Acquiring 10,000 SMB Customers Solely from Data with Gorgias' CEO Romain Lapeyre

Hey, thank you so much. So I'm Roman, CEO at Gorgias. So Gorgias is a customer service platform for e-commerce stores. Our mission is to make sure that when you shop online, you have an exceptional customer experience. And so as you can see by the title of the session, we are primarily focused on SMBs. So we are about 200 on the team and based a little bit everywhere over the world, in San Francisco, Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, Paris, and a few other cities. So today we're gonna talk about how to get to 10,000 customers solely using data. So the first thing I want to talk about is the goal when you're a founder is to get to be helping those customers, right? And so it's typically difficult to do the zero to one, like when you just get started and you say, hey, I want to get my first 1,000 customers, and 2 years 2 years ago, I was at Saastr and did a session on how to do this 0 to 1 and get to this 1,000 customer mark. And for us, it was about 2 million AR at the time. And so what I want to do today is talk about the journey from this 1,000 customer mark to the 10,000 customer mark. By the way, we have the Q&A open, so if you have any questions while I share things on this session, don't hesitate to ask them directly and I'll answer as we go. And so my goal for you guys is to share some practical learnings, like numbers, things that you can act on after this webinar that can apply to your business, that can help you get to the 10,000 customer mark. Alright, let's do it. So before we dive in, I want to stress the 3 things you need to get right if you wanna get to this 10,000 customers. The first thing is you need to build a way to acquire customers in a repeatable way. And so that's all the go-to-market engine, marketing, partnerships, sales, and then activation to get them to use your product. Once you do that, you want to measure and increase the value you deliver to these customers. Because as you bring them in, obviously, like, if you make them happy, then that's going to create the third point, which is a flywheel effect. So you can leverage the existing customers to bring even more customers and keep acquiring. So we're going to focus on those three things today and share a few, a few learnings on those topics. So the first thing I want to talk about is before you start acquiring customers, you want to have a good understanding of who your customers are, where they are, and how you can find them. I shared what we call the map internally. That's what you can see on the slide. What we do is that we scrape a bunch of data on the internet. For us, we sell mostly to Shopify stores. There are about 2 million of them. I think there's about 700K of them that are on our, on our TAM. That's what you can see on that slide here. And so what we do is that we use tools that help us get the list of everybody who's in our town. So those tools are StoreLeads, which is a provider of data on the e-commerce stores. There is this BuiltWith as well that gives us data about domains and the technographics that they use. And then we plug that into our CRM, which is HubSpot. So that we know like who's potentially a customer for us and then where we stand on acquiring those customers, reflecting on the CRM data. And so the beauty of using data and tools to make it happen is that it's like a little bit like playing a video game. Like you have the map that is live and you can see like who's moving where, are you doing like good efforts to expand your footprint on the market, like what's paying off, what's not. And so here is the way we segmented the market. So we essentially built 5 segments. For that, we used Alexa Rank, which is a measurement of traffic provided by Amazon. And once we have the Alexa Rank, we split it into different buckets. So bucket 1 would be the biggest merchants, and bucket 5 being the smallest ones. So we do that, and then we look at what does each segment look like. So if we look at the first one, for example, there are like 4,500 companies, and the smaller ones, so segment 5 would be like, so the small stores, obviously there are plenty of them, so 600,000 there. And so the reason it's helpful is that that gives us an idea of like, hey, if we go target segment 1 that has an ACV of $10,000. Here is roughly the time that we can get. Here is how we're performing in terms of sales. So let's say 30%. So that's what we can expect from that segment next year. Another thing here that has been super helpful is to look at where we are in terms of market share. So that's the column you can see towards the end of the chart. Compared to our main competitor, which is Zendesk. And so you can see that, for example, in segment 2 and 3, we are like halfway there compared to Zendesk. But for segment 1, where like all the big customers are, we're not doing as good of a job. And so there's still like some, some room to grow in that segment. So the other thing that we can see is the deal creation rate, which is how well we are essentially creating deals or interacting with merchants in that segment. So again, that's the third column here. And what you can see is that there are some segments that we are doing a really good job at to get in touch with our potential customers, and there are some segments where it's not as good and there's room for improvement. So taking the first one as an example versus the second one, we're not doing as good of a job at creating those deals for our sales team through our marketing channels. And so there's room to grow and that explains the lower market share. But the part that's interesting is that based on the small sample size that we have of customers on this first segment, we're able to say, hey, like the net dollar retention is much higher on that part of the market. So we are able to say, if we were to focus more resources there, this is what would happen. The downside here is that segment number 1 for us is not like super big versus like 2, 3 are like way bigger. And so it turns out there's more AR for us if we go focus on the segments. So the reason I want to share that is that I think it's super helpful as a go-to-market leader to have a clear understanding of what's going on in the market live. And so that's why I think it's helpful for you guys to say, hey, what are my sources of data? Let me plug that into my CRM live. And then we build this dashboard to, with the SQL tool. For us, it's SySense. You can use Looker or Tableau to have this clear map of what's going on in the market. And then every board meeting, let's say every 3 months, you look at it and you say, hey, like, this is the goals that we set. How is our positioning moving? What's the difference versus last year? And then you can prioritize your efforts based on that. So at this point, we're not acquiring customers, but we are like trying to understand what's going on to make sure that we prioritize our efforts in a in specific areas. So that's my first practical piece of advice: build a map that's going to tell you where to focus. So once we have the map, the thing we want to do is start thinking about each of our go-to-market channels as an engine. And so what an engine is, is something that takes inputs and converts them into outputs. So your inputs can be prospects, they can be partners that you work with, they can be information that a lead is buying from, let's say, a competitor tool or a tool that integrates with you guys. And then the output would be value for customers, obviously, and then AR for your business. So what I want to talk about here is two specific examples of how we scaled the growth engine for a couple of channels for us. So again, the session is focused on how to get from 1,000 to 10,000. And so I strongly believe that to go from that step to this other step, what you need to do is probably launch one or two new channels, but the bulk of the results are going to be provided by you scaling what you have and what already works. So that's what I want to focus on. So I'll take two examples. First one is outbound, and the second one is partnerships. Alright, so let's talk about outbound. So what outbound is, is you identify some people who can use your product and then you find a way to engage with them and convince them that your product is good. And so when we were at $2 million AR with 1,000 customers, outbound was probably like 10% of our AR generation every month. And so we started thinking like, what is the way we can get outbound to get us to this like 10x milestone? And so there's a funnel if you think about it. So there is your target companies and then there is like, you need to find like the contacts at those companies and then you need to start optimizing the messages that you send them and then you start engaging those companies. So let's do a deep dive on all the steps. And figure out what are some of the ways that you can improve the efficiency of your outbound engine at each of the steps. The first thing you want to do is have a very clear understanding of the target market. This is back to the map step. Now we know what are the stores that we want to go after, what do they look like, we can segment them by vertical, location, etc. And we can figure out what is the most interesting segment for us. Is it the big stores, smaller stores, depends on strategy, but at least you have a clear understanding of what's the potential of each of the segments that are available on the market. Once you've done that well, one thing we can do better is figuring out how to find contacts at those companies. So typically when you have an SDR team, what they're going to do is go prospect on LinkedIn, use a bunch of tools in a pretty artisanal way. And so what we've done here is that we've tried to make it a process to find company contacts that are interesting for your business at the companies that you want to target. So what we've done is we've looked at the tools that help you find those people. So those tools are typically pretty straightforward. It's like you give them a domain and they give you a bunch of email addresses in return. And you can specify the persona if obviously you're working with big companies. So what we've done there is list about like 10 tools that allows us to do that. And then we've built what we call a waterfall, which is essentially a script that starts with the cheaper tool and says, hey, I wanna find a customer, sorry, I wanna find prospects at, let's say, Allbirds in customer service, like tell me who you have. And then that returns some people. And if we have more than 3, we stop. If we don't, we go to the next, the second cheapest provider, and then the third and the fourth, fifth and so forth, all the way until we've done 10 of them. And essentially what we've done with that is that we've managed to roughly triple the amount of leads that we are able to identify from that process. Yes, I didn't catch the tools you mentioned. Keith is asking for the sales reps. To use. So the tools would be the ones that are on the side. So there is RocketReach, EverContact, Clearbit. Then we have an outsourced team that does the manual research on LinkedIn, on the website. And there are about like 5 other tools there, Hunter being one of them. So it's about like identifying the tools and then like figuring out like what are the ones that generate the most return for your business. But the point I want to stress here is that you don't want your salespeople to use the tools. What you want to do is to know who's your go-to market and then run this waterfall among like all your target markets, find those contacts and then give that to your salespeople. Because your script is going to be more efficient than them at finding the contacts. So you don't want to be spending time, too much time there. You want them to focus on what they do best, which is reaching out to the companies. So hopefully that's helpful. Okay. Second thing is once you've identified the contacts that you want to go after, what you want to do is to start optimizing the message that you're going to send to those businesses. Because obviously you can send them like the vanilla, like, hey, here is the pain points that we help solve, like this is what we can do to help you guys, do you want a demo? But there are much smarter ways to do that. So what we found is we focus on having signals of interest. So for example, from BuiltWith, we are able to figure out like, hey, they use Recharge, and Recharge is a subscription platform for e-commerce that we integrate with. And so when you start using Recharge, you start getting customer service requests about your subscribers. And so what we do is that instead of sending the vanilla email, we say, hey, like, just notice you use Recharge, you're probably getting those 3 questions from your subscribers. 'And we know like they can add up quite a bit and turns out we integrate really well with them and we can help you with those questions.' And guess what? When you do that, you get about 2x return on the open rate and the reply rate of those emails. Same story with LinkedIn. What we found is that when we are able to identify that a champion moved to a prospect, so somebody was using the product, happy with the product, time to reach out to them and say, "Hey, you love Gorjas in your previous company. Let's make sure you keep loving it at your next company." And so that also works pretty well. And then you engage with the company. And so all in all, what we were able to achieve with this is about 3x AR over 2 years by scaling each of those steps and spending more time to essentially optimize them and make sure that we get the most value out of it. So I'll pause and respond to a few questions. Platform used to track and measure all of this data. So there are a few components here. So first you want to feed your data platform. So these are the tools that I was referring to in the beginning. So BuiltWith, Store Leads, those types of things. The tools that you see here, RocketReach, Clearbits, to enrich the contacts and that gives you the data about the TAM. Then you have another set of tools that you connect which is everything in your stack. So that's your CRM, your customer success platform, your marketing tools, your Gong, your webinars tools. So you push everything to, in our case, Segment. So Segment is the tool that builds the the unified profile of the customer, and then you push that to your data warehouse, and then from the data warehouse, you're able to build charts that are similar to what I was showing here. For example, the map of your customers. Alright, so hopefully that answers the question. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to drop it in the chat or in another question here. Alright, so that's how we scale outbound. The second example I want to share is how you scale partnerships. So a little bit of context here is we've built partnerships at Gorgeous pretty early on because e-commerce is a space that's pretty heavy on agencies. So there are plenty of agencies all over the country that build websites. And we had some early traction there, getting to 1,000 customers, they probably brought 200 or 300 customers. And so same story here, we asked ourselves what is the way we can scale this this partnership channel all the way to 10,000 customers. So let's break down the channel here. So the first thing you want to do, same story here, is let's understand the TAM of our partnership. And so for that, you can do a few things. First, you're probably not the company that has the most partners in your space yet. So what you want to be spending your time on is figuring out like who's working with who among your existing partners so you can identify opportunities for collaboration. So in our case, there were two platforms that we scraped to identify the partners. First one is the platform we're on, which is Shopify. So they have a listing of maybe like 300-400 partners. So we got some partner names from that. Typically it's just the name. So then once you have the name, you need to use tools like Clearbit to get from name to domain and then domain to people. To identify who you can work with. And then the other thing is everybody in our space uses a tool called Partner Page. They have that page that says, hey, here is everybody that we work with. And so what we do is that we scrape that page for a bunch of partners to figure out like who are the new customers that they— no, sorry, new partners that they work with. And then if they are relevant to us, make sure that we add them to our map and start engaging with them. So that's the first step. Optimize the way you understand who's in your partner ecosystem and who you gotta work with. Second step is about building more, building the partnership and making sure it's as robust as possible. So here, I think what you wanna do is to give first. So you don't wanna be thinking about like, hey, what is the way I can get leads? You wanna be thinking about what is the way you can provide more value to your partners. We learned two things there. The first one is we hired a BDR whose job is to send leads to partners. That's their full-time job. And so what they do is they go on CSM calls, they get the CSM to ask, hey, like, what are some of your problems right now? And then they find like, okay, like for example, they want to generate more revenue. So have they considered SMS marketing? No, but we're interested in it. Great, we happen to have a partner, their name is Attentive who does SMS marketing. Let us introduce you. And as you do that, your partner is gonna be like, oh wow, like you're just sending me leads, they are like my number one partner, love working with them, let's reciprocate. And that's where you start getting value here. The other way we give first is that we do a whole lot of marketing with our partners. So we do about one event a day, which is pretty intense. And so that helps the partners essentially like attract their own leads. And so we provide the content, we make it easy to make it happen. And so this way the partners get value out of the partnership. One thing I want to stress is we use a tool called Crossbeam. And so what Crossbeam does is you upload your CRM, the partner uploads their CRM, and then that tells you, hey, here is the overlap. Here are all the people that the partner can introduce you to, and here are all the people that the partner is trying to connect with that you already know. So you leverage that to maximize the value of the partnership by being very crisp on who you want to go after. And so third part, obviously, is that once you have shared customers, you want to make sure they are super happy because that's how you're going to get more customers afterwards. And so I want to talk a little bit about the impact this had. So by optimizing all the steps I just described, we increased the ARR by 6x over 2 years from 1,000 to 10,000 customers. So that has been one of the key elements of getting there. So yeah, learning number 2: scale what works by having this mindset of tracking how you convert your inputs into outputs and then optimize each of the steps of that engine. Alright, so I'll take a quick look at the questions. There is, how effective is outbound and what ACV segment is more effective? How is the top funnel to conversion ratio? So lots of questions here. So outbound, how effective is it? It's about 10% of our AR today. So that gives you an idea and that's like pure outbound. Like sometimes what we do is we also combine the outbound with the partnerships. For example, if we want to go after, say, Allbirds, one of the biggest stores on Shopify, and they happen to work with an agency, we'll try to connect with the agency to get the intro and combine that approach. So that's how effective it is. I think it's a pretty good channel for most of the B2B SaaS apps. So highly recommended here. What ACV segment is more effective? It's very easy to get the answer to that question. You just take that slide, and this is actual data. So you just like do the whole math of companies times close rates times ACV and then look at NR and you see like what's working best. So far it's like the segments that are producing the most, bringing the most customers are segment 2 and 3. Where we need to improve is segment 1, but it's not as big as the other 2 and 3. So like right now the most effective is definitely the like $2K to $4K ACV segment. And top of funnel conversion ratio, So we measure SQL to close, and that's the close rate I'm sharing here. But on those particular numbers, we exclude people that are what we call non-qualified. So their store is not live or a bunch of criteria like this. But if you want to get the actual metrics, you just start from that slide. We're going to share it after the session, and then you'll have all of the data. By the way, I know we're supposed to finish after 30 minutes, but I think I'm going to take the questions as we go, so this way they are relevant to the slides. So hopefully that's okay with everybody here. There's another question when we talk about partnerships. Do you think there is an ideal time to start investing in partnerships? Is there an accomplishment, example, CR— I'm sorry, I don't know what CR— commercial rate maybe. That indicates that companies is ready to invest in partnerships. So definitely, if you want to have at least some proof of product market fit before you invest there, because otherwise you just need to focus on your product. So for sure you need product market fit, so say about 100 customers at least if you're an SMB. And then what is the right time to do it? So You need to think about a couple of things. Partnerships take about a year to build, I would say. So if you make the decision now, you're going to get results, meaningful results, probably towards the end of 2022, let's say Q3, Q4, and then the real thing is going to come in 2023. So there's a lag between— because you need to get the partners to know you and start to trust you, and when they trust you, you start working with them. Think about that, it's just something that's gonna take time. For example, I know that Zendesk, that is a billion AR business, used to have like 2 or 3% of their revenue from partnerships, so pretty slim, I think. And now they're like, hey, like we wanna double down because like businesses like HubSpot probably have like 25 to 50% of revenue from partnerships. So it can be definitely a big channel. So essentially I think what you need to do is to, do a little bit of research and figure out like, am I in a partnership-driven space? Who would be the potential partners? Are they already working closely with like similar apps or similar businesses than ours? And then if that's the case, you probably should invest early. I actually did a SaaS2Session on that about a year ago, sharing our journey with partnerships. So yeah, feel free to check it out for more details. But I I think the learning here is that it takes one year, it takes a full-time person who's just going to focus on that, and it pays pretty high dividends. So I would definitely invest in partnerships early if it's a fit for your business because it's a flywheel and it's super effective. Alright, a few more questions on outbound. I'll answer live. Who helped with messaging? Did you have a conversion copywriter on your team to help with messaging? So I think that's one of the mistakes that we have made is on the outbound is this, what I'm showing on the side is mostly driven by DemandGen people who have more of an engineer mindset of optimizing the steps by building scripts, by looking at conversion rates, and they are not like super product-driven. And that's what we're doing right now is to make the outbound machine more product-specific. So I would probably have a— if you have a product expert in the company who can spend a month on this, you can probably deliver a whole lot of value, like get 80% of it in just over the course of one month. So I would focus on that. Thiebaud is asking, what's the LTV level you need to digest the cost of the two methods? So those two methods are about 1:1 sales and marketing to AR. So that means you recover the cost of go-to-market after one year. So I mean, as long as you have a, you don't have 100% 12-month churn, you're good. So yeah, like it's not that expensive to be honest. And I think the scalable aspect helps a lot there. Essentially, you can either throw people at the problem if you have high ACVs, that works really well. If you have low ACVs, then you need to start thinking about optimizing. In our case, we have an ACV of about 3K, so we need to optimize and be super cognizant of the efficiency of the whole thing. Should we keep recycling the same cohort of outbound, like Lakshman is asking, or trying to find new segments trial and error. So if your TAM's small, you're not going to have a choice. If your TAM's huge, that's going to help. So in our case, I think we recycle the whole thing every 4 quarters. That being said, Shopify is expanding, so there are new leads that are available every year. But now it's like the growth of the space has slowed down a little bit, so not as many. So yeah, I would say about every year. The thing is we looked at how often our prospects are changing help desks. I think it's about every 3 years. So that means like every 3 years, like people are going to be interested in making a purchase decision. So you're there, like, and there are some extreme cases where they change every year. So I think it's okay to refresh every year, but it's probably correlated with how often they change tools. And if you want to get this information, like how often they change tools, you just go back to your map and say, hey, who was on Zendesk last year, who's on Zendesk now, and then you get your answer. And then you can track that over time and see how often they rotate tools. Okay, all right. Thibault, thanks for the answer. Sure. Anonymous attendee, do you invest in ads? We do. We mostly brand ads, probably like 50% of our ads revenue. Ads is about like 10-15% of our AR. We've tried, it's generating some revenue for sure, like the incremental non-branded stuff. But for us, it was very much of a quick win, like we launched the ad, we had some success there. What has been helpful on the ad side is, it's not something I'm talking about on this slide, is plugging in LinkedIn and doing these emails on LinkedIn as a second way to do outbound that has I think probably provided a lift of 30-40% by doing that. It's technically ads and they can serve existing channels, not only the paid channel. Alright. I'm going to get back to where we were. We spoke about scaling the channels that are working, outbound and partnerships. Hopefully, that part was helpful. Now, what I want to talk about is the second part. So first one was let's acquire the customers, fill in the top of the funnel. And second is what you want to do is like when you bring customers to your product, how do you make sure that you make them happy so that you then build the flywheel effect of those customers like talking about you guys and then referring people to your product. So let's get into that. So I think when you are super focused on data, one thing you can you can do that's very valuable is to start thinking about what is success, what is performance for your customers. And so for us, again, we build a customer service platform. We went out and asked our customers, like, how do you measure your own success? And so it was pretty unanimous. Like, they told us first response time, satisfaction from customers. Okay, great. So now we know who's successful among our customers and who's not. And so what we did is we built a score from 1 to 5. We call it the customer experience score. And then we segment our customer base. So we say, okay, like we have a few customers that are doing super well at providing support. It's about 3% of our customers that are like 5 out of 5, which is like very fast response time, very high satisfaction. And then the bulk of it is somewhere in the middle, like 2 out of 5 roughly. And then so we have this, we have, so those 10,000 customers, there's again like 3% that are really good and then like, let's say like 6,000, 7,000 that like need some coaching and like a couple of thousands that need a lot of coaching. And so what we did there is we spent our time figuring out like what are the things that correlate with a great performance for our customers at providing great customer experience to their shoppers. And so what we found is that there are a bunch of things that matter. So one, they need to offer chat. And so to offer chat, you need to staff up, you need to have like 5, 6 people who are available to chat with your customers live. You need to do some routing of your customer support tickets and you need to use macros. Just a couple of examples, obviously there's more, but I think the exercise is try to understand what is success for your customers, and what are some of the ways that you as a business can help. And so this data-driven approach looks like this for customers. So this is an example of one of our customers, United by Blue. They sell products that are respectful of the environment. And they've been super interesting because they went from— they were 2 out of 5 in terms of customer experience score to 5 in the last few weeks. And so the way we try to coach them to get to this high performance with our product is that we look at what are the different ways that they use our product. So for example, like, are they using chat a lot? Because we know that if they use chat a lot, their customers are going to be happy and that's going to yield to a higher perception of quality customer experience for their customers. And so we essentially built a playbook Half of it is through the CSMs. So we have the CSMs come to the business reviews and say, "Hey, I noticed you're 2 out of 5. Here are the 3 things you need to do to get to a 3." And then repeat, get to a 4 and a 5 after that. So that has been pretty effective. And then the other thing that we've done is we use the tools like Appcues or CanDo.ai that essentially allow us to add elements to the product to coach our customers. So a simple example would be there's a level bar that says, hey, you're level 2, here is how you get to level 5, you have the 3 action items, and we show that in the product. So when I'm a Gorgeous customer, I log in and then I clearly see, okay, like this is how I'm doing compared to my peers, this is how I get to the next level. And then we have this score that is like visible to the CSMs, the customers, to show them how good of a job they are doing with the product. And so the reason I think it's important is as you bring those customers, you obviously want to maximize the value that you deliver to them. And so that's what it looks like for us. I shared that at the beginning, our mission is to empower all merchants to deliver an exceptional customer experience. And how we've been delivering is through this Customer Experience Score coaching our customers to get there. Same philosophy as what we were sharing with partners, you want to give first. Your product should be focused on serving customers and not only on acquiring them, obviously. And so I want to share a little bit of the results of having that score. So we were able, by saying to product, engineering, success, and support, to focus on these goals, After 1 year, we increased the customer experience score from 2 out of 5 on average to 3 out of 5. So pretty, pretty solid improvement there. And so what I think this— what I learned there is that if you find a way to measure success for your customers and then share that everywhere in your company, like, what you measure is going to move because that's going to align all the efforts behind it. And here's the results after 1 year. We've been able to achieve significant improvements for our customers. And that's something that I'm super proud of and proud of the team there. So I have a question: can you share more about the elements of your customer experience score? So for us, yes, it's first response time, resolution time, and satisfaction. We found that those are the metrics that our customers care about the most. That being said, over time, as we start, like right now, personalized support, later on we want to speak with marketing personas, all the people in the business, then we want to probably add new parameters to this that measure the customer experience. So the playbook is relatively simple, like ask your customers what they think is the metric that they want to— Viens me voir, viens me voir. Sorry. All right. And I want to talk a little bit about the impact that it has. So turns out, like, if you have successful customers, the NRR is going to be much better. So in return, like, as you think about, like, acquiring and keeping those 10,000 customers, having this philosophy of saying, hey, like, once they get in the door, how do we bring value to them, is what's going to help you the most because you'll find ways to keep the customers that you brought to stay longer. So yeah, conclusion: they retain about 20% better if they have a higher Customer Experience Score. So yeah, that's the third point I wanted to make, is it's not only about acquiring customers, it's also about measuring the customer success and then find what are some of the ways you can, you as a business, improve the success of the customers. Alrighty. So once you have that, it's time to leverage it. So if you think about your company, so it's a bit of a— it's a system, right? You have one part that acquires the customers, another part that makes the customers happy, and then once you have that, you can refeed the acquirable customers. And so what we've done based on the the improvements of the customer experience score is that we find the people that are the most successful and then we ask them to promote us and bring more people to our platform. So here's what we've done there. So the first thing is we try to identify those success moments. So a success moment could be when you leave a review on G2 or when you complete a course in our university program, which is hosted on WorkRamp. When you find a new job, similar to what we were talking about in outbound, we identify that via LinkedIn and we say, hey, like, you did so great at your previous company and were able to achieve like those great results. Let's partner together at your new company to work on getting the same results. Other types of success moments can be like when they level up in their customer experience score. We can also like tell them, hey, like, congratulations, share that on LinkedIn, on Twitter. Tell your peers. And so once we have that, like, first step is you identify when to ask for the referral, and then second step is you create some incentives. So incentives for us were we offer an iPhone if you refer us a customer. So you just do the math, an iPhone is like $1,000, ACV is $3K, and then you have an AR that is like around like 90%, so it's like super worth it. Because your iPhone is essentially your CAC for the new customers there. And what I want to share here is what you can see on the right is what is the impact of that. And so what we were able to do is get the referrals from 0% to 5% of the new AR that we add after 2 years. I think it's still pretty early, but that has become a pretty big channel that brings customers every month. Being this flywheel effect of making the customers happy, and once you succeed at doing that, feed that again into your acquisition engine. Alright. So yeah, here is my last piece of advice is focus— once you've found ways to generate this value for your customers, use that to accelerate the flywheel. So top takeaways from this session that you can apply today in your business is: one, before all of this, build a data-driven culture in your company very early on because it's much, much harder to do it afterwards. By doing two things: one is building all the infrastructure, collect the data, store it in your warehouse, have a data visualization tool to look at all this information. And then the second thing is empower your team. So when we were small, I was the one like coaching new hires on this is how you can leverage the data to make decisions. Now what we've done is that we have our ops team who's responsible for it. We have SQL classes. We essentially make it a part of the career ladder. Like if you want to like step up and become a manager, you need to prioritize your ideals. To prioritize your ideals, you need to look at data. Look at data, you need to have a good understanding of the whole stack. That's piece of advice number 1. Number 2 is build that clear map of your ecosystem. Happy to help there if you have questions, but the idea is to scrape a bunch of data on who's your potential targets and then build that map to understand where to focus your efforts. 3 is take what's working on the, on the go-to-market side and improve the efficiency between 3 to 5x AR increase over 2 years from the existing channels by refining all of those steps and getting more value out of them. Four is track the ROI of your product for your customers and make sure you set that as the north star of the product engineering org. So this way you're not shipping features, what you are doing, or you're not like shipping, trying to get usage, what you are doing is like you You're essentially building things to help your customers get better at the metric that they care about. And I think that creates a very solid alignment there. Again, after we launched that in January, 25% improvement to that metric. Um, last is, uh, once you have all of these, focus on this flywheel effect, and that can be a 5% booster to your AR after 2 years. And I think it's still pretty small for us, like there's probably potential to make it bigger. All right, thank you so much. I share some of these things on Twitter and LinkedIn if you want to follow me on those channels. Hopefully that was helpful and you learned a few things that are applicable to your business. So now I'm going to pause and look at the questions a little bit. All right, so First question is, what scaling tactics didn't work along your journey to 10,000 customers? So let's see. So I think if I take a step back, the things that didn't work are the things that we didn't massively invest on and we just did some small experiments here and there. And so what comes to mind is, for example, we focus on Shopify right now. It's about like 95% of our business and we're starting to go on Magento and e-commerce and build those partnerships there. And I think one of the things that's challenging is that the whole company is so focused on Shopify that you need to find ways to say, hey, if we go on this other ecosystem, it's okay that it's not gonna be as efficient as the Shopify go-to-market for some time. And what we've done there is We built some integrations through partners that were okay but not amazing. And then we had some people that were focusing on both Shopify and on BigCommerce. And obviously, they kept spending their time on Shopify because that's what allowed them to hit quota the easiest way. So I would say this is probably an ownership problem. We should have a person who owns the go-to-market for that specific platform, have different quotas. And has more time to figure it out. That's a mistake we learned from about a year ago and we've been changing that. Now things are in a much better spot. So yeah, that's one learning. Let's see, another failure was working with the— on the partnership side, working with the VCs that focus, who focus on the direct-to-consumer brands. So we hired a person to focus on that full-time and what we found is like it was just like 200K ARR, 300K ARR per year. So not enough to justify a full-time focus there. So we bundled it with something else and focused on that. But yeah, essentially we had high hopes initially, it was working pretty well and then over time diminishing returns. That being said, I think I saw Keith Rabois is building an aggregator of 600 Shopify stores. So I think there's a bit of a it's taking off again and there might be a chance to get into this one. But sometimes you just do an experiment, it doesn't work, that's fine, move on to the next one. What's important is to keep exploring. Next question is, do you work with inbound leads and product leads? What is the ratio? What do you think about these sources to SMB accounts? So yeah, so we consider all of them as inbound leads. And so what we do is that we have this scoring system that tells us, hey, they are 1K ACV, in that case they're not touched by sales, or they are like 3K+ ACVs, in that case sales is going to work them and that's going to create a deal in our CRM HubSpot where they're going to essentially engage with them, book a demo and so forth. And so we have about 20% of our revenue that comes from the product leads that we don't engage with and 80% that comes from the blend of inbound leads plus product leads that we do engage with. So yeah, these are the ratios. That being said, I think one of the struggles we've had there is our sales team is very focused on the sales piece, so the demo, the interaction, like showing the value and not so focused on the self-service experience. And reflecting on this a little bit, I think it's worth having probably like splitting those two and having a leader dedicated to the self-service experience so that you maximize the value that you provide out of that and the close rates that you get. All right, and we have Thiebaud who's saying the same for our software. I think you're talking about the customer experience score. Deep, build a set of tasks your customers need to do. So yeah, similar to our approach there. And then automate as much as you can, it's great customer experience for them. 100%. I think it's— so what's interesting with this customer experience score and using your product to coach customers to improve that score is that it's a bit new, right? For SaaS, there is typically the checklist for onboarding and then you have the stats of the product and that's it, like go figure it out. Sometimes there's a guided tour. But there's not a whole lot of this consultative approach of saying, this is where you are now, this is how you get to the next step, besides what the CSMs are doing. And so I think that's one part of SaaS I'm really excited about, is I think we need to put the CSM knowledge inside the product and use the product as a way to coach you. Lattice does a pretty good job at that on the one-on-ones and saying, hey, this is what you think about from your one-on-ones with your team. You should also talk about that. That part's interesting. So yeah, that's the part I'm really bullish on. And I would— so if there's one learning I would stress is empower your customer success team to have access to the product. Like, don't make it this sacred area that they can't touch. So that they can run experiments on a subset of your customers, learn what works, and then iterate.