Unveiling the future of Vero

Chris here — CEO and a founder at Vero. I’m writing today to share our vision for the future.

Over the last 12 months we’ve spoken with many customers and non-customers and we’ve learned a lot. This has brought renewed clarity to which problems we’re solving, who we’re solving them for and how we’re solving them. Today I want to share this clarity with you.

I am excited the best is yet to come for our product, business and, most importantly, you: our customers.

Summary: ‘Not another data store’

We’re launching a new take on our product.

Why? In the future CRM software like Vero will connect directly to the data stores where your customer data already lives. No need to setup another Javascript snippet, manage two-way data syncs, troubleshoot mismatched data or pay for your data to be stored again.

Whether your CRM data lives in databases like Snowflake, Redshift or BigQuery or platforms like Airtable we see a world in which customer data is always owned, stored and managed directly by you.

This is a powerful future and it will:

• Make software cheaper by reducing duplicate data storage.
• Make it easier to setup by tapping into data you already have, not making you track data once again.
• Increase data accuracy by making it faster and easier to access “source” data.
• Gives you access to more data by encouraging the true centralisation of CRM data in one place, creating a flywheel that increases the value of this centralised record over-and-over again.

Over the coming months we’ll be making changes to Vero in line with this vision.

First up, I want to assure you that the current version of Vero isn’t going anywhere! Instead, Vero will transform over time and we will continue to ensure we meet your needs as customers.

Some of the short-term changes you’ll see:

• Vero will offer two products with separate prices:
  • Newsletters — a brand new, stand-alone newsletters product.
  • Workflows — a new name for our existing Vero product (which includes the newsletter and workflow functionality you use today).
• Storing user-level data in Vero will be optional: you will have the option to load data directly from your own data stores, rather than “sync” data into ours.

Read on for more detail.

Launching today: Newsletters 2.0

We’re excited to launch the first major step toward this vision for the future today.

Vero “Newsletters” is a brand new, built-from-the-ground-up, standalone version of our Newsletters product, with its own pricing and new functionality.

Newsletters doesn’t store user and event-level data. Instead it connects directly to data sources that already contain your user and event-level data. This enables you to “bring your own data”, design a great message and send it to your customers in three simple steps. Whether you have CRM data in Google Sheets, Airtable, Segment Personas, Looker, Redshift, Snowflake or anywhere else, our new Newsletters product provides a simple, powerful way to message customers.

This approach is a game changer. It:

• Increases trust in your data by removing the need to “sync” data to Vero.
• Reduces the time it takes to get started by removing the need to install any Vero SDKs or libraries.
• Lowers costs as you only pay for the messages you send, not the data you store.

We’ve rebuilt the entire Vero frontend to be faster, easier-to-navigate and to remove as much friction as possible. This initial release serves as a base for future releases that will see Vero connect directly to more popular data warehouses and platforms.

We’d love you to try this new version of Vero. If you’re a current Vero user you can login using your existing Vero credentials. New users can sign up for a free account. You can also read the FAQ on how to try Vero 2.0.

How this will affect current Vero customers

In the very short term: it won’t!

Our current product — now known as “Vero Workflows” — will continue to operate and get better, just as it always has.

Over the coming months, you’ll see further changes: first slowly and then more rapidly. At each stage we’ll keep you up to date, invite you to try the new things and ensure we provide an elegant path for you to start using new features, products and services where applicable.

Innovations in messaging software

Our new vision is built on these trends that we believe will change the way CRM software is purchased and used:

• Unified data pipelines. In the past businesses have maintained two data pipelines: one for their core product and one for their marketing and CRM tools. This is changing. Thanks to an ecosystem of great products including Snowflake, Big Query, Segment, Snowplow, dbt and more businesses are investing with a “data as-a-platform” mindset, empowering all of their teams to tap into the same rich, clean and accurate data. Giving product, engineering, growth, marketing and sales teams a consistent and clear view of the customer is crucial. The only way to do this well is to curate one, primary data pipeline that everyone else builds on top of. We see this trend accelerating. It means less data duplication, more secure data and faster access to data for all teams. You can read more about this trend from smart investors like Tom Tunguz and Andreeson Horowitz.
• Marketing Operations. “Marketing Operations” teams were originally hired to “sort out the mess” created by business teams buying an array of SaaS products. In the future, Marketing Ops will be less about “cleaning up the mess” and more about “doing things in a scalable way from day one”. Tools will help instil Marketing Ops practices into every marketing activity. Better testing over message content and timing, making it easier to maintain automations over time, better versioning and backups and easier configuration are all examples of sound MarOps practices. We believe the importance of these practices will grow.
• Power to the product user. The quality bar for software is way up and messaging software is no different. Fast, easy-to-use, easy-to-get-started products are and will continue to win. Making it easy to send your first message whilst providing the power to scale to your 10 millionth is what customers expect. We think this trend remains largely untapped in our market, particularly when it comes to solutions for product companies. You’ve likely heard of this trend using the term “Product-Led Growth”.

These changes provide so much opportunity to innovate and help businesses send quality notifications to their customers.

Our commitment: why choose Vero?

Vero is committed to offering:

• Lower prices. Any innovation that helps us lower our prices is a win.
• Greater leverage. Finding ways to enable our customers to access more data and to do so faster and more easily.
• Greater reach. Getting messages to end-users means supporting the widest range of channels.

Writing these down is one thing — but ensuring our product(s) deliver on these commitments is key.

Where to get updates

We’ve consolidated our feedback board and release notes into one platform. All feature requests, roadmap updates and releases will be kept there.

We will also email out product updates every six to eight weeks. If you’re a paying customer we will make sure you get these. If you’re not a paying customer, please subscribe to our product update newsletter using the form in our website footer.

Finally, join our Slack community where we’ll post updates too!

We’d love your thoughts

Do these ideas resonate with you? Do you disagree with some of our hypotheses? We’d love to talk to you. The only way we can build great products is by talking to those we’re trying to help. Please get in touch with any thoughts or questions. You can email me directly at chris@getvero.com or you can get in touch with our team via support@getvero.com.

We’re super excited to be pushing toward a future we truly believe in. Stay tuned!

Chris