Meeting Stefan and Robert it was clear to me that this was a dynamic duo able to out-execute most teams out there. Stefan has a strong commercial and founding background and encountered the underinvested potential in user-led growth as CRO at Shore, while Bob has a solid technical and product background from his time at Twilio and Thomson Reuters.

Many SaaS companies are currently struggling with acquisition strategy and rising CACs, which, especially after recent changes in regulation and the latest updates to iOS14, is an unnecessary limitation on their ability to grow. Over the last couple of years, there have been several evolutions to bring CAC down. First, we had sales-led growth through the use of targeted outbound and extensive CRM systems, then came marketing-led growth through the focus of thought leadership and emphasis on MQL, and lately there has been a lot of focus on product-led growth, creating native growth loops and spending more time on widening top-of-funnel.

The new underutilised wave is within user-led growth, it allows companies to better leverage the power of current users and their existing network as self-engineered growth loops are one of the most potent ways to create long-term sustainable growth and it has a strong impact on CAC as referred customers churn less and spend more. Currently, most companies lack the capacity to fully leverage the power of the users and create incentives for them to refer new users. This is where Cello comes in.

Cello helps SaaS companies unleash their real potential through user-led growth by arming them with a powerful P2P referral feature as part of their arsenal. Their platform allows any product to be shared and discovered in only a few clicks. This is a great way to create a new high LTV/CAC channel as well as a scalable source of topline revenue with high ROI and without all the billing hassle.

It easily allows you to embed referrals into your product, create specific payout structures, and display analytics of your referral performance - all this with very limited integration. They also provide a consumer-facing product for end-users to track their referrals, and see their payouts in real time. Cello is the world’s first User-led growth platform that helps businesses to harness their most passionate users to drive word-of-mouth growth at scale which is why category leaders including Demodesk, Pliant, Sastrify, and Unlock currently rely on Cello to put growth in the hands of their users.

A crucial part in order for this to succeed is the ability for the product to be tooling agnostic but still enable integration depth. Meaning that Cello must be able to integrate to all parts of the RevOps stack in a way that is easily integrated without any data loss.

The product vision is also to add further modular elements like B2B referrals, sales reference loops, and user review loops. This would allow Cello to expand into more of a holistic growth engineering platform that can capture and create more value for the end users.

We are super happy to back Cello on this journey and announce our €2.3m pre-seed round and are excited to see Stefan and Robert scaling this to unprecedented heights and help businesses take their growth strategy to the next level.

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Continue reading about the funding round here: https://www.eu-startups.com/2022/09/fueling-the-next-phase-of-customer-acquisition-cello-raises-e2-3-million-to-build-its-user-led-growth-platform/?

Or listen here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7C2zzTxNOgfBI8XvNJCurK?si=WN5l2ibUTDWftt-PapXcPw&nd=1