Insight
Shared distributed databases introduce catastrophic platform-wide failure points for SaaS companies
“Interestingly, when you have a distributed database, you actually have a single point of failure, and now we don't have a single point of failure for any, or every customer has a single point of failure with backups, of course, but you can't, like, take out ou…”
Insight
Founders should stop trying to reinvent software buying and just embrace sales
“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.”
Insight
Early-stage startups with a capital-raised-to-ARR ratio under 1.0 are unhealthy
“The chart that's up here is, is something that I came up with called the strap ratio, which is how much money have you raised total divided by where's the revenue, like, what's your ARR in your business? And I think that, for me, super early on, it's not healt…”
Disclosure
Apple acquired Customer.io's database vendor and refused to renew their support contract
“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…”
Insight
Startups cannot scale on scrappy execution, but systems builders need surrounding teams
“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…”
Insight
Founders hitting $10M ARR need a purpose beyond personal wealth to continue
“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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
One of Customer.io's first five customers from 2012 remains, surpassing $100k LTV
“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”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Customer.io reached $1 million ARR within two years of founding
“Fast forward two years, and we get to a million in ARR”
Disclosure
Customer.io rewrote its frontend after a breaking pre-1.0 JavaScript framework upgrade
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shopify was Customer.io's largest customer in 2013-2014 before churning in 2015
“Shopify canceled with us, so they were like our largest customer back in, 20, 1314, and then canceled, I think this is in 15”
