Beynd gets $2M seed to improve customer experience with better onboarding

Customer experience is a term that gets bandied about quite a bit these days. If you can improve the customer experience, you can win more customers. Beynd, a Utah startup, wants to help by providing a better, more automated onboarding workflow. Today, it announced a $2 million seed round.

The round was led by Peak Ventures with participation from Prelude Ventures. The investors seem to be making a good bet. CEO and founder Peter Ord says the company has had a product for just 10 months, but already boasts 121 paying customers with 6800 users on the platform.

Ord says the company's genesis began, like so many startup ideas, out of frustration he experienced at his previous job. Getting people started on the company's software was too hard. He thought there had to be a better way, so he built it, and Beynd (pronounced Beyond) was born.

"They say the best companies start with the founders biggest frustration. One of my biggest frustrations at my previous job was that in my everyday life, I could order a pizza and know exactly when that pizza was ready. But when our customers bought our software, we had no thoughtful or meaningful way to help our customers understand when we were going to deliver that," Ord told TechCrunch.

The customer starts by creating an onboarding workflow template. Each client has its own unique requirements. The first interactions are by email (or communication channel of choice) giving instructions on how to proceed. If the customer gets stuck, there is a button to email the project manager that there is a problem.

The solution includes tools for projected launch dates, so that customers can understand when a product will be ready (or service completed). It also includes an analytics tool, so that customers can understand which processes are most likely to stall.

The company actually uses its own software to onboard its customers. "We drink our own champagne, We use our own products. And so we're extremely efficient in the way we onboard our customers because they get an immediate sense of how they use the tool through us using our tool to onboard them," Ord explained.

The company had bootstrapped the business to this point. He says that his goal is to continue to run it as a real business, but the funding will help him expand his vision and improve the experience. He just doesn't want to get too caught up in the funding culture. "There's an interesting culture in the VC space where it's all about raise as much as you can, as fast as you can, and I actually have kind of the opposite opinion, he said.

For now, he has $2 million to try and scale the business further, and he'll get more only if he feels he needs it. "Let's continue to prove out the model with this money, then let's raise more if we have to," he said.