VOUCHING FOR A SCALABLE SOLUTION TO CUSTOMER STORIES AND ASYNCHRONOUS VIDEO

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1 JUNE 2022

There are not many companies that come out of stealth with enterprise customers including Canva, SafetyCulture, Shopify, CultureAmp, Atlassian and the list goes on. This is just the beginning and one of the reasons we are so excited to be co-leading Vouch’s $8m seed round, with Stage 2 Capital, a U.S.-based go-to-market specialist investor in SaaS businesses.

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THE PROBLEM AND SOLUTION

Have you been in a prospect call, where you know the benefits the product can deliver to a potential customer but the prospect doesn’t know whether to trust you as you are the marketer or salesperson?

... Or, a prospect requests to speak to an existing customer, and you have two options (1) spend time, and expense to hire a videographer, location etc. produce a one off testimonial, or (2) give the phone number of an existing customer, who you have already used for a number of other prospects? Written case studies are scalable but do not yield high engagement. High-production advertisements are costly and often viewed as inauthentic.

This is the problem that Vouch has set out to solve.

Their web-based software platform allows organisations to remotely collect, curate, and share authentic video testimonials from their users. Vouch reduces the cost involved and time taken to collect video content whilst maximising the scalability of an ongoing testimonials campaign. Users share content whenever and wherever they wish and organisations collect video content – at scale.

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WHAT MAKES VOUCH DIFFERENT FROM VIDEO TECHNOLOGY

Along with the ease of use, and cost savings that are achieved by using Vouch, there are a couple of key features that we believe give enterprises a comparative advantage -

Giving structure to testimonials: Vouch’s platform provides structured content that standardises information to be collected across numerous customers at scale.

Integrating into enterprise workflow: The team has continued to release integrations with existing workflow tools including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Confluence, Jira, and Sitecore. From an internal perspective, approvals and editing functions are enabled across teams, allowing organisations to work cross-functionally to efficiently collate, review, and distribute customer testimonials.

Empowering organisations to derive ROI from customers and employees: Their software facilitates a seamless customer journey - recording, sharing, tracking for performance and lead conversion.

And the market have recognised the Vouch difference –

· Vouch serves nearly 5000 enterprise customers

· Vouches are growing 30% MoM and ARR growing 40% MoM

· 40% of teams interacting with Vouches multiple times a month

INVESTMENT THESIS

FOR THE FOUNDERS, THIS IS PERSONAL

Co-founders, Gary Zurnamer (CEO) and David Stirk (CTO) are exceptional talents with significant enterprise sales and technology experience. For Gary, Vouch was born from a pain point in his own professional experience. Gary was Canva’s first enterprise sales hire and led the firm’s enterprises sales division. He recognised the power of customer stories in sales prospect conversion. However, Canva didn’t have the capacity to scale the collection of engaging customer stories with their scale in product growth. Gary had experienced similar problems in his previous roles as Head of Sales at Stackla and the Content & Partnerships Lead at The Iconic. After connecting with David, the pair built their MVP for Vouch’s video platform and the rest is history!

David is core to Vouch’s success and brings over 25 years of experience in building technology and engineering teams globally. The team are supported by an impressive group of advisors including Oji Udezue, a recognised expert in product-led growth and currently the Head of Product for Creation & Conversation at Twitter and previously held product leadership roles at Calendly and Atlassian. Finally, the inclusion of Stage 2 Capital in this round provides Vouch with an invaluable network of go-to-market specialists in the US who have already contributed immense value.

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EXPLOSION OF VIDEO GROWTH ACROSS ALL ASPECTS OF BUSINESS

Across the world, short-term video has become the medium of choice for viral user engagement. This is no different for testimonials, team communications, product feedback, and sales calls. 72% of marketers realise a return on investment greater than 50% from testimonial videos, with significant improvements in prospect conversion. However, the demand for video content is currently not serviced by an affordable, professional solution. This opens an enormous market opportunity for Vouch. Having already onboarded over 65 active paying customers, we believe that Vouch can execute on capturing a significant slice of the B2B SaaS customer pie.

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PRODUCT LED GROWTH AS A GO-TO-MARKET MODEL (global customers, no sales team, fast growth)

Vouch was founded by a team with extensive experience in product-led growth – they don’t have a sales team, and their position in market is primarily driven through product virality.

Growth is entirely driven by the Vouch flywheel to achieve organic virality in two ways -

· Intra-company virality is gained when customer testimonials are used across an organisation, from marketing and pre-sales through to customer success, product teams and marketing. Vouch has seen that this is a product multiple teams can use for different purposes from a single video testimonial

· Inter-company virality is achieved as when a new company comes on-board and shares a request for a testimonial with other parties. To date, on average, Vouch interacts with at least two companies for each Vouch created (the person who provides the vouch and the person who receives the vouch; both can quickly become Vouch customers).

A philosophy of building for everyone is the foundation of Vouch’s viral loop, driving their growth and compounding scale, and we are excited to see this continue to grow as new functionality is built into the product.

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WHERE TO NEXT

Gary, David, and the Vouch team are focussed on their go-to-market and revenue efforts whilst continuing to drive product innovation.

In addition, as a software platform for short-form video collection, curation and distribution, Vouch’s customers are using Vouch in ways the team never intended – which is a testament to the product, scale and opportunity that Vouch has. Customers are now using Vouch for hiring, employee onboarding, customer feedback, product development and team communications within an organisation.

As the first-mover for an unserved market need, we know that Vouch’s product-led growth will drive traction and customer love across self-serve and enterprise customers. We could not be prouder to vouch for Vouch.

We’re a Vouch customer as are our portfolio companies and we think there’s an opportunity for every business globally – from freelancer to Fortune 500 – to better leverage short form video. Check out Vouch for yourself here.

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There's a number of open roles at Vouch, make sure you explore the latest opportunities.