June

My @ycombinator Expansion Pack (for scaling) 🧡 Startups need a few more tools to support growth as they scale. Here are a few of my personal favorites: - @NumeralTax (W23): Sales tax is a pain. I spent about 5 hours the other day trying to figure it out. I'm pretty hype that Numeral now supports SaaS! - @UpflowHQ (W20): Gotta collect that cash. Cash in / cash out was mission-critical at my first startup. And Upflow's platform for cash collection is wicked good for B2B. - @rootlyhq (S21): We were in the same YC batch with Rootly, and it's been incredible to watch them grow. @jjrichardtang and the team have built a modern on-call and incident management platform. Plus, JJ doesn't sleep and is always happy to help. - @usepylon (W23): Super helpful for us. Pylon makes managing our very large number of shared Slack channels easy. - @JuneDotSo (W21): Has been a game-changer for us / helps us get better insights into product usage (or lack thereof). I really like how you can track feature adoption and flag users who are at risk of churning. - @deel (W19): Makes it so easy to hire contractors in both the US and abroad. We manage all of our contractors in Deel. They handle the agreements, payments, and compliance. Big fan. - @checkr (S14): Gotta know who you are working with. Love that it integrates with @Rippling (W17), our HR/payroll system. And, of course, @GoPositional (S21): helps to support your content/SEO strategy as you scale. For example, our internal linking toolset, Internals, is my personal favorite, as I have spent hundreds of hours internally linking. What other tools are perfect for startups starting to scale?

Over the past three years, we’ve learned a lot at @JuneDotSo, often in unexpected ways. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘣𝘢𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘧𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘴. It’s not just about changes in design but about how listening to our users has shaped our product. 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟏 June started as a cute little analytics tool, something akin to what Google Analytics might have been if it were designed for product teams rather than marketing websites—and if it launched in the 2020s. At the beginning, our tool was all about simplicity, and startups looking for that simplicity quickly began to adopt it. We were a straightforward solution for product teams that needed basic analytics, nothing more. 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟐 As we grew alongside our early users, we made a key discovery: most of our users were B2B SaaS companies. They came to us because we offered something that traditional analytics tools didn’t—account-level analyses. Honestly, we didn’t anticipate this. But as we dug deeper, we realized these companies had unique pain points that weren’t being addressed by existing solutions. It was a wide-open market, and in 2023, we decided to focus on serving these B2B SaaS users more effectively. This shift in focus led us to refresh our sidebar to better serve their needs. 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟑 Soon, we noticed that it wasn’t just product managers using June anymore—Customer Success experts were on board too. This got us thinking: should we continue building for this broader audience? After careful consideration, the answer was a resounding yes. B2B SaaS companies thrive on collaboration between Product and Customer Success teams, and our product was already well-positioned to support this. Our decision to cater to this collaborative use case made June more integral to our users' daily workflows. As a result, usage shifted from a couple of times a week to almost every day. To accommodate this increased use, we updated our navigation bar once again, ensuring that all users could easily navigate the product and save dashboards and audiences for quick access. 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟒 But just when we thought we had it all figured out, another unexpected challenge arose. When new users started using June, we asked them why. The most common answer? “To generate more revenue.” This response posed a problem: while analytics can help make decisions that eventually lead to revenue, they don’t directly generate it. We realized that if we wanted to truly meet our users' needs, we needed to change that perception. So this year, we took a bold step: we started powering revenue teams. We integrated deeply with CRM systems and introduced a way to create dynamic traits—like tracking the number of active users or changes in usage—without the need for engineering support. Suddenly, Sales and Customer Success teams were using June not just for analytics, but to directly generate revenue by activating, converting, and renewing their customers. These use cases became central to our product, and once again, we had to update our sidebar to reflect this new focus. ___________ The evolution of our sidebar has been anything but a result of “my vision.” Instead, it has been dictated by our users. Their needs have driven the changes, guiding our product’s direction more than any roadmap ever could. While it’s crucial to have a long-term vision and know where you want to be in the next decade, it’s equally important to recognize that your customers will determine the sequence of how you get there. And if you’re listening closely, your sidebar—or whatever your product’s equivalent is—will show you the way. Hope this story helps guide your journey! Have a great weekend, Enzo