By Chad Byers (General Partner and Co-founder) and Derick En’Wezoh (Investor) at Susa Ventures
Susa Ventures is excited to announce our investment in Journey, a remote-first startup building a digital storytelling product for salespeople and founders. We led their pre-seed round with participation from Y Combinator, Sahil Lavingia, Adam D’Angelo, the founders of AdRoll (Adam Berke & Aaron Bell) and Udemy (Eren Bali & Oktay Caglar), CapitalX, GTMFund, and others. Additionally, over 100 Journey users invested in this round, including Harvey Multani, Ugur Kaner, and Josh Steinman. The Susa Family is thrilled to partner with Peter Clark, Brendan Weitz, Anil Sevim, and the rest of the team at Journey.
Susa Ventures cares deeply about storytelling. As early stage investors, we are students of storytelling.
From our data, a founder’s ability to tell a compelling story is highly correlated to success. Logically, it makes sense. Founders will tell their story over and over again to investors, employees, customers, press, and potential hires. The more compelling that narrative, the more success a founder will see in every element of company building.
But founders aren’t the only ones that tell stories. We would argue that storytelling is core to almost every single knowledge worker, because after all, knowledge work is always between people, and people communicate through stories. This is the way it’s been since the dawn of humankind.
Given our focus on storytelling, we’ve been frustrated with the digital tools available to founders, salespeople, and customer-facing teams to craft compelling narratives. We believe the winning tool would allow someone to use any medium, such as video, PDFs, text documents, slides, Figma documents, and many more. It should give you all the control you have with Docsend, regarding permissions, but with more robust analytics around consumption.
Journey is this tool. When we met the team, our visions aligned.
Let’s build a company that empowers the Storyteller.
These content creation tools automatically style themselves based on the creator and their content. This content can be anything from headers and text, to interactive checklists that can be leveraged as Mutual Action Plans within dynamic B2B sales rooms, to recorded videos that dynamically adjust their dimensions depending on if they’re viewed on mobile or desktop.
Since soft-launching in January 2022, Journey has achieved compelling milestones:
- Surpassed 10,000 Journeys created in September 2022
- Surpassed 250,000 Journeys opened in August 2022
- Over 400 startups have raised financing via Journeys, including Lawtrades, Highlight, and Gumroad
- Over 200 B2B organizations rely on Journey each week to sell and close deals, including Lumos, Osmos, LaunchNotes, and Turing
- Empowering storytellers at over 100 paying organizations
We look forward to working with the Journey team as they turn plans into action.
Our Investment in Journey was originally published in Susa Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.