Knowing your customer is one of the core tenets of any business. For digital businesses, knowing your customer interactions with your software is critical. In a SaaS-dominated world, sales strategy largely focuses on providing free trials with the hopes that a certain percentage converts to paid customers without considering any feedback from the customer or customer behavior. Correlated calls itself a “Product Led Revenue Platform” that lets software companies track and understand exactly how their customers are interacting with their product, providing them with contextual insight on when and how best to convert trial users into paying customers based on the customer’s specific circumstances. Previously, sales teams have relied on using sets of disparate and rudimentary tools to monitor a customer’s behavior but Correlated is one of the first platforms to centralize and formalize this sales enablement function in real-time. The platform integrates with sales technology stacks with a few clicks, supporting Hubspot, Salesforce, Snowflake, Segment, Slack, Outreach, and others. Similar to Zapier, Correlated can trigger corresponding actions in these platforms based on when pre-established conditions are met based on user behavior.
AlleyWatch caught up with CEO Tim Geinsenheimer to learn more about how the founding team’s experience at a number of high-growth New York startups inspired the idea for Correlated, the company’s launch out of beta, future plans, recent funding round, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$8.3M Seed round led by Harrison Metal and NextView Ventures to build the leading platform for Product Led Revenue!
We’re also fortunate to have some fantastic entrepreneurs joining this round including Apollo Projects (the Altman Brothers’ fund), Brian Long (CEO, Cofounder at Attentive), Andrew Jones (CPO, Cofounder at Attentive), Ben Darnell (CTO, Cofounder at Cockroach Labs) and Pete Kazanjy (CRO at Atrium and author of Founding Sales).
Tell us about the product or service that Correlated offers.
Correlated is a Product Led Revenue Platform that unlocks new expansion opportunities for software companies based on how people are using their product.
Correlated envisions a future where sales teams can spend their talents on reaching the right customers at the right time with the right message, driving more revenue more efficiently.
Correlated is trusted by leading software companies, including Ally, ReadMe, and Pulumi, as well as many others.
What inspired the start of Correlated?
Correlated is built by a team of industry experts who experienced this problem firsthand at software companies like Timescale, MoPub, and Cockroach Labs and helped to scale companies including Twitter and Lime.
Frustrated by trying to generate actionable insights from a mix of manual spreadsheets, across multiple tools, with data that was quickly becoming outdated — we set out to build a better way to take real-time action based on how people were actually using our product.
How is Correlated different?
Until Correlated, sales teams had no way to see how their customers were using their products and then take action based on which customers and users were most likely to convert. Correlated is like a superpower for software sales teams!
What market does Correlated target and how big is it?
We target sales and revenue teams at software companies that want to be more product-led. SaaS spend, which Correlated helps to power, is projected to grow from $120B this year to $140B in 2022.
What’s your business model?
We charge on a SaaS license basis.
How has COVID-19 impacted the business??
We started the company in the middle of the pandemic so from day one we’ve embraced remote. While we have a physical office in NYC, we have team members throughout the US. We intend to be “remote-first” which means that we have organized our company to embrace remote best practices. That includes a heavy focus on documentation, making sure that meetings with a mix of remote participants and office participants are remote-friendly, and a focus on getting the team together regularly in person as the pandemic abates.
What was the funding process like?
We raised funding completely over Zoom which was a new process for us! While fundraising is always challenging, in some ways Zoom makes it easier for founders to hold many meetings in a row to be as efficient as possible during fundraising.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Now that we’ve officially launched we’re going to go to market with Correlated and open the product up to the public. We intend to work with many leading sales teams at software companies to help them drive more revenue!
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
Pasta Louise in Park Slope.
