I fall short of words to express my excitement for the news that I’m about to share.
I’m pretty much as excited as I was when we started Zarget!!
I tried to keep the post short, but a lot of mention worthy things happened during our roller coaster ride, so couldn’t miss out on anything.
Long story short:
We have released a new and much improved version of Zarget — Guided by your amazing feedback, we have made a lot of enhancements to our existing features and also added Form Analytics, Polls & Feedback to bring Zarget a step closer to being a complete CRO suite. Also, we have closed $6mn in Series A funding led by Sequoia and are also backed by our existing investors — Accel and Matrix.
Here’s the full story — read on :)
First things first, — A HUGE Thank You!!
This post wouldn’t be possible without all the hard work of the folks at Zarget. My super awesome team has put in so much of efforts to make this possible. And I’m really proud to be a part of this team — A big thanks guys!!
We are also thankful for our mentors for taking hard decisions, customers for giving us brutal feedback and also to our Early Access Program (EAP) customers for testing out the beta features and providing their valuable opinions.
Special thanks to Arun - our mentor and COO for joining us at the right time!!
What’s New —
Last few months have been crazy. Really crazy.. In the blink of an eye — A lot of things have happened — we built an awesome team, made huge enhancements in the product and garnered a fast growing customer base.
Feature requests, issues & enhancements started flowing in from the customers and we prioritized everything in Zarget’s scrum.
Here are the major highlights,
Form Analytics: Helps you find drops-offs, success rate, hesitation time and so on in the web forms of your landing page. It helps to reduce abandonment rate and improve the conversion rate.
Polls & Feedback: It helps understand what visitors are looking for in the website. And also finds out why website visitors perform certain actions. Mainly used as a remarketing tool which helps to engage and receive feedback from the visitors.
Heatmap’s New Approach: We came up with a lot of innovations in our Heatmap and one of the important things is with the magical keys — “Ctrl + Shift + H” which let’s you view the heatmap of your landing pages right on your website without having to load it on a different website. Take a look at this post to know more about the differentiators.
In addition to this, we have brought in so many enhancements, which add more power to Zarget. For a more detailed understanding, I’d suggest you check out our blogs. The best way would be to try it by yourself :)
Some of the other updates include — Google is entering into the Optimization space with their new product — Google Optimize 360. Google will educate the importance of Optimization to everyone :) And more importantly, the interesting part is that the big boss has also came up with a Chrome extension to create A/B testing experiments. And Optimizely has recently introduced a Chrome extension for the websites which cannot be A/B tested through their proxy servers? What’s so special about it? When we started Zarget, our main USP was the Chrome extension to make the optimization process a much simpler one. And nobody in the market had such approach. A lot of questions arose from various corners, but we believed in ourselves, went ahead and built it — We got appreciated by our early customers, some praised in ProductHunt and encouragement also came in from @Tim_ash who mentioned it during our release in Conversion Conference in front of everyone. Many customers went ahead & spread the word about us and some of them wrote blog posts on what they like in Zarget and how they switched from Optimizely. All these were a motivational factors!!
Now looking back, it seemed to be the right way :)
And a Major milestone — We are funded!!
We’re happy to announce that we have closed our Series A funding with a $6 million round led by Sequoia with Accel and Matrix.
Quick recap on how it started and what went behind the scenes — We attended Saasx3 conference and my CoFounder & CEO — Arvind delivered an excellent 5 min talk. That impressed Harshjit who immediately came to us and got our details.
A few weeks later, we got an invitation to meet the whole Sequoia team at Bangalore. We thought we could fly, but Arun is not a big fan of flights (no.. I won’t tell the reason ;)). We took the 7 hr drive from Chennai. We were super happy and excited about the meeting. We discussed quite a lot of things and prepared to present our best during the ride.
We arrived at the place and the environment was super awesome. Shailesh, Harshit and few others were there and a couple of folks joined over Skype including Shailendra. We did a quick-walkthrough of the product and discussed about our future roadmap and quite a lot of things about the CRO space. The meeting went off really well.
After a few more discussions, it all came through. We are now funded by 3 big players — Accel, Matrix and Sequoia.
This new round will allow us to expand our team, work steadily towards shaping up the CRO space and also deliver a top notch product to our customers. And we are really excited for the future!! Thanks for trusting us!!
Life @ Zarget —
We have an amazing culture with an awesome team.
What’s a startup without having fun??
Zackathon —
Even though we hack something or the other on daily basis, Bharathi and Saro, our geeks wanted to do an official internal hackathon on a Friday. We grouped together as four teams and each team decided to hack a different module the whole night.
I have always wanted to work on fun projects and am a big fan of Hackathons. But after starting Zarget, my focus shifted completely and coding was never part of it. Even if I wanted to work on a fun project, some high priority item kept coming up and I had to shift the idea of doing a fun project to cold storage. But this hackathon tempted me to come out of my comfort zone and I decided to build something that will be helpful for Zarget!! I came up with a mobile app which can be used for internal purpose and it helped me to brush up my basics.
A big thanks to Bharathi and Saro for taking this initiative and rekindling my coding days’ memories :) Can’t wait for the next hackathon :D
The Zarget Family —
Being in the centre of the city and near the bessie beach, Santa(my CoFounder & CTO) and I walk to the beach and have the product discussions at the shore. It has also improved our relationship and our thoughts matched most of the times. Without even exchanging words, I can understand what he thinks and vice-versa :) — how nice would it be, if such wavelength matches exists between the wifey-husband ;) — Trust me, it is more fun and productive than being inside the meeting rooms. And that’s how we came up with an innovative enhancement to our existing Heatmap feature.
Recently we had been to a resort and it was a lot of fun. We talked, shouted, sung, danced and partied hard. For the whole day, we danced like mad people. In my whole life, I have never danced like that. Thanks to Shanky, Santa, Kannan and Kavitha for supporting my improvisational moves :) All of us danced without any thought or planning — some moves came out really well even the best of choreographers could never imagine :D
From 6 to 36+ — the team strength is large enough to play anything — from an one-pitch cricket match to an inter-corporate match. Yes we played a match against CloudCherry. I hit a six and a couple of boundaries — Being one-pitch specialist this is a big surprise for the whole team :) And yes, we won both the matches. We have chess masters, carrom, ping-pong specialists and Badminton players as well :) I really hope that we will be conducting intra tournaments very soon!!
We take a lot of photos and we don’t need any special occasion for that :) Thanks to Google Photos for the unlimited storage and for the immediate sync :)
Finally, If you would like to be a part of this roller-coaster ride, send a note to becrazy@zarget.com. Would be really awesome, if you send us what inspired you and why do you want to join us :)
That’s all folks. Magizhchii :)
I am Naveen Venkat, Co-Founder, and CPO at Zarget.
ZargetHQ is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) tool that helps companies to optimize their website and increase their growth more rapidly.
