The question that kept coming up at Neat was almost comically simple: “How do I scan?” Neat had made its name with receipt scanners, then moved toward cloud bookkeeping. Its users arrived carrying a memory of the old product into a new one. Somewhere between that memory and the new interface, they stalled. A help center could hold the answer, but the user had to know where to go looking.
Simpo offered a more immediate arrangement. It placed a layer of instructions inside the software itself: a short walkthrough at the moment of confusion, an announcement when a feature changed, a search box that could find the right article, a survey that asked whether any of it helped. The company sold this to product and customer success teams as a way to make software adoption less dependent on emails, training calls and a user’s patience.
- Simpo gave teams a no-code way to build in-app guidance.
- Neat used it across seven applications after a difficult attempt with a larger vendor.
- Neat reported 55% less support volume and 20% less year-over-year churn; it also ran other experience initiatives.
- Founder Yuval Karmi says Simpo began winding down in 2021; WalkMe later bought its technology assets.
The answer at the scene of the crime
The usual software help system asks a user to leave the place where a problem occurred. Go to a support site. Search an article. Return to the product. Try to remember which button the article meant. Simpo’s proposition was to shorten that trip. Its Smart Walkthroughs led users through a task step by step; Targeted Announcements called attention to changes; Universal Knowledge Search brought existing help materials into the app; NPS and surveys gathered feedback in the same place.
This was a business-to-business platform, aimed at the people responsible for getting others to use software. Simpo’s public customer list included Walmart, Sam’s Club, monday.com, Neat, DuPont and Jet. Its selling point was partly editorial: product teams could write a sequence of useful prompts without asking engineers to rebuild the interface each time. It was also operational. Customer success teams could see where users faltered and place an answer near that exact point.
It sounds tidy in a diagram. The test comes when somebody must configure the thing. Neat had tried a larger digital adoption vendor first. According to Jeff Gove, its VP of Operations, that rollout dragged on for months, customization demanded technical work, and access to its customer success manager was too limited. He wanted a system his team could actually operate. Neat changed vendors.
Seven applications, one stubborn question
Simpo set up a dedicated implementation and success team for Neat, with a private Slack channel for questions. Within weeks, the product was in seven parts of Neat’s ecosystem, including its cloud app, mobile apps, Salesforce and older desktop software. That spread matters. A customer does not experience a company as a neat stack of internal systems. They simply move from one screen to another and expect the company to remember what they are trying to do.
Neat built a welcoming explanation for new users, then an announcement that could lead into a walkthrough. Its knowledge base became searchable from inside the app. When people needed to know how scanning worked in Neat’s newer product, the answer could meet them without sending them on an expedition. Surveys and NPS prompts gave Neat another view of whether users were getting comfortable.
“The first thing most people search for is ‘How do I scan?’”Jeff Gove, Neat VP of Operations
In under a year, Neat created 37 announcements and 18 walkthroughs. More than 193,000 unique users interacted with its Simpo experiences, according to the case study. Gove estimated roughly 2,080 engineering hours saved. He also reported a 55% drop in support volume and a 20% year-over-year reduction in churn.
Customer-reported results. Neat also described other user-experience initiatives during the period.
These are Neat’s measurements, and the churn number is not a controlled experiment. Gove credited Simpo alongside other strategic changes to the user experience. Still, the sequence is useful: name the question, put the answer in the workflow, watch whether support demand and user behavior change. A tour that looks pleasant but never answers a real question is merely decoration with a Next button.
The guide maker’s blind spot
Simpo began in 2016, founded by Karmi and Yohanan Hruschev. It was first called ActionBar, a name that described where its early product lived more clearly than where its ambition might go. By 2019, the rebranded company had raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Redpoint Ventures. TechCrunch described a no-code platform for software adoption, with workflows that could learn from user behavior and suggest the next step.
Karmi has since said the company raised $15.5 million in all and grew to 21 people. He has also described a less flattering internal picture: reviewing copy at 2 a.m., stepping into decisions others could have made, and making himself a bottleneck. In a later account of delegating customer onboarding without documenting the process, he wrote that customers became confused and the team’s NPS fell. His point was painfully close to Simpo’s product pitch. Handing off a task is difficult when the knowledge needed to do it stays in one person’s head.
This does not mean a tour builder could have saved the company by taking its own medicine. Karmi has written about venture pressure, his relationship to the company’s success and the exhausting way he worked. He says Simpo began shutting down in April 2021. The lesson he draws is narrower and more useful: a process cannot scale by assumption. Someone has to make its decisions, exceptions and standards legible to the next person.
WalkMe bought Simpo’s technology assets on October 4, 2021. Its SEC filing records $1.306 million in cash consideration and treats the deal as an asset purchase. That figure describes the technology transaction, not a price for the whole company. It is an unromantic ending for a venture-backed startup, and Karmi has resisted dressing it up as a triumph.
A small instruction worth stealing
For a software team, Simpo’s most copyable move is almost free: collect the questions users ask most often, then examine where they ask them. “How do I scan?” is better product data than a vague mandate to improve onboarding. Write an answer that appears at the right moment. Make it short enough to act on. See whether the question returns, whether support requests change, and whether people finish the task. Segments matter too: a new user, a returning customer and someone learning a changed feature may need different prompts.
That method has limits. In-app guidance cannot make a broken workflow sensible. It can annoy users when every screen demands attention. And in a complex enterprise deployment, an easy editor still needs an owner who keeps instructions current. Simpo’s Neat case worked because the team had a concrete transition to explain, help content to connect, people to maintain it and a vendor that helped implement it.
The company’s other lesson is for the person assigning that work. Write down what a good decision looks like before the whole operation depends on somebody else guessing it. Simpo’s product moved knowledge closer to the user. Its founder’s later reflections ask the same question inside a team: where does the answer live, and who can reach it when the person who knows it is away?