While the flexibility and benefits of remote work arrangements have been touted, the reality is that working from home can be isolating and depressing for many, leading to lost productivity. The small interactions with colleagues in an office setting or team-building events just can’t be replicated in a remote workforce. SquadPal is a community app for distributed teams to connect and interact at a social level. The app offers games, quizzes, live experiences, competitions, and challenges to improve employee morale, build engagement, and foster comradery among coworkers. The app formalizes and improves much of the makeshift team engagement activities that were being done on company Slack channels and on Zoom. The app is being used by teams at companies like Amazon, Uber, and Paypal.
London TechWatch caught up with SquadPal Cofounder and CEO Robinson Nouveau to learn more about how the founding teams’ experience managing remote workforces at the onset of the pandemic inspired the business, strategic plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a £400k Pre-seed round from investors including CapitalT, RLC Partner Jair Paula Jr; Serial angel Charlie Songhurst; PriceMatch Cofounder Raphael Theron; Heroes Cofounder Riccardo Bruni; Ravelin Cofounder Nick Lally; Divider Cofounder Christer Holloman; Spotify ex-Product Director Martin Gould; and Foundrs & Heights Cofounder Dan Murray-Serter.
Tell us about your product or service.
While working remotely, employees often feel isolated or even disconnected from their teammates. This leads to high rates of disengagement and loss of productivity. We created a social community app to help remote workers connect and share personal moments with their teammates which ultimately helps them better engage at work. The app includes asynchronous games, competitions, and challenges.
What inspired the start of SquadPal?
Our founding team has been working remotely for 4 years. We have managed teams remotely and even started a company remotely. We have all felt disconnected from our teams from time to time and it was difficult to stay engaged or keep the teams engaged. Knowing that most people spend one-third of their lives at work, it’s a heavy burden that has a high cost for both employees (well-being, employee satisfaction) and companies (disengaged and unproductive teams). It is only after the first lockdown that we realised a lot of employees and teams felt that struggle.
Since we used to manage this problem with our teams, organising socials at work, competitions or challenges, we wanted to share this experience with other companies. That’s why we created SquadPal to keep teams engaged and connected.
How is it different?
When it comes to employee engagement, we focus on social engagement at a team level. Most companies in the market focus on professional engagement (e.g. skills development, etc) and reporting for top management. But there is nothing fundamentally fun or even engaging for teams.
For a team of 10 people, it is often time-consuming to organise socials: Teams have to find the right game/activity and a different platform to host it every time. That’s why in many instances companies struggle and prefer hiring office managers, or more recently during lockdowns: happiness managers. Before SquadPal, our users were using Slack for competitions (e.g. baking competitions) and other small features like recognitions (e.g. Karma – Slack extension). The problem with such large platforms (e.g. Slack, Teams) is that users do not want to share pictures of their kids/dogs/… with the entire company. This is why we focus on the team level and not organisational level. Engagement should come from the ground up, not being pushed from the top.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We are targeting distributed teams which include fully remote workers, hybrid workers, and global teams (e.g. working in different offices). By 2025, we expect that 450 million employees will work at least 2 days per week remotely.
What’s your business model?
We will be launching our premium subscription next year which we will sell to businesses (B2C2B model).
What are your post-COVID office plans??
We are a remote-first company but we will open a small office in London so the team can meet for workshops, group work, and socials of course.
What was the funding process like?
The funding process is always very time-consuming, so it shifted our focus away from the product. But we can’t wait to get back to developing a product our users love.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The main challenge at this stage for us was to find the perfect partners with experience in B2B SaaS but also with a passion for the remote space.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Team, market, product, traction in that order. Like many early-stage companies, what usually matters most for seed investors, is the team. That’s why we made sure to have the right founding team with experience building products for millions of users, and the right advisors by our side. This helped us build a product our users love and use every day.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
In the next six months, in addition to new activities, we are planning to integrate our solution within team’s workplaces (Slack, Teams, Zoom, etc…). The goal is to ensure we provide a smooth experience for our users so that they can connect with their teammates seamlessly (and asynchronously!).
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Fundraising isn’t a goal by itself, it’s only one way to scale your company. Many successful companies never raised a single dollar and bootstrapped their business to millions in ARR. In our example, fundraising made sense but not from the start. We actually bootstrapped our activity before starting to look for investment. Even if this approach took a bit longer, it enabled us to focus on the product development, reiterating constantly, and proving further traction. This was critical in the success of our fundraising.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
In the near term, we want to become the go-to app for the social life of distributed teams. The objective is to transform remote relationships at work. We strongly believe that it’s not because you are physically apart that you can’t be virtually together.
What’s your favourite outdoor activity in London?
That would have to be a Sunday morning bike ride in Richmond Park.
