Former head of growth at Slack is building a growth-tracking platform for everyone

When Panobi co-founder Merci Grace started operating development at Slack in 2015, she helped develop the person base from 50,000 to over 3 million in simply a few years. Alongside the way in which, she discovered some useful classes about monitoring development metrics, and the way troublesome it’s to drag this information from quite a lot of sources.

In 2021 she determined to place that data to work, founding Panobi, a development monitoring platform she wished she had when she was at Slack. Right this moment, the corporate introduced a $5 million seed, and that it was launching a closed beta of the product.

When Grace began the corporate along with her co-founder, head of engineering Jason Klym, they had been shocked to be taught that many development professionals had been nonetheless monitoring their key metrics in a spreadsheet or in a challenge administration instrument like Notion, however there nonetheless wasn’t a instrument particularly designed for development managers. They determined to repair that and launched Panobi.

“We began to have a look at completely different concepts and got here again to this downside, which I’ve skilled at 90 miles per hour at Slack, and was form of amazed that it was nonetheless so laborious simply to get every little thing about development into one place. So we [decided to build a product] that permits you to see it and share it and assist the remainder of the corporate, each perceive how development goes for the expansion workforce, but in addition actually collaborate with them throughout the entire shared product surfaces,” Grace advised TechCrunch.

The product initially tracks key person metrics like every day energetic customers (DAUs) and month-to-month energetic customers (MAUs) by connecting to an information warehouse like Snowflake and giving the present standing in actual time, whereas offering the flexibility to trace that data on a timeline to see how you’re performing over time.

Panobi timeline lets product groups observe key metrics like DAUs and MAUs. Screenshot: Panobi

And since development entails lots of completely different departments and other people, it features a collaborative piece, each within the product itself, but in addition the flexibility (not surprisingly) to share that data in Slack and ultimately Microsoft Groups, as effectively.

“Actually what’s so distinctive about development is it’s this cross-functional hub, the place [different departments] like gross sales must know what’s taking place with development, and they should perceive the information, and that’s an enormous hole for folks proper now, having it packaged for them in a manner that’s comprehensible and speaks to their timeline and their experience,” she stated.

The corporate continues to be pre-revenue, however when it does GA, the plan is to cost for paid editor seats for product folks interacting with the product regularly, whereas providing free viewer seats for these of us who simply must see the information, however aren’t key gamers on the product workforce. Grace says that ought to assist forestall a ballooning month-to-month invoice.

Panobi at the moment has 11 workers. When Grace left Slack, she had constructed development to a 50-person workforce, that was probably the most numerous group within the firm, and it’s one thing that she’s bringing along with her as she hires at her new firm.

“I believe a part of that’s simply treating folks with this baseline excessive degree of respect, and after which it’s doing the work of discovering and recruiting folks, who aren’t form of like de facto within the hiring pool for a very early stage firm. You simply should spend the time to do it as a result of it’s that vital,” she stated.

Right this moment’s funding was led by Nina Achadjian and Paris Heymann at Index Ventures, together with a who’s who of angel traders that features Slack co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson.