Customer.io

“Customer.io, where I work, only a couple percent of customers churn each month, which means there's about 98%, 99% customer retention each month. And of those greater than 60% expand their profile count each month.”

“You can sometimes have early cohorts of customers, I know Customer.io does, that are still paying the same amount of MRR as they were like 10 years ago, even though maybe like 20% Of the companies have stayed with the product.”

“And as I was preparing for this talk, one of those companies is still our customer today, and is like a hundred K LTV plus”

“Fast forward two years, and we get to a million in ARR”

“That this database company ended up getting acquired by Apple. They didn't renew our service contract, and so we encountered this issue where we were trying to scale up, and the entire cluster fell over, and we couldn't, you know, it was really hard to get sup…”

“We were on it before version one, and the difference between version zero point something and version one was so significant that we had to rewrite our application.”

“It doesn't make sense to hire the systems builder too early, because they probably need a team around them to help them accomplish all, all the things, but like, you can't scale by being scrappy because it just doesn't work, and everything breaks, and people g…”

“If you're there now trying to figure out how you're going to reinvent how people buy from you, stop. Like, just call it sales, is my advice.”

“Shopify canceled with us, so they were like our largest customer back in, 20, 1314, and then canceled, I think this is in 15”

“The one thing that you'll need to figure out when, around about the time you get to ten million, is what do you want from the business? Because at about ten million, you could sell, unless you've taken a shit ton of money if you're bootstrapped and you get to …”

“If I was a B to C business, I'd buy Amplitude for my CDP, I'd buy customer IO, and maybe I'd upgrade to Braze in the future. I'd put everything in Snowflake. I'd buy high touch to reverse ETL, that data out to my ad networks. For attribution, probably AppSlyer…”

“You know, a lot of people use HubSpot. I would try to go away with customer IO as long as I could, and then I'd move to Braze afterwards.”

“I pointed out customer.io. I'm an investor in, angel investor, churn buster, right message, cart hook, lead fuse, all of these folks who are like, yeah, we're not looking at IPO.”

“I think he's doing, he's open about his numbers. I think he's doing twenty-two million ARR right now.”

“I've never felt like I belonged in any community, but certainly I share more values with the bootstrapper community than I do with the sort of venture funded grow at all costs community.”

“We have about 40 people on the cap table, which our lawyer always tells us, like, that's a lot of people on the cap table. And anytime we need to get people to sign documents, it's a big headache to get everyone to sign. But what that's meant is that for the p…”

“I think when you start a company, it just doesn't feel real. And I think people print business cards and they make a logo because somehow that makes it more real to them. And when you tell someone I've started a company and you hand them a business card and it…”

“That's somewhere where unless your company is all about how companies work, you should probably not challenge the norm there and just use The tried and true methods that have worked over years.”

“And we pay market rates now, and we benchmark to the U.S. National average. This, I think it's like the 75th percentile of the U.S. National average for all of our roles.”

“Over time, we raised our prices, and one of the things that we found by raising our prices is, well, A, it lowered churn, because if you have a really low price point, many people will sign up, but also many people will churn.”

“And what I found is, you can, under the guise of not selling something, trick people into having a conversation with you But really, you're trying to sell them something. And that's happened to me a couple times as CEO, and it's really annoying, but we were li…”

“And the way that all that stuff worked was my co-founder would write a MapReduce script behind the scenes when someone would set up a campaign. They would write in plain English what they wanted the campaign to do. We would manually look at the data that they …”

“And I think in 2015, we had an outage that lasted, it might have been 24 hours. Basically what had happened was we were using this database technology called FoundationDB. It was acquired by Apple. Apple did not, would not let FoundationDB renew any service co…”