Growth Lives in Three Tools That Don't Talk to Each Other

01 /The Concept

Growth at most companies lives inside three separate tools that don’t talk to each other: the metrics dashboard, the project tracker, and the team’s chat. Panobi’s bet is that consolidating all three into a single growth-specific workspace is worth building from scratch.

The founders spent their careers working on Slack during its remarkable growth period starting in 2015. They describe that era as a constant juggling act: pulling data from dozens of sources, manually assembling it into spreadsheets, pushing updates to teammates, collecting feedback, revising the spreadsheets, and then starting over.

Panobi is their attempt to replace that process with something built from the ground up for growth work.

The central view of the platform overlays key growth metrics – revenue, conversion rates, retention – with the active tasks the team is running to move those metrics. At a glance, you see both where things stand and what's in motion to improve them.

Anyone on the team can comment on any point in the plan, suggesting new initiatives, questioning assumptions, or sharing learnings from completed experiments.

Metric charts are built automatically. Any metric a team cares about can be tracked – you define the formula once, connect the data sources (Google Analytics, a CRM, financial systems), and the platform maintains the chart going forward.

Each initiative on the growth plan includes three required components:

- the core hypothesis being tested,

- the testing plan, tied to specific dates,

- a post-experiment summary of what was learned.

That last element is easy to undervalue. Growth teams accumulate a lot of experiment history; without structured capture, that history disappears when people leave. Panobi makes the institutional knowledge permanent.

The expectation is that experiment results and new hypotheses get shared broadly – not just within the growth team. The goal is for everyone in the company to understand that growth is an active, hypothesis-driven process, not something that just happens.

Panobi is still in early testing with real customers and hasn't started charging yet – though the founders acknowledge that's probably a mistake. Pricing will eventually be seat-based for editors (people who can create and update content), with free read-only access for the rest of the company.

The company has raised $5M in its first significant round, following a couple of small angel checks.

02 /Why It Matters

Panobi fits into a broader trend: specialized collaboration platforms purpose-built for specific types of work rather than general-purpose tools stretched to cover everything.

Yes, teams use Miro or Notion or Trello for almost anything. But a tool designed for a specific workflow will always outperform a generic one in that context. Several startups illustrate this trend across different domains:

- Voiceflow (a prior review) – collaborative AI chatbot development, $39M raised.

- AllSpice (a prior review) – collaborative hardware engineering, $9.8M raised.

- Digs (a prior review) – collaboration on residential construction and renovation projects, $7M raised.

- ResearchHub (a prior review) – collaborative academic research and paper development, $5M raised; co-founded by the founder of Coinbase.

- Multiplayer (a prior review) – collaborative backend development, $3M raised.

- Along (a prior review) – collaborative contract management, €1M raised.

What's striking is that growth – arguably the most important ongoing project at any startup or company – has been conspicuously absent from this list until now. There are product management platforms, roadmap tools, advertising dashboards, and CRM systems. But none of them treat growth as a unified, hypothesis-driven effort requiring cross-functional coordination.

That gap is what Panobi is filling. Growth can't be siloed into product, or marketing, or sales. It requires everyone pulling toward the same current metrics, generating hypotheses, testing them, and building on what works. A dedicated platform for that coordination is a natural fit for the trend Panobi is part of.

03 /Opportunities

The problem Panobi is solving is real and underserved. Even companies that haven't thought about needing a dedicated growth platform will likely recognize the need once they see one.

There's a parallel to the famous quip about customers wanting a faster horse – until they saw a car. Panobi may be exactly that kind of product: the thing people didn't know to ask for, but which becomes obvious the moment it's in front of them.

One conspicuous gap in the current platform is AI. That's a meaningful omission – both for functional value and for investor interest. But it's a solvable one.

A [related review](/review/kak-bystro-prevratit-ideju-v-produkt) covered Rubix Labs, whose Gobi platform uses AI to help founders build and execute product plans – delegating some tasks to specialized AI agents and routing others to human freelancers through an embedded marketplace. The model is directly applicable here.

A growth planning platform with an AI assistant that proposes hypotheses based on the team's current metrics, past experiment data, and growth case studies found online would be materially more valuable than the same platform without it. The team could filter, refine, and prioritize the AI suggestions – keeping human judgment in the loop without the blank-page problem.

An embedded marketplace for execution – connecting teams with freelancers who can implement specific growth experiments – would compound the value further. This is especially relevant for early-stage startups that have ambitious growth goals but limited internal bandwidth.

So the interesting direction: build a Panobi-equivalent with an AI hypothesis engine and a freelancer marketplace baked in. The result could be significantly more valuable than either component alone, particularly for resource-constrained teams who need to move fast.