Cookeville software startup sees 400% growth
The DIY design platform will double the size of its team
Could a Cookeville startup become the next Canva? Arvo’s stats certainly suggest it's not out of the question.
Since debuting their DIY document design platform last February, Alane Boyd and her husband, Micah Johnson, have seen sales soar more than 400-percent. Arvo has attracted customers — ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies — nearly all 50 states and on three continents (North America, Europe and Australia).
To accelerate and support its gargantuan growth, Boyd says Arvo will times its eight-person team by two. She adds that her and Johnson — who have bootstrapped the business thus far — are also entertaining the idea of raising a seed-round sometime this year.
This isn’t the first venture the dynamic husband and wife duo have embarked on together. Prior to Arvo, Boyd, a sales and marketing guru and Johnson, a seasoned software engineer started and sold — in 2018 — an automotive software company.
During the pandemic, the pair launched BGBO, an operations consulting company that converts companies' time consuming tasks into automated workflows. The Cookeville couple noticed a common theme among the 120 companies they consulted with.
“All of them were managing their teams with ineffective, boring black and white text documents,” Boyd explains. “We knew companies would crumble if they continued to run their remote and hybrid teams this way. Culture would decline, expenses would increase and turnover would become the new normal.”
In 2022, the pair sought out to solve the problem.
They answered with Arvo, a digital design platform that enables everyone from admins to executives to easily create professional, eye-catching documents in a matter of minutes. The drag-and-drop interface requires no coding or design skills.
These documents build what Boyd calls “knowledge suites” — online resource libraries for different business departments.
“Arvo connects employees — remote, hybrid, or in-office. Everyone can instantaneously access the knowledge they need,” she says. “Arvo is changing how companies operate both internally — such as HR recruiting resources and new hire how-to guides — and externally — such as sales proposals and status updates.”
The female co-founder claims that companies who don’t use Arvo spend an average of $120,000 more per year on freelancers and wasted time, while organizations who implement the software save an average of $3,100 per month in operational costs.
“With Arvo companies are eliminating repeat questions and unnecessary meetings,” Boyd says.
Arvo also allows users to embed anything — like YouTube videos, Google Forms, SoundCloud audio files — into the digital documents.
Kathryn Rickmeyer, a marketing manager and Arvo adopter, says the software combines the plug-and-play structure of Microsoft Office Suite with the creative, colorful designs of Canva.
What’s the platform price tag? The subscription-based software starts out at $99 per month for an account. Additional editors can be added for $20 per month.
Boyd says Arvo is industry agnostic and has been used by an array of industries from hotel chains to agriculture companies. The product is popular with revenue teams — sales executives, business development professionals and account managers — who are using it as a sales enablement tool to create case studies, sales and customer success stories.
“Arvo has become an invaluable tool for our sales team to craft their own customized message,” says Taylor Duncan COO of Nxt Level Recruiting. “It’s intuitive and simple to use.”
“We can build beautiful, professional one-pagers in minutes, not months. Arvo has put an end to expensive, time-consuming back-and-forth with freelancers and graphic design groups,” says a Business Development manager at a small software company.
To date, more than 35,000 documents have been built with the Cookeville company’s tool. But Boyd says this is just the beginning. She and her husband hope to dominate the documentation market.
