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Funding announcement

Cord is powering collaboration for companies like Typeform with our latest $17.5M round

Nimrod PriellNimrod Priell
  • Product
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Collaboration-first companies will be the ones who scale the fastest. We’ve seen it time and time again – Figma, Notion, Canva and Airtable are the most notable examples. SaaS tools that put collaboration at their core, instead of as an afterthought, will win in this new era of software.

Collaborative products are better for businesses, users and their teams – so why doesn’t every product have a collaboration experience as smooth as Figma’s? Well, they are trying.

Teams are scrambling to build multiplayer tools, only to discover how hard it is, and often disappointing users. It makes sense – as more teams go remote and rely on tools like Slack and Loom, users hold incredibly high standards of what smooth collaboration features feel like.

Product teams are discovering the market-winning benefits of adding collaboration but are struggling to deliver an experience that aligns with the standards they hold for their core experience. That’s where Cord comes in.

Product managers save their teams months of research, design, development, testing and iterating and get ahead of the collaboration game by partnering with Cord

Read more about Team Led Growth with Cord here.

Typeform becomes a market leader by adding collaboration

It doesn't look like anything to me.

For example, Typeform is, by nature, a user-friendly software tool that prioritizes an intuitive interface (they’re called “people-friendly forms and surveys” for a reason). Their users’ top feature request was a way to work with teammates on a typeform. We were delighted when a member of their team discovered Cord by using it in another tool.

Thanks to the leadership of Tyze Whorton, Typeform’s group product manager, we rolled out what he called a “Google Doc experience, and then some” to over 120,000 Typeform users in just a few weeks, creating the best form collaboration tool on the market.

Some amazing investors trust us to make this a reality for even more tools

It doesn't look like anything to me.

I started Cord last year after leading a product team at Facebook, advising founders and CPOs of $1B+ startups and mentoring newer startups with Techstars. I witnessed firsthand the stark contrast between Facebook’s suite of connected internal tools and the disjointed nature of B2B SaaS tools newer startups rely on.

My co-founder, Jackson, an early engineer at Facebook, and I knew we couldn’t change this space alone. We looked for the best designers, engineers, and product craftspeople to start working on transforming web products into collaborative, multiplayer experiences. We’re proud to have gone from not having a single line of code in May 2020 to signing partnership deals with 9-figure companies just over a year later.

With a $17.5 million raise, our team can forge ahead with connecting more tools and websites to a collaborative, communication-first team environment. All our partners need is a line of Javascript for Cord’s API to save years of development time, improve customer experience, and level up their products.

This is exactly why the Cord team puts all of our energy into crafting the best features for all types of collaboration like real-time (e.g., co-browsing, live video) and async (e.g., annotations, integrations with task managers, screen recordings).

This all drives what we’re calling team-led growth.

The next big shift in SaaS: Team-led growth

There’s a lot of talk about product-led growth. This was the remedy for over-relying on salespeople to sell software. It highlights how important self-service and trial periods are for products.

But, product-led is missing the secret sauce of the fastest-growing products we see today (again, think Figma, Notion, and Airtable). What do these products have in common? They’re collaborative and grow within teams.

It doesn't look like anything to me.

Figma reached 4 million users in 4 years and decimated Adobe, Invision and Sketch to become the dominant prototyping design app – in major part thanks to its built-in collaboration.

Team-led growth happens organically as users invite their teammates from Slack, Google, Teams, and task managers to work together inside a tool like Typeform.

Team-led growth makes your product stickier in organizations

When selling software for teams, a product has to stick with more than just one person. Network buy-in reigns when a product is collaborative, shareable, and has baked-in communication. Try ripping out months, or years, of messages from a team’s vice president to analyst, out of a team’s workflow.

It doesn't look like anything to me.

Plus, users spend more time in sticky, collaborative products. Imagine a world without context switching and app toggling just to complete one task. Cord lets your users do just that — stay in the trenches (aka deep-work mode) without the Asana-to-Slack-to-your-product dance.

Better collaboration and efficient workflows make for better products. We will continue to see that welcoming a user’s team into a tool leads to better sales value, seat expansion and retention. We know our partnership with Typeform is just the beginning.

Make your product multiplayer