Product Management Confabulation

January 17, 2019

Pro.com raises $33M for its home improvement platform

Pro.com is basically a general contractor for the age of Uber and Prime Now. While the company started out as a marketplace for hiring home improvement professionals, it has now morphed into a general contractor and serves Denver, Phoenix San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle. Today, Pro.com announced that it has raised a $33 million Series B round led by WestRiver Group, Goldman Sach and Redfin. Previous investors DFJ, Madrona Venture Group, Maveron and Two Sigma Ventures also participated.

WestRiver founder Erik Anderson, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and former Microsoft exec Charlotte Guyman are joining the Pro.com board.

“Many of Redfin’s customers struggle to get professional renovation services, so we know firsthand that Pro.com’s market opportunity is massive,” writes Redfin’s Kelman. “Pro.com and Redfin share a commitment to combining technology and local, direct services to best take care of customers.”

The company tells me that the round caps off a successful 2018, where Pro.com saw its job bookings grow by 275 percent over 2017, a number that was also driven by its expansion beyond the Seattle market (as well as the good economic climate that surely helped in driving homeowners to tackle more home improvement projects). The company now has 125 employees.

With this funding round, Pro.com has now raised a total of $60 million. It’ll use the funding to enter more markets, with Portland, Oregon being next on the list, and expand its team as it goes along.

It’s no secret that the home improvement market could use a bit of a jolt. The market is extremely local and fragmented — and finding the right contractor for any major project is a long and difficult process, where the outcome is never quite guaranteed. The process has enough vagueries that many people never get around to actually commissioning their projects. Pro.com wants to change that with a focus on transparency and technology. That’s a startup that’s harder to scale than the marketplace the company started out with, but it also gives the company a chance to establish itself as one of the few well-known brands in this space.

January 17, 2019

5 Types of Marketers Your Company Needs

Have you ever prepared a meal with a group of people? Each person tends to gravitate towards what they do best. Some folks have impressive knife skills and some love to precisely measure out ingredients. Others shy away from the cooking altogether, preferring to lay out place settings instead. No matter the role, the goal is shared — an enjoyable meal.

It is not so different from being on a marketing team — you lean on your best skills to cook up a successful outcome.

As a marketer, you know there are many skills required to reach that outcome. Product announcements, advertising campaigns, social media, email blasts, blog posts — each one requires a unique approach. At larger organizations, this work is done by a team of people, each with their own specialized skills. But not every marketing team is like that.

Smaller organizations often have a marketing “team” of one or two — all-purpose marketing managers doing the work of many. No matter the structure, every marketing team needs to understand customers, the market, and have a vision for how they want to communicate. And they need to be flexible with the ability to tweak how they deliver a message based on the audience and time.

I have been fortunate to see marketing at its best over the last 20 years. I started out in marketing early in my career, and over the years I have worked with many talented teammates — all who practice their craft a bit differently. Today at Aha! I am fortunate to work with an incredibly high-performing marketing team.

Based on my experience, these are the five types of marketers that all companies need:

The Advocate
A true tech enthusiast, this marketer truly believes in the company’s product and loves sharing its benefits with customers. In order to do that, they need to work closely with product management — learning what new features and enhancements are coming so they can plan and deliver the go-to-market strategy. (They are often the first to use that new functionality — a big perk of the job.) And while you will often find this person on a product marketing team, they spend a lot of time working cross-functionally, highlighting the product’s value to teams like sales and support.

The Statistician
Recurring revenue, monthly trials, sales goals… this pro can practically recite these numbers in their sleep. This is because they spend their days mining data and pulling insights to help educate the team. For instance, when teammates are struggling on how to increase trials or engagement, this numbers-savvy pro can pull up an insightful report and guidance. When they are not weighing in on marketing campaigns, you will find them heads down in data — looking for new ways to optimize the budget.

The Wordsmith
Words, words, words. This scribe knows how to string the perfect ones together to send the right message with the right tone. Just ask the rest of the team — this is the go-to person when it comes to crafting new blogs, editing ad copy, or writing new marketing collateral. The best ones are more than just content pushers. They are strategists. It is their job to put together an editorial calendar that aligns with the company’s objectives, making sure each piece of content serves a clear purpose.

The Connector
Ping! That is the sound of another new notification. These community builders and social media managers have the ability to connect with people online and keep them engaged. They are skilled at writing short, quippy copy and responding to folks (especially those with support questions) in real time. But the connecting does not stop there. They are constantly pulling new analytics reports to understand what messages are working so they can better inform the next social calendar and engage with followers.

The Protector
This person voraciously guards the brand. You might even find them peering over the work of others — ensuring that every marketing activity and piece of communication stays true to the company’s core values and identity. This work is important but they do not just understand the company — they know the audience. They spend a lot of time analyzing the market and keeping a close eye on competitors in order to deliver messaging and materials that resonate.

You may approach your work differently from your teammates but you should all be united in your shared goals.

So, is there really such a thing as too many cooks in the kitchen? This old cliche rarely rings true for marketers. To realize big goals and create breakthrough moments for your company, you need a team. It is the only recipe for success.

Which types of marketers does your company have?

Help your team do great things — sign up for a free trial of Aha!

January 17, 2019

Hany Farid and Peter Barrett will be speaking at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI April 18 at UC Berkeley

We’re very excited to announce our first guests for this year’s TC Sessions: Robotics. TechCrunch is returning to the U.C. Berkeley campus again this April for another full-day session delving into all aspects of robotics. As we mark our third year, we’ve decided to add programming devoted to artificial intelligence, because you can’t really do robotics without AI.

We’ve got a ton of speakers, panels and demos to announce in the coming months, but we’re excited to start with a pair who encompass two distinct parts of the industry.

Hany Farid is Dartmouth’s Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of Computer Science, with a focus on human perception, image analysis and digital forensics. A recipient of the National Academy of Inventors, Alfred P. Sloan and John Simon Guggenheim fellowships, Farid is set to join the U.C. Berkeley faculty in July of this year.

Peter Barrett is the CTO of Playground Global, an investment firm that has backed a number of robotics startups, including Agility, Canvas, Common Sense, Skydio and Righthand Robotics. Prior to co-founding Playground, Barrett founded Rocket Science Games and served as the CTO of CloudCar and Microsoft TV.

TC Sessions: Robotics + AI is being held April 18 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.

Early Bird tickets are on sale now for $249 and students get a big discount with tickets running at just $45.

January 17, 2019

Streaming TV service Philo to launch a co-viewing feature for watching with friends

Following last year’s $40 million raise, low-cost streaming service Philo is preparing to further differentiate itself from rivals with the launch of a new feature that will allow viewers to watch shows together in real-time. With co-viewing, the company hopes to make a case for choosing Philo that goes beyond its affordability.

Instead, the company hopes subscribers will pick Philo simply because it’s a better way to watch TV.

It’s only been 14 months since Philo first introduced its take on the modern “skinny bundle” of TV delivered over the internet. The service opted to drop sports in order to keep the cost down, in order to appeal to budget-minded cord cutters, and particularly the younger demographic that never signed up for traditional TV in the first place.

Today, Philo subscribers can pay $16 per month for 43 entertainment and lifestyle channels – like those you’d find on cable TV – or you can opt top pay $20 for a larger bundle of 56 channels.

Since its debut, Philo has been quickly rolling out support for numerous platforms, including Fire TV, Apple TV, and Android TV. It also last year added user profiles, kicked off a referral program to boost its subscriber base, and introduced built-in sharing features.

While Philo won’t talk subscriber numbers yet, CEO Andrew McCollum told us at CES earlier this month that the service was growing 40 percent month-over-month, on average, throughout 2018.

For 2019, Philo aims to continue that trajectory, he said. And one way it’s planning to do so is through the launch of new product features.

“I feel like we have a really strong and unique offering, so it’s nice that people are responding to it,” McCollum said.

However, he admitted that, so far, what Philo offers is still very similar to cable TV – the very thing it aims to replace.

“We give you a lot of the same experience you can get on a cable box, only it works on all your devices. It’s an unlimited DVR. It’s all in the cloud. It’s much simpler. It’s got a lot better search and discovery…by default, we do a lot things to make it easier and better,” McCollum said. “But, by and large, it’s a similar experience to what you’re used to with cable.”

Now that’s about to change.

The company has developed a synchronization technology that will allow users to share links in order to invite friends and family to watch TV with them, at the same time.

This technology has been available on other platforms. For example, YouTube in 2017 launched an experimental app for watching videos with friends called Uptime. Tumblr tried, then shuttered, a similar app called Cabana. There are also apps like Let’s Watch It, Rabbit, and others. Even Facebook has been working on a co-watching feature.

But none of the live TV streaming services – like Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, etc. – offer a way to co-watch TV with others.

McCollum said Philo’s co-watching feature is finished from a technical perspective, and the team is now polishing the user interface. The plan, at present, will have Philo subscribers using their TV and their phone in conjunction with one another to launch the co-viewing experience.

The way it works is this: After finding something to watch, you’ll be able to press a button to share a link with a friend through a text message. The friend opens the link on their own phone, casts the show to their TV, and Philo then links the two sessions together.

The team is finalizing how this all flows to make the process feel seamless and natural, with as few steps as possible, McCollum said. But the feature is ready to launch, and will arrive “soon.”

In addition to co-viewing, Philo is also working on a clever joint recommendations feature. With this, you and someone else – a roommate, a friend, or a significant other, for example – could connect your Philo profiles together in order to browse a set of recommendations based on your shared tastes and interests.

This may launch after the co-viewing experience, but the two features will be tied together at some point.

Also in 2019, Philo says it will explore expanding its service through add-ons. These may encompass premium cable channels (like Showtime and Starz, e.g.), premium digital content, or even traditional broadcasts networks, or sports channels.

“We want to balance creating more options with making sure people don’t feel like they’re being coerced into stuff they don’t care about,” said McCollum.

Philo’s coming updates could make the service more compelling at a time when there’s an overabundance of choice in terms of getting TV delivered over the internet. While on-demand video services like Netflix and Prime Video have amassed millions of subscribers, many consumers today are still deciding if they want to cut the cord with cable TV – only to replace it with something that looks very much like cable TV. Philo could encourage them to make the switch by offering something differentiated.

Philo to date has raised over $90 from investors including AMC Networks, Discovery, Viacom, A+E Networks, CBC New Media, NEA, Rho Ventures and Xfund.

(Image credits: Philo; images do not show the yet-to-launch features)

January 17, 2019

Streaming TV service Philo to launch a co-viewing feature for watching with friends

Instead, the company hopes subscribers will pick Philo simply because it’s a better way to watch TV.

Today, Philo subscribers can pay $16 per month for 43 entertainment and lifestyle channels – like those you’d find on cable TV – or you can opt top pay $20 for a larger bundle of 56 channels.

While Philo won’t talk subscriber numbers yet, CEO Andrew McCollum told us at CES earlier this month that the service was growing 40 percent month-over-month, on average, throughout 2018.

For 2019, Philo aims to continue that trajectory, he said. And one way it’s planning to do so is through the launch of new product features.

“I feel like we have a really strong and unique offering, so it’s nice that people are responding to it,” McCollum said.

However, he admitted that, so far, what Philo offers is still very similar to cable TV – the very thing it aims to replace.

Now that’s about to change.

The company has developed a synchronization technology that will allow users to share links in order to invite friends and family to watch TV with them, at the same time.

But none of the live TV streaming services – like Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, etc. – offer a way to co-watch TV with others.

The team is finalizing how this all flows to make the process feel seamless and natural, with as few steps as possible, McCollum said. But the feature is ready to launch, and will arrive “soon.”

This may launch after the co-viewing experience, but the two features will be tied together at some point.

“We want to balance creating more options with making sure people don’t feel like they’re being coerced into stuff they don’t care about,” said McCollum.

Philo to date has raised over $90 from investors including AMC Networks, Discovery, Viacom, A+E Networks, CBC New Media, NEA, Rho Ventures and Xfund.

(Image credits: Philo; images do not show the yet-to-launch features)

January 17, 2019

Squad is the new screensharing chat app everyone will copy

Squad could be the next teen sensation because it makes it easy to do nothing… together. Spending time with friends in the modern age often means just being on your phones next to each other, occasionally showing off something funny you found. Squad lets you do this even while apart, and that way of punctuating video chat might make it the teen girl “third place” like Fortnite is for adolescent boys.

With Squad, you fire up a video chat with up to six people, but at any time you can screenshare what you’re seeing on your phone instead of showing your face. You can browse memes together, trash talk about DMs or private profiles, brainstorm a status update, co-work on a project or get consensus on your Tinder swipe. It’s deceptively simple, but remarkably alluring. And it couldn’t have happened until now.

How Squad screensharing looks

Squad takes advantage of Apple’s ReplayKit for screensharing. While it was announced in 2015, it wasn’t until June 2018’s iOS 12 that ReplayKit became stable and easy enough to be built into a consumer app for teens. Meanwhile, plus-size screens and speedy LTE and upcoming 5G networks make screensharing watchable. And with Instagram aging and Snapchat shrinking, there’s demand for a more intimately connected social network.

Squad only launched its app last week, but droves of Facebook and Snap employees have signed up to spy on and likely copy the startup, co-founder and CEO Esther Crawford tells me. Screensharing would fit well in group video chat startup Houseparty too. To fuel its head start, Squad has the $2.2 million it raised before it pivoted away from Molly, the team’s previous App where people can make FAQs about themselves. That cash came from betaworks, Y Combinator, #BUILTBYGIRLS, Basis Set Ventures, Jesse Draper, Gary Vaynerchuk, Niv Dror, and [Disclosure: former TechCrunch editor] Alexia Bonatsos. Next, Squad wants to let people tune in to screenshares via URL to unlock a new era of Live broadcasting, and equip other apps with the capability through a Squad SDK.

“People under 24 do video chat way different than people 25 and above” says Crawford. Adding screensharing is “an excuse for hanging out.”

Serious ideas are preludes to toys

Screensharing has long been common in enterprise communication apps like Webex, Zoom and Slack. I even called a collaborative browsing and desktop screensharing app my favorite project from Facebook’s 2011 college hackathon. But we don’t just use our screens for work any more. Teens and young adults live on the digital plane, navigating complex webs of friendships, entertainment and academia through their phones. Squad makes those experiences social — including the “social” networks we often scroll through in isolation. Charles and Ray Eames said “Toys are preludes to serious ideas,” but this time, it is happening in reverse.

Squad co-founders from left: Ethan Sutin, Esther Crawford

“The idea came from a combination of things — a pain we were experiencing as a team,” Crawford recalls. My development team is constantly sending each other screenshots and screen recordings. It seemed ridiculous that I can’t just show you what’s on my screen. It was a business use case internally.” But then came the wisdom of a 13-year-old. “My daughter over the summer was bugging me. ‘Why can’t I just show what’s on my screen with my friends?’ I said I think it’s not technically possible.” That’s when Crawford discovered advances in ReplayKit meant it suddenly was possible.

Crawford had already seen this cycle of tool to toy before, as she was an early YouTuber. Back in the mid-2000s, people thought of YouTube as a place to host videos about eBay listings, professional presentations or dating profile supplements. “They couldn’t imagine that if you let people just reliably and easily upload video content, there’d be all these creative enterprises.”

Use cases for Squad

After stints in product marketing at Coach.com and Stride Labs, she built Estherbot — a chatbot version of herself that let people learn about her. Indeed, 50,000 people ended up trying it, convincing her people needed new ways to reveal themselves to friends. She met Ethan Sutin through the project and together they co-founded FAQ app Molly before it fizzled out and was shut down. “Molly wasn’t working; it had high initial engagement sessions, but then they would drop off. Maybe it’s not the right time for the augmented version of you,” noted Crawford.

Crawford and Sutin pivoted Molly into Squad to keep exploring new formats for vulnerability. “What excited Ethan and I was this mission to help people feel less lonely.”

Alone, together

Squad recommends apps to screenshare

Squad worked, thanks to a slick way to activate screensharing. The app launches to the selfie camera similar to Snapchat, but with a + button for inviting friends to a video call. Tap the screenshare button at the bottom, select Squad and start the broadcast. To guide users toward the best screensharing experiences, a menu of apps emerges encouraging users to open Instagram, TikTok, Bumble, their camera roll and others.

People can bounce back and forth between screensharing and video chat, and tap a friend’s window to view it full-screen. And when they want another friend to see what they’re seeing, Squad goes viral. One concern is that Squad breaks privacy controls. You could have friends show you someone’s Instagram profile you’re blocked by or aren’t allowed to see. But the same goes for hanging out in person, and this is one reason Squad doesn’t let you download videos of your chats and is considering screenshot warnings.

What’s so special about Squad is that it lacks the intensity of traditional video chat, where you constantly feel pressured to perform. You can fire up a chat room, and then go back to phoning as you please with your screen displayed instead of your blank face (though the Android version in beta offers picture-in-picture so you can show your mug and the screen).

“There’s no picture-in-picture on iOS, but younger users don’t even really care. I can point it at the bed and you can tell me when there’s something to look at,” Crawford tells me. A few people, alone in their houses, video chatting without looking at each other, still feel a sense of togetherness.

The future of Squad could grant that feeling to a massive audience of a celebrity or influencer. The startup is working on shareable URLs that creators could post on other social networks like Twitter or Facebook that their fans could click to watch. Tagging along as Kylie Jenner or Ninja play around on their phone could bring people closer to their heroes while serving as a massive growth opportunity for Squad. Similarly, colonizing other apps with an SDK for screensharing could allow Squad to recruit their users.

Squad makes starting a screenshare easy

The startup will face stiff technical challenges. Lag or low video quality destroy the feeling of delight it delivers, Crawford admits, so the team is focused on making sure the app works well even in rural areas like middle America where many early users live. But the real test will be whether it can build a new social graph upon the screensharing idea if already popular apps build competing features. Gaming tools like Discord and Twitch already offer web screensharing, and I suggested Facebook should bring the feature to Messenger when in late-2017 it launched in its Workplace office collaboration app.

Helping a friend choose when to swipe right on Tinder via Squad

In June I wrote that Instagram and Snapchat would try to steal the voice-activated visual effects at the center of an app called Panda. Snapchat started testing those just two months later. Instagram’s whole Stories feature was cloned from Snapchat, and it also cribbed Q&A Stories from Polly. Overshadowed, Panda and Polly have faded from the spotlight. With Facebook and Snap already sniffing around Squad, it’s quite possible they’ll try to copy it. Squad will have to hope first-mover advantage and focus can defeat a screensharing feature bolted on to apps with hundreds of millions or even billions of users.

But regardless of who delivers this next phase of sharing, it’s coming. “Everyone knows that the content flooding our feeds is a filtered version of reality. The real and interesting stuff goes down in DMs because people are more authentic when they’re 1:1 or in small group conversations,” Crawford wrote.

Perhaps there’s no better antidote to the poison of social media success theater that revealing that beyond the Instagram highlights, we’re often just playing around on our phones. Squad might not be glamorous, but it’s authentic and a lot more fun.

January 17, 2019

Squad is the new screensharing chat app everyone will copy

How Squad screensharing looks

“People under 24 do video chat way different than people 25 and above” says Crawford. Adding screensharing is “an excuse for hanging out.”

Serious ideas are preludes to toys

Squad co-founders from left: Ethan Sutin, Esther Crawford

Use cases for Squad

Crawford and Sutin pivoted Molly into Squad to keep exploring new formats for vulnerability. “What excited Ethan and I was this mission to help people feel less lonely.”

Alone, together

Squad recommends apps to screenshare

Squad makes starting a screenshare easy

Helping a friend choose when to swipe right on Tinder via Squad

January 17, 2019

Prisma’s style transfer tech creeps into kids’ books

The style transfer craze kicked off by an app called Prisma a couple of years ago led to a tsunami of painterly selfies flooding social feeds for several months, as we reported at the time, before the rapacious, face-snapping hoards shifted their attention toward fresh spectacles. But that’s not the end of the story.

The same tech is now creeping into (paper) kids’ books, via a partnership between children’s publisher startup, Kabook, and Prisma Labs: aka the b2b entity that the original app makers pivoted to in late 2017.

So instead of AI sending robots into a human-slaying frenzy, per the usual dystopian sci-fi storyline, we find ourselves confronted with neural nets being used to serve up contextual illustrations of children so parents can gift personalized books that seamlessly insert a child’s likeness into the story, thereby casting them as a character in the tale.

Not the end of the world then. Well, not unless you view this kind of self-centered content manipulation as a threat to children’s imaginations and developing sense of empathy. (The research on any ‘little princes in training’ will, unfortunately, have to wait a few decades to come through though.)

The Kabook integration is the first consumer product partnership that Prisma Labs has scored, according to a press release from the pair.

And while they note there are other publishing services that offer the chance to insert a bit of custom text and photography into a book they claim their collaboration is the only publishing technology that does this “seamlessly”, i.e. thanks to the AI’s style blending fingers.

[gallery ids="1770824,1770839,1770840"]

“We are excited to be able to work directly with the team at Kabook! to create a truly unique user experience; one that has offered young readers a completely personalized way to enjoy reading,” said Andrey Usoltsev, CEO of Prisma Labs, in a statement.

“Part of our mission at Prisma Labs is to develop new ways for people to express their emotions through digital creations, and through this partnership with Kabook! we are able to take that one step further and bring that to life on the pages of an actual book.”

Kabook, which was set up last year — describing itself as “a technology-based” children’s book publisher, with a focus on kids aged 0-7 years — is currently offering four stories that can be personalized with a kid’s AI-generated likeness.

Three of the books incorporate just one custom image into the story. While a fourth, called Hornswoggled!, makes uses of seven photos in a pirate-themed buried treasure adventure.

The personalized stories start at $24.99 per book, with hard and soft cover versions available.

January 17, 2019

Index has backed Immersive Games Lab, a new startup from founder of Tough Mudder

Immersive Games Lab, a new venture from Tough Mudder co-founder and Chairman Will Dean, has picked up around £2.5 million in seed funding, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, London-based Index Ventures has led the round.

In a call confirming the close, Dean told me Sweet Capital, and JamJar Investments (the VC fund set up by the 3 Innocent Drinks founders) also participated.

Developing the “next generation” of immersive group gaming, Immersive Games Lab describes itself as “part indoor theme park, part video game, part escape room” and says it will launch a new breed of “captivating group experiences” in London in early 2019.

Little else is known regarding what Immersive Games Lab’s first experience will be, although Dean told me it will be sold in retail spaces, in ticket form, and will be a blend of technology and in-person group activity. It is currently being prototyped and tested in a warehouse in North London.

More broadly, he said the idea of creating a new kind of immersive gaming experience is partly based on the sentiment that we spend too much screen time on our devices, consuming social media in a way that isn’t always good for our mental health.

His previous and hugely successful venture Tough Mudder was all about creating a new, fun experience around exercise — and ultimately helping people become more physically active. Dean says he is keen for Immersive Games Lab to also make a positive dent on people’s lives.

The new venture also builds nicely on Dean’s track record of creating an experience and community-led consumer proposition — and implementing the type of go-to market strategy that requires. Which is undoubtedly what caught the interest of Index and other investors, in what I understand was an oversubscribed round.

Immersive Games Lab’s other co-founder is David Spindler, who also played a key role at Tough Mudder.