was intuitive and accessible to a range of users - we wanted something that customers could find value in, quickly. Because of that, we’ve been so impressed and inspired by the variety of Arcade use cases, and the customer love.

There are teams at Carta who use Arcade across their support documentation, social media campaigns, and websites. We have users at Sentry who incorporate Arcades into blog posts to communicate product updates. There’s even a beekeeping app, Nectar, that uses Arcades in the field with commercial beekeepers to educate them on how to use their software.

On the product side, we’ve shipped a ton of product updates this year. A few highlights:

• Arcade Play — a new type of capture experience that automatically generates video with drag and drop, typing and scrolling actions.
• Arcade for Teams — our new multiplayer product for Teams to collaborate inside Arcades.
• A completely redesigned user experience with a new design language.

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Honing in our power users

While Arcade is versatile and can be used by a variety of people across roles and use cases, we decided to really get to know our power users. We conducted dozens of 1:1 interviews to learn how they used Arcade, what they loved about the tool, and what they wanted from it over time.

What we learned floored us. First, 66% said they would be “very disappointed” if they could no longer use Arcade. For context, the gold standard is 40%.

Second, the way that they were using Arcade was slightly different than we expected. Most of our power users were marketers or product managers. They used it frequently to learn, experiment, and quickly showcase just shipped features. They published, edited, and refined constantly. They used Arcade to help them keep up with the fast pace of their software development lifecycle and communicate changes to customers.

Lastly, these users told us that they loved how easy Arcade is to use. We’re delighted to hear that we’re time and time again the most intuitive (and magical ✨) interactive demo platform.

By listening to this user base, we also learned what improvements they wanted to see, including the desire to integrate with email and export Arcades as GIFs. That’s why we’re delighted to announce that Arcades are interactive inside Gmail, Outlook, Superhuman and GitHub, and that you can export Arcades as a GIF!

We also want YOU to connect with your power users, too. Arcades can help turn all users into power users.

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We’re product-led!

We’re so excited to announce that Arcade is now available if you want to give it a try. Because we’re staunch advocates of letting the product sell itself through product led growth motions, we decided to become models for this and do it ourselves.

Give Arcade a spin and let us know what you think!

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