- SCRATCHPAD 13M CRAFT VENTURESSAWERSVENTUREBEAT UPDATE
- SCRATCHPAD 13M CRAFT VENTURESSAWERSVENTUREBEAT SOFTWARE
- SCRATCHPAD 13M CRAFT VENTURESSAWERSVENTUREBEAT SERIES
While not at first apparent, when we dove into the product usage data and isolated weekday usage among paid accounts, we saw that sales reps use Scratchpad almost 4 work days every week, which is best-in-class. The data in that blog is actually from our Scratchpad diligence.
I wrote about its habit-forming nature in my blog Measuring SaaS Engagement. Once a rep starts using Scratchpad, two things tend to happen: 1) it becomes a daily habit, and 2) they share it with their teammates. Its freemium model lets any sales rep sign up, connect their account, and start using the product. What got us most excited about Scratchpad is its viral spread within sales organizations. Sales reps love it for its speed and ease of use, while sales management and operations love it because it encourages real-time updates and data hygiene.
SCRATCHPAD 13M CRAFT VENTURESSAWERSVENTUREBEAT UPDATE
It provides a beautiful and lightning-fast interface to take notes, record to-dos, and update the status of deals – with everything instantly flowing back into Salesforce. Scratchpad is a workspace for sales teams as well as others in revenue-related functions.
SCRATCHPAD 13M CRAFT VENTURESSAWERSVENTUREBEAT SERIES
This phenomena of viral spread is rare and indicates a very strong product-market fit,” he said in a statement.Today Craft Ventures is excited to announce that we are leading the $13M Series A in Scratchpad, and I will be joining the board. “Once a rep starts using Scratchpad, two things tend to happen: it becomes a daily habit, and they share it with their teammates. Sacks says that he liked the viral way the product has been spreading. Customers include Autodesk, Brex, Lacework, Snowflake and Twilio. It’s resonating with thousands of users (although Salehi didn’t want to share an exact customer number just yet). This includes notes, which usually don’t make it into Salesforce, but provide a lot of context about interactions with customers. The company has completed the initial work of building the individual salesperson’s workspace, but the next phase, and part of what this capital is going to fund, is building the team workspace and seeing how this data can flow from individuals to a team view to give management more insight into what their individual reps are doing. What the paid tiers provide is a way to bring all this data together and get a bigger picture view of what’s happening on the sales team, and it helps ensure that people are using Salesforce because the data in Scratchpad links to the Salesforce database automatically. Scratchpad gives them an interface like a spreadsheet or notes application that they are typically using to hack together a workflow, but with a direct connection to Salesforce. They are essentially databases and even with a visual interface, it doesn’t really match up with the way they work. Traditionally, sales teams don’t like the tools that are thrust upon them. This approach of getting the end users involved early allows them to gain traction with members of the sales team before approaching management about paid versions.
SCRATCHPAD 13M CRAFT VENTURESSAWERSVENTUREBEAT SOFTWARE
The bottoms up approach is certainly something we have seen with developer tools and with software for knowledge workers, but companies often take aim at sales through the sales manager, rather than trying directly to get salespeople to use a particular tool. In fact, the company caught the attention of Craft because they were hearing about Scratchpad from their portfolio companies. He says that lead investor David Sacks, who has built some successful startups himself, really got what they were trying to do, and the deal came together fairly easily. We had plenty of runway, but we started to see a lot of bottom-up user growth, this bottom-up motion just really started to take hold,” Salehi told me.
“To be honest, it actually wasn’t on our radar to raise again so soon after we raised what I consider a substantial seed. Co-founder and CEO Pouyan Salehi says that he wasn’t really looking to add capital, but the investors understood his vision and the money will help accelerate the product roadmap. The company has now raised a total of $16.6 million including the $3.6 million seed round we covered in October. Today, it announced a $13 million Series A led by Craft Ventures with participation from Accel.
Scratchpad is an early stage startup that wants to make it easier for sales people to get information into Salesforce by placing a notation layer on top of it.