Lapel

What do they actually do

Lapel is an early, limited‑access platform that connects a company’s customer data from tools like CRM, billing, product analytics, and support into a single, real‑time account view. The team is working alongside select partners rather than running a broad self‑serve launch, and there are no public demos or pricing pages yet lapel.com.

Using that unified view, Lapel helps customer‑facing teams coordinate actions across sales, success, and support. It surfaces relevant signals and can trigger alerts, tasks, or automated touches across the customer journey. The company positions this as infrastructure that “powers every touchpoint,” and emphasizes secure handling of business customer data with SOC 2 noted on the site and details in its privacy policy lapel.com privacy policy.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Head of Customer Success at a SaaS or online service: Renewals and expansions slip because data is fragmented across CRM, billing, product usage, and support tools; the team spends time stitching account health instead of acting lapel.com privacy policy.
• Sales Operations / RevOps manager: Maintains many brittle point‑to‑point integrations yet still lacks a reliable, real‑time account view for reps, leading to inconsistent lead qualification and handoffs lapel.com.
• Support team lead: Agents lack context like contracts, recent product activity, and prior touchpoints because systems aren’t unified, causing longer resolutions and more escalations lapel.com.
• Account Manager or Strategic AE: Misses upsell/expansion opportunities due to absent or late signals and no coordinated workflows when usage or sentiment changes lapel.com.
• Platform/Integration engineer or security lead: Needs a secure, maintained way to reunify customer data without building bespoke pipelines; reliability and compliance are key concerns privacy policy lapel.com.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Run high‑touch, paid pilots with 8–12 hand‑picked accounts from the founders’ and YC network, providing custom integrations and dedicated onboarding with clear success criteria to convert to references lapel.com.
• First 50: Standardize 4–6 core integration templates (CRM, billing, product analytics, support) and sell a 6–12 week onboarding package via targeted outbound, partner intros, and niche communities; publish a one‑page ROI study and implementation checklist to reduce evaluation time.
• First 100: Launch a documented integration library and a self‑serve trial for mid‑market, add a small inside sales team, and recruit SI/CS consultancy partners; finalize SOC 2–backed compliance posture and SLAs to ease procurement for larger accounts lapel.com privacy policy.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Lapel targets the intersection of customer data platforms (real‑time profiles), customer‑success platforms, and cloud/workflow automation for customer‑facing processes. Recent estimates: CDP ≈ $7.4B (2024) MarketsandMarkets via PR Newswire, CS platforms ≈ low‑single‑digit billions Mordor Intelligence, cloud workflow ≈ low billions Grand View Research.

Bottom-up calculation:

Add CDP (~$7.4B) + CS (~$2.0B midpoint) + cloud workflow (~$4.3B) ≈ ~$13.7B, then apply a 30–50% overlap reduction (same buyers/budgets) to avoid double‑counting, yielding a practical TAM of roughly $7–10B today MarketsandMarkets Mordor Intelligence Grand View Research.

Assumptions:

• Budgets for CDP, CS platforms, and workflow automation meaningfully overlap, so a 30–50% adjustment prevents double‑counting.
• Core CRM/CX license spend is excluded from near‑term TAM (Lapel complements or replaces parts of it in specific workflows, not the full system of record).
• Focus is on web businesses with active sales/success/support teams willing to consolidate data unification + activation in one product.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Twilio Segment: Customer‑data platform for event collection, identity resolution, and activation into downstream tools; overlaps on “unify and activate” but is primarily data infrastructure rather than packaged CS/sales/support workflows Segment.
• RudderStack: Data‑first CDP focused on real‑time collection, profiles, and activation to your data cloud and tools; positioned for data engineering use cases more than out‑of‑the‑box customer‑operations playbooks RudderStack.
• Hull: CDP with two‑way, real‑time syncs across CRM, support, and product tools to build a single account picture; emphasizes integration/sync logic over prebuilt CS automation and cross‑team orchestration Hull.
• Gainsight: Customer‑success suite with customer 360, health scores, playbooks, and Journey Orchestrator for renewals/expansions; overlaps on signals and automation, but is a CS application rather than a unification infrastructure layer Gainsight.
• Totango: CS and revenue platform combining data ingestion, health, and campaign automation (incl. AI signals) to prioritize risk/expansion; competes for the same teams but is more of an end‑user CS product than a real‑time data + orchestration backbone Totango.