COVID has generated a new need for collaboration tools as the world moved to remote work. With companies struggling to keep their workforce on the same page, communication and training platforms shifted from nice to have to necessities for the health of businesses. According to McKinsey, 97% of employees and executives believe a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. Tango is a workflow documentation platform that simplifies capturing processes and providing step-by-step tutorials for virtually any process, ensuring that teams and employees are seamlessly on the same page. The platform offers a browser extension that captures workflows and allows employees to annotate and document on the go without friction. Tango, founded in 2020, focuses on the workplace learning market ($370B), allowing organizations to ensure that their employees are able to optimize productivity and scale up their skills while new hires are on-boarded quickly with an enduring repository of company best practices available. The platform is currently in private beta with public beta opening next month.
LA TechWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Ken Babcock to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$5.7M Seed Round.
Wing Venture Capital led the seed funding round of $5.7M with participation from General Catalyst, GSV Ventures, Outsiders Fund, and Red Sea Ventures. Angel investors include Michael Stoppelman (former Senior Vice President of Engineering at Yelp), Jai Ranganathan (former Head of Data at Uber), Shoaib Makani (CEO of Keep Truckin), and Julia Lipton (Awesome People Ventures).
Tell us about your product or service.
Tango is the only workflow intelligence platform that removes the burden of creating workflow documentation while providing the insights necessary for organizations to standardize best practices, onboard and train new hires more quickly and improve employee performance.
Tango’s Chrome Extension integrates into existing tools to automatically capture your workflow best practices in real-time to create beautiful step-by-step tutorials without the time or performance art required for video recording. Tango transcribes actions, URLs, and screenshots and provides you with instantaneous documentation easily exported into commonly used platforms.
What inspired the start of Tango?
We saw an opportunity to reduce the friction in creating documentation. For growing organizations, the key to scale is often making internal process and knowledge accessible. When I was at Uber, our secret sauce was providing the playbook and data for cities to grow without bureaucracy or ambiguity.
How is it different?
Tango does 90% of the work for you in creating documentation. We automatically create step-by-step guides complete with descriptions, annotated screenshots, and links. When a user finishes their Workflow, we make it easy to share with other users or export to commonly used wiki applications.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We’re tackling the $370B workplace learning market.
What’s your business model?
We’ll provide premium features free for 60 days, at which point we’ll introduce Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans paid on a per seat per month basis.
How has the business been impacted by COVID-19?
COVID has accelerated the adoption of our product as organizations figure out how to facilitate onboarding, knowledge transfer, and ongoing training in a remote and/or hybrid environment.
What was the funding process like?
Fast! With a virtual fundraising environment, we were able to quickly tap into investors across the country. One day, we had three pitches across three different time zones, which we wouldn’t have been able to do in a prior funding environment.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
In fundraising, you’re always looking for the right investor alignment. As much as you’re pitching for investment, you’re also trying to determine which firms truly get your mission and vision, and will be there for you when you need it. It’s a mutual selection process, and everyone is on their best behavior.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We boil it down to three factors:
- We invested in customer discovery, and those customers spoke on our behalf that Tango would be a gamechanger.
- Prevailing trends in remote work were changing how organizations leverage peer learning.
- We had already built a solid team, all working for the mission (unpaid) at that time. We have now converted everyone to full-time, paid employees.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We’re tightly focused on user adoption and engagement. What we see from pirate metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, Re-engagement – AARRR) will define how close we’re getting to Product-Market Fit. With the introduction of paid plans, we’re also looking to paid conversion to continue to define our user personas.
What advice can you offer companies in Los Angeles that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Spend an inordinate time defining the problem with potential customers. We only transitioned to building when we started hearing the same issues ad nauseam.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We will build out team-based functionality that makes sharing, collaborating, and training on Tango dead-simple.
What is your favorite restaurant in LA?
Hatchet Hall in Culver City.
