We are delighted to share that Unusual Ventures is a Day 0 investor in Endgame—the new platform for product-led sales.

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The product-led growth philosophy is not new. In fact, it was born before I was—way back in 1983 with the GNU Project and AOL’s free internet minutes ISP offering. By 2006, companies like Skype and Box were being described as having a “freemium” model. In 2012, the first B2B SaaS company with a product-led growth model went public, LogMeIn. Today, we have ~35 public B2B software companies that have embraced a product-led GTM motion, the latest being Monday.com, trading at a 40x EV/ARR trailing multiple as of this article being drafted. When it works, the benefits of product-led growth are obvious: happier, stickier customers with faster and more efficient revenue growth. 

Like every glacial market shift, this has now birthed a new normal, the Modern GTM. Unfortunately, the industry forgot to do something important along the way—empower every sales team to operate in this new world where customers often use the product before they ever talk to sales. (Note: every public company with a product-led model has an enterprise sales team.) 

Enter Endgame. When I first met Alex Bilmes and Graham Murphy back in November 2020, I was in the process of transitioning out of Amplitude (the #1 analytics platform for product-led growth) to join Unusual Ventures, the first full-service seed fund in Silicon Valley. While still an idea on paper, their long-term vision for Endgame was crystal clear to us from the beginning. The massive demand from sales and growth leaders poured in just a few months after we invested in the form of securing renowned design partners like Figma, Airtable, and Miro, plus a growing waitlist for a private beta.

This latent demand from sales teams for product usage data is obvious to everyone in hindsight. GTM teams needed to understand exactly how their customers were already using the product before talking to them. But existing analytics solutions didn’t work for them for a couple of reasons:

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• BI tools are not good at visualizing the event streams of product data or modeling them to represent customer milestones.
• Product analytics tools like Amplitude are exploding in terms of market adoption, but are designed for deep feature level analysis without a focus on demographic information or user/account “states” that are critical to GTM teams.

The innovators amongst us have “rolled their own” solutions, so to speak, to get GTM teams the minimum customer state information required.

The diagram above roughly depicts what a few companies have done to give basic product usage data to their sales teams. Pipe the product event stream to a warehouse, model a few states, and join the data to accounts and contacts in a traditional CRM like Salesforce. But that’s not a great experience for sales and success teams:

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• CRM tools are universally bad at visualizing time series data. This means you can’t view the customer’s journey and experience with the product outside of a PQL score.
• They are also notoriously bad at surfacing *recent* changes in customer states. As every good salesperson knows, timing and momentum are everything in a deal. 
• Last but certainly not the least, they are a system of record and not action, leaving a lot of problems unsolved on the table.  

The end result is that even for the Modern GTM innovators amongst us, sales teams know they are missing potential accounts that are ready to level up to enterprise plans. They know they are giving their customers a sub-optimal experience when reaching out to them without clear visibility of their existing relationship with the product. The signal—and millions in potential ARR—is lost amongst the noise. 

This made it clear to Team Unusual that there was a new category waiting to be born: product-led sales. Part analytics, part sales CRM, and part growth system of action. 

Endgame is a product-led sales platform that helps every customer-facing team in B2B software take immediate action on prospective and current accounts to drive more revenue, faster. It works by analyzing real-time signals from a number of data sources, including product adoption, user behavior, transactional data, and more—without needing expensive data scientists or engineers. 

Today, Endgame is announcing both their Seed and Series A rounds adding up to $17.25M with an amazing group of investors, including my friend Naomi Ionita from Menlo Ventures, Kara Nortman from Upfront Ventures, Todd and Rahul's (CEO of Superhuman) fund, Lenny Rachitsky, Guillaume Cabane, Elena Verna, as well as founders and senior executives of Zoom, Dropbox, MongoDB, Github, Segment, Airtable, Loom, Clubhouse, Gainsight, Puppet, Retool, and others. 

Congratulations to Alex, Graham, and the entire Endgame Team! We are excited to be a part of the Endgame adventure!

Read more about Endgame’s Seed and Series A from CEO Alex Bilmes

Learn more about how to build a business with a Modern GTM at its core