Sentry Uses Arcade to:
- Create thorough, interactive product demos for prospective customers.
- Share new product releases in an engaging, dynamic format in blog posts.
- Build interactive assets for the sales team to help answer customer questions.
If anyone knows what it’s like to make the most of limited resources at a rapidly growing company, it’s Rahul Chhabria. Rahul leads product marketing at Sentry, an error and performance monitoring platform for developers. Sentry has expanded exponentially over the past ten years, from a two-person, open-source passion project into a company with three offices and more than 200 employees worldwide.
The key to marketing any software product is providing contextual education and demonstrating its value in an easy-to-understand way. While Sentry continued to see consistent growth with developers and companies to Disney, Slack, and Rockstar Games, Rahul and the team needed to find more creative ways to bring the product closer to anyone who wanted to learn more about Sentry.
Normally, in order to show off the depths of what Sentry could really do, prospective users had to install one of Sentry’s SDKs and push it to production. Once live, Sentry would start recording error events and transactions. Rahul was seeking a way to showcase the rich error context from stack traces to the line of code and surface what data developers would have access to when diagnosing performance issues without having to install anything.
Then there was the matter of explaining particular product features and new releases. The obvious solution—a blog post full of static screenshots—was far from ideal. These posts were descriptive, but needed an element of interactivity. Building high-quality GIFs to demo product features was a better option, but time-consuming. “Contrary to popular belief, it actually takes a while and a decent amount of work to make a high-quality GIF,” says Rahul. That’s not to mention the issue of page-load time. “Another reason we didn’t want to put a massive GIF in a blog post or email is that it might bog down performance,” he explains. “We can’t have our site taking three seconds to load a page.”
Discovering Arcade was an aha! moment for Rahul, and it didn’t take long for him to roll it out across the Sentry team. “Arcade is a delightful solution to a complicated problem,” he says. “It took about five clicks, and boom, you’ve got a demo that’s shareable and embeddable.” That’s a far cry from the old process, which involved creating a ticket for video editors to create a GIF or demo and back-and-forth with notes and revisions—and could take a few weeks from start to finish. Arcade has given the team a level of independence and freed up resources. “Now our creative team can focus on bigger, more complex projects instead of making GIFs. No one wants to do that,” says Rahul.
“Arcade lets our product do the talking at scale. Product demos are super easy to create and maintenance is no longer a pain as it’s simple to recreate them as our product improves over time,” says Chris Jennings (co-founder and CTO).
With Arcade, Rahul and his team felt they finally had a way to communicate their product updates as quickly as they were developing them, and create general, fully interactive product demos that didn’t ask too much of potential customers up-front. They also had the ability to embed Arcade demos in blog posts and emails, and share one-off tutorials with the sales team to help answer customer questions with clear, interactive walk-throughs.
Final Thoughts
To wrap up, we asked Rahul what he’d tell other product and marketing leaders who are thinking about using Arcade:
"Arcade has given my team a level of independence, in that they’re able to quickly and easily build product demos. It's definitely helped us move a lot faster," says Rahul.
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