#372 – Last Season on the Cupcake Squad

As we begin a new trimester at Parabol, our Squads pause from our regular rhythm to reflect on our work over the past four months and decide on what’s next.

One of our Squads, the Self-Serve Cupcakes, spent most of this calendar year focused on building a compelling Team tier offering, and since January, we’ve more than doubled Team-tier MRR.

At the start of the year, we focused exclusively on conversions, while in this past trimester, we shifted our attention towards increasing the number of active users in those converted orgs.

To accomplish that, we wanted to make it easier to invite teammates, share content from Parabol, and improve the overall experience so that you can’t help but tell your colleagues about us.

Here’s a quick run-through of some of the features we’ve built over the past trimester.

Many users create a calendar event that includes a link to the video call, but the Parabol meeting link might be shared in Slack, a Zoom chat, email, or manually added to the calendar event.

To make this process frictionless, we built a Google Calendar integration. This should also make it easier to invite colleagues to Parabol, as you can simply invite them to the calendar event.

This is currently being used internally at Parabol and will be rolled out once our Google application is approved.

We’d like to offer more high-level insights so that managers who aren’t able to attend every meeting can still know how their teams are feeling. By solving this use case, we believe managers will be more likely to encourage other teams within their organisation to join Parabol.

This is our first step in this direction, which is now being rolled out:

One-on-ones are perhaps the most common meeting type, so we built a product for exactly this. It involved adding a new user picker where you can quickly invite your teammate who may or may not have a Parabol account.

We focused on making it easier for users to invite team members. We added an invite input when creating a new team, which now accounts for 37.5% of total invites.

We also added an invite link in the sidebar, which opens after creating a team. And finally, we enabled users to create a new team and invite colleagues from the meeting settings.

Related to our focus on invitations is our new “Auto Join” feature. With this, users can select a team that they would like new users with verified emails to join automatically.

At Parabol, we would like all new users with the same email domain to automatically join their colleagues in our “Company”, “Growth”, and “Product” teams. This should reduce the friction of new users requesting an invite link for each team. We’re now starting to roll this out with a small group of users.

We’ve added a button to our meeting summary that lets you download the summary to a PDF, as users have mentioned that they’d like to share their summary internally.

We shipped a way to share topics from a Retro in Slack. After testing this with users, we didn’t see enough usage and decided to drop this experiment.

While we’re delighted that Team-tier revenue has continued to grow substantially over the trimester, our Starter usage growth has slowed. In the next trimester, we’ll be focusing on improving this.

To decide on what to focus on and which features to build, we:

With the company’s barbell strategy in mind, we’ll start by shipping some small wins quickly while also working on a few more speculative features.

To begin with, we’ll focus on the following:

We haven’t focused on this for a while, and we believe there’s some low-hanging fruit available. We’ll make some small changes to help new users get value from Parabol faster and encourage them to invite their teammates.

Most people have Retros every week or two. Rather than creating a Parabol Retro each time, it would be great if you could set up your cadence so that meetings are created automatically.

Recurrence is already been very popular in our Standups product, so hopefully, we’ll see a similar effect in Retros. It should also tie in nicely with our Google Calendar integration.

You can currently sign up with Google Sign-In, but many users use Outlook. To make the sign-up flow smoother, we’re adding Microsoft Sign-In too.

We restricted access to some public templates and put them on the Team tier. While that’s been a good conversion lever, we’re concerned that it could be damaging the user experience and affecting growth. We’re now increasing the number of free templates and running an experiment to assess the impact template limits have on usage.

We’ll be experimenting with making all teams within an organisation visible in the left sidebar rather than just the ones you’re a member of. If you click on a team you’re not a member of, you’ll be able to send a request to join the team.

We’ll be building a product that helps you to show your appreciation for the great work a colleague has done. We hope that this will make Parabol a more positive place and start to encourage usage outside of Parabol meetings.

And, now that we’re focused on usage in the Starter tier rather than our self-serve offering, we made the very important decision to change our name from the Self-Serve Cupcakes to the Self-Raising Cupcakes 🧁.

Metrics are slightly down this week, possibly due to Halloween, however the number of Standup meetings continues to increase.

…made five deployments! We kicked the tires on our new Kubernetes architecture and made several deployments. It’s now a dramatically faster, easier, and more stable deployment process.

…announced our marketing learnings and achievements. We had our best-ever trimester for web signups with 27.7% growth, reaching 2k web signups in one month.

…increased the number of free templates on the Starter tier.

…begin our second Sprint of the new trimester.