Why our investors gave us $1.9m to fix user onboarding with Chameleon
I’m excited to share with you that Chameleon has closed it’s seed funding round, led by True Ventures with great angels such as Auren Hoffman. Our full list of investors is at the end of this story.
Chameleon helps companies create better user onboarding. We do this by providing the platform to build, analyze and improve in-product tours, without writing any code.
Brian Norton and I worked on user onboarding for many products and we’ve been frustrated by how shitty the experience often is, both as makers and users. And this includes tooltips by the way way — too often they are not relevant, interesting or valuable!
It is a big pain point faced by almost everyone that works on tech products (and affirmed by founders, product managers, customer success reps, marketing managers and designers we’ve spoken to). We have all known times when a product’s user onboarding wasn’t good enough, but often there isn’t the time or resources to invest in a big project to improve it. People also told us that they didn’t have much guidance or a go-to tool to help them.
This meant that companies kept delaying improving first-user experience, probably the most important experience of your product. Julie Zhuo from Facebook puts it nicely:
“Nobody cares about the thing you’ve designed, unless you can get them past the beginning.”
The key issue is that developers don’t have time to fiddle with user onboarding, and the people responsible for user engagement don’t have easy control over the experience.
So last year we built a prototype that allowed anyone non-technical to build some tooltips and publish them using a JS snippet. We got some early customers, including Amplitude and Mesosphere, who validated our approach, and so we went all-in and raised $1.9 million to give us the chance to test some of our key hypotheses:
- User experiences should be contextual and specific, and giving non-engineers the ability to create these will be valuable
- Data-driven user onboarding will lead to multifold improvements in user activation and retention, helping both products but also users
- A platform providing intelligent insights for user learning, drawn from across the network can become a defensible business idea
We ran a private beta for a few months and recently opened our platform to new signups. To try it (for free) and get a design review, visit: trychameleon.com
Some of the key benefits of using Chameleon include:
- Implement, build and launch a product tour within minutes
- Analytics on tours performance automatically collected
- Target groups of customers by user properties or user actions
“In the past, feature tours were expensive for us to build and maintain, which prevented us from educating our customers within the product as much as we’d like. With Chameleon, we’ve been able to quickly create and update tours, and even see the analytics in Kissmetrics. Many of our customer-facing teams, especially Support, are excited we’re using Chameleon.” — Greg Weinger, Product Line Manager, Urban Airship
We have learned a lot about user onboarding while working with our customers, but we want to gather insights from across the technology world and share them with everyone, so here is a request-for-experience:
If you have worked on improving your product’s user onboarding we would love to hear from you. If you’re in SF, we’ll get you a coffee, and if you’re elsewhere, we’re happy to do a video call, and share some of our insights.
You can also receive our newsletter of user onboarding and product insights by signing up on our website and following Chameleon on Twitter.
Our institutional investors are: True Ventures, Maiden Lane, Vast Ventures
Our angels are: Adeh DeSandies (CTO, Innovative Auctions); Alap Shah (Cofounder, Sentieo); Amish Shah (PM Etsy, ex-Twitter); Amit Gupta (Cofounder, Photojojo); Amrit Dhir (Manager, Google), Ariel Poler, Armando Biondi (Cofounder, AdEspresso); Ashwin Cheriyan (Cofounder, Thistle); Auren Hoffman (Cofounder, Liveramp); Brad Garlinghouse (President & COO, Ripple); Charles Songhurst (ex-Head of Strategy, Microsoft); Chris Michel (Founder, Military.com; Partner, Nautilus Ventures); Eric Di Benedetto; Eric Stein; Jay Weintraub (Founder, Grow.io); Jeff Epstein (Partner, BVP); Jeremy Lizt (Cofounder, Liveramp); Jonah Goodhart (Cofounder, Moat); Mario Martinez II (Director, MRTNZ Ventures); Mike Greenfield (Cofounder, Bonafide); Mike Baker (CEO, DataXu); Neil Devani (Investor, Rothenberg Ventures); Paras Shah; Premal Shah (President, Kiva); Raghu Nandakumara (VP Cloud Security, Citi); Safi Bahcall (Founder, Synta Pharmaceuticals); Scott Faber (Cofounder, Ingenio); Sean Harper (Cofounder, FeeFighters); Seth Harris (Cofounder, Breadcrumb); Sheel Mohnot (Partner, 500 Startups); Tikhon Bernstam (Cofounder, Parse & Scribd); Tod Sacerdoti (Founder, Brightroll); Varun Manocha (Founder, Hedgepoint).
