Yahoo Autos Cycle is a new product management hub that centralizes all customer feedback
Meet Cycle, a French startup that is building a collaboration tool for product managers where they can collect data from various tools, work on the next product iterations and close the feedback loop with the most engaged customers.
The company raised a total of $6 million across two funding rounds, including a recent funding round led by Boldstart that closed late last year. The startup is backed by eFounders, the European startup studio focused on SaaS products. Base Case, The 20VC Fund, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Hummingbird Ventures and 60 angels also invested in the company — it’s a long list of investors*.
Like many software-as-a-service products, Cycle first acts as a single source of truth. Many product teams rely heavily on products like Confluence, Notion or Google Docs. But they also have to check GitHub issues, Intercom messages and more.
“The issue we are trying to solve is an issue that every product manager faces. Product information is scattered across many different products,” Cycle founder and CEO Mehdi Boudoukhane told me. “As your company scales, you get feedback from users, the sales team, the customer success team and the marketing team.”
And yet, in most cases, product management becomes a black box. Other teams in the company don’t really know when something is going to ship or — worse — if their feedback will have an impact in one way or another.
Cycle has built integrations with popular startup products like HubSpot, Intercom and Slack. Once everything is in Cycle, product teams can organize feedback so that everything related to one feature is grouped together.
Product managers then use Cycle to write their Product Requirements Documents with a rich-text editor that supports embeds. It’s a collaborative editor with the ability to mention your teammates.
“Designers produce visuals, developers produce codes and product managers produce documents,” Boudoukhane said. The idea is that product managers could spend most of their day in Cycle — on average, product managers who use Cycle spend three hours per day in the product. And product managers don’t have to manually export their documents to other tools as Cycle offers integrations with Linear, GitHub or Notion.
