10 years ago, I had no idea what customer success (CS) was.

I was working on a management team when the company closed a funding round, and the CEO asked me to lead the CS organization. I said yes, mostly because someone in my network convinced me it was worth pursuing. No grand plan, just a door that opened.

Since then, I've built and scaled CS organizations at a handful of early-stage startups, each time with a different engagement model. 

I consider myself a builder, drawn to technical products sold into engineering teams and to building teams from the ground up.

From customer love to business outcomes

For most of my career, CS was framed as a service organization: focused on customer love and customer satisfaction. Over the last three to four years, that's shifted. The pressure to justify CS in terms of revenue has grown, and I've felt it directly from the people I work with.

You can push back on that pressure, or you can embrace it. I decided to embrace it, and that decision has shaped how I've built every team since.

Where most early-stage customer success functions actually start

When you come in as the first customer success leader at an early-stage company, the picture tends to look the same:

  • Founders are running sales
  • Engineering and product are handling pre-sales questions and support
  • Nobody formally owns the customer experience, because everyone is busy running the company and building the product
Where most early-stage customer success functions actually start

At the earliest stage, there are gaps between what customers expect and what the product and processes can actually deliver. That gap is the job.

I've walked into companies with 20 customers and barely any engagement model. I've walked into companies with 150 customers where large groups had never been proactively contacted at all. Customers had signed, been onboarded to some degree, and then simply existed, with nobody tracking whether they were getting value or at risk of leaving.

That's the starting point, and the first question is always: where do you start, when everything needs attention at once?