Announcing In-Product Surveys and Our £2.6M Seed Round

When we started building Ribbon in 2020, I'd grown disillusioned with how difficult it was to build good and useful software. As a previous product manager, I experienced first-hand the complexity of ensuring that new features and product changes met the needs of our users. For example, setting up user interviews and product testing with customers would take days.

Since we couldn't easily validate what our customers wanted for each product change we shipped, we started thinking about our product decisions as 'bets'. Unfortunately, we didn't have the time or tooling to gather the data needed to make informed product decisions every time we shipped a new feature, design or product. Unsurprisingly, many of our bets failed to improve our customers' experience.

Through speaking with other product managers, designers and user researchers it became clear that these were common pain points that plagued almost every product team. Most teams had experienced failed product launches and wasted countless millions in developer time on products and features that never delivered any value to customers.

There had to be an easier way to build great user experiences by involving your users in the design and development process without compromising on how quickly you can ship your product.

Announcing our Seed Round

With Ribbon, we're building the user and product research platform I wish I had access to as a product manager to help product teams create more useful products. That's why today, we are incredibly excited to announce we've raised £2.6m to continue developing Ribbon and helping product and user research teams make products that are more useful. Octopus Ventures led the round with participation from earlier backers MMC Ventures and Concept Ventures. Angel investors also joining the seed include Matt Robinson (founder of GoCardless and Nested), Keith Grose (Head of UK at Plaid), Ross Sheil (SVP Global Revenue at Infogrid) and Felix Leuschner (Group Business Development Director at Cazoo).

The Ribbon team is now eight people strong, and we're proud to work with leading global research teams, including those at Dyson, Gousto and Butternut Box. With our seed funding, we're now growing the team further (check out our open roles in our London headquarters) and continuing to improve our user research platform to make it easier than ever to build useful products.

Getting rapid, targeted insights faster with in-product surveys

At the heart of what we do is making it easier for researchers to gain valuable and contextual insights from real users fast. That's why today, we're also announcing some updates to our platform that make collecting targeted feedback from your customers more effortless than ever.

Firstly, customers across our Team and Enterprise plans can now mix moderated video interviews with our newly launched in-product survey studies. After integrating Ribbon into their products using a simple code snippet, researchers can target customers with interaction-based surveys across their product journeys in just a few clicks. Gather feedback on a newly launched design, measure NPS ratings and validate new feature ideas within minutes by collecting feedback from real users through a mixture of our new NPS, rating, multiple-choice and open-text question types.

Secondly, to make it even easier to start collecting useful feedback, we've also launched a completely new survey template library that customers on all our plans can use to launch their surveys. So whether you're recruiting participants for your moderated video interviews or running research on your user journeys, you can now choose from one of our 20+ new templates to build your surveys more quickly.  

Finally, in the months ahead, we'll continue expanding our research platform to help researchers engage their customers in research and reach rapid and relevant insights. Over the next weeks, expect further expansions to the Ribbon research platform with new capabilities like SDKs for native mobile applications to enable research across your product stack.

Get started with your first in-product research study

We're thrilled to continue supporting research and product teams in building products that are more useful through targeted and rapid user research. To spin up your first in-product survey or moderated video interview in minutes, early-stage teams can get started directly with our Free and Team plans for free. To check out our Enterprise plan, reach out to us to get a platform demo.

Happy researching,

Axel & the Ribbon team