It takes craft and vision to build a well-loved product. Sustaining that love over time — through shipping features, launching products, and expanding into new segments — is another challenge entirely. The best product-led companies of the past decade have achieved this by building robust ecosystems around their products. They stay close to their users and build trust: resulting in better feedback loops, stronger loyalty, and more scaleable support and knowledge sharing.
The era of community-led growth is just beginning. We’re building Outverse to be the engine powering product communities, and we’re starting by giving software companies a modern, streamlined alternative to old-school forums or Slack and Discord: a place where knowledge is open, easily discoverable, and retains its value over time.
Today, we’re excited to announce $6 million in new seed funding led by Wing to deliver on that vision, and are entering open access.
The journey
Our team has deep collective experience building beloved products and helping to grow the passionate ecosystems behind them – including the likes of Seedcamp, Softr, 1Password, Meta, Twitter, Multiverse and others.
We’ve spoken to hundreds of startups who’ve built their communities on Slack and Discord, and their feedback was overwhelmingly consistent. These tools are inherently noisy, hard to scale, and don’t accumulate value in the way a knowledge network should. They’re fantastic tools for their intended use-case, but not great for building product community. Useful discussions are lost to time, and member fatigue sets in when the same questions get asked on repeat. There’s a better way.
We were inspired here by the gathering places of the early 2000s Internet: forums & IRC channels, ‘the open prairies of the early web’. We wondered: what would a modern and dynamic forum-like experience look like, upgraded with the toolkits product teams need to drive value and growth? We designed Outverse to be the best way for software companies to create scalable success ecosystems around their products. For us, that means three things – intuitive discussion interfaces, native documentation/knowledge archives, and streamlined workflow tooling for teams.
While we’ve started by providing opinionated, ready-to-use infrastructure for software teams, we’re ultimately building Outverse to be both an open ecosystem and also highly configurable. We’re planning to launch full API access along with deeper integration and customization features for technical teams later this year.
AI is changing the way we all interact with knowledge and data – and leveraging LLMs is core to the Outverse vision of becoming a centralized knowledge ecosystem for software communities. Starting with surfacing semantic relationships between content and discussions, we’ll be rolling out a range of AI-powered features over the coming months — including AI-augmented knowledge retrieval flows and AI-powered team workflows.
We launched an early version of our beta last year, and have been building out the platform based on the feedback from the many community builders and product teams that have showed interest in Outverse. Today, we’re opening access to everyone. You can get started for free, and begin building on Outverse.
Our investors
We’re delighted to partner with Zach DeWitt and Tanay Jaipuria over at Wing as lead investors for our $6M seed round – a fund that has seen the compounding power of ecosystems firsthand through early investments in iconic companies like Snowflake & Gong. Wing have been longstanding champions of product-led growth, and we are excited to hold a shared vision of the community-led future.
We’re also so happy to have the repeat support of two of earliest backers and among the best in the business when it comes to seed-stage investing in Europe: Seedcamp and Connect Ventures. And we are excited to welcome Notion Capital as new partners, alongside Paul Forster (Indeed.com) and Tiny VC.
We’re hugely appreciative of our angel investors from both this round and before – including Nicolas Julia (founder and CEO at Sorare), Foreword.VC, Everywhere Ventures, as well as founders & executives from the likes of Revolut, Dropbox, Airbnb, Songkick, Grabyo, Lyst, Niantic, Nextdoor, Treecard & many more.
What’s next
We started Outverse in 2021 with a deep conviction in the power of community ecosystems, and a desire to upgrade the infrastructure that supports them. We’re grateful for all the support we’ve received so far — from our investors, partners, and beta community — and can’t wait to see what the next generation of product companies can achieve with Outverse.
We’ve got huge plans in store as we move into the second half of 2023 – including full API access, advanced configuration and continuing to roll-out AI features as a core part of the Outverse toolkit. In beta and beyond, we’ll be actively seeking feedback, bug reports, and feature requests over in our own Outverse community – join us there!
