Customer.io: 18 Months to $10K MRR, 10 Years to $70M ARR – with Colin Nederkoorn

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: All right, Colin, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Colin: Great to be here.

[00:00:02] Omer: Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[00:00:07] Colin: Yeah, so recently I've been really enjoying the, there's a TV show called The Bear and I just, I love food. I'll probably mention food again at some point during our conversation today.

[00:00:20] But there's this episode where cousin his cousin Richie, is apprenticing at this very high-end restaurant. And in the restaurant, in the prep area, in the kitchen, there's a sign on the wall and it's underneath the clock. And it says every second counts. And that, that idea, that concept features really prominently in that episode.

[00:00:41] And I just have that, that visual of the clock and the, the sign etched into my brain now, and I think about it a lot. And I just, I love the double meaning of that, of that quote and that sign on the wall.

[00:00:54] Omer: You mean like the, the urgency in the kitchen and then just sort of like, just generally with life?

[00:00:59] Colin: Yeah, absolutely. It's like you seem, you seem a pretty chill guy. I don't think, you don't come across as like, let's go, go, go kind of a person.

[00:01:07] Yeah. I mean, it's, I, I think for me it's, it's about doing things that are worthwhile in the end, not filling every minute of the day. That's, that's the meaning that I take from it.

[00:01:18] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Cool. You know, I, I've, I've heard of that show for so long and I've never watched it, and then earlier today I, I looked at one of the trailers and I just thought to myself, why have I not. Watch this show before. So it's, it's something I'm gonna start this week. So looking forward to that.

[00:01:40] Colin: The, there's this real journey that they go through from, from season one to season two and I think you find yourself really, I. Cheering for all of the characters there, and there's something to admire and some struggle that they're all going through. And it makes it a really, I don't know. It's, it's, it's a life enriching show is probably the way that I would describe it.

[00:02:01] Omer: That's a high bar. Good. I'm, I'm, I'm looking forward to it even more now. So let's talk about Customer.io. Tell us what does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:02:14] Colin: So, the problem that we're, we're looking to solve is that people are bombarded with emails and notifications every day, and most of those go ignored.

[00:02:24] And so if you're, if you're a company who's trying to reach your customers, we help you cut through that noise by leveraging the first party data that you have to send more targeted and relevant messages. And so today we've been around for, for 12 years, and today there are over 7,000 companies who use Customer.io.

[00:02:45] And a typical customer of ours is a mid-market company that has a digital experience. So an example might be. A web and mobile based e-learning platform or a mobile banking app, or a B2B SaaS product on the web. And the, the companies that use us typically have dedicated folks on the marketing team in roles like lifecycle or growth marketing.

[00:03:11] And so what, what. I guess what's different about us or what's special about us is we've taken this technology, which traditionally is extremely complex. Traditionally, it exists in multiple systems that a business might use, and it's reserved for the largest enterprises. And we've made it accessible to many more companies through through the platform that we built.

[00:03:34] And so with Customer.io, our clients can connect to their data sources. They build personalized customer journeys. And then they use our templates and creation tools to maintain their brand consistency all in one place. They're doing things like sending reminder emails to improve student outcomes and e-learning.

[00:03:53] They're using push notifications to nudge users to link their bank accounts or complete account setup and banking, or they're showing in-app notifications to onboard new users into software applications.

[00:04:04] Omer: So this is a lot more. Complicated then emails triggered based on which webpage or they visited or, or kind of which part of the app they used.

[00:04:16] Can you, you, you sort of touched on that. Can you just give the listeners a sense of like the complexity, like what are the types of data sources that you're hooking into?

[00:04:24] Colin: I mean we, today we can hook into Salesforce, we can hook into a data warehouse. We can or our customers can instrument their application directly via our SDK or via you know, the, the, the web as well via JavaScript.

[00:04:41] So there we're aggregating information from all of these different. Places that our customers are storing data about their customers. We're building that unique profile that gives you this full picture of every way someone's interacted with your business and the, that, that lifecycle marketer is setting up these rules for when, when those people get messages.

[00:05:05] And so it is, it is really sophisticated. I think one of the, when we started. The, the thing that we, the, the problem we took on, which I think we only did because we were so naive, was trying to send messages when people don't do something. Because to be confident that you, you know, someone didn't do something, you need a hundred percent certainty over everything they did.

[00:05:32] Otherwise, you look like a fool, right? When you're sending, when you're saying, Hey, it looks like you didn't complete your account signup, but someone did, then that, that looks really bad. And so it was really important to architect the system in a way that didn't drop data. It didn't. It didn't sort of approximate things and say, oh, these people probably did this stuff.

[00:05:54] No. Like, we have to know with certainty, otherwise the whole promise doesn't work and, and yeah, so it's, I. It's complex.

[00:06:04] Omer: Give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of team? Yeah. So I mentioned we're seven, 7,000 plus companies who are using us.

[00:06:15] Colin: 70 million ARR and 250 people on the team in over 30 countries.

[00:06:23] Omer: Have you raised, like, I think you've raised about 10 million, is that right? At least that's the Crunchbase number that I saw.

[00:06:29] Colin: Yeah. Crunch, Crunchbase is a little wrong and I tend not to correct them. I think the, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but it's in the, the mid thirties.

[00:06:40] We did like a, around in 2022 with spectrum equity, and that was a, that was a larger round for us where we added some cash to the, the balance sheet to help us grow.

[00:06:51] Got it. I was, I was blown away when I realized you were doing 70 million in ARR mean, I knew you were an eight figure business, but I thought, I was thinking, oh, maybe, you know, 20 million.

[00:07:02] That was kind of my guess, but wow. I was way off.

[00:07:05] Yeah, I mean, I think if if you're starting out today, if you're pretty early in the journey I think the, the only thing you need to solve for. Is to have your business continue to grow at a certain percentage, and if you can maintain the percentage growth rate over.

[00:07:23] A long enough time horizon, you get really big and it starts to happen very quickly. You know, once you're, once you're compounding 50% year over year, 80% year over year, and you're starting from 20 million, let's say, or 10 million, like those numbers get really big really quickly, but it seems like you know, who cares when you're at a hundred k.

[00:07:48] At adding, you know, 80% year over year or 150% year over year, eh, no big deal. But if you can sustain that, it's, it gets massive really quick.

[00:07:59] Omer: I love that. That's a, that's a great way to think about that. Let's talk about where the idea for Customer.io came from, and what I think is really interesting about your story is that earlier you told me that.

[00:08:17] If, if we'd stuck with the original idea, you and I would be having this conversation today. So let's start there. Like what was that idea and, and how did you. Come up with it.

[00:08:28] Colin: So my, my co-founder and I were working at a startup together. He was head of engineering. I was head of product and we were excited to go and try something on our own and started exploring a few ideas together.

[00:08:43] And when we, when we decided, yeah, let's, let's go and try and make a go of this one of the first things we did was made some wire frames and started talking to people about our idea. And we, we knew we were interested in, in doing something around data, we felt like we were, we had the technical skills to go and build a system, and that would create, and doing a hard thing in data would create a little bit of a moat around the business.

[00:09:11] That was hard. It was harder for someone else to replicate that, but our initial idea was to build a more sophisticated analytics product. So Google Analytics was on the market. It was free at this point, and. I think that, I think it was either in their terms or in their, in the way the product worked.

[00:09:31] You couldn't see like unique sessions and you didn't, you didn't know who was using the website and what they were doing. And so our idea was if someone logs into a website, you, we would show you their unique activity within the website and you would log in and you would get this sort of. Digital CRM for like a modern company where the way you're interacting with your customers is through a web product.

[00:09:59] And when we started showing people screens of that they weren't interested. They told us, Hey, I've got 10 products that show me what people are doing on my website. What I really need is something that will help me influence their behavior. You know when when people sign up and they don't end up converting, I don't.

[00:10:21] They leave, I don't have a way to get them back. And if you can help me, like get people over the hump, that's money for my business. And when we heard that feedback a few times, we, we realized, hey, this, this business was a bad idea. But if we tweak it a little bit, we can still lean on our skills. We just need to figure out how to like do, how to build a rules engine on top of this data that's coming in.

[00:10:46] Omer: How many prospective customers did you talk to at the time when you took these wire frames and, and started showing it to people? There's always a question for founders in the early stages, like, should I be talking to 10 people, 50, a hundred? Like, how do I know when I've got to a point where I've really validated this idea?

[00:11:05] Colin: I mean, I think, I don't, I don't completely remember how exactly how many people we, we talked to. We tried to put ourselves in situations where we could be, be efficient about it. And one of the, I. Places I remember going was there was a nighttime coworking meetup called like New York Night Owls, and we went to that and I remember like showing it to multiple people who happened to also be working on their side hustle or trying to get something going and just getting their feedback on, on the wire frames.

[00:11:37] So I think it would've been probably 10. 10 to 15 people who we pitched this original idea, maybe showed them wire frames and then talked to them about it before we realized that there was enough signal to, to, you know, modify the idea.

[00:11:55] Omer: One of the things I often see founders struggle with is they either take a, well, actually the easier path probably is they take a market first approach where they might say.

[00:12:09] We are gonna build a product for procurement people in X companies and we're gonna go and talk to 50 or a hundred of these procurement people and figure out what problem exists that we can solve, and then we're gonna build a product for that, right? That's example one. But more often what happens is founders sort of start with sort of an idea, sort of a problem, and they kind of say, well, okay, they start building a a solution and then they're in this place where they're.

[00:12:38] Looking for, trying to figure out which market to serve, who's their ICP. Do they actually have this problem? And you, you're kind of, you've gotta, you, you've got the sort of the chicken and egg and I've got a problem and I, I don't really have a clear problem. I don't have a really clear, a clear market.

[00:12:54] How do I figure that stuff out? When, when you guys were starting out, did you, I. Have a general idea of the type of customer or the market that you were gonna sell to, and were those the people that you were talking to? Or was it like, let's go get feedback from anybody. It doesn't really matter who they are right now, as long as we're getting anybody who will kind of pay attention to us.

[00:13:16] Colin: Yeah, I mean, I think the, what what we did, and I, I wish I could dig this up. I don't know where this is, but we. Came up with characteristics of the business that we wanted to build. One of them was, and, and you know, I think there's like the B2B versus B2C thing. Where do you wanna try to build the next Twitter or some kind of social app?

[00:13:39] Or do you want to build something where you're selling to businesses? And I think for, for us, some of the decision points were we. Wanted to build something for our peers. And if you remember, I'm, I'm head of product, I'm working in tech already. My co-founder is an engineer. We wanted to build something for our peers, so we, that narrowed it down.

[00:13:57] We wanted it to be, there's these, these frameworks to think about like, are you a painkiller or a vitamin? You know, that and, and stuff like that. Like we, I wanted, it was important to us that the business. Was close to revenue. And maybe we backed into this after the fact when we heard that feedback that nobody wanted to buy our, our analytics product.

[00:14:19] But I think we, we realized before fully committing that we, we wanted to be close to revenue either, and either we had to be really compelling and that we would save people a ton of money or we would make people more money. And I thought it would be, and I think that's the like painkiller vitamin thing.

[00:14:34] And I, I thought it would be. I great that we can do both, right? Our product could be used to do either of those things, but ideally it's about conversion and getting more people to pay you, more people from free to pay in a product. So that's what we focused on. It had to be. What else? Oh, I think we initially were really inspired by MailChimp, so we wanted it to be self-service, not enterprise.

[00:15:03] We didn't wanna build a sales organization and we, we changed that over time. At least at first it, it was all about self-service. So we needed to get good at that. I forget some of the, there's probably a couple other, other criteria, but I think that's really helpful if folks are just starting out.

[00:15:23] Think about what your strengths are and what your desires are. If you succeed and you build a business that you hate, is that success. And so for us it was defining like. If we're, if we're dramatically successful and we want to do this for a long time, what are the characteristics of the business that we would wanna be running?

[00:15:41] Oh, I think another one was, it had to be technically interesting, technically challenging enough that it would keep our interest for, for a while. So none of, not a simple crud, SaaS app like crud being, create, read, update, delete, like, so we had, we had some criteria like, like that, and then we evaluated ideas against that criteria.

[00:16:02] Omer: I, I love that. I think that's such a great way to think about it. You know, you, you, you're just, you're laying out what's what you care about, what's important to you, what you think would make sense for a business that you wanna be involved with for. Not just one year, but five years or 10 years, or in your case, 12 years.

[00:16:20] And I know it's, and it's kind of worked out because I know that you're still excited to get up every day and work on this business most days. Right. And I, it, it, it, it, it occurred to me when you were talking about this that sometimes it's not that easy to come up with this list, but it's easy to come up with a list of things you don't want to do.

[00:16:39] I don't want to do this, I don't wanna do that. Well, maybe that's what you start with, and then just turn them into positives. It's like, I don't wanna work with these type of people in, I wanna work with these type of people instead. But either way, I think it's, it's great to have a list like this because just.

[00:16:54] It gives you something to evaluate the, this sort of journey that you are on because you're gonna see lots of potential opportunities and it's gonna be so easy to follow some short-term opportunity. And if you can just go say, oh, wait a minute. No, it doesn't kind of match this list that we put together.

[00:17:12] It at least lets you question whether that's the right way to go.

[00:17:16] Colin: And I a hundred percent agree that starting with what you don't want is an, is an easier way to, to get going and then turning it into, well, that means that we should build this type of business.

[00:17:28] Omer: Yeah. So you heard loud and clear, hey, the analytics thing is not an interesting enough opportunity.

[00:17:38] How did the, the sort of, the next idea if of how did you come up with that and then. You know, what, what kind of validation did you do before you started building the product?

[00:17:50] Colin: So we, what was interesting at this time was there, there weren't solutions like ours that existed in the market, but there were, we were starting to see people talking about.

[00:18:05] The, the pain point that they were having. There was a, there was a blog post by this, this guy, Paul Statu, who, and I think he, the blog post is titled User Retention as a Service, and he was building Pic Plum at the time and, and wished it was a, it was a photo sharing app, I think, and, and he wished that something existed that would help him with.

[00:18:31] Automating messages to his users in order to retain them and help them be successful in the product. And so we saw that as really strong validation that we were on the right track. And we started to see conversations on, on Twitter as well, where people were saying similar things. And I think that, that, that through having conversations or reaching out with those folks, I.

[00:18:55] That's how we started to gain confidence in, in what we were building or at least the, the need we would serve. And then as we started to build out the product we, we aggregated the, the demand that we were aware of and then started talking to those folks to make sure what we were building was gonna, was gonna meet the needs that they had.

[00:19:19] Omer: Let's, let's talk about, and I think we should, we should clarify that you, you and your, your co-founder John, were, were doing this while you were still working, and then you set yourself a goal of getting a certain number of paying customers before you would go all on all in with this business. What, what was that goal?

[00:19:40] Colin: So maybe to back up a little, we. Decided together that we, we we were working full time at at this company and we would see each other every day. So we were talking about these ideas during lunch and and then when we realized, Hey, I think we have something here. It happened to be right around the end of the year.

[00:20:02] So we went away for, for holidays and then came back and we were both thinking like, do we want to go all in on this and, and take the leap? And so when we came back, we decided yes, we would do that. We told our, our boss that we were gonna be leaving. And so this was like first few days of January and we.

[00:20:23] Said that we were gonna stay until April 1st. So we had this four month period essentially to get, get everything in order to, to leave and then help, help transition out because we were pretty critical to the organization. Like it was a, it was a small company. We were both in, you know, in senior roles within our disciplines.

[00:20:49] And, didn't wanna leave with short notice, but it worked out well for us 'cause it gave us time to prepare. And the, the task we set ourselves out. Or we set out for ourselves was to have five paying customers by April 1st, by the time that we were full-time. And we, we put up you know, we started talking to people and what we were asking for from them was like, put down a credit card and pay us $10 a month.

[00:21:18] And when I think we started collecting these signups in, in March, so, you know, the, the product was like sort of functional, but barely. And what people were really signing up for was the promise that this thing would solve their problem in the future. And in the meantime we could kind of help them with a, with a sliver of the problem.

[00:21:41] And what was amazing is I was actually looking back at this and one of those first five customers is still our customer today. It's wild. It's, it's totally wild to me.

[00:21:53] Omer: That's some nice retention.

[00:21:55] Colin: Yeah. The, the, you know, the person who committed is no longer at that, that company and probably the, the two people after them are probably no longer there.

[00:22:04] They've moved on to other things, but, but we're still doing. A good enough job for them, and we're a critical part of, of their product that it's, it's amazing that they're, they're still with us.

[00:22:15] Omer: So basically your goal was if we can get to $50 a month or $50 MRR, we're gonna go and do this thing.

[00:22:25] Colin: Sounds it sounds too low and I, it absolutely was too low from a how are, you know, how do we.

[00:22:31] Replace our income from our, from our full-time job with our, our startup revenue. And it took way longer than we expected to get from 50 to anything meaningful to pay our salaries. But I. I think again, this is where being totally naive and just taking the plunge was the right move even though it was totally foolish.

[00:22:58] Omer: Tell me about that first version of the product. 'cause you're charging $10 a month, presumably that's because you just want some money, some validation, but you also feel like the product. Is still sort of a half-baked thing. You know, it's, we, we have this vision, there's all this stuff that we could be doing.

[00:23:19] But right now it doesn't do that much. So what did it actually do? The initial version?

[00:23:26] Colin: Yeah. So someone would, would log into the product. They would click a button that says, create a new campaign. They would type into a box to explain what they wanted the campaign to do, and then my co-founder would write.

[00:23:43] MapReduce query, which he would sort of look at what data they were sending us. 'cause they had, they had done the inter the data integration at this point. So they had installed our JavaScript and were sending us data and then my co-founder would look at the data flowing in to figure out could he write a query that would.

[00:24:04] Actually do what they wanted to happen, and then I think we could, I don't know even know if we had delays and a sequence of messages at this point. It might have just been one message you could send and then you could. I think we had a, a simple wizzywig editor where you could like bold text and, and stuff like that.

[00:24:24] But it was, it was very basic at the, at the time. And you know, essentially if the map, duce query found people who met the conditions, we could trigger a message and you could see sent messages to your customer. So it was functional, but the hard part was. Really the, we, we talked about him being like the wizard behind, behind the curtain to make it actually do the hard stuff.

[00:24:51] Omer: Yeah. I, I think they actually call that a wizard of Oz, MVP now. Right. This idea that maybe you coined it and you didn't even know that when you back then. Right. So, so he was writing. Custom queries for every time somebody created a campaign and said, I wanna be able to do this. And if that query didn't exist, he would go and figure out how to write it.

[00:25:13] Colin: Yeah. So Google invented this thing, MapReduce, which sort of is helpful for finding needles in a haystack. And if you remember, you know, one of the things that we were our, one of our promises was we could tell you who didn't do something. And so in order to do that, we had to look through the entire history of the data that the customer had sent to us to, to verify that that particular user didn't do something in order to trigger the message.

[00:25:42] And he had like a, a little admin interface where he would. Type out the, the queries and then I think it, I'm sure he had a way to test it, hopefully. And yeah, but it, it, we, we were gating who could sign up for the product, so it wasn't like anyone could sign up on their own. We, I was talking to every single signup at this point, and then I.

[00:26:04] Setting expectations.

[00:26:06] Omer: Yeah. And it would've been very easy to not launch until you had all this figured out in the backend. Right. And I think this is a really important lesson here in terms of what you guys did that, you know, we, we often hear the stuff about being embarrassed about the product and all those, those things.

[00:26:24] But really what you did here was you sort of combined some code, some human element and said, okay, if we could put this together in a manageable way, what's the soonest we can get something out of the door and start testing it? People will pay for it. And that's a much more valuable thing to do than spending six months writing more code to find that you couldn't even get five people to sign up.

[00:26:49] Colin: Yes, it's absolutely important to launch when you're still embarrassed by your product. I think the thing that we really focused on was. What's the value that customers are trying to get from us, and can we deliver that value to customers without necessarily building the nice ui? Like what's, what's the way that they can get that?

[00:27:14] And that enabled us to, you know, take, take shortcuts in some, in some areas of the product because the thing we wanted to prove was. This stuff actually worked and it helped companies convert more people, or, you know, retain more people. It actually moved the needle on their business. So, you know, we, I believe we, we had a sense of a conversion and one of the promises here, you know.

[00:27:43] Traditional email marketing products. At the time, they couldn't tell you if your messages actually did anything in, in a product. So you know you'd be sending these messages and they'd tell you opens and clicks. Well, we came in and said, look, we're, you're instrumenting your product in order to send these messages.

[00:28:00] We can tell you if they convert. Like, you don't need to do anything funny. We have all the data. If you want to move this number, we can tell you if it moved. And so that was, that was a big, I think like when we could complete the loop, we took the shortest path to demonstrating the value. And then later came back to make it so that customers could like actually configure their own campaigns.

[00:28:25] And, you know, we had to build our like segment segmentation builder and all, all of that stuff. But we did it later.

[00:28:33] Omer: How did you find those first five paying customers by the way?

[00:28:36] Colin: I was looking back at, at the list, and there were definitely a, a couple who we knew beforehand who sort of took, took a bet on us.

[00:28:46] There's one person I've never met or talked to since then. I think like there, they're in the, we were in New York at the time and this, there was a, there was a company in the New York. You know, tech ecosystem. They're no longer around, but somehow they found, found out about us and they, they took a bet.

[00:29:07] And then yeah, and another, another person I've like known, I didn't even realize I, I'd known this person for a long time and I didn't realize they were one of the first five customers, but it's. It was just, I think it was a moment where clearly there was this latent demand for a product like this.

[00:29:25] And so there was a lot of interest when we said we were working on it, that people, people sort of signed up for, for our list and for updates. And we picked a few people to, to test the product early with us.

[00:29:39] Omer: Let, let's talk about that that launch page you created. 'cause you had a page up where you were.

[00:29:44] Telling people about the, you know, your upcoming launch and you were collecting email addresses. And then just, just tell us that story of you meeting Ramit.

[00:29:54] Colin: Yeah, so we had this launch page up and I, I was in, in the background. I'm trying to figure out, figure out, okay, we're collecting email addresses, we're getting a little bit of attention.

[00:30:06] How do we make sure. What else do we need to be doing? How do we make this this thing successful? And a friend of mine introduced me to Ramit Sethi, who's a master marketer. He's incredible. And he runs, I will teach you to be rich. I. I think he has like Netflix shows now and all this stuff. And so Ramit kindly met us for coffee and, you know, asked us to describe what we're doing and how we, and, and asked about this this list that we were building.

[00:30:39] What we were doing with all these email addresses. And I, I looked at him, I said, nothing right now. Like, we're gonna email them when this launches in six months. And I, I don't know exactly what he said, but what I took from it, I was, you guys are idiot.

[00:30:55] Omer: It's a polite, a polite way of being told that.

[00:30:58] Colin: Yeah, I'm sure. He was like totally polite. And, and what he said to us was, look, you have all these people who say they're interested in this, in this problem. Find a way to provide value to them. Before you launch, otherwise they're not gonna remember who you are. You're gonna send this like one email, which says you probably changed your name three times between now and launch.

[00:31:23] And so they're gonna get this weird email from this company they don't recognize that, says, Hey, we launched, come sign up and pay us money now. And they're not gonna care about you then. And so find a way. Find, you know, something that they care about and talk to them about it between now and then, and build excitement and interest ahead of your launch.

[00:31:44] And then you're gonna have a much, a much better outcome if you do that. And so I, I scratched my head, I took, I went away from that. I felt sad probably. And then I scratched my head a little bit and realized that. This, we, I, I didn't come from an email background, and so the, the thing that I had no idea how to do was probably something that a lot of our audience was learning as well, which was like conversion copywriting, right?

[00:32:15] You're sending these messages to, in order to get people over some hump get them back to your product, get them to convert from free to paid. What should those messages say? And that was like this like light bulb moment where I realized if I went deep and learned everything I could from all these great copywriters and then I've applied those lessons to to email.

[00:32:39] If they weren't email copywriters or I learned from email copywriters, I could teach these lessons to our audience while we're building the product. And then. We can later sell, you know, we can teach them how to write these messages and then sell them the tool to send the messages. And that was such a, such an amazing, piece of advice that, that we got, which I think tremendously helped, helped us get off the ground.

[00:33:05] Omer: I, I think that's a, a really good example and I think you were very fortunate to get that, that feedback. Then you know, one of the things that I've often had found is took about is I, I, I'm not an expert in this market, what could I possibly write about or teach my target customers and.

[00:33:27] Number one, what you did was you, you found a, a, a problem, a need, and said, okay, I'm gonna focus on helping them with this. Because their, their goal wasn't to be able to send emails, right. Their goal was to be able to change some kind of behavior or, or persuade people to do something, as you said. So that's really the kind of the core of what they wanted to do, and.

[00:33:52] You know, kind of just, I, I'll kind of give credit to a couple of like online sort of digital writers that I follow, like Dickie Bush and, and Nicholas Cole. And one of the things I learned from these guys was you can either be an expert, somebody who's gone out and done something, and then you're sharing that experience of this is how I do something.

[00:34:12] Or, you know, did something or whatever. Or you can be a curator where you're just saying. Either you're, you're sharing resources or you are, you are, you're saying, look, I'm not the expert, but I'm learning and I'm sharing what I'm learning with you, and if you position it that way. It's easier to do that because you don't feel like a fraud or, or I'm, you know, I'm not an expert because you're not pretending to be one.

[00:34:35] You're just there and saying, I learned something useful and I'm sharing this with you because it might help you too. And I Sounds like that's exactly what you were doing.

[00:34:44] Colin: Yeah, and I, I think that's, that's a really really good nuance take on it. I think I, I felt really uncomfortable. To go and say, Hey, you should listen to me.

[00:34:55] I know everything when I really felt like I didn't, but I was sharing the lessons that I learned along the way. And I think the key thing for people who are who are nervous about starting that is you don't, you don't need to be an expert, but I think it's important to be. Honest about that you're not an expert and you just need to be smarter than the people you're sharing and digesting this information for.

[00:35:18] Right? You are more knowledgeable about it, and most people are not gonna spend an hour to go deep on a topic. But if you spend an hour or two hours on something and then I. Synthesize it into a 32nd tweet, right? Like people really value the curation and the, the digestion of, of information.

[00:35:40] Omer: Definitely. I, I think I follow a lot of people who are exactly in that position where they're not pretending to be experts, they're just sharing what they're learning on the journey.

[00:35:48] But it's super helpful, you know, and just to, to, to be able to follow that and some, for somebody to just give it to you in a digestible way. Let's talk about another growth strategy. That helped you w which was finding people online. You know, we often say, you know, figure out where your customers hang out and go, go there.

[00:36:06] And often it's, it's communities or it could be Reddit or, you know, Facebook groups or something like that. Where did you find some of these people and how did you kind of get on the radar or, or, or, you know, get their attention?

[00:36:23] Colin: So I, I mentioned that. We were fortunate in that there were people talking about this, this problem online, and I, I ended up setting up alerts for terms like user retention or lifecycle emails, and one of the most amazing superpowers you can have is.

[00:36:44] Saying that you're not selling someone something. And, and even going a step further saying, I can't sell you anything, like, I have nothing to sell you. And so I would, I would reach out to people and say, Hey, my, my co-founder and I are working on this problem that you're talking about. I would love to understand what, you know, what an amazing solution would look like to you.

[00:37:05] I can't sell you anything right now. I have nothing to sell you. Would you be willing to talk to me? And the difference between. I'm trying to sell you something. Would you be willing to talk to me and I have nothing to sell you? Would you be willing to talk to me? Is tremendous. Like you will get a much higher success rate of people responding when you have nothing to sell them.

[00:37:27] And then they, you, you make a good impression. They're on your list. They're, they wanna know when you've solved their problem. And then so you then have this other opportunity to, to reach out when you in the future have something to sell them. But you have this tiny window of when you start working where you can actually say that and be honest about it.

[00:37:50] And. It's amazing how disarming it is for folks.

[00:37:54] Omer: I love that. I've, I've often said to founders in that situation, you know, be clear that, you know, you, you're not selling anything right now because, you know, maybe you don't have a product. But I love the way you put it, which was, I. I can't sell you anything, even if I wanted to.

[00:38:09] Right. And I think it's like a, a lot of us, you know, if you get an email like that, you, you wanna help people in that situation. Right. It's just like people are sort of showing a bit of vulner vulnerability and it's like, you know, I should, I should do something.

[00:38:22] Colin: But, but it's not even, I mean, I, I get a lot of emails like I'm a student.

[00:38:26] So and so, and I'm doing, I'm compiling this data on SaaS or what, whatever. I don't respond to those. 'cause I don't have, like, they're not, so, you know, they're not in a position. I, I, I don't have time to respond to all of those. But like, I think the, my point is, it's like so aligned, right? Someone's said they have a problem.

[00:38:48] You're coming along and you're saying, I can't, I'm not gonna like be sneaky and try to sell you something, but I care about the fact that you have this problem. I want to hear you, I wanna hear about it. I wanna know what you have to say. I wanna know the pain you're feeling because I'm going to work on solving that pain.

[00:39:03] But I, I don't have anything right now.

[00:39:05] Omer: Yeah, yeah. That's, that's, that's a great way to put it. Okay. In terms of growth, the other thing you tried to do was, was, was ads. Spending money on, on them that, that didn't work out too well. Which and I think sometimes it's just founders, you know, it may be in a position where they don't really.

[00:39:19] Know the nuances of, you know, how to, how to run paid ads. But for you, I think it was, it was a bigger problem than that, right?

[00:39:26] Colin: Yeah. I mean, I think, so. I definitely hadn't, hadn't run a ton of paid ads before. Got a little bit of coaching from people who were more experienced than me, but what I ran into, in, in our space and every space is gonna be different in, in our particular space.

[00:39:42] The prospective buyers of our product. I didn't, we didn't have a vocabulary yet. And the words that we were using, like segmentation or triggered messages or even like, you know, email marketing is such a broad category that the, it was inefficient spent for us to buy ads for any of those you know, any of those terms.

[00:40:08] 'cause the people were not. Or DI didn't know what to search for at this point in time. I think the market is more, is more defined and we have an ad program now that's pretty effective. But at, in the very early days, all of our spend ended up attracting really like people who are not the right buyer for our product at that time.

[00:40:32] So we ended up, we ended up turning it off.

[00:40:35] Omer: Did you spend a lot of money?

[00:40:36] Colin: It's probably a lot of money at the time. I, I would say it's in, you know, in, in the thousands a month, but not, you know, not in the hundreds, yeah, not in the hundreds of thousands a year at that point.

[00:40:49] Omer: It's interesting. It's just, I, I've really come across someone who says, you know, ads, I, I got ads working in, in those early days.

[00:40:56] But, I'm sure there's something there.

[00:40:58] Colin: Yeah. I mean, I think if, if you're selling a, a product that's on Instagram and, and you know, you have these like paid Instagram ads and I think for, for us, the, the thing was there was this education step and what we didn't figure out until later is that like, I.

[00:41:16] You get, you get that initial interest and you've gotta educate the person before they're ready to buy. Otherwise they don't know what they're buying. They don't know what product they're signing up to to try. And they're sort of con, you know, if they make it into the trial, they're confused. Whereas I think, yeah, in.

[00:41:35] There's so many things that I buy on Instagram where I'm like, that, that looks amazing. This ad is like, awesome. I want to buy that thing, and I go do it. Our product is not one of those.

[00:41:45] Omer: Yeah, yeah. Okay. I would love to keep talking, but we, we've, we've gotta wrap up, so let's move on to our lightning round.

[00:41:53] I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Just try to answer 'em as quickly as you can. Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:42:01] Colin: Yeah, so this is, this is from Chris Savage, the CEO of Wistia. When we were really early on there was this, I was really frustrated because we were running outta money and was stressing about fundraising.

[00:42:15] So he, he posed the question to me, do you need more time or do you need more money? And as I thought about it, like the answer was time. I didn't actually need money. I needed the, i, I needed to extend our runway so that my co-founder and I could figure out the business and figure out the product and get, get further along.

[00:42:36] And so I think in the earliest stages. Your job as a, as a founder is to figure out like, do you actually need money or do you need more time? Because. There's creative ways to solve for the time thing, but the money thing, I, I, if you raise too much money, you actually shorten the amount of time you have to figure it out.

[00:42:57] Omer: Chris is actually one of my OGs. He was he was a guest on episode 15, almost 10 years ago when I had no audience and he still agreed to come on and be a guest, so I'll always be grateful to him and, and those other people. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:43:12] Colin: So there's a, there's a book, Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet.

[00:43:15] It's a really great read, but we have taken the idea unless I hear Differently, which is talked about in that book. And it's a great way to empower folks in your company to bias toward action. So something's gonna happen unless I hear differently.

[00:43:35] Omer: What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:43:39] Colin: Perseverance. You gotta be able to survive long enough. If you can survive, you can probably build a good business.

[00:43:47] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:43:51] Colin: Piece of paper. I've tried all the productivity software, all of the promises it makes, but I find that like when I'm super stressed and I declare bankruptcy on, on what's on my to-do list, I just take a piece of paper and I scribble it all down and then I get to check it off.

[00:44:06] And I feel that sense of accomplishment.

[00:44:09] Omer: I'm, I'm so digital, but there's something so magical about paper. I'll never stop doing that. Yeah, totally with you. What's in your crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:44:19] Colin: So we probably don't have enough time to get deep into talking about it, but I, I love, like all of, I would love to solve all of these systems that people have in their homes and make them like one unified thing rather than all of these disparate systems that all kind of fight against each other and don't really work together.

[00:44:38] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:44:42] Colin: When I was in my late twenties, I rode my bicycle from San Francisco to Boston.

[00:44:47] Omer: Wow.

[00:44:49] Colin: How long did that take? It's like 57 days of, of riding. It's a long way. Yeah.

[00:44:57] Omer: And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:44:59] Colin: I. I guess I, we started with food. Let's, let's maybe end with food. So I love food and I just appreciate how much goes into making food good. And so I live in Portland, Oregon and we've got some incredible food options to, to eat out and I love learning to cook dishes at home as well.

[00:45:17] Omer: Awesome. Colin, thank you so much for joining me.

[00:45:20] It's been a pleasure. It was nice to pick your brain and sort of unpack some of those early days and how you went from basically an idea to another idea to a seven-figure business. And then you know, there's a whole story that we haven't uncovered yet in terms of what happened beyond that.

[00:45:34] But I appreciate you making the time to to join me. If people want to check out Customer.io, they can go to customer.io and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:45:45] Colin: I'm @alphacolin on X. Which that never feels right to say it, but or you can just email me, colin@customer.io.

[00:45:56] Omer: Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate the time. I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:46:01] Colin: Thanks so much home Omer.

[00:46:02] Omer: Cheers.