How Carta Marketed Itself Directly to Founders and Doubled Conversion with Arcade

Learn how Carta experimented with Arcade and used it across multiple functions

Carta Uses Arcade to:

  • Share interactive tweets that showcase specific product features on Twitter.
  • Produce product website pages with clear, interactive demos. 
  • Integrate with Salesforce for support documentation.

When you’re a marketer launching a new product in a relatively competitive space, you have to find a way to cut through the noise. Just ask Jane Alexander, Chief Marketing Officer at Carta, a cap table management software system. 

With multiple products in the pipeline, Carta has gotten incredibly far with a traditional sales and partnership model, raising over $1B in funding and employing more than 1,500 people across the world to date. But as the company entered a new phase of growth—going self-service—Jane wanted to find a way to tap into a new category of customers: founders. She partnered closely with Carly Blumenfeld, Director of Product Marketing, to come up with a plan.  

Because founders today tend to be product-oriented, Carly and her team were looking for a way to highlight differentiating features of various offerings across Carta Launch (a free equity management tool for early-stage founders), Carta Total Comp (which helps companies build a compensation management strategy), and of course - Carta’s cornerstone cap table product.

They built demo videos to showcase different aspects of each of these products, but the videos ran long and didn’t perform as well as they’d hoped. Engaged potential buyers might click on them, but then drop off after not really getting a feel for how the products worked. Carly realized that, in order to truly showcase Carta’s value, she needed something beyond traditional demo videos. She wanted to give her prospective audience a chance to play around with the tools before requiring them to take any sort of action or sign up for a free trial. 

It all changed when she started working with Arcade. “Arcade makes it easy for potential customers to really get a feel for how they might use new features or products,” she says. “It’s a way to experience our product that’s even lighter weight than a free trial.” When the “Arcades”—demos that allow users to actually interact with the product—started to get a lot more traction than Carta’s original demo videos, Carly had an idea.

Rather than trying to attract founders who might be interested in Carta to the site, she brought the Arcades to them, where they were already spending time, on Twitter. She’d attach an individual Arcade to a tweet promoting a specific offering, like Carta’s SAFE tool, which is particularly attractive to early-stage founders. 

This gave the product a chance to speak for itself, and it worked. Conversion spiked to 20 percent. The ability to add a direct CTA at the end of the Arcade, which points the user to a landing page about the product, probably didn’t hurt.

Carta has since published six Arcades, and included them in multiple tweets and on various product pages, with higher engagement and conversion over the original demo content every time. They also used Arcade to build a custom Carta integration for Salesforce documentation. Eleven members of the Carta team are involved with Arcade now, collaborating and brainstorming ways to leverage Arcades in marketing content going forward. 

Arcade has played a key role in helping Carta grab people’s attention and differentiate itself in a crowded market, showing clear and interactive walkthroughs of truly distinctive product offerings in the financial software space.

“I feel so proud of our product when I click through our Arcades,” says Carly Blumenfeld. 

Final Thoughts

To wrap up, we asked Jane what she’d tell other product and marketing leaders who are thinking about using Arcade:  

"Arcade makes it easy for our users to feel how they might use new features or products. It is a way to experience the product that is even more lightweight than a free trial," says Jane Alexander.

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