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As we recently explored, there’s nothing wrong with bootstrapping instead of taking investment.

And as today’s company shows, it doesn’t mean you can’t switch modes and go for external funding once you’ve proved you have a business worth growing.

Scroll down to find out how ProdPad is gearing up for its second act as it moves beyond bootstrapping.

But first:

• Let’s find out together what pre-seed looks like in 2024: please take our two-minute survey 🙌

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ProdPad is ready for its second act, and its first funding round

Just as ‘write what you know’ is common advice for budding authors, ‘build what you know’ can be useful guidance for startup founders.

And the founders of product management platform ProdPad certainly know product management.

Janna Bastow and Simon Cast previously founded, and later sold, product manager community Mind The Product. That experience helped them build ProdPad, which Bastow says is designed to “help you become a better product manager.

“Too many teams end up building the wrong things. They're stuck in a ‘feature factory’ or a ‘build trap’. They're building a whole bunch of stuff, but none of it's actually making an impact. And they feel like they're being customer driven, because they're building stuff that customers might be asking for, but it doesn't actually tie back to what the business needs.”

To solve this, ProdPad provides a place for product managers to manage their objectives and roadmap, as well as their ideas, experimentation, and customer feedback backlogs. It also lets them analyse that feedback.

“It's giving them a space to create that golden thread between what the business needs and what the customers are asking for, so that everything's tied together,” Bastow says.

The platform takes an ‘opinionated’ design approach that helps shape its users’ behaviour. This is based on best practice observed from Mind The Product members around the world 

“We were building out this community, and listening in to all these leaders about how they do product management at the best large-scaling, most functional, product companies out there. And we brought those practices into how ProdPad is shaped.”

The story so far

ProdPad is very unusual for a startup featured here at PreSeed Now, in that it was started 12 years ago. Bastow says the platform now generates six-figure ARR, and serves thousands of users around the world.

But in other ways, Bastow and Cast are only just getting started. ProdPad was their side-hustle alongside Mind The Product for its first few years. 

Since 2022, it’s been their main focus. Until now, they’ve not taken any external investment. But now they see an opportunity to push it further.

“When we launched ProdPad, we were the only ones out there. We were trying to make a name for ourselves in a world of task management tools and project management tools, but there were no product management tools. There was no such thing as roadmap software or idea management software… it was inherently uncool to build this stuff,” Bastow says.

Because they had their own community of product managers, finding early users wasn’t a problem. But due to the way the tech industry recruited at the time, Bastow says navigating a path to substantial growth was difficult.

“If you were a product manager, you were the only one in your team. You didn't have a CPO, you certainly didn't have a product operations team to back you up. Your budget sometimes came out of the marketing budget, sometimes the tech budget. You certainly didn't have a product management budget to pull from.”

“What we've learned as product builders is that there's no point in building a great product if the market isn't ready yet. Now that the market is ready, we're ready to take the product-market fit that we've built. and fuel it up, and go for it.”

Next steps

Bastow admits that simply ramping up sales of what they already have isn’t enough to make ProdPad a substantially bigger business.

Part of the product roadmap includes AI features that build on top of what they’ve already built. 

“In 2018 we were already building in AI features like being able to de-duplicate and match up ideas and feedback. In 2021 we launched what essentially was a ChatGPT-like chatbot that you could talk to about what was in your feedback backlog. And it was very cool, but it was niche because it was just about your feedback.”

Bastow says this ‘CoPilot’ (a familiar name!) chatbot has been developed further with current AI tech to become “a coach and a sidekick” that draws on much wider inputs to inform product development.

“Imagine your product sidekick understands the context of the space that you operate in, the goals that your company has, what's on your roadmap, what you aspire to as a company, what your customers are asking for, what experiments you have run, and what's worked, what hasn't worked, and what good product management practice looks like.

“You can say, ‘hey, you know what? I've got this idea. But does it line up with anything our customers have asked for?’ ‘Can you put that on the roadmap for me?’ And it will go off and do this work for you, and help you do your product management work.”

Bastow says this will help product managers scale their abilities and allow companies to build better products.

Beyond AI, ProdPad will expand the ability for third-parties to build on top of the platform.

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