In April 2015, Jackson Noel had some peculiar advice for the people most likely to buy his software. Stop fussing over your onboarding. His company, Appcues, sold a way to help people learn software without asking developers to build every explanation. Yet here was its co-founder telling young startups to put the automated welcome aside and help customers themselves. It was an awkward position for a salesman and a useful one for a founder.
In a guest essay, Noel described a familiar conversation with startup friends. They had redesigned their onboarding repeatedly. They admired Slack. They had studied other products. Then came his question: “Have you looked at any of your own data?” The difficulty was elementary. A handsome introduction could not establish that the thing being introduced was useful.
He recommended talking to new users, helping them get set up, and following up with people who had disappeared. Learn what makes the product worth using, then make that path easier to follow. The advice puts a human being at the beginning of an automation business. It also supplies a good way into Noel’s story: look for the person behind the numbers.
A finance guy finds the other side of the spreadsheet
Noel’s earlier career included three years as an investment analyst at GE Capital. He studied at Bucknell University and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School; his Harvard years ran from 2011 to 2013. He then worked on growth at Testive, a Boston education startup. Finance, business school, growth marketing: on paper, it is a tidy sequence. The interest that connected those jobs is easier to see in his own compact description of himself.
On his founder profile, Noel called himself a “Reformed finance guy.” He listed data, psychology and building teams among his interests. The joke earns its keep. Finance can tell you what a customer is worth. Psychology makes you wonder what that customer was trying to accomplish before closing the browser.
At Testive, onboarding became a practical interest. Bringing people to a product was one job; helping them successfully use it was another. Noel would build his next business around that second assignment. It required attention to the point where a company’s promise met an actual person, with an actual task and a limited supply of patience.
The first colleague was there to ask why
Jonathan Kim, Noel’s Appcues co-founder, came from engineering at HubSpot. They arrived at the same problem from different jobs: useful software needed a better way to explain itself. Their partnership combined the experience of building features with the experience of trying to get people to use them. Appcues took shape around giving teams the ability to publish guidance inside a product without commissioning every change from engineering.
An early staffing decision gives that idea some texture. Kim and Noel brought in John Sherer, a salesperson, as their first hire. Sherer called people to find out why they were not buying. Those conversations exposed objections and clarified which product capabilities mattered. The next person through the door could have been another developer. Instead, they hired someone whose work would generate questions.
That is an unusually concrete picture of customer research. It involves a phone, a refusal, and the possibility that the refusal is reasonable. For a company selling smoother introductions, listening to people who declined the introduction was a sensible place to start.
A small head start, honestly described
Appcues also had to explain why onboarding deserved a budget. In a 2022 conversation with Peep Laja, Noel recalled the early struggle to gain traction and the decision to write educational material. A post spread through Hacker News and GrowthHackers, helping bring roughly 1,500 blog signups within a couple of months. Teaching people about the problem helped them recognize a reason to buy.
His account of competition was less polished than the usual founder performance. He acknowledged that Appcues’ differentiation was still modest. He wanted the company to concentrate on experience building and design flexibility. That candor matters because it leaves room for work still to be done. A product can have customers and a recognizable brand while its distinctions remain difficult to explain.
Education continued to be part of the business. Noel described content as an investment whose benefits accumulated over years. The company was helping prospective customers learn a craft before asking them to choose a tool. That sequence suited a founder who had already told startups to understand their own users before perfecting the machinery.
When a better welcome needed a measuring tape
By July 2019, Noel was publicly making the case for product-led growth as Appcues’ CEO. Buyers wanted to learn for themselves, he argued. They could try another product rather than call support when something went wrong. Software companies therefore had to take more responsibility for what happened inside the product, after the marketing had done its work.
That argument also created a demand for evidence. A team could publish guidance, but how would it know whether the guidance helped? In April 2021, Appcues introduced click-to-track and Events Explorer, giving nontechnical teams tools to record actions and inspect product usage. Noel’s announcement identified measurement as a missing part of the company’s approach to adoption.
The change joined two activities that are often separated: making an intervention and observing its consequences. A prompt might look clear in a design review and still fail to help a customer. Measurement gives that customer a vote. It turns the welcome from a piece of decoration into something a team can question, change, and judge by what happens next.
Appcues reported nearly two billion personalized experiences delivered by the time it announced the round.
In January 2022, Appcues announced a $32.1 million Series B led by NewSpring, taking its stated funding total to $47.9 million at that point. The company reported serving more than 1,500 customers. Noel described the aim as making improvements to product experiences as easy as updating a website. The money would support product development, international operations, a remote team, and education. His original concern about the distance between an idea and its implementation had acquired a much larger audience.
The customers who leave still have something to say
Departure interested Noel almost as much as arrival. In a contribution to a book about SaaS churn, he described interviewing customers who stopped paying. Their feedback helped Appcues understand the outcomes they had wanted and the changes that might have helped them get there. An account cancellation could carry information that a happy customer had no reason to volunteer.
“Just because someone stops paying you doesn’t mean they stop rooting for you.”
Jackson Noel
He thought about former customers as alumni, people who might still offer useful feedback or eventually return. There is a generous streak in that description, alongside a commercial one. The relationship survives the invoice.
His writing on churn also makes distinctions that a single percentage can conceal. Losing a customer deserves investigation, but the reason for leaving matters. A company cannot sensibly respond to every departure in the same way. The interesting question becomes what happened to this customer, and what that experience reveals about the business.
There is a family resemblance between this view and his onboarding advice. At both ends of the relationship, Noel asks teams to resist replacing an individual story with an attractive generalization. A person has arrived, or a person has left. Before improving the chart, find out why.
Thirty-seven tabs and a sandwich
Noel could make the argument with a joke, too. In a post about Appcues’ Launchpad resource center, he imagined a user leaving a product to search support documentation, confronting 37 open browser tabs, forgetting the original task, and heading downstairs for a sandwich. The sandwich was an excellent outcome for lunch and a less promising one for the software.
His point was that useful help should be available where the person needs it. Launchpad let teams put a resource center inside their product. The humor worked because the detour was recognizable: finding an explanation can become a separate project, and the original project loses.
The same attention to context appeared as Appcues extended into mobile experiences and, later, email and push notifications. In February 2025, Noel announced an out-of-product messaging suite following a beta with nearly 50 customers. The company could help teams reach people both during product use and after their attention had moved elsewhere. The setting changed; the problem of earning another useful interaction remained.
A different kind of handover
On March 25, 2025, Appcues announced Ryan Barry as its new CEO. Noel moved into a board role. In their announcement video, the two appeared in matching black T-shirts, apparently without having arranged it. After a career spent helping companies manage first impressions, Noel’s own introduction of his successor came with a small wardrobe joke.
Noel said he would continue supporting the team from the board and take his first real work break in more than a decade. He thanked Kim for inviting him into the venture. In the company’s announcement, he emphasized the philosophies he and Barry shared about culture, teams, and customers. His next assignment had room for both continued involvement and time away.
His writing remained part of Appcues’ public library. A guide carrying his byline, dated June 2026, advises teams to investigate the moment customers first recognize a product’s value. Its method combines conversations, departed users’ experiences, and behavioral data. It is a fitting subject for Noel: the point when a promise becomes useful enough for someone to believe it.
Years earlier, he had warned founders against polishing an introduction before understanding what they were introducing. The advice still asks something inconvenient of people who sell convenience. Sit with the customer. Listen to the hesitation. Help with the task. There will be time to automate once you understand what deserves to happen again.