Things have been busy here at Arrows HQ, but we made time to get the team together for the first time. Most of us had never met each other before. On this episode, we have Kim and Matt on discuss the experience of organizing and attending our team retreat.

Arrows is launching its second podcast today, called Happy Customers. So we have Stuart Balcombe on the show, the host of Happy Customers and the head of product marketing at Arrows. We talk about why we're launching a podcast, what the goal of the podcast is, and some tips he learned after creating multiple podcasts now. Please subscribe to Happy Customers! https://happycustomers.transistor.fm/subscribe

We're joined this week by the first Arrows employee, Shareil Nariman. Last week we launched the ebook that was written by Shareil, and it was a smashing success. Much better than we'd expected. Shareil tells us what it was like to write the book, and we talk about the strategy of writing it. You can find the ebook here: http://arrows.to/resources/books/startup-ceo-guide-to-customer-success/ Email shareil@arrows.to if you have any thoughts!

Today we're joined by our friend (and Arrows angel investor) Justin Duke. We talk about building Arrows, how we try to balance building features vs foundations, and what we get anxious about when prioritizing features. Justin is a super talented developer who runs Buttondown and Spoonbill on the side of being an engineering manager at Stripe. https://twitter.com/jmduke https://buttondown.email https://spoonbill.io

We've always cared about marketing at Arrows.to, and really think it's critical to our success. But we've never had a full-time marketer who can help us really excel at everything we're doing. In this episode we run through a lot of the things we're doing from a marketing angle and why we think a full-time marketer will help us out.

We recently realized one of our early employees was in the wrong role in the wrong environment for them. Neither of us was happy. So what do we do to fix it? How do we communicate it to them? To the rest of the team? Come hear our thoughts.

Today our internet friend and listener of the podcast, Ben Orenstein (CEO of Tuple.app), asks us questions he wished we talked about on Keep Going. He asks why we chose to take VC funding, what our equity breakdown is, what the biggest thing we need to focus on is, and more. This one is long but good! Ben's company: https://tuple.app Ben's twitter: https://twitter.com/r00k

After a couple of weeks off, we discuss why "working in bets" feels like it's not working for us as well as it used to when we were smaller... and how we're trying to focus everybody on the team around their own One Big Thing.

This week we talk about all of the Arrows funnels and the tools we use to organize them... our sales funnel, our marketing funnel, and our product development "funnel".

Growing the team brings new challenges that we hadn't expected. How do we stay open and allow people to be involved in decision-making while still staying focused?

Arrows has two new engineers starting next week. So we discuss how we're preparing for them to join by getting our plans together for the next big iterations of the product.

This episode is an interview with Kathy Osborne, founder of Kamel PR, who we worked with to do PR for our seed funding announcement. We talk about how we got connected, why we decided to spend money to hire a PR consultant, and more. To be honest, when we first took funding we assumed we'd do all the press ourselves. Oh boy, were we wrong... Working with Kathy was fantastic and helped us get great results from our announcement. We'd do it all over again. https://www.kamelpr.com https://www.instagram.com/kamelpr/ https://twitter.com/kathy_m_osborne

In a surprisingly fast turn of events, we hired 2 developers since the last episode! We talk about how that happened, how we structured our take-home project, and more.

As of today, we now have 5 employees at Arrows, and we still have a few more to come (https://arrows.to/jobs). This week we talk about this process and the new challenges we're experiencing as we scale.

Now that we've raised some funding, we can afford to hire a few people to join Arrows sooner than we expected. We dive into how that's going and what that means for the next few months.

This is an unusual episode for us. We recorded most of it back in April, when we decided to raise venture capital money for Arrows. This episode was recorded on April 12th, the day we first started speaking to investors, and on April 14th, which is the day we signed the term sheet. It all happened very quickly. Special guest at the end: we talk to Darian Shirazi, who is our lead investor at Gradient Ventures.

We explore some of the bigger questions around what Arrows actually is, why the timing is right for us now, and how a big new customer is starting to integrate Arrows.

We talk about some feature updates we made, and how we're trying to improve the product to better solve the job customers expect.

We're trying some new things with demos and how we encourage people to take the next steps at the end. We also discuss our new features that we built on the fly for a trial customer.

After a slow week or two post-launch, we've starting to build up our momentum again.