State of the Parliament 2024: KnowledgeOwl Annual Report

Welcome to our annual State of the Parliament report! In this report, we’ll share a summary of our activities and achievements from 2023 and look ahead to 2024.

2023 Key Milestones

• January 2023: Erica (Lead Customer Success Owl & Mixer of Colors), Sue (Senior Developer Owl & Climber of Mountains), and Veronica (Lead Customer Success Owl & Ice Cream Scholar) joined the parliament, which made KnowledgeOwl’s team 60% women (recent stats indicate that women currently hold ~26% of all tech-related jobs).

• June 1, 2023: KnowledgeOwl celebrated its 8th birthday. Around this time, we created an annual vision instead of an annual strategic plan for the first time.

  • Fun fact: KnowledgeOwl came to life on June 1, 2015, but before that the company was called HelpGizmo. We still have 40 customers who have been with us since our HelpGizmo days. Our oldest account signed up on February 4, 2013, which predates KnowledgeOwl’s inception!

• September 2023: Chad (Executive Assistant to the CEO & Friend of Felines) and Jamie (Lead Technical Technical Support Owl & Foliage Connoisseur) joined the parliament.

• October 12-13, 2023: KnowledgeOwl's CX team attended ElevateCX in Atlanta, our first in-person owl meetup since the pandemic. The hotel even had a bird theme!

• December 6, 2023: KnowledgeOwl celebrated its first “B Day”, the day we owlficially joined the B Corp movement as a Certified B Corp.

Product and Service Summary

Part of our mission is to provide valuable knowledge base software, and we hope that this has been your experience in 2023. You can keep up with our product updates by subscribing to our release notes. Here’s a summary of some of the major product updates that were made in 2023:

• Customize Text Tool 

• Advanced Search

• Required Reading

• New Slack Webhook

• Integrate KnowledgeOwl with Zapier

On the service front, great service has always been our thing and we are doubling down on making it better with the help of our new Customer Success team. Here’s a list of some of the success-oriented things we created in 2023:

• Video Library

• Customer Showcase 

• Onboarding emails

• Monthly product newsletter

• Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn

In 2023 we ran another annual customer survey, as well as our ongoing customer service survey. Here are the results:

• Annual customer survey NPS: 48.1 (316 responses)

• Annual customer service NPS: 100 (34 responses to date)

Team Highlights

We seem to be making good on our mission to make life better for ourselves and our teammates. Despite many changes and challenges during the year, we ended up…

• Earning a 100 eNPS score from our annual team survey.

• Adding 5 owls to the parliament:

  • Erica and Veronica as new Lead Customer Success Owls

  • Sue as a Senior Developer Owl

  • Chad as the Executive Assistant to the Chief Executive Owl

  • Jamie as a Lead Technical Technical Support Owl

• Hatching 2 baby owlets (2 team members added new humans to their families!)

Impact

Part of our mission is a belief that business can be a force for good. Here’s a brief look at our impact beyond just knowledge base software:

• Through our 2% for People and Planet program, we pledged 1% of our sales to 1% for the Planet through our partnership with Eden Reforestation Projects and 1% of our profits to support our owls’ local communities.

• Through our Customer Charity program, we planted trees for each annual survey response and provided matching donations to charities of our customers’ choice.

• In June 2023, we introduced a new Give a Hoot in Your Community program, which offers our owls up to 20 hours/year of paid time off to participate in volunteer work.

• In September 2023, KnowledgeOwl became a Small Business Partner of Carbonfund.org.

• In December 2023, we became a Certified B Corporation.

Challenges and Learnings

2023 wasn’t without its challenges, and it’s my hope that we have learned some valuable lessons so we can move on to even better problems in 2024.

Issue #1: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits

KnowledgeOwl is a team of dreamers and we have some big goals in our vision. One challenge has been figuring out how to make those goals a reality. We’ve realized that we need better systems and processes. Rather than only focusing on the big vision and end goal, we’ve been focusing on building systems to help us get there.

We’ve learned that creating, documenting, and iterating on systems leads to better outcomes, happier people, and less stress. There is freedom in structure!

Issue #2: “Successful businesses do the things that other businesses know they should do … but generally don’t.” Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman's 12 Natural Laws of Business

This is one of those leadership lessons that Brené Brown would say the universe keeps teaching me over and over again. Even though there are some things we know we should be doing, they can still be hard to actually do for various reasons.

For example, sales and marketing have long been my bugaboos. Part of our long term vision for the company is to stop thinking of sales and marketing as bad words. It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve learned that we can do sales and marketing in an ethical, authentic, and fun way that feels true to the KnowledgeOwl experience.

Issue #3: “Life is, by nature, highly interdependent. To try to achieve maximum effectiveness through independence is like trying to play tennis with a golf club—the tool is not suited to the reality.” - Stephen R. Covey, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

As individuals and a company, we have prided ourselves on our independence and marching to the beat of our own drums. How very American of us.

However, trying to figure out everything on our own is pretty silly. Both as an individual and a company, I know that we haven’t reached our potential and that there are much greater things we can achieve.

I believe what’s held both me and the company back is the idea that it’s better to figure it all out on your own. By getting outside the nest and starting to work more closely with other companies, people, and organizations, we are learning and growing at a faster pace than ever before.

We’ve learned to ask for help and to work with others to achieve our goals. And it’s also a heck of a lot more fun this way too!

Future Outlook

While it can be a fool’s errand to try to predict the future, our team is big on visioning and we have a pretty good idea of what we want KnowledgeOwl to look like in the future. One thing we know for sure: we will continue to focus on making valuable knowledge base software.

So what does valuable knowledge base software look like in the upcoming year? You can expect regular product improvements, both in terms of new functionality and improved user experience. We also plan to continue prioritizing service by rolling out new customer success initiatives, strategic partnerships, and content to help make life better for everyone we meet.

Something I’m very excited about is a new reporting and analytics suite that we hope to roll out in early 2024. For years we’ve been recommending 3rd party reporting solutions for more robust reporting and we are excited to bring this in-house!

Talk of the future wouldn’t be complete without discussing AI. While we are still exploring how AI can best be incorporated into our software, we are looking into partnerships with other companies to provide AI-augmented experiences for both authors and readers. Stay tuned for more on this front in 2024 as we will be testing out a new AI software for our support team that integrates with our own knowledge base to enhance the experience for both our owls and our customers.

Conclusion

Whether we're looking back to the past or reflecting on future possibilities, we remain grounded in our mission statement, the North Star that guides our decision-making:

We share the KnowledgeOwl experience
Making valuable knowledge base software
Giving great service to everyone we meet
With the belief that business can be a force for good
Being helpful and kind in all our actions
To make life better for ourselves,
Our teammates, our customers,
And our communities too.

We look forward to continuing to share the KnowledgeOwl experience with y’all in 2024 and beyond. 😊

Acknowledgments

I want to thank all of our owls, customers, and other friends for their support along our journey. Looking back over the past year, I have a few special thank yous:

• Dan Martell for inspiring me to become the best version of myself and to share that with the world.

• Gia and Claire at Forget the Funnel for teaching me Customer-Led Growth and showing me that marketing can be people-first and people-focused.

• Jim at Love At First Try for teaching us to think like a senior UX designer and mentoring us on product-led growth.

• All of my friends from ZingTrain for the ongoing support, encouragement, and inspiration.

• Sorin for all of the support and love you provided to our team and customers over the past three years.

• David for all of the product improvements over the years and the new frameworks to make life better for both us and our customers.

• Will for all of the internal support and inspiration, and for showing me that we all have a writer inside of us.

• Kate for being the Lorax for the KnowledgeOwl Experience and helping us transition with dignity and grace to a KnowledgeOwl without Kate.

• Chad for agreeing to join me on this journey as my Executive Assistant (best thing I did for myself and the company in 2023!).

• Pete for sticking with me through the ups and downs of owning a software company - we can do hard things, and we can do them together!