Our Investment in Nue.io: Nue Kid on the Block

Nue Kid on the Block (with the Lemonade Stand)

Imagine you’re driving through a typical leafy, suburban area and come across a classic kid’s lemonade stand. Feeling parched on a hot summer’s day, you figure you’ll stop in, pay them a couple of bucks, and get a nice, refreshing drink. As you get closer, you notice there’s not one, but three separate stalls all under the same banner. Curious, you park and walk up to the first stall.

Stall one is the sales kid. They tell you about how this is the greatest lemonade in the neighbourhood – it’s cold, fresh, sweet, and tangy – and, just for you, they’ll give you the drink for $2.50. You agree to the price, but say you only have a $5 bill on you. They assure you it’s not a problem, mark down another sale and tell you to go to the next stall to pay and they’ll help you figure it out.

Stall two is the finance kid. They ask you for $2.50 for the drink and you explain what you had said to the previous stall, that you only have a $5 bill on you. They say they don’t have change at the moment but can take down your information and send you the change tomorrow when they are able to get to the bank. With postage, transport, and time to return the change, you wonder if the kids will even make a profit on your sale. You sigh and agree to the deal because if you go away at this point, you won’t get that cold refreshing drink. You pay the finance kid, give them your information, and they send you off to the third stall for your beverage.

Stall three is your final product, the lemonade. The kid behind the counter asks if you’ve ordered regular lemonade, peach lemonade, an Arnold Palmer, or limeade. Annoyed you say, “I just want one glass of cold lemonade, like I mentioned at stall one, isn’t that what you’re selling?” The kid smiles and says, “you got it,” handing you the right stuff, finally. You get back in your car, shaking your head at this whole tedious ordeal.

Now imagine having even more options. The lemonade stand could start offering subscription services (what isn’t a subscription today?); you could get rapid delivery of lemonade to your home; you could get lemonade bundles with peach lemonade, limeade, and Arnold Palmers; and they could add a loyalty card that gives you discounts when you make purchases on it. Each new option adds complexity and needs a reassessment on profit margins and value add to the customer. The sales kid, finance kid, and operations kid are each working in separate stalls, with separate ledgers, and different information.

After all this confusion, you see a problem in dire need of a solution and offer to help the lemonade stand kids unify their processes. You implement a single stall that simplifies and unites the sales process again, while leaving room to expand on opportunities and create dynamic pricing that keeps finance happy. Step by step, you’re able to add in multiple product types, introduce new bundled offerings, and attract a regular subscription crowd.

Simplifying the revenue lifecycle and delivering a simple all-in-one place for businesses is exactly what co-founders Tina Kung and Kate McCullough are working to do with Nue.io (Nue). Nue is changing the way that sales teams deliver software, by unifying sales and billing from the beginning. Their revenue lifecycle management platform is allowing customers to manage the entire quote-to-cash cycle in one location, rather than bouncing through a patchwork of solutions or coding their own.

Tina experienced the complexity of these solutions firsthand while working with clients as engineering lead at Salesforce CPQ, Zuora, and Oracle CPQ. She saw that CPQ was a defining part of a company’s success, but most CPQ platforms were built before the rapid growth of subscriptions and weren’t set up to handle SaaS structures efficiently. Without a single, consolidated view of revenue from Sales to Finance, a large portion of companies are left working on parallel processes with different tech stacks, leaving room for inefficiencies and human error. With support of board member Cheng Zhou, a former CTO and Co-Founder of Zuora, the Nue team set out to build a product that elevated billing across all departments and get a holistic view of revenue.

The team behind Nue believes “that the right way to accelerate business results is by giving RevOps teams the agility to sell however they want and wherever they want – with complete revenue visibility end-to-end.” By modernizing CPQ and building the product to look at the entire customer lifecycle, not only is the platform driving more innovative sales processes, but it is bringing customers through the journey, empowering them to make changes themselves and improving the customer experience overall.

It is extremely exciting to be working with such a bold and well-qualified team on a significant problem integral to so many companies. They are building critical infrastructure that will allow organizations to look at revenue holistically, from opportunity to cash. Working with them over the last few months, we’ve seen how passionate they are for this problem they know all to well. We are excited to support their work as they reinvent revenue lifecycle. The Nue kid on the block is hangin’ tough and ready to take over the neighbourhood.

– Rob and the Information VP team