Cycle acquire 80% of their customers through App Marketplaces. Here's how.

Cycle is “the fastest way for your team to capture product feedback and share customer insights – without the busywork.” It’s used by product teams at Strapi, TrustLayer, Zipline, and OpenAI - and integrations are a core part of their product offering. Cycle integrates with platforms like HubSpot, Slack, Intercom, Notion, and Linear.

Cycle has attracted strong venture backing, with $6M raised so far from Boldstart Ventures, eFounders, Base Case, The 20VC Fund, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Hummingbird Ventures, Script Capital, and Tokyo Black. Angel investors include Scott Belsky (Behance), Shreyas Doshi (Stripe), and Omar Pera (Meta).

In short, things are going rather well at Cycle. Including growth.

Cycle’s founder Mehdi Boudoukhane recently sat down with Anna Nadeina, Head of Growth for saas.group, to chat about Cycle’s journey. He also shared some of the drivers behind their impressive growth. App Marketplaces are a key part of this strategy. Cycle acquires 80% of its customers through App Marketplaces.

In Mehdi’s own words:

Every new customer we close, we make sure to have the answer to the question “how did you learn about us.” More and more - 80% of our customers - they hear about us through the Linear Marketplace… it’s half Linear and half HubSpot, where we’re also on the marketplace.

By being listed in these App Marketplaces, Cycle offers customers solutions to problems they already have, within the context of the products and platforms they already know and trust. Integrations unlock the ability for Cycle to reach new audiences, unlocking the opportunity to create distribution through their App Marketplace listings.

Our biggest competitor is ProductBoard, and they basically don’t have integrations with neither of those tools. So we realised that’s the main way people discover Cycle. They look for a feedback tool that plugs to HubSpot, or a feedback tool that plugs to Linear.

Cycle are very much at the beginning of their App Marketplace distribution journey. The more integrations they build for customers, the more incremental reach that creates for Cycle through each App Marketplace. They don’t plan on limiting their reach to one or two platforms - they want to be wherever their future customers already are.

And so we’re happy that we did the work to go on the marketplaces. And it’s just the beginning, and we want to do it further, because Cycle is really a Platform that’s very connected to many different tools. There are some customers that are coming from those channels, so let’s double down on it and do more of what works.

Check out the full conversation from the saas.unbound podcast.