Tiny Seed Funded Us (And We’re Stoked)

Bust out the champagne, we’re celebrating—

We’ve just received seed funding from Tiny Seed!

The year-long program promises to launch Savio to even greater heights (to the moon, if we’re not very much mistaken). 

We’d like to thank our director, the cast, and the academy for making this all possible…

Just kidding, we’ll spare you the Oscar speech. But humour us through a little moment of reflection on this milestone and what it means for our future.  

The blood, sweat, and Savio story

It was sweat that brought my business partner, Ryan Stocker (the man, the myth, the legend), and I together. 

I don’t mean “sweat” as a symbol of working hard on a tough challenge. I mean the literal sweat that came from suffering through CrossFit together. (It was the kind of suffering that builds relationships—a bit like how pressure turns coal into diamonds).

We discovered that we had a ton in common. Besides the slightly masochistic desire to generate muscle from pain, we were both software developers turned product managers. Most importantly, we had the same vision for what makes good software: clean design, thorough testing, and—critically—a customer-centric development process.

Ryan and I clicked so much that we started a business together. Then we sold it and bought another one. We eventually sold that, too.

Finally, four years ago, we decided to take the plunge on our third business together: Savio.

Our product rocks (sorry)

Fact: The biggest problem in software is deciding what to build—and especially what to build next. 

Opinion: The best software products are informed by customer feedback. They’re built by companies that genuinely listen to their users, care about customer feedback, and then build the features their users are asking for.

Our vision was to build software that solves the problem of what to build next by helping product leaders understand and prioritize what their customers ask for. 

We were essentially building the tool we would have liked when we were shipping software for companies like ESPN and Microsoft. Based on hundreds of conversations with product leaders from companies like Google, Drift, Zapier, and GoDaddy, we identified the major “jobs” our tool needed to do:

• Organize feedback and feature requests. There’s no lack of feedback. The problem is centralizing it so that it’s usable. Savio needed to be like a Swiss Army knife, receiving feedback from all of a customer’s customer-facing teammates and the tools they use (customer support tools, CRMs, email, social media—all of it) and putting it in a single feedback repository.

• Segmentation. It needed to be able to slice and dice feedback, so you could easily prioritize features based on a number of criteria that you happened to care about most that sprint or quarter: customer plan, MRR, and more. 

• Roadmaps. It needed to be able to produce planning documents so you could align your stakeholders on what you’re going to build next. Ideally, it would even display the customer feedback data that helps you make product decisions (so you can justify those decisions and make your roadmap “stakeholder-proof”).

• Close the loop. This one time I submitted a feature request to Slack and they replied, which was nice. But then they built the feature I asked for. And then they told me they built it in a reply to my original message. It was wild and it blew my mind. We wanted our tool to give our customers that same ability to wow their users by closing the feedback loop.

The result was Savio. We’re super proud of it. (Seriously, it’s amazing, check out what it does). 

Tiny Seed will push us to the next level

Ryan and I are bootstrappers at heart. We like to build things the way we want and maintain balance in our lives. 

We spent the first few years building Savio part-time and managed to grow it to several hundred happy customers. We were hesitant about getting funding from the large VC funds looking for growth at all costs. We know endurance is key in this industry and we wanted to last (plus, we wanted to have time to see our kids). 

That’s why we couldn’t be more thrilled to join the Tiny Seed team. In addition to just being a fantastic group of very accomplished people, they have the same vision for what good software is and how to build it. 

We’re extremely grateful for the recognition and validation that this investment ultimately represents. 

(Also, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the insane talent and capacity of the other companies in our cohort. Wow, what a group.)

A big thanks

I started this ramble with a joke about making an Oscars speech, but I actually do want to take a moment to be grateful. 

It takes a village to raise a product, and I love my little Savio village. 

So thank you to Ryan for being reliable, authentic, super talented, and willing to invest in this little dream of ours. Thank you to everyone else that’s been on this journey and that had a hand in building Savio, especially my hard-working dev team. Thank you to our customers that took a chance on what was a new tool (and who keep providing us super valuable feedback).

And of course, a massive thank you to the Tiny Seed team—we’re humbled and honoured. 

Things are looking bright for Savio, and with this investment, we’re ready to ramp up and continue to build the best product management software that B2B SaaS teams can imagine.  

Giddy up.

(Want to join us on our journey? Get on the mailing list to follow along on and get great resources on how to build a better, customer-centric product.)****

Last Updated: 2023-06-21

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