It’s good to be in the Stripe mafia.
That’s a term startuppy folks use for early employees who spin out their own startups, ICYDK. More than 40 new companies have been started by ex-Stripers to date. Some are still in stealth mode. Others have launched on Product Hunt, including Quill, Watershed, Clearbit,and OpenAI.
Sometimes Stripe invests in these startups, and recently Stripe backed one called Accord, which made its Product Hunt debut yesterday. Accord is a “customer collaboration platform” for sales and onboarding teams. The founding team of three is made up of two brothers with seasoned sales backgrounds – Ross Rich (who’s ex-Stripe), Ryan Rich (who’s ex-Google) – and Wayne Pan.
What's the startup? If you’ve ever been on either side of a B2B sale, your experience most likely included dealing with a mess of emails, chasing approvals, tracking pitch decks, and going back and forth on contracts. And enterprise sales? Imagine more of the same but with more people and on a bigger scale.
The goal of the Accord platform is to make the whole process flow better, with all of the information around a sale accessible for sales teams and customers. Accord's features include shared timelines and milestones, a resource center, and integrations with CRMs so that sales teams aren’t working against their current process.
More to the story. Accord fits within a growing trend called “buyer-first selling." Not long ago, we wrote about TestBox in this space too, which takes a “try it before you buy it” approach to enterprise sales.
Buyer-first approaches involve designing a sales process around the buyer and you can see how a sort of cross-company project management tool like Accord could make for a better buyer experience.
YC, at least, was convinced of the concept quickly. TechCrunch reported:
“[T]he founders applied to YC… and impressed the incubator with their insight and industry experience, even though they didn’t really have a product yet. In fact, they literally drew their original idea on a piece of paper.” 😮 Accord went on to be part of the W20 cohort.
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