Reveall was founded in Amsterdam in 2021 as a customer insights platform helping product teams make customer feedback and research more actionable.
Shortly after being founded in 2021, Reveall raised a pre-seed round of €1.5 million. The company became a notable European brand for the rapidly growing product discovery trend and served several top European companies including PostNL, Albert Heijn, Signify, WestLotto and WeTransfer.
In 2023, Reveall was acquired by NEXT, one of Europe’s leading AI-powered enterprise product discovery solutions.
Ferdinand co-founded Reveall after taking over and rebranding the user research platform, Sticktail. The idea was to leverage the rising tide of customer-led product decision making.
Not wanting to rely too heavily on the funding they had raised given the volatile landscape, the founding team wanted to build a leading brand in Europe and invest in scalable growth levers with increasing ROI.
Clement joined Reveall as interim Head of Growth in 2023 and led some of the company’s most important marketing initiatives leading up to the exit.
Reveall was launched shortly before one of the most volatile periods that startups have ever faced. With fundraising conditions rapidly changing, it was important to rely on channels that did not require huge budgets or diminish in returns.
To ensure a scalable growth engine, we focused on demand generation. Product discovery was a rapidly growing trend, but it was still relatively new to a lot of European product teams. Rather than tapping into existing intent, we aimed to position ourselves as thought-leaders to nurture intent and be top of mind for every customer-focused product team that matched our ICP.
Our demand-gen engine rested on 3 core approaches:
For SEO, we decided to start early. We combined a “short-tail” approach where we went after high-intent, highly competitive keywords like “Customer Journey mapping” and “Product Discovery” with a “long-tail” approach, where we tried to sweep up lower-intent, more specialized keywords like “continuous discovery habits” or “how to use a KANO model”.
For the short-tail strategy, we created comprehensive guides, placing importance on quality, originality and depth of content. At their peak, our guides generated over 15,000 monthly visitors after just a few months and minimal investment.
For the long-tail strategy, we created a “product glossary” that combined over 200 long-tail keywords. Many of these keywords had low search volumes but were highly relevant and not very competitive. The glossary allowed us to interlink content and entrench our content-relevance for the space.
Alongside our SEO strategy we invested heavily into thought-leadership content. Product discovery was rapidly growing with the meteoric rise of experts like Teresa Torres, Melissa Perry and Marty Cagan.
We crafted our entire brand proposition around the importance of customer insights and geared all of our content towards it.
We applied our core narrative in all of our own content. But as an early-stage company, we didn’t have time to just build our own audience from scratch. We wanted to tap into audiences that were already out there.
That’s where our “other people’s network” approach comes in.
As mentioned above, product discovery was gaining steam in the product landscape and a number of experts and companies emerged as thought leaders on the topic.
Our goal was to tap into these networks, by partnering with experts, featuring on relevant events and collaborating on content where possible. We did this by elevating and celebrating those that shared our ideas and vision.
Where possible, we featured product professionals either through mini-podcasts published to LinkedIn or our weekly “customer-led heroes” segment where we featured an inspiring product person and a piece of advice they shared. These were easily-produced content formats that not only associated us with top brands (we featured people from Nike, eBay, Swapfiets and others) but also encouraged those featured to share the posts with their own followers. The approaches gained us over 1,500 LinkedIn followers in under a year and consistently drove 10-20 qualified opportunities per month.
In addition to creating our own content, we also tried to tap into existing content by getting featured on events, podcasts and publications. We spoke at Product Tank meetups, got featured on User Interviews’ Awkward Silences podcast, spoke at the Berlin CPO Summit and SaaSiest Amsterdam and got our own discovery case study published on MindTheProduct.
Finally, we built a strong network & community of experts and influencers that we regularly collaborated with. Most notably Tim Herbig (Europe’s top product discovery expert with over 30,000 followers) joined us as an advisor and we partnered with several top product discovery coaches.
This culminated in us organizing Europe’s first ever product discovery conference with the backing of Amplitude and Maze. The event attracted over 400 product professionals and featured 15 top speakers from companies like Nike, Booking.com and OutSystems.
Our brand became our main driver of traffic (71%) and we acquired over 2,000 users from our demand gen efforts. By the time of our acquisition by NEXT, we were generating over 40 qualified leads every month just from organic channels.
When we took over Sticktail, there was no real PLG motion within the product. All clients had been acquired via the UX agency that had created Sticktail with a high-touch onboarding.
As our demand engine started rolling, we felt we needed to facilitate a self-service motion to put the product experience front and center and attract as many users to the platform as possible.
We first focused on creating a self-service trial with in-app payments that gave teams the option to try, engage and buy on their own. Once this was in place, we focused on 2 things:
As Reveall was a feature-heavy platform that facilitated a certain process within teams, we knew that rapid activation was crucial for engagement. We built and tested several onboarding flows to drive faster activation.
In addition to this, we built sharing links into core features such as our product maps feature, to encourage users to share their content both internally and externally.
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Our efforts to support a self-serve PLG motion allowed us to increase adoption rates on certain features by 200% and double our number of daily active users (DAUs), achieving a DAU/MAU ratio of 39%.
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