Introducing Makelog: Unlocking the Power of Product Updates for Fast Shipping Companies

June 22, 2022 • Makelog Team

Today I’m excited to unveil what we’ve been working on at Makelog, the release communications platform that transforms your product updates into a beautifully designed, engaging platform that showcases product velocity and drives feature awareness and adoption from day one.

Throughout my career I’ve worked at hypergrowth companies like Segment, Warby Parker, and Scale AI. They all have one thing in common: a culture of product innovation. We were constantly shipping new products, features, and improvements. Yet when product and engineering teams are working fast and focused on execution (as they rightfully should be), sometimes customers, prospects, or even other employees are left in the dark and these enhancements go overlooked and, worse yet, unadopted.

Makelog changes that.

Customers like Monte Carlo, Armory, and PopSQL are seeing exciting results when rolling out our product. On average, they increase monthly product updates by 142% – so software teams are sharing 2.5x more with stakeholders than they were before. While we mostly see product and engineering use our product to share their work, a byproduct of this is that sales and customer success then leverage the updates as touchpoints for customer conversations. Makelog not only improves visibility into shipping velocity and impact, it can also contribute to new sales, renewals, and overall customer engagement and satisfaction.

We’ve raised $3M in seed funding from Accel

To support our growth and expansion, we’ve raised a $3M seed funding led by Accel with support from Basecamp Fund, Formulate Ventures, and Bluewatch Ventures. Angel investors to date include Calvin French-Owen, Ilya Volodarsky, and Ian Storm Taylor, the cofounders of Segment, Christine Yen, the CEO of Honeycomb.io, and Ashley Smith, former Global VP of Marketing at GitHub, among others from Miro, Reddit, and Stripe.

Here’s what Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel, said about why he led our seed round, "In today's CI/CD paradigm, important content around feature development, bug fixes, and version upgrades is routinely lost to the chaos of fast-growth. Makelog programmatically structures that 'innovation data' so an entire organization has a more active pulse on what's shipping, and to whom it matters. Driving that visibility levels up the entire company, and has a huge impact on sales, marketing and success."

With today’s funding, we’ll double down on our own product capabilities, with a particular focus on enabling continuous communication and integrating more deeply into the products and services that our customers already use like Linear, Jira, and GitHub. In fact, you should expect accelerated momentum in our own Makelog over the course of the next year! We’re hiring engineers and designers, so if you’d like to help contribute to our ledger in the future, check out our careers page.

We’re just at the beginning of our journey to help companies achieve more through fostering a culture of product transparency. If you’re interested in getting in touch, reach out at hello@makelog.com.