The story behind Rocketlane, the name, and the inception date
Vignesh, Deepak, and I (Srikrishnan) worked at Freshworks together, and we’ve onboarded many large mid-market and enterprise customers. We experienced firsthand the pains involved while onboarding customers – how chaotic it can be and how hero-driven it typically was. It solely depended on one or two individuals on the team to ensure the project crossed the finish line. We also realized how bad the experience could be when information is siloed across different tools like email, Slack, project management software, and documents. An accurate picture of what’s happening in any project is never readily available/accessible. This leads to escalations, disappointments, and eventually, churn.
Onboarding is the phase where you make or break trust with your customers, and many companies are unfortunately breaking that trust. We aim to change that.
Rocketlane brings the right kind of visibility to your onboarding projects and unifies all information and experiences in one place. By doing so, Rocketlane helps businesses deliver a consistently solid experience for every customer. That’s how Rocketlane was born. We started the company in April 2020. And we named it ‘Rocketlane’ because our mission is to accelerate how quickly you can deliver value. And if you put your projects on the Rocketlane, then they are going to take off faster.
Platform Description
Rocketlane’s collaborative customer onboarding platform helps businesses accelerate time-to-value, streamline implementation journeys, and deliver exceptional customer experience.
Rocketlane replaces generic project management, communication, and document collaboration tools with a unique, unified workspace that is purpose-built for repeatable customer-facing projects. This helps improve communication, collaboration, and project visibility for businesses and their customers.
With Rocketlane, businesses can consistently hit their goals by making onboarding more delightful and friction-free.
Market Insights
There are two parts to what Rocketlane is trying to accomplish. The Client Onboarding or Customer Onboarding market alone is probably worth around $2 billion. And Rocketlane is quickly emerging as the leader in this space.
Beyond that, we also aim to help businesses like marketing agencies, professional services teams, and consulting firms since they too can use Rocketlane for their customer-facing projects. We want to be the best at helping companies collaborate with their clients. It’s a large market.
Target Audience
The core audience we’re going after today is onboarding and implementation/delivery teams inside SaaS companies. In the initial stages, this tends to be the Customer Success within these companies. But as the company evolves, separate onboarding/delivery teams get formed.
While companies do a lot to win deals, they lose their intensity once the sale is closed. And that’s when they start encountering problems. Most companies don’t have the means to measure how their onboarding and implementation teams are doing. They typically use spreadsheets or Smartsheets, documents, email, and Slack to work with their customers. This makes the team prone to occasionally dropping the ball on tasks. Holding each other accountable in these scenarios becomes difficult.
This leads to unhappy situations where you don’t get the customer to see value fast enough. They then lose interest in the product. Adoption suffers, and it eventually leads to churn.
Demographics
Rocketlane’s customers are global. Though our initial focus is to cater to customer onboarding teams at B2B tech companies selling to mid-market and enterprise customers, we already have consulting firms and marketing agencies using our product.
In just six months since our launch, we became a leader in the G2 category for Client Onboarding. All our customers seem to be loving Rocketlane so far.
Our Customers
We’ve had rapid early traction with many customers globally, including well-known names like Linksquares, ParcelLab, ReleaseHub, Appcues, ContractPod AI, etc.
We also have high growth B2B companies from India as customers, including
Chargebee, Delhivery, Yellow.ai, MoEngage, WebEngage, AccelData, Netcore, MSD, Pando, etc.
Success it has brought to the end customer
We’re helping shave the time it takes to onboard new customers. For instance, a bot company using Rocketlane used to take eight weeks to onboard a customer. Knocking two weeks off their time-to-value means they start billing the customer earlier, which means they pull forward their revenue. Plus their teams become more efficient. And this efficiency allows them to onboard more customers. At the same time, they can work with more customers in parallel.
Businesses also use Rocketlane to impress their customers right from the start of the partnership. Customers also do more business with them as a result, whether it’s expanding to more geographies or more use cases in a faster time.
Rocketlane’s Growth
Rocketlane was launched just in June 2021 and has seen rapid growth. We became a leader in our category on G2 within the first six months of launch and signed many customers in a short period. Our product is seeing upwards of 30% growth month on month.
Technology Scalability Model
What’s unique about Rocketlane is that it offers a unified experience bringing together experiences from typically siloed tools. We’ve built this tightly knit experience across project management, document collaboration, communication, and more. Rocketlane also works well with other systems that customers use, like their CRM, help desk, or internal project tracking tools like Jira. It also allows you to embed third-party content and resources inside it like videos or Google Docs, survey forms, and so on.
Competitors (direct/indirect)
Our indirect competitors are regular project management tools like Asana, Smartsheet, or Monday.com. We aim to offer a 10x better experience when it comes to customer-facing projects.
There are a few direct early-stage competitors in this space, but this category is still blue ocean.
Funding Details
We’ve raised two rounds totalling $21 million.
Seed Round (led by Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners) for $3 million.
Series A (led by 8VC) for $18 million.
Revenue Model
We charge based on the number of users. We don’t count the customer’s customers as users.
Growth Plans
We’re going after more categories of customer-facing projects. We are also evolving Rocketlane to support multi-org projects – like a company working with a partner ecosystem to onboard customers.
With our new enhancements, these third-party partners and vendors can also hop on to Rocketlane with the right level of visibility and collaborate easily.
Rocketlane’s Vision
Our vision is to make Customer Project Delivery beautiful and professional. Think customer-facing projects, think Rocketlane.
About the team
The three co-founders, Vignesh, Deepak, and I, had built a successful in-app messaging platform that got acquired by Freshworks. We wanted to repeat that success and build something bigger this time around.
We were very particular about assembling a solid product and design team. Our earlier success is helping us attract the best of talent across functions. People want to work with us because we push each other to perform to our full potential. Our team sees Rocketlane as a place where they can truly grow and blossom in their career.
