Hi Runway Team!

I meant it when I said I absolutely loved using your software! I have some notes about the same with some feedback - things I loved, things that could be improved and just ideas in general. I wanted to share the same with your team. I’d be glad if it can help in any manner, in terms of feedback from a first-time user.

💯 Features I loved:

• Loved the Notion design language used, was so clean and easy - almost like I had muscle memory while using this product (Thanks to Notion!) This might sound like a basic feature but the very thought of separating models, databases and pages gave a pretty organised view.
• Copy pasting a forecast formula doesn’t paste it exactly with the previous attributes but with the attributes corresponding to the driver in the same row (trust me, I know how much time this saved especially as someone who studied finance and dealt with the very infamous spreadsheet mishaps!)
• The ‘Expand by dimension’ feature which I just discovered while creating this document! It could have saved the time I spent on manually creating the Expense by category & Location combinations.
• I haven’t gotten a chance to explore the Plans feature yet due to the limited access I got, but I can see from the information available online that it’s the most differentiating and crucial feature! I was utterly surprised to see how you can also adjust the chronology of tasks and see how that affects the final metric.
• Nothing related to the product but absolutely love your website design & the concept of social proof used with the tweets there, as someone who (deeply) cares about branding - Runway did it so right. Even the change-log/help center videos with the sky background and the person seeming to sit in a plane seat, the branding is SO on point!

🔨 Features that could be improved:

• When trying to choose options from the dropdown menus to choose attributes for drivers or drivers for a graph, the dropdown menu glitched a lot making it a slower process of selection.
• Sometimes the dropdown menu had options which were not fitting in the screen and I wasn’t able to view those options in the menu. As a temporary workaround, I minimised the screen and I was then able to view the options.

💡 Product Ideas:

• If hovering over headers like drivers, forecast formula, actuals formula etc. can show a bite-sized description of what it means on the tool-tip, it can give non-finance team users a better idea of what it is. There could also be a tutorial mode in which these tool-tips can be enabled. Semrush has similar tool-tips, and it has made the product a lot more intuitive for everyone on the team especially while creating reports.

• Formulae which return the present value, future value or the internal return rate after inputting the cashflows can be a great time saver, especially when companies are calculating the net present value of their investments.

• A mini-game like tutorial for first-time users to get used to the product and understand basic functionalities first. For users like me who prefer figuring out a product without reading the documentation first, it can be a great way to get them to use the sticky features of Runway in the first try itself.

  I implemented a similar feature at Womp (a tool like Canva but for 3D design) for our first-time users, and it was a huge HIT! Users discovered the product’s sticky feature aka the Goop feature through the game, and started using the app much longer since then.

• Have you explored tools like Navattic for an interactive demo of the product and Dock for onboarding new customers? I think these could be a great addition but of course, factors like budget should also be considered.

• Editable, ready to use financial templates can also be created on Runway for teams to quickly get the best out of the tool in a faster & more efficient manner.

• From a marketing perspective, a slack community of customers can be created to engage the community members, share useful resources/workarounds/product updates, enable networking and build a strong community brand for Runway.