Klaviyo

“Klaviyo, Kate Walsh, runs customer support and customer success there, and she's built this incredible model where they basically work with lots of online merchants, e-commerce companies, et cetera, And to get them live on Klabio and getting value, they define…”

“Being, taking on the ownership of the customer and the non-customers, and more importantly, actually the, what I would call the rejecters, the people that have rejected your product is, is extremely important as well, because you must know the market more than…”

“The other thing I've tried to do, which has been pretty successful, is I challenge my team to come up with one low hanging fruit opportunity per month. So every month, each of my directs and me, we sit down together and say, what can we do that we can jump on …”

“My first hires at Klaviyo, the first five, were my head of brand my head of product marketing, head of performance marketing, head of self-serve, and my head of analytics ops and research.”

“And at Bessemer, we very much believe that the top private cloud companies will shortly follow suit as well.”

“I really think all the VCs are gonna get excited about Klaviyo. It's gonna be a monster IPO. I think it'll trade over to ten billion.”

“You know, on the B to B side, Klaviyo, as you know, I think last week filed for the first great SaaS IPO since December, 20 21. Since December, 20 21. They're at six hundred and fifty million in ARR, I think growing almost 60%, and they're profitable, and that…”

“They're the only SAS IPO of the last two years. The only SaaS IPO since Hashi Corp in December of 2021.”

“Klaviyo, which was the only IPO of this year is marketing just for e-commerce. In fact, Klaviyo really is just marketing only for Shopify customers. 70% of Klaviyo's almost one billion in revenue only not only comes from e-commerce, it only comes from Shopify”

“It's gonna eclipse MailChimp, right? And it may even pass HubSpot as a, HubSpot's marketing piece because it's so valuable in e-commerce, right? Because you're so close to revenue.”

“In B to B after HashiCorp, there was only one IPO, which was Klaviyo in e-commerce last year.”

“We have seen a few green shoots, if you will, in this space, particularly, for example, what we saw with Klaviyo and the impact that they have had by bringing AI from a project siloed or customer interface type level usage to their core business, where they au…”

“Klaviyo owns marketing. About almost 70% of everyone on Shopify uses Klaviyo.”

“First is I think you definitely want to build, I think it's a good idea to build, you know, your underlying tech so that it's kind of agnostic, right? So there's a level of indirection in between what you solve for and the other folks that today and tomorrow c…”

“So we built, you know, 40, 50 different, you know, connectors into all sorts of different kinds of systems, CRMs, e-commerce platforms, platforms. Payment platforms, all this kind of stuff.”

“In some sense, if you think about in the SaaS world, defining what customer success is, they didn't really have a customer success playbook. They were figuring it out as they went along. In e-commerce, everybody knew kind of the standard playbook.”

“The first three years of Klaviyo were really, it was our kind of bootstrapping phase, right? I think when we were about, after about three years, we'd gotten to Around, you know, maybe about a thousand customers, maybe around a million dollar run rate.”

“It's like, if you build the best product, like consumers are going to kind of, your customers are going to demand getting to interoperate with it.”

“One of the things I tell, you know, entrepreneurs all the time is you have to be a little careful. I know people aim for MDPs, but sometimes you cut off parts that are really important.”

“We kind of looked at the pricing models of everybody else was out there and said, Hey, we're just going to charge, you know, 50% more, a hundred percent more. And we just made that our model.”

“Gone are the days where it's like, if you use the word Viagra, like that's spam and everything else is like good. Now it's actually very personalized where, Hey, you know, you Jason, you'll stop getting emails if you just stop opening them. And it's the respon…”

“Our pricing model is still today is based on effectively the number of customers you have and how frequently and potentially how frequently you message them. But what we wanted to measure internally is we looked for every single, you know, business we worked w…”

“I mean, I would tell folks like you're building stuff, like you want to invest in both, right? I mean, certainly like the partnerships we built have been fantastic. And at the same time, like we've built more of our own content in our own kind of like, I don't…”

“When you get into messaging, the hard part is not so much actually sending an email. Like that's pretty straightforward. There's like, you could actually, you could do that yourself if you want. The really difficult part is getting it delivered.”

“I mean, we try to keep teams like, you know, two, three, four, five people. And you, you're like, you're just this David versus Goliath. Like you're trying to solve this massive problem that there's whole companies out there that are trying to solve.”

“This whole deal de-anonymizing who the consumer is, making it so that consumers, if they want to be known by that business, they can start to build that direct relationship. We think that's a really big trend and that definitely really took off last year.”

“I mean, definitely the majority of our customers come into us all self-serve.”

“Our big goals for this year is how do we make sure we've kind of opened up? I don't think anybody's ever done this. Give you all of the APIs into our customer database. So it's a little bit like a SQL database, but just really designed for kind of customer, yo…”

“I think the key thing for us was you have to, a lot of people will be kind of interested, but you have to do a little bit of work for them, helping them figure out Especially let's say somebody that's selling services. What are the services they're going to se…”

“We actually, in our product, we just deleted or kind of hid and de-emphasized all of the classic kind of, you know, metrics, things like open rates, click rates, all that stuff. We just said, Hey, you can find it, but it's a couple of pages deep. Instead, we j…”

“So I think it's a couple hundred bucks a month is roughly where we draw the line of where it's self-serve versus you'll talk to somebody in sales”

“One of the things I think, honestly, we've not done a great job is being there for those, you know, those Companies really, those entrepreneurs, as they're growing up and building, whether it's specific to Klaviyo or just like adjacent to us. So we're really p…”

“We said, Hey, we think we can add, you know, messaging and some of the marketing primitives on top of our database faster than all of the existing, say marketing tech companies that just did, you know marketing stuff fast. And they could figure out how to buil…”

“The first three years of our company, all three years, It was just two of us.”

“So our sales team will, I, this is not normal, but like they'll actually get into the product, help people set up a few, you know, whether it's a few emails, a few automated workflows, get them to show them some ROI all before we ever asked them to, you know, …”

“Probably I think it was year number two for us. We invested a bunch in how do we make sure we can handle attribution internally? So you didn't have to use Google analytics or something or pay for some other software to do it.”

“So CMO to CMO connects. CTO to CTO connects so that they can discuss challenges and goals. That in and of itself is delivering a differentiated experience because you're offering strategy in a way that maybe your peers aren't able to do, particularly not at sc…”

“Within the sales organization at Klaviyo, we have a weekly closed meeting. It changes from week to week. Sometimes it's won, sometimes it's lost, sometimes it's focused on large deals, sometimes it's focused on volume. But that meeting includes our CMO, our CF…”

“The first and arguably most important is aligning internally, and this starts at the top. In fact, in some organizations I've been a part of, we refer to this as corporate jail. It's where your C-suite is locked in a room for a couple of days, And they have to…”

“We share an upgrade number across sales and customer success as well. So we've created a team who sells into our existing customer base, working closely alongside CS, who's responsible for strategy and identifying additional value add within the product.”

“Sometimes more valuable are those closed loss conversations than the closed one. Closed one validates something you already knew. Closed loss allows you to identify things maybe you didn't.”

“They have probably 60% market share in the Shopify ecosystem.”

“Clayville gets 40% of its one billion in revenue through agencies and partners.”

“Klaviyo is a leading market automation company, and they went public in September of last year with a market cap of 7.6 billion dollars. There are around seven hundred million of ARR and are trading today and at 10 times ARR multiple. And one thing that's uniq…”

“All the IPOs that we've had in B to B recently, Klaviyo, one stream rubric that was here on, they're all five hundred million growing 50%.”

“And that first prototype took a weekend to run and build through our dark factory pattern. And now we've been able to iterate on it on top of it.”

“One of the things that we have at Klaviyo is everybody, you know, we have a lot of engineers, but everybody codes. From myself all the way down to some of our like co-ops and interns for the summers.”

“Are you one last thing we've done for infrastructure is we've also gone down this path of how do we let somebody sign up for our software with their identity, right? Email, phone number, whatever it is entirely and use our product without ever touching it. So …”

“I took all the crits, all the feedback that we've given over the last couple of years, right? These like Zoom meetings or raw notes, we just dumped it in a database, right? Gave it to an agent and said, look, from here on out, before we even get to those revie…”

“And we think that's going to be the future of frankly, like how marketing and just consumer experiences in general are delivered. It's going to be much less like each of us deciding every single decision And more, Hey, having really good agents that will bring…”

“We saw everybody's like, look, by the end of June, you need to be an L three, which is if you're not constantly running either end sessions or a team of agents, right? You're just not, you're not going to be skilled to survive in this next era.”

“I think this is the future of how software is going to get built, where very much when you do a normal product review with actual like humans, with people, like you meet and you discuss the key product decisions and you harden what you're after. We can now do …”

“I think one of the things that's happened with LLMs, we're now very firmly in this world of, hey, it's all about building the software that goes around the core LLM, the harness as we speak, as we talk about it.”

“What we tend to think of as software. I now think of as its infrastructure. It's just a means to an end. So if you build some amazing UI, that's great. Like there might be, there are a lot of humans that will still use that some AIs, but the reality is like he…”

“Normally in software, you have this power law of like how good your users are, your products. Do you got a couple of really advanced users? Maybe you put them on a customer panel together. You bring them in and it really wants pushing the limits, but then you …”

“Consumer teams don't have salespeople. They just, they have to deliver every experience automatically has to be done through software, not through people.”

“That's a brutal oversimplification, but if HubSpot, there's a parallel universe for me to be in e-commerce and Klaviyo had like, 80% market share.”

“One of the things we've done inside of Klaviyo is we've architect our agent environment so that it has very tight access to various like tools and controls in terms of what it's allowed to build on our infrastructure and then good sandboxing staging environmen…”

“Every time it has a proposal, like, Hey, we think you should market to these customers in this way. You should send them this email. It will go check its work kind of against its coach that will say, Hey, how good will this, how good do you think this will act…”

“There's so few people that are gonna get there in the next year or two. If those skills are gonna be so valuable, if you truly are not talking about AI, right? Yes. But if you're the kind of person that's, I can put an agent to work and actually have to produc…”

“By the end of this year, I think most businesses are gonna have their own agent. They deploy either on their website or behind a phone number or through email or to chat with your Claude that you can just access.”