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Find out why CS Angel invested in Bagel's $1.2m pre-seed round alongside Atic LLC, Think Capital, and other private investors.
At most tech companies, the tension between GTM and Product teams can be cut with a knife. Product is always under pressure to develop features that aren’t on the roadmap and seldom gets enough guidance into how to prioritize the many requests that GTM teams generate. On the other hand, GTM teams are frustrated that what gets prioritized is of little use and what gets built isn’t what their customers are asking for.
It’s a mess and, worse than that, it’s a waste of time and resources, with some estimates as high as $150 billion being lost per year due to misalignment. There has to be a better way!
Enter Bagel. Co-founded by Itai Danino, (Co-Founder of Houseparty before it was acquired by Epic Games) Ohad Biron (Prophesse), and Yuval Nachman (ClickTale, acquired by ContentSquare, LivePerson) Bagel was born of the frustration around the broken feedback loop between Product and GTM.
Ohad realized the crucial need for a solution like Bagel at his previous company. The way he tells it: “I found myself chasing after Product teams on a daily basis, frustrated and asking, ‘Why aren’t they listening to me? Why aren’t they listening to our customers? Why am I discovering new features while doing a demo?’ I saw us, literally, losing business opportunities because of that.Therefore, it was clear to me that that's a huge problem that I wanted to solve.”
Itai and Yuval agreed and from their partnership came Bagel.
Bagel Bridges the Gap Between Product and GTM
The major reason that Product and GTM struggle to work together is because they speak different languages when it comes to the product improvements; Product focuses on data while GTM focuses on customer pain and anecdotes. Bagel bridges that gap, Ohad tells us, by “making this whole discussion between GTM and Product more factual and data driven.”
They do that in two ways: First, by integrating with both the Product and GTM tech stacks so anyone working with customers can create feature requests directly from where they’re working and Product can review those requests where they are.
Then, using AI, Bagel surfaces similar customer evidence to give the Product team direct insight into how often the same product gap has come up and what sort of pain customers are experiencing. Using that information, Bagel is able to attribute a dollar value and a more accurate sense of urgency to each feature, so both Product and GTM know just which requests will have the biggest revenue impact.
And that’s a game changer. Now, Product and GTM can speak the same language, combining the customer pains that lead to feature requests with real data to tell a complete story. and data-driven approach to prioritizing the product roadmap.
Just like that, the biggest driver of tension between Product and GTM is gone. Everyone wins, especially customers.
Why We Invested
Obviously, Bagel’s pitch to finally align Product and GTM offers massive potential, and that perked up the ears of a mighty group of angels who are all expert GTM operators. Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, Founder at CS Angel (former CCO at Chili Piper, Medallia, Cision) was immediately drawn to Bagel’s ability to drive NRR (Net Revenue Retention), a north star metric for SaaS companies. According to Gemma, “NRR powered by customer-led-growth depends on better collaboration between CS, Sales and Product teams. BagelAI assistance fosters this, helping turn product requests into revenue”.
Customer-centric organizations have a remarkable opportunity to enhance the way they transform invaluable customer insights into prioritized requests for our Product leaders. Rosie Roca (former CRO Hopin, Salesforce, Box) agrees and also went on to invest. According to Rosie, “In many organizations today, this crucial task is often managed manually (often by multiple teammates) through platforms like Slack, Notion, JIRA, and Google Docs. What sets Bagel apart is its ability to revolutionize this entire process. It offers a streamlined approach that enables both our GTM (Go-to-Market) and Product teams to gain a profound understanding of the immediate revenue and customer implications of their product-related decisions. By leveraging Bagel, we are poised to unlock unprecedented levels of efficiency and insight in our journey toward customer-centric excellence”.
Chad Horenfeldt (VP CX at Path Factory, former Meta, Eloqua), looked at his investment from the perspective of a CS leader, “One of the most challenging tasks I have as a CS leader is to provide our executive team with the overall product themes that are emanating from our customers. Bagel aims to solve this problem by pulling out the various forms of product feedback and serving this up in a way that can be easily digestible. This removes opinions from the conversation and focuses it on the data.”
Similarly, Ezra Zimbler (CS Leader at Linkedin), was attracted to invest after trying to build his own process before he knew Bagel existed, “Over the past year I have been on a journey with my team to be able to show the impact on revenue that new product features would create. Right now, this process has been very manual and tedious. I love the work that Ohad Biron and the Bagel team is doing because it is trying to make this entire process much easier and automate it as much as possible. I am so excited for their vision to come to life so we can create an even stronger partnership between our client-facing teams and our product partners!”Consultants also signed up to invest, including Jan Young (Founder & CCO, JanYoungCX). Jan shared "as a consultant, I work with a lot of different companies and one of the most common challenges I see is the lack of a common language that leads to a lack of alignment-- not just internally, but with the customer. What impressed me about Bagel is how the platform makes it easy for everyone to share their perspective and the information that they bring to the table, then translates it into the information and language that the others need, in the place that they need it. So if Sales spends their day in Salesforce, Marketing is in Hubspot, Product is in ProductBoard, and CS is in a CSP, everyone can continue to work from their platform. The difference is, now they are connected and speaking to each other. The GTM alignment fostered by Bagel doesn't just allow each team to work better together, it connects them to the customer, leading to everyone's success."
Mary Poppen (President at HRIZONS, former SAP, Glint, Lawson Software), was excited about the potential Bagel holds for all tech companies, “Every technology company needs a streamlined way for customers and internal teams to align with product enhancements and innovations, and Bagel is the first solution to provide a systemic way to solve this challenge!”
Bagel solves a massive problem that every B2B SaaS company faces when scaling- how to keep the customer at the center of your roadmap. And this is only the beginning for Bagel. In the future, they promise to improve product launches and proactively identify potential beta customers, bringing new insights to Product teams and helping GTM teams deliver better versions of the features customers need to succeed sooner. The future of the GTM-Product relationship is bright with Bagel. Become an angel investor and join the CS Angel waitlist.
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