Journey (YC W21) – a better tool for selling software

Hi, we’re pclark, bweitz and anilsevim, the founders of Journey (https://journey.io). We want to make buying and selling software a better experience. We do this by allowing sellers and marketers to combine all sorts of content—slides, videos, forms, calendars, text—into one sharable webpage, which they can then easily personalize for specific prospects. Think of it like a website that is specifically designed for a specific individual to take a specific action, which answers any questions or objections they may have.

For example, I took one of our standard demos and made a "personalized" version for HN here: https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?pr.... To customize it, I simply added the YC logo at the top, and a "Welcome HN" video to intro the demo—but you can customize these things as much as you like, as your sales process moves forward.

Edit: here's a further example on top of that one: https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?em.... In response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27235504, I made a new version of the "Welcome HN" demo by adding a personalized intro video, changing the logo at the top (I just picked a different one arbitrarily), and restricting it to a specific person (note the "only visible to [email address]" text on the right). Of course it's not really restricted, because we want you all to see it, but it's an example of how you can evolve these demos in response to specific people's questions.

Back in 2012 I launched a B2B email marketing startup called Userfox on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715237), and as that company grew I repeatedly found that it was really hard to create an email that performed well—because if an email is too long users will skim over it, and if it has more than one link they’ll never come back to click them all. Our hope is that Journey helps fix such interactions by allowing you to send users a specific page that has all the content you want them to read, including answers to their specific questions about your product.

Sales people have a hard job, and we don’t think their tools help them enough—they have to rely on live meetings and phone calls. Which is annoying because a live phone call is pretty much the last thing I want to do when I want to actually use a product. You have to talk to a sales person because there isn’t a good way to communicate complexity today in an asynchronous manner.

Sales and marketing is actually ‘just’ storytelling. You build something and then you tell people why they want it. We often think that the latter part is the easy part—but it isn’t! It’s really hard to introduce your product to someone, even when you know they would benefit from it.

If Journey can provide a superior storytelling experience it stands to reason that humans will require fewer live meetings. You don’t need to telephone for a taxi because you have the Uber app.... You won’t need to talk to a human to buy software because you’ll have Journey…

Journey specifically is a web app where you can embed and sequence various pieces of content (videos, slides, forms, calendars, …) and then share that sequence (a “Journey”). You can then take a Journey and personalize it for a specific recipient. Once you’ve shared a Journey, you get insights on where they’re spending time, and any comments they may have. Over time, you and your prospect can build up an entire sales conversation this way, focused around what they specifically need from your product. And you can reuse any bits that worked particularly well in your future conversations with other prospects.

We’d love to know what HN thinks of Journey, here's a link again to our HN demo mentioned above: https://jny.journey.io/p/3bbb55f82a224e399aafd2dc04f4f32b?pr.... From there you’ll be able to sign up, request an onboarding call, view case studies, and learn more. Thank you!!