Startup Spotlight #12: The User is Always Right
Every website needs users. But to get users, you need to truly know them - their needs, their pains and their goals - and build your user journey around them. Today's startup makes that a breeze.
Project Overview
TheyDo specializes in helping businesses build and manage user journeys. The platform not only maps out these paths but also analyzes them to allow for optimization and continuous improvements.
It unites efforts across product teams, enabling collaboration between managers, product leads, UX researchers, and UI designers.
The platform constructs user journeys based on research data, ranging from brief survey responses to comprehensive studies. However, crafting the right questions to elicit actionable insights can be a challenge.
To simplify this, TheyDo provides a library of survey and research templates, making it easier to design effective user journeys.
Even with the right data, analyzing it to create user journeys is a labor-intensive process. This is where TheyDo’s AI assistant, Journey AI, steps in. It automates the process of building user journeys from survey results and integrates them directly into the platform.
Journey AI cuts the time required for creating user journeys by 85%. Tasks that typically take 74 hours manually are reduced significantly.
The AI doesn’t generate a single, generalized journey. Instead, it segments and groups data to create distinct personas and personalized journeys for different user types and goals.
Once user journeys are created, the AI identifies the critical steps where users tend to drop off. For example, many users abandon registration forms when asked to provide their phone numbers. Beyond such obvious pitfalls, the AI uncovers numerous challenges even after registration across various user paths.
At each problematic step, the AI attaches notes derived from user feedback, explaining why issues occur. This enables teams to develop targeted hypotheses for solving these problems—through clearer explanations, interface simplifications, or adjustments to the user flow.
After implementing changes, the platform tracks their impact, showing whether more users successfully navigate through bottlenecks or if further refinements are needed.
This structured, data-driven approach empowers product teams to solve real problems effectively and measure the success of their solutions.
TheyDo offers a free plan for analyzing up to 10 user journeys, but paid tiers range from $65 per journey per month (minimum of 50 journeys) to $135 per journey per month (minimum of 120 journeys).
Despite these (relatively) high prices, TheyDo has major brands like Ford, Cisco, Lego, and Johnson & Johnson among its clients — a notable achievement, especially for a European startup based in the Netherlands.
The company recently raised €31.1 million, bringing its total funding to €45.5 million.
What’s the Gist?
The market for platforms that streamline product development and management is thriving.
Earlier this year, Airfocus — a startup that introduced what it claims to be a “new way to manage products” — secured $14.9 million in funding. Similarly, Productboard, which launched a product management platform, has raised $261.7 million to date, including a $125 million round in 2022.
These aren’t the only examples. Other startups in this space are also securing significant investment.
What makes TheyDo stand out is its roster of clients, which includes companies like Ford and Johnson & Johnson — businesses that aren’t traditionally associated with B2C digital products.
Why would such companies invest in an expensive platform for user journeys?
The explanation lies in a slide from Airfocus’s pitch deck: “By 2030, every company, whether software development is its core business or not, will need to become a software development company.”
In today’s landscape, businesses must digitize their operations to remain competitive, creating internal software solutions. Globally, companies already spend $4.5 trillion on IT infrastructure, with a growing share allocated to internal platforms.
The larger the company, the more resources are devoted to developing internal tools. While smaller firms dedicate 25–30% of developers’ time to internal software, this figure rises to 40–45% in larger enterprises. Even in non-software businesses, internal platforms dominate development priorities.
Internal tools, like any product, need to provide excellent user experiences for their primary users — company employees. Optimizing these experiences drives efficiency across the organization.
This burgeoning market for internal software tools is vast, underexplored, and ripe for innovation.
Key Takeaways
The internal software product market is a major growth area fueled by accelerating digital transformation across different industries.
There are many ways to enter this market. For example, Retool — a startup offering pre-built modules for speeding up internal product development — has raised $141 million.
TheyDo and Airfocus approach this space from a product management angle, which is as vital as coding.
In fact, as AI increasingly takes over coding tasks, deciding what to build becomes even more important.
AI tools like TheyDo’s Journey AI highlight how artificial intelligence can enhance human decision-making in developing, refining, and managing internal software products.
The question now is: how can AI be further leveraged to create platforms that improve efficiency in developing and using internal tools?
Company info
TheyDo
Website: https://www.theydo.com/
Last funding round: €31.1 million, 14.03.2024
Total funds raised: €45.5 million over 4 rounds