Customer onboarding

Over time, more and more of Calendly’s usage came from “1-sender-1-receiver” and “many-senders-many-receivers” use cases. This includes things like sales pitches, syncs between agencies and their clients, meetings between CEOs and their legal counsel, and new SaaS customer onboarding calls. These use cases turned out to represent a much larger swath of valuable interactions than “1-sender-many-receivers”, hence why Calendly today primarily sells into sales, marketing, success and recruiting teams.

I think a lot about the type of customer onboarding tool we are as feeling similar to something like e-signature tools in the late aughts—we're moving into this point where a lot of companies are aware that this is a problem they have, but it's still new behavior for them. And actually, to inspire people to change or adopt this way of working with their customers, it's better to be louder in a smaller ecosystem. 

I would argue though, on the customer onboarding side, we are closer to a need-to-have. Companies have to onboard their customers and they could do it in a spreadsheet, but if they want to do it properly, they need to use a system like Dock.

Over time, we realized that the use cases could focus on customer related operations—customer onboarding and customer support. It could be you're running a marketing campaign and you need a way of generating coupon codes, it could be something ad hoc like that or could be something like you're a fintech startup and you're doing a KYC process for your customers, which is an onboarding process, but it's one which has multiple people and multiple steps involved. So, the majority of our use cases, and by majority, I would say about 60% of our use cases, are related to customer operations. That's basically our focus. 

Guest: So we definitely will. Really, it's getting to a size where we can afford to hire someone who can focus on helping us both launch, implement and sustain that tool. We'll probably have our new customer onboarding manager take care of that, actually. So the main thing is bandwidth.

The product is very horizontal, but salespeople are the main end users today, mainly at software companies, along with customer success people and founders. The primary use cases are in sales follow-up, customer onboarding, and fundraising.

Founded in 2017 as an "Airbnb for bandwidth", Fluidstack offered people $50/month to turn their home computers into content delivery networks (CDNs) for companies like Dailymotion—pivoting in 2021 to rent ML companies underutilized GPUs from data centers. Fluidstack connected AI startups with data centers (~1,000 as of 2024) that either (1) have deployed, underutilized GPUs, or (2) need deal flow to justify buying GPUs, with Fluidstack handling the customer onboarding and pre-configuring those clusters so they can be used for AI training and inference out of the box.

Plaid (2021 valuation: $13.4B) grew 47% in 2021 to reach $250M in revenue and crossed 500M+ connected bank accounts acting as a middleware for fintechs like Block (NYSE: SQ) and Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) to connect to their customers’ bank accounts for moving money to their app or fast-tracking customer onboarding. Plaid made bank accounts programmable despite uncooperative banks by taking users' banking logins, scraping their account screens for their data, and exposing that data via API. (link)

Could you tell us a bit about Arrows? What made you feel like the customer onboarding space was worth devoting years of your life to?

Pulkit Agrawal is the CEO and co-founder of Chameleon. We talked to Pulkit to better understand the product-market fit of customer onboarding and activation tools, Chameleon's positioning with respect to companies like WalkMe and Pendo, and the transition from generation 1 customer onboarding tools to generation 2 and generation 3.