Meet Bicyclea French startup building a collaboration tool for product managers where they can collect data from different tools, work on the next product iterations and close the feedback loop with the most engaged customers.
The company raised a total of $6 million in two funding rounds, including a recent funding round led by Daring start which closed at the end of last year. The startup is supported by eFounders, the European startup studio focused on SaaS products. Base Case, The 20VC Fund, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Hummingbird Ventures and 60 angels also invested in the company – it’s a long list of investors*.
Like many software-as-a-service products, Cycle first acts as a single source of truth. Many product teams rely heavily on products like Confluence, Notion, or Google Docs. But they should also check GitHub issues, intercom messages, and more.
“The problem we are trying to solve is one that every product manager faces. Product information is spread across many different products,” Cycle founder and CEO Mehdi Boudoukhane told me. “As your business grows, you get feedback from users, the sales team, the customer success team, and the marketing team.”
And yet, in most cases, product management becomes a black box. Other teams in the company don’t really know when something will be shipped or – even worse – whether their feedback will have an impact in any way.
Cycle has built integrations with popular startup products such as HubSpot, Intercom, and Slack. Once everything is in Cycle, product teams can organize feedback, grouping everything related to one feature.
Product managers then use Cycle to write their product requirements documents with a rich text editor that supports embedding. It is a collaborative editor with the ability to name your teammates.
“Designers produce visuals, developers produce code, and product managers produce documents,” said Boudoukhane. The idea is that product managers could spend most of their day in Cycle – on average, product managers using Cycle spend 3 hours per day in product. And product managers don’t have to manually export their documents to other tools, as Cycle offers integrations with Linear, GitHub, or Notion.
Image Credits: Bicycle
The worst thing that can happen when you read feedback from customers who have decided to end their contract with you is when they say that your product is missing a feature, even though the feature exists. They just didn’t know about it.
So when something finally ships, Cycle helps you close the loop with your customers and colleagues. For example, the sales team will get a notification in HubSpot. “Sales teams can then reach out to customers who have spoken about the feature that just shipped,” said Boudoukhane.
A clear line of communication with your customers is a good way to prevent customer churn and keep your customers engaged with your product. According to Boudoukhane, some companies like Capitaine Train or Superhuman have been pretty good on this front.
Cycle competes with Product sign or even Jira. But with its lightweight and collaborative approach, Cycle hopes everyone in the company will interact with their product in some way to provide feedback and contribute, making it easier to build a product-centric company.
* Some of the people who have invested in Cycle include Scott Belsky (founder at Behance), Shreyas Doshi (former product lead at Stripe), Kelton Lynn (director of product management at Google), Youcef Es-skouri (head of product at Dropbox), Omar Pera ( Product Lead at Meta), David Hoang (VP Design at Webflow), Jonathan Widawski (CEO at Maze), Mark Pundsack (ex-VP Product at GitLab), Antoine Martin (Founder at Zenly), Marie Gassée (ex-VP Growth at Confluent), Mary Nelson (CCO at Aircall), Olivia Teich (ex-Product Director at Dropbox), David Apple (ex-Head of Sales & Customer Success at Notion), Eric Wittman (ex-CRO at Figma), Sriram Krishnan ( ex-Head of Growth at Tinder), Jeremy Le Van (founder at Sunrise), Brad Menezes (ex-Director of Product at Datadog), Guy Podjarny (founder at Snyk), Nick Candito (co-founder at Flatfile), Romain David (ex product manager at Uber) and Kyle Parrish (VP Sales at Figma). I told you it was a long list.
Image Credits: Bicycle
