Reveall founders Ferdinand Goetzen and Marcel Hagedoorn (image: Reveall)
Amsterdam has a new SaaS startup. Launched today, Reveall is a brand new platform aiming to help companies gather and report customer insights. While a new SaaS startup in one of the main startup hubs of Europe may seem like a weekly occurrence, Reveall catches the eye by launching with massive international customers already on board. We spoke with co-founder Ferdinand Goetzen on how he pulled that off.
Customer’s king
Reveall is a customer insights platform that helps teams gather and share learnings from customer research and feedback. According to its description, it provides teams with a single source of truth about their customer by turning customer data into actionable insights and breaking down silos between teams. This way, companies can start putting their most important asset – the customer – at the centre of their actions.
Recently, the winners of the 2021 Future Hamburg Award were announced.
Reveall was founded by Ferdinand Goetzen and Marcel Hagedoorn. Goetzen was previously the CMO of Recruitee and led former 3DHubs (Now Hubs) to their €272 million acquisition as a director of marketing & growth. Serial entrepreneur Marcel Hagedoorn has co-founded several companies that are all still active today, including the Dutch design agency Concept7, travel startup srprs.me as well as journaling SaaS app for founders, Mindwave.
Big clients, right at launch
Goetzen and Hagedoorn started their venture not only with a polished product but also with a wide range of launching customers, many of them massive international companies. Talk about hitting the ground running.
Goetzen explains: “After I had the idea I started to talk to people to validate it. Someone mentioned I should talk to UX agency Valsplat.” Turns out, they built a UX research repository tool somewhat similar to what Goetzen was thinking of: Sticktail. “It was very focused on internal use. They didn’t want to push it as a product to sell.”
Valsplat had previously contacted Marcel Hagedoorn, a seasoned entrepreneur, to help figure out what to do with Sticktail. “Marcel and I met to have a chat, and our ideas instantly clicked. Not only on UX but also on how sharing and collaborating is important. And how we wanted to bring it beyond UX, to marketing, sales and customer success.”
‘Give us the product’
So Hagedoorn and Goetzen decided to pitch the original creators of the tool with their ideas. The goal, according to Goetzen: “We wanted them to let us have it. We made a really strong pitch in which we argued they should give us Sticktail as an angel investment. They agreed.”
That not only gave Goetzen and Hagedoorn a strong tool to build their own ideas upon. It also already came with a range of customers. Upon launch, Reveall can already claim Schiphol Airport, file transfer platform WeTransfer, temp agency Randstad and grocery chain Albert Heijn as their customers. “We’ve informed them of our plans and they are all on board, extending their contracts”, Goetzen adds.
Clear roadmap
Reveall is not just a rebranding of Sticktail, as Goetzen and Hagedoorn did some overhauling. “We made some technical changes to improve scalability and we integrated Stripe for easier payments. There’s a clear roadmap where we add data integrations, research and management features. In the future, we want to utilise machine learning, where clients can upload audio from interviews which will be automatically transcribed and provide insights.”
For Goetzen, it was important to build a product that solves a problem he himself experienced. “I wanted to scratch an itch I had myself. One problem I always encounter is that every company agrees their customers are important. But there’s a gap between thinking so and acting upon it. Taking customers seriously takes time and expertise.”
Reveall prevents repeating work
Goetzen often noticed customer data turned to insights hidden in long documents that didn’t get shared well. Companies that set out to get to know their customers better, often repeatedly started from zero because previous work was lost or hard to find.
“When do customer work, they often find themselves doing repeat work”, Goetzen says. Having all customer data in one place is a start, but providing clear and concise insights from that data is where Reveall excels, according to Goetzen.
Building the ideal company
Starting his first venture is not just about building a product he wanted. For Goetzen, it also allows him to build the company he always envisioned. “We’re coming in with a clear idea what kind of company we want to build from day one. The kind of company where people from all walks of life want to work, in all stages of our growth. No restrictions when or where they work.”
That means that Reveall is a ‘100% remote company’ with its headquarters in Amsterdam. “There’s no better place to start. It is an international, diverse and exciting tech scene”, says Goetzen. It also provides access to growth capital, Goetzen says they are already talking to ‘several VCs’. A seed-round is planned for the first quarter next year.
