Friday.app, a Portland-based startup that is developing software tools to help distributed teams better communicate, has raised $450,000 in a pre-seed round from investors, the majority of whom are not based in Maine.
Luke Thomas, Friday’s founder and CEO, tells Maine Startups Insider that the funding will be used to continue product development and ramp up the company’s marketing efforts.
The company, which he founded in 2016 as a side project, currently has three full-time employees and three contractors. Late last year, Friday was selected as one of the Maine startups sent to TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
Thomas believes that the future of work will be unshackled from a physical office and that “working in place”—a term coined by local linguist Michael Erard to replace the slightly uncomplimentary term “remote”—will be the norm, not the exception. But the tools to provide effective communication among these distributed teams are still in their infancy, leaving teams to usually cobble together multiple tools to get the job done, says Thomas.
“The key to a well-run distributed team is this simple idea that you should create routines in the way that you communicate and share updates. Right now, this is a manual process that involves several different tools, so people frequently don’t do it,” says Thomas, who worked remotely in Portland for out-of-state software companies for several years before founding Friday. “We created software to help you create better communication habits, helping everyone stay connected at work.”
The product
Friday’s software platform provides built-in workflows (e.g., “Morning Routine,” “Daily Standup,” etc.) that help team members create productive work habits and keep up to date on what other team members are working on.
Thomas says Friday is not aiming to compete with behemoths in the space like Slack or Microsoft’s Teams product, but instead serve as a complementary tool.
“We see workplace chat as a great way to collaborate, but there’s a need to balance the quick back-and-forth chatter with high-level updates and feedback. You shouldn’t need to sift through the noise to understand what’s going on at work,” says Thomas.
“The best teams and companies are using a different playbook to retain key talent, grow faster, and serve their customers,” Thomas says. “Friday helps accelerate this workplace transformation in less time and with fewer headaches.”
Friday’s current product has evolved from Thomas’ original vision. He founded the company in 2016, originally calling it Friday Feedback and building a more narrowly defined tool that aided managers in soliciting weekly check-ins from team members. He won the Startup South Portland pitch event in 2017 with his idea. He gained some early traction with that tool, reporting a $60,000 run rate back in 2017, but pivoted last year from an employee-engagement tool to a communication tool built for distributed teams.
“I won’t share specifics, but we’ve nearly quadrupled the number of people signing up for Friday versus a few months ago,” Thomas says. “The product is significantly better that before and it’s showing up in the numbers.”
Out-of-state investors dominate round
Thomas found success pitching investors outside Maine. In fact, less than 30% of investors in Friday’s round are angel investors based in Maine.
Underscore.vc, a Boston-based venture capital firm, led the round.
“The future of work is largely remote, ” said John Pearce, a co-founder and partner of Underscore. “Not every employee or company is yet equipped for the shift in tooling and mentality that remote work creates. We’re confident that Luke and the team at Friday are the right people to tackle this impending organizational challenge.”
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