Caroline:
Well, I'm so excited to be here and can't wait to be on this journey together. So the first thing I'll ask is, what excited you about Arcade, and what got you excited about partnering with us?
Mamoon:
As software becomes more powerful and there's this insatiable demand for tools that allow folks to showcase their very nuanced products, there's really a need for a product like Arcade that makes it easy and simple to produce some powerful demos for these software products.
What I loved about Arcade was that it allowed folks to pick up your product and create these really nifty designs, which, in some ways, demonstrated the sophisticated nature of your customers' products.
There's something about it that is not only simple and beautiful but also very powerful, and it allows people who are doing very nuanced work to showcase their products.
Caroline:
Well, yeah, you used the words simple and beautiful. That means so much to me that you see that because I care so much about the word. Beauty is such a subjective term. But I think that having that polish for our customers is so important because they're putting it on their homepages, and they're putting it in front of many people, so I take that very seriously.
I remember even, actually, the first time we pitched you during a seed round, you pointed out to me that we needed to do some optimizations on mobile. I love that feedback because you understood the product and you pushed us to be better, and we have since made a lot of changes to the mobile experience. So thank you for that.
So, I have to say one reason why we're so excited about partnering with you and Kleiner is that you've seen this in so many other ways. You've partnered with Figma, and you partnered with Slack. But at the time, the question people thought always was, “Oh, that's such a specific market.” How do you see the vision of that and Arcade?
We are still thinking about that as well and have a few perspectives. I'm just curious from your side: What do you think you saw in those companies? Is there applicability to Arcade?
Mamoon:
Yeah, it's a great question because if you look back at Slack and Figma, when I got involved, these are both companies that allow people to communicate very effectively in different ways. One is via chat initially, and one is a lot more visual with Figma. But they were both very much centered around this notion of beautifully communicating your work with your coworkers and customers.
In the case of Slack, actually, if you go back to the early days, it was really used by engineers to share code snippets and look at like bug reports that were generated by machines and sent to Slack channels being viewed by groups of developers or developers to developers communicating. But it really started with a certain segment of the population inside of a company.
In a similar vein, Figma started with designers, and designers would communicate with their marketing teams and with engineers. But in the early days, it was mostly designers using Figma. Then, it started to spread to marketers and then to engineers, which is how I see Arcade as well.
Initially, and you know better than I do, it started with folks wanting to do product demos with Arcade. Then, marketers started using Arcade, and then other folks inside the organization used Arcade.
And so I love these products that are simple, beautiful, and allow people to communicate effectively. If I take that to Arcade, you create this simple thing called an Arcade, and then you share it with people. People view it and ask themselves, "Oh, what is this Arcade thing? How do I create one of these myself?" So they create one themselves and then share it with their coworkers or customers.
So you have this beautiful, very efficient way of growing the virality of your product, increasing adoption, and hopefully signing up a lot of customers.
Caroline:
That's our plan. We've been excited by that. And the fact that other people see Arcade has been such an underrated part of our growth. I really experimented with so many different investments, but the way people discover Arcade is primarily through receiving one, whether it's a potential sale or someone inside the company. And what I feel is really underestimated about Arcade is that they hear the word " demo" and think it must be a very specific use case. But the reality is that so many people use it in many different ways; it's anytime.
Even talking about engineers at Slack... we have many engineers using Arcade, and every time they build a product, they just share an Arcade inside the company, and people start giving feedback. So that's been one thing we really embraced and continue to build on.
And the next big investment is AI. I know many companies are thinking about that. I have a few points of view about AI and content. What have you really seen as being powerful applications, and what do you think is maybe not as known?
Mamoon:
I would say that we especially love AI applications that help people do their job faster and better. Looking at specific job types and making a salesperson more efficient by taking away some of the more menial parts of their job or allowing a doctor to be super-powered with an AI copilot as they do their notes and transcribe them rather than having to type in their notes.
And so I imagine, in a similar vein, to turn the question back to you, how do you envision AI specifically helping the folks already using Arcade today?
Caroline:
When I first started the journey, I thought, "Okay, ROI and success with Arcade because it's all about revenue impact. You can close deals faster, see faster onboarding times, and the impact from the customer base.”
What really surprised me was that I would get on the phone with chief revenue officers of billion-dollar companies and come prepared with my presentation about all the impact metrics. One person cut me off in the middle of a presentation, and he just said, "Oh, this is great, but all I care about is people being empowered to build great content quickly." It was such a simple statement, and I was surprised to hear it from him. But I realized, okay, so it's really come back to those same principles we discussed earlier where you have something easy to use that builds beautiful content. And so if we just solve that problem, then we're solving the executive problem and the creative problems.
To that end, that's why we're using AI. We are taking the datasets we know perform really well and applying them inside companies. So, if you take a 100-person+ company, that's a lot of content you're building.
We see a lot of potential in building content quickly: pre-populated copy and pre-populated storylines. We actually compare what we know performs really well in the website context and apply that to the Arcade itself. So that's one quick win we have built and started working around. But I think it really comes back to the data set we have and training that data to be even more applicable and high quality. And that's the hard part. The hard part isn't building, the hard part is really high quality output. I'm excited by what we're building. We're getting great feedback so far, but it's a constant challenge.
Mamoon:
That's great. Well, what are some very specific applications of AI in the product today?
Caroline:
Today, when you build an Arcade, we capture the code behind the product so we know what's inside the product and what parts of it are most exciting to people. If you host it somewhere, we know how it's performing. We then take all that data to generate automated copy, so in each hotspot, we suggest what to write. We suggest the length of Arcade based on what we know performs the best. We even have automated sound smoothing, so taking out background noise and removing filler words—both common applications of AI.
Then there are even more futuristic ideas, which a lot of people think I'm crazy, but I'm really convinced it's going to be the future where you can really reimagine content the way that actually feels and works like an app through AI. It's not hard to imagine taking a vision model and then pairing that with front-end code and then making that look and feel like a real app. So excited to roll that out.
Mamoon:
Is our demo agent coming out soon?
Caroline:
Yes, that's why we have a new Arcade agent called Avery. That's something we're very excited about, and we will keep investing in that. We have a few design partners today, but it’s going to be something we're rolling out to the wider customer base.
Mamoon:
So, if I get this right, you can just type in what you want Avery to do, and it will create a demo for you?
Caroline:
Yes, exactly.
Mamoon:
That's amazing.
Caroline:
Well, we have to build it and continue to build on it, so I'm excited to do that.
Mamoon:
Amazing.
Caroline:
Well, I'm super excited to be on this chapter with you, and I can't wait to see what we build and make history together.
Mamoon:
We're so excited to be part of this journey and we're going to make history together, I'm sure.
Caroline:
Can't wait.
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