May 12, 2020 · 38m · startups-for-the-rest-of-us
Episode 496 | " The Press Cover Expectations. Don't Compare Yourself to Slack or Zoom"
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, host Rob Walling interviews Customer.io co-founder Colin Netterkorn about scaling an independent, remote SaaS business to over $11 million in recurring revenue outside Silicon Valley's venture capital ecosystem.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Rob holds 38.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Rob as informed peer 5.7 Guest teaching 4.7 Guest disagreement 1.2 Rob pushing back 0.7
speaking balance: gold is Rob, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 13:23 Rejecting irresponsible VC behavior
Colin attacks conventional venture scaling as undisciplined cash burning where irresponsible founders still get bailed out.
Hardest push from Rob ▶ 5:15 Challenging investor misalignment on exitsRob presses Colin on whether taking seed funding from angel investors created friction regarding unicorn exit expectations.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 26:40 Ramit Sethi's pre-launch list lessonColin shares Ramit Sethi's corrective feedback that waiting six months to email prospective leads guarantees they forget you.
Rob holds their own ▶ 28:55 Rob's success equation frameworkRob articulates his detailed formula of skill, hard work, and luck required to build repeatable, non-billion-dollar startup bets.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Rob as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Rob pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spotlight on Hugo and the HelpFounders Initiative | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Rob outlines Colin's company timeline, metrics, and non-traditional funding path in detail. Colin provides context on having 40 cap table investors and taking a leap of faith to quit day jobs with minimal initial revenue. | |
| Pivoting from Analytics to Behavior-Driven Customer Messaging | 6 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Colin explains how early customer research shifted their focus from analytics dashboards to event-triggered messaging. Rob demonstrates domain knowledge contrasting behavioral email platforms with early ESP blast tools like Mailchimp and AWeber. | |
| Rejecting Silicon Valley Dogma and Embracing Outsider Status | 5 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Colin articulates his contrarian stance against venture-funded dogma, irresponsible spending, and the traditional tech happy path. Rob validates this perspective, noting how bootstrap and indie models resonate with industry outsiders. | |
| Scaling Remote Teams and Tailoring Pricing for Bootstrappers | 6 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Colin discusses the early necessity and modern compensation structure of running a fully remote team, alongside their tiered pricing dynamics. Rob shares his own experience running remote companies and coining the term fundstrapping. | |
| Generating Early Traction via Twitter and Content Marketing | 5 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Colin recounts customer development on Twitter and receiving blunt audience-building advice from Ramit Sethi. Rob frames this within the 2011–2014 content marketing playbook that drove early SaaS traction. | |
| Measuring Startup Success and Surviving the 2015 Outage | 6 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Rob presents his three-part framework for startup success (skill, hard work, luck). Colin recounts their catastrophic 24-hour database outage with FoundationDB and how they recovered through engineering outreach on LinkedIn and Twitter. |
Statements from this episode (10)
Netterkorn: Values Align More with Bootstrappers Than Venture-Funded Startups
“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.”
Netterkorn: 40 Cap Table Investors Shields Customer.io From VC Pressure
“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…”
Netterkorn: Early founders print business cards from a lack of confidence
“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…”
Netterkorn: VC-backed founders crash companies with undisciplined spending and face no consequences
“I would see founders take when they were scaling a company with venture money was that it was really undisciplined and they were just spending cash all over the place. But at the end of the day, it didn't matter because they would end up like crashing the comp…”
Netterkorn: Do not innovate on organizational structure unless it is your core product
“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.”
Netterkorn: Customer.io benchmarks all roles to 75th percentile of US average
“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.”
Netterkorn: Raising Customer.io's prices lowered churn by filtering out high-churn signups
“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.”
Netterkorn: Customer discovery works best when founders genuinely have nothing to sell
“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…”
Netterkorn: Customer.io's early campaigns were manually fulfilled via co-founder's MapReduce scripts
“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 …”
Customer.io suffered a 24-hour outage after Apple acquired FoundationDB
“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…”