5 on Funding with Peter Clark, Brendan Weitz, and Anil Sevim, Co-Founders of Journey

Welcome to 5 on Funding! This weekly newsletter asks venture-backed startups 5 detailed ways they plan to use the new funding to scale their companies.

Quick Facts About Journey:

Journey is a remote-first startup building a digital storytelling product for salespeople and founders. Journey is a tool that allows you to combine all sorts of content into one interactive experience. They believe that the future of storytelling looks more like a video game than a slideshow.

Industry: B2B Software 

Amount Raised: $4.1m

What 5 things will you do with this funding?

Key Priority for Funding: Establishing a strong product and brand

1. Building the Company and Culture from the Ground Up

“We raised the money when it was just us three founders. We've grown the team to 10 people since then, including engineers — front-end and back-end engineers specifically — with experience building consumerized tools or productivity-oriented tools. We also have two designers who are very strong at building consumerized B2B interfaces.”

2. Product Development  

“We've spent the last two years radically changing the product interface to make sure it's the most delightful and easy-to-use experience possible. For example, when a customer signs up for Journey and they upload their company logo and color palette, we do a lot of magic in the background pulling out primary colors from the logo. Suddenly, all of their slides are styled with that color. It’s magical. This is just one very complex and intricate problem to solve, and it takes a lot of time to develop.”

3. Using Content to Introduce the Brand to the World

“We're trying to create interesting storytelling content that isn't typical B2B sales content. We've really invested in hiring great copywriters and building a great blog, brand, and advertising to ensure that people discover this content. The north star of our blog is to help people tell better stories via the internet.”

4. Infrastructure

“We've invested a lot in our marketing and engineering infrastructure to allow us to create experiments and market to users really quickly. So we use data visualization tools to take aggregate user data — who's opening Journey and how they’re spending their time — to say, “Hey Rebecca, you've opened five journeys this week; here are some recommendations.”

5. Experimentation

“Startups typically try something that has a 90% chance of it working out. We try and allocate resources to experiment on things that have a 10% or 20% chance of it working out. And if it works out, it will be really big. An example of this is a new Google Chrome extension we created, which allows people to create journeys from within their browser.”

About the Founders: Peter Clark, Brendan Weitz, and Anil Sevim are the founders of Journey (YC W21), a storytelling tool that enables you to close pitches and deals faster with fun and interactive presentations. Peter is a two-time Y Combinator founder and has spent the past 15 years leading growth for B2B companies. Brendan previously was GM at Quora, Senior Director at AdRoll, and part of the early Sales team at Facebook.