Looking back on the Trail — 2017

Published in

Trail Blog

6 min readDec 6, 2017

It’s been another bumper year here at Trail HQ! 🚀 We’ve smashed our targets, secured another round of investment, grown our customer base with loads of fantastic new names, won awards for global expansion and have joined Oracle for their startup cloud accelerator programme.

Oh and if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also developed our product and solved many of the problems that the service sector face on a daily basis.

Problems solved ✅ (via new features)

A raft of new customers also brought us a bunch of fresh challenges. Thankfully we love a good challenge — here are the highlights:

For managers

Hit the ground running — with a clear new onboarding flow and over 40 best-practice task templates to pick from
Keep on top of tasks — with a faster, more powerful Planner including search, filters and preview

Automate tasks from other systems — connect Zapier and integrate with over 750 third-party apps
Complete visibility across the business— with site scores in the new daily digest, and BI dashboards for trends over time

Example dashboard with performance stats

For teams

The right tasks for the right site — managers can now add their own checks to business tasks for individual sites
The right task at the right time — with snoozable ongoing tasks and a simplified Trail to help focus on what needs doing now
Highlight when a task can’t be completed or when it’s not applicable — with flags, comments and corrective actions

Include photographic evidence — attach files & photos to comments
Show your records off in style when the EHO comes knocking — “Search Tasks” allows you to find tasks today and see historical records

Search for tasks and view historical records

Trail raises £1m growth capital

We’re firmly in our growth phase with revenues increasing steadily, but great products need R&D. We raised close to £1m this year to support growth from angels and follow-on-investors. We’ve added industry knowledge, expert advisors and of course capital, all of which stand us in good stead for the next year.

Trail joined forces with Oracle

In September we were selected from hundreds of applicants to join the inaugural Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator programme.

The accelerator is significant for a few reasons:

Following the Micros acquisition in 2014 ($5.3bn), Oracle continue to invest in hospitality & retail. Trail represents a new breed of startup built on consumer-grade technology.
Offers access to a vast customer base (420k), and the opportunity to expand both across service verticals and into international markets
Helps scale the technology to meet demand, tighter integration with the Oracle suite, and innovation like machine-learning & automation
Mentorship and support as the team grows

“We’re a young startup and the Oracle program offers unrivalled global enterprise experience and support, helping take Trail up a gear during our first year of growth. From using machine-learning to derive the perfect service day, to IoT and automation of repetitive and mundane tasks, Oracle’s experts can help us tackle complexity and save teams time. In return, Trail offers a means to deliver critical insights and actions to a young and highly mobile workforce — a way to offer enterprise tech to a whole section of the workforce previously out of reach.”
- Joe Cripps, MD

Award winning! 🏆

At this year’s excellent Retail Recharged event, our man Joe Cripps stepped up to pitch — and won the Global Expansion award!

Team effort all round! 💪

Building Trail has always been a team effort. Ensuring that we have a company that’s full of passionate and thoughtful people has allowed us to have customer support that’s second to none and deal with all the challenges that growing a new business in the antiquated service sector throws at us.

Trail Trip — Peterborough

In June the whole team headed to a big house in the Peterborough countryside to tackle our next big challenge, growth… how do we take our great product and grow our customer base whilst maintaining our top levels of support and product quality.

We looked at how we move customers through the sales and on-boarding funnel and ultimately how we can get them understanding all the great benefits of using Trail and get them rolled out faster!

Just 6 months later, we’re already seeing the results. We’ve got loads of great new names who’ve joined the Trail family and are seeing the benefit of using Trail…

New additions to Team Trail

The Customer Success team had some new additions this year with Amy and Caroline joining to make sure our customers are setup properly and happy on the Trail.

We also introduced the GTBO 🍰 (that’s the Great Trail Bake Off!) which has been a delicious success and we’re already looking forward to doing it next year too.

We’re hiring!

We’ve been out and about too at events like Silicon Milkroundabout and TechHub Demo Night, demoing the product and trying to snap up the best talent out there. Fear not — we’re still looking to hire a few more people.