HubSpot Alum Aims to Give Customers a Voice with Latest Venture

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BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Former Head of Creative & Design at HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) and Chief Product Officer at Firecracker (acquired, AEX: WKL), Keith Frankel, announces today the launch of Parlay, his newest venture designed to give customers a direct say in the development of the digital products they use.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180426006566/en/

Keith Frankel, Co-founder & CEO (Photo: Business Wire)

Parlay will be presenting publicly for the first time on May 2, 2018 on the center stage at Collision Conference – “America’s fastest growing tech conference” (Forbes) – as part of the semi-finals of its startup pitch competition.

Founded in 2017 by 3 technical co-founders, Parlay is a Customer Collaboration Platform designed to transform how digital product teams engage their customers more deeply and effectively in their ongoing product development efforts. Through Parlay, teams can engage their customers in a far more proactive and personal manner, giving both sides the tools they need to share new ideas, review potential product updates, validate the impact of future efforts, and dramatically de-risk the cost of new feature development.

“The average American uses just around 9 different digital products every single day,” said Frankel, “yet very few people has ever been contacted by someone actually capable and responsible for improving those products. Rather than talking to users directly, development teams have fallen into a misguided over-reliance on analytics tools and Customer Support teams to learn about their customers’ wants and needs. Unsurprisingly, most teams don't know their users nearly as well as they think, meaning a whole lot of expensive and time-consuming duds are being built.”

While Parlay is focused on making an immediate impact on the $600B annual global software market, its founders believe its value will increase exponentially over the next few years, in particular as AI and automation make hyper-rapid software development a possibility.

“Today, companies are still able to rely primarily on their software’s feature differentiation as their main form of competitive advantage,” Frankel said. “However, competitive advantage through feature differentiation will soon be a thing of the past, especially as the tools we use to build features become so powerful that we can essentially instantaneously copy and launch the same features as our competitors. At that point, there will be no defensible, long-term feature differentiation. Instead, teams will need to rely primarily on the relationships they've built with their customers to prevent disruption. Very few teams are prepared for this shift.”

Early-stage digital product companies can now apply to join Parlay’s open beta for free. More mature companies can lock in a year subscription at Parlay’s currently discounted price, giving them access to future product updates at no additional cost.

About ParlayParlay App, Inc. is a Customer Collaboration Platform designed to provide digital product teams with the tools they need to engage their customers as active collaborators. Through Parlay, development teams can accurately determine the impact of potential new features before they spend the precious time and money building them, and in the process, fundamentally transform how they effectively identify, engage, and collaborate with their customers. The result: better products and better relationships – at a fraction of the cost.

For more information about Parlay, visit https://parlay.ai or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, AngelList, and Crunchbase.