Introducing Blissfully

Over the last ten years we’ve seen dramatic changes in how businesses use technology to run their business, due to a move to cloud enabled software subscriptions. This new age of SaaS won because it delivered better products, improved usability, more choices, lower costs, and easier deployment. It also led to an explosion in the number of SaaS vendors across the entire technology stack, from core products like email and security, to increasingly specific domain tools to optimize marketing, sales, product development, engineering, and nearly every function.

The explosion in SaaS is not without drawbacks

It’s become so easy for individual teams and departments to adopt amazing SaaS tools that it’s easy to forget that moving key strategic operational and IT decisions to the edges of the organization also brings challenges, specifically to operations, security, and finance.

Ops teams need to know which tools are critical to delivering their offering. Finance needs to help keep a company within their budget goals, which means not wasting money on products they’re not using, and having accurate forecasts. IT needs to keep a companies’ information safe and secure, which relies on knowing exactly where all that data is going.

All of these needs, while critical, can easily by forgotten in a world where it’s so easy to sign up for new services. In fact, there’s even an affectionate term used to describe products that “rogue” employees sign up for outside of IT/ops approval: “Shadow IT”. These “rogue” employees are trying to be more productive, not trying to risk the company’s data.

Introducing Blissfully — We’re here to help

We started Blissfully to help companies leverage technology more effectively. To focus on what they love, what they’re best at, what differentiates them, while making sure they’re staying productive and secure. We want to humanize and simplify IT and technology management.

One of the first steps to enable that is to stop treating employees like security risks to minimize, and start leveraging the intelligence spread throughout the entire organization. We believe in leveraging, not fighting, “Shadow IT”.

Today we’re starting with phase 1 in that vision, with a free tool that helps companies of all sizes instantly and automatically identify all the SaaS products they’re using internally. This helps companies rest easy, check if products meet their security and compliance guidelines, and easily aggregate valuable product intelligence.

A bit more about Blissfully

We started Blissfully to help companies feel confident they’re making the right technology choices, without feeling overwhelmed. This was born out of our own experience (and pain) building and advising technology companies over the last decade. We’ve seen how far these products have come to simplify and automate business ops, and we want to continue and accelerate that trend.

To help achieve this vision, we’re excited to announce a seed round, led by Eric Paley at Founder Collective, who also led our seed round at our last startup, Boundless. In addition to Founder Collective, we’re lucky enough to have experienced entrepreneurs as angel investors, including the founders of Hubspot, Giphy, Firebase, Crashlytics, SessionM, Behance, Handy, Invision, RunKeeper, Smarterer, Troops, Flipkey and more.

You can learn more at Blissfully.com, and sign up for early access to our private beta.

Originally published at www.blissfully.com on May 18, 2017.