Pendo Climbs 41 Spots on Forbes 2020 Cloud 100; Triples Crowd for Annual Pendomonium

RALEIGH, NC—SEPTEMBER 17, 2020—Pendo, a platform that helps companies accelerate digital product adoption among customers and internal employees, today announced record attendance at its fourth Pendomonium conference. More than 3,000 people from the fields of product management, customer success, user experience and marketing explored the idea of “rewriting our 2020 playbooks” with keynotes by NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Blue Apron CEO Linda Kozlowski as well as two dozen sessions led by Pendo customers, executives and product experts. 

Amid an exciting week for Pendo and its customers, Forbes also ranked the company #54 on its annual list of top privately-held cloud companies, moving up from last year’s #95 spot.

“Today is a day for customers and it’s fitting that more than 30% of the Forbes Cloud 100 uses Pendo,” said Pendo CEO and co-founder Todd Olson. “I’m excited to receive this recognition during this incredible week of celebration and knowledge-sharing—our growth comes from our relentless focus on customers.” 

Pendomonium serves as an annual “state of the union” moment for Pendo, where the company showcases various efforts to support customers and the larger product community over the prior year and casts a vision for the future of the platform and company. Olson and Chief Product Officer Brian Crofts opened each day of the conference sharing several new “plays” for 2020 and beyond.

New products and features

• Pendo Free: A new, free version of Pendo gives companies access to Pendo’s analytics and in-app guidance capabilities, giving product managers the answer to the common question: Are my customers using my product the way we envisioned they would? 
• Core Events: This new set of features lets product teams identify which user actions in their applications are most critical for achieving product adoption and customer retention. Teams can set adoption goals for these “core events” and track user engagement over time. 
• Measuring product engagement: An interactive quiz and free consultation helps companies quickly diagnose how their products are performing and build an action plan to improve engagement. Coming soon is a new capability in Pendo to calculate and track product engagement score.
• Building an inclusive product: Previously named “Blacklist” and “Whitelist” features in the platform have been renamed “Exclude” and “Include,” changes made as part of an ongoing focus on inclusive design.
• In-product messaging enhancements: Teams now have access to dozens of new guide themes, a robust guide management experience, and the ability to create and customize multi-step guides for a richer onboarding experience for mobile users. Additional changes improve the end user experience with in-app messages—new controls let users snooze a guide and view it later.
• Hubspot integration: By pulling company and contact metadata from Hubspot into Pendo, marketers can target guides and messages to the right segments of users and track the behavior of those segments in Data Explorer.

Customer growth: Pendo now serves more than 1,500 customers, including newly-added companies like Toast, Public Broadcasting System (PBS), Zenefits, Mindbody, FullStory, Updox, Automattic, CitizenNet, Parata Systems, Fivetran, Cox Communications, First West Credit Union, Owler, and Texas Capital Bank.

At Pendomonium, the company spotlighted two customers that went above and beyond to support their users and communities in 2020, with Pendo as a key part of their technology stack.

• The “Rewriting the Playbook” Award was awarded to Patreon, a membership platform that makes it easy for creators to get paid. With new onboarding flows and in-app communication powered by Pendo, Patreon has helped tens of thousands of musicians, artists, restaurants and shop owners raise funds during the COVID-19 crisis and sustain their businesses.
• The Pendo Community Impact Award was awarded to The University of Phoenix, which used Pendo data and in-app messaging to ensure students remain focused on their educational and career goals; while creating a new pro bono virtual teaching academy to share learnings from 20 years of experience in virtual education with educators around the world.

Global expansion: Pendo has doubled its UK presence to 40 team members over the last year, with new sales and customer success teams dedicated to expansion into France, Germany and the Nordics. Its R&D team in Herzliya, Israel has grown by 25 percent, to 40 employees. The company also plans to open an office and build a team in Japan in 2021.

A new resource for product-led companies: Wiley will release Olson’s first book, “The Product-Led Organization: Drive Growth by Putting Product at the Center of Your Customer Experience,” on September 23, 2020. Olson walks readers through three key considerations for companies on a product-led journey: how to leverage data to build a great product, strategies for automating aspects of sales, marketing, support and customer education inside digital products, and a new way of delivering product that focuses product teams on driving product adoption, incorporating customer feedback and establishing “product ops” as a hub of cross-functional communication and collaboration. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Forbes Cloud 100 list: Pendo joins 30 customers on the annual list of top privately-held cloud companies published by Forbes in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures. Winners were chosen based on an analysis of market leadership, estimated valuation, operating metrics, and people and culture by a judging panel of 43 publicly-traded cloud company CEOs. The recognition comes on the heels of Pendo’s #26 ranking on the Inc. 5000 in July 2020.

About Pendo

Pendo helps companies drive software adoption, leading to happier customers and more productive employees. Pendo customers include the world’s leading software companies and digital enterprises, including Verizon, LabCorp, OpenTable, Coupa, Okta, Salesforce, and Zendesk. Founded by product people in 2013 in the heart of Raleigh, North Carolina, Pendo is backed by Battery Ventures, Spark Capital, Meritech Capital and Sapphire Ventures. Through its editorial site and community ProductCraft, sponsored events and podcast, Pendo aims to support the success of product people everywhere. For more information, visit: www.pendo.io