The Future of Customer Success with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

Wow, this is amazing to see all these people joining. Thank you guys so much. We are really excited again to have this special workshop between Nick and Jason M. Lemkin. You guys are going to get a live view of a behind-the-scenes conversation that they've been having about the future of customer success. They're going to be going over their insights and predictions and addressing the question on everyone's mind: is it the end of customer success in SaaS? So Nick and Jason both have lots of opinions about this. So without further ado, I'm going to let Nick dive into the presentation. We also will have plenty of time for Q&A, so make sure to use that Q&A function down at the bottom of your screen, and I will get your questions queued up to ask Nick and Jason here in a few minutes. But Nick, I'll let you take it away.

Awesome. Excited to be here, Jason. Thanks so much for doing this. Appreciate it. How you doing?

I'm good. I just need some more customer success. I need a little more support for a few of my apps. So if you, if you, if you can help, that would be good. Other than that, a good start to the year.

Is that what's happening here is we're doing live? I'm going to do live support for your apps here, even the ones I don't know anything about. Yeah, exactly. I love, I love reading your tweets and posts about your vendor experience because it's very real. It's like what people go through and you guys are like the voice of SaaS, but you're also a company. And so you guys are customers of how many, how many software products do you guys use internally?

You know, we don't— the reason it's fun to talk about it is because we probably don't have that many real products like you're talking about. We probably have 10. Yeah, 300. And so the issues are really real, right? When we don't get help, when we're mispromised, when the CSM doesn't show up to the meeting or presents misleading statistics or asks us for 100% price increase with no discussion. If I had— if we had 200 apps, it would be annoying. But like, they're mission critical. That's why it's so visceral to me since the beginning of SaaStr. But It's our apps are our lifeblood, right? So it's interesting. And I think also— Yeah, it's funny. Yeah.

Well, I was gonna say it's funny 'cause I mean, you and I have known each other forever since kind of early days of Saastr and Gainsight. I remember being at the first Saastr conference and was that 2015 or 2014? 2015. Long time ago.

2015.

2015. I remember, I mean, you've come such a long way. And I remember those early days. I mean, you, CS, your first exposure was your last with EchoSign, right? You guys had— a CS team, probably very different. It's evolved a lot over the years from what that was to now. But yeah, I mean, you've known CS in some way from the beginning, right?

Yeah. Look, I mean, I've been— that's why it's a fun discussion. I've been one of the, you know, a lot of the stuff has gotten back then in 2015, even earlier, 2012, when we met, we didn't have the data. We didn't know the IRR of 115 public companies. We didn't know anything.

No.

What I did know is that if trying to help founders at SaaS, the number one inside tip I could give you is put a person on it.

Yeah.

Like, and I wrote 20 different learnings as a CEO, but at the end of the day, I, you know, too many folks weren't putting great people on great accounts. And whether it's customer success or Frank Sloopman's professional services or whatever, like, you can't charge this kind of fees and not put people on it. And once, once I figured— so that was really the point. And now we're in 2024 and we're— because of a lot of reasons, including efficiency, we're rethinking this. Should I put a person on it? Right. Can software do it or should I tolerate more churn and more issues because I got to be cash flow positive? Like, what am I going to cut?

Right.

So, so I'm passionate about it. It's just the world has changed and that's what we'll chat about. You have some great data. I don't know what the new world is, but it won't be the same as when we put somebody good on it. Right. That, that, that idea is still true today. But the way we do it is probably going to be different the next 5 years.

I totally agree. And, you know, it's— I mean, it's funny because even me, right, like I, I am one of the voices for customer success. Yeah. So obviously I'm, besides being a major Swifty, I'm also a major customer success fanboy. And I run a company with 1,200 people, so I gotta get, look, we're profitable, but I gotta get more profitable. I gotta get more efficient. And we're like, we think about the same stuff internally. Even, yeah, doesn't matter if you're the vendor or whatever, you all, we all have the same problems, right? Everyone watching has these challenges. You wanna drive retention, you wanna drive growth, but you also wanna make money, you know? And so, I guess that's the real world. I guess we were in a bit of a fantasy world for a while, but this is the real world, right?

I think we were. I— what I didn't realize, which is— you'll go into the data in a minute. What we learned in 2023 was so many things, but one of the things we learned is as a function how vulnerable CS was to cuts, right?

I mean, there was some—

you have some data. Pilot put up some data that far and away the number of layoffs in CS was their highest category. Pilot did across all their startups. You have more enterprise data, but I wouldn't have thought— I would have thought they bear a little bit of the brunt, But I did not think CS as a function, because I grew up in an area where that would be the last thing you'd want to cut. Tough times, what we did, and I've written about, you know, what everyone really did in tougher times was hide in their NRR, as I said, we hide in existing customers. So fire this, I mean, I don't mean to be less caring, but it would make more sense in some ways to fire the sales folks or fire, do these other things. Why would you hire the protectors? But yet we learned the opposite, which we'll talk, we learned the opposite. We learned it was the most vulnerable, part of the team in many ways, right?

And I think a lot of it is also the stage of the company, the size. Interestingly, like you alluded to, we have different data than the, the stuff you quoted, um, because I think different segments. I mean, it's fascinating. Some folks know where our majority investor is, Vista Private Equity, who's— by the way, if Vista is watching, Vista is great. Just kidding, they really are great. I enjoy working with them. Um, but they, um, you know, some people might imagine, oh, private equity, they must want to not care about customer success. I'm like, No, our private equity-backed customers are the most committed to customer success by far because private equity firms are like, hey, it's all in the recurring revenue. In fact, some of them are like, yeah, new growth, that's great, but I'd rather have like smaller growth but more profitability. And if that's true, retention is like the main driver of all of it. Now, customer success is not a panacea for retention, which is I think a legit discussion to have. But everyone in private equity knows it's about retention and expansion, you know? And so yeah, it's, it's fascinating though. Early stage startups, I mean, you know, people love Frank Slootman as a role model, but there's some of, you know, he wrote this book called Amp It Up and he has a whole chapter against customer success. Yeah. So there's kind of a, a healthy debate right now with different people, you know, maybe have a little bit of bias, but this would be a good debate.

So can we hit that? I know I wanna get to your slides, but can we talk about that for a second?

Yeah.

I only skimmed the book, but I have also read a lot of folks at what— at Snowflake have said and talked to folks. I could be wrong, but my sense is— and this happens on, on the social medias— is that what was said, what is distilled into a tweet from that was— and at the— maybe more importantly, the company level— somewhat misunderstood. Because Snowflake has a huge proserve team and deployment team.

Yes, totally.

We could talk about where— whether that should be split from CS or where— whatever, put that aside for a minute. In my simplistic world, a really good professional service implementation team is part of customer success. Forget about where it reports. It may actually be in the enterprise. It may be the most important part. Okay. Because if you don't get that deal dialed up and those folks deployed, they don't want to. And so this— I— and so the idea that everyone should just fire their CS team and put it in sales because Frank said so, I'm not sure that's what Snowflake's doing. It's just they have this matrix-style org where they've got sales, they've got presales, they've got professional services, but they're just— there's just not someone without goals layered on top of it was his point, right?

That's exactly right. And we see that a lot where like people are basically like, you know, they want to drive customer success across the company and across their customer base. Nobody would disagree with the idea of retention and expansion is important. 100% of people know that's important. And then some people make the rep carry the burden or the services team or whatever. And I think there's some nuance. I will say, so I read the book. I regret it. I was like, I don't want to read this book because I know there's a chapter against customer success. But then I read it because the rest of it's pretty good and it's kind of the GOAT all-time CEO, right? So you should learn from him. And then there's this chapter on customer success. I'm like, come on, dude. Like, why do you got to pick on me? Like, there's so many other people you can pick a fight with. And I'm assuming it's eventually going to end in a cage deathmatch between me and Frank Slootman. And my guess is he'll kick my butt unless it's like a video game contest, maybe it'll be even. But like the thing that I try to take away from it is each business is different. And you know, if you have a consumption-based business, there is more of a natural engagement for a salesperson, right? Because they got to keep driving that consumption. Also, Snowflake's got a business that's kind of a, you know, once you start using, you're never going to leave, right? Like we use it, it's great. And so there's some nuances to this where I'm like, yeah, that model might make sense to your point. They have services. Some customers are willing to pay for services. Some expect, kind of like you were talking about SaaS, expect the vendor to do it as part of the subscription, right? So I think there are a lot of nuances. The only other takeaway I would say when I read that book and blog post, I was like, yeah, learning from Frank Slootman is like being a high school basketball player and trying to learn from like Michael Jordan. Like, what are you gonna learn?

Or maybe Jim Harbaugh, whatever it is. There's only so much you can take away, right?

It's a different world. Exactly. So for the folks that are not Frank Slootman, I think this will be a good discussion because a lot of nuance to have here.

So let me give—

I'll give you just a couple data points on a predictions post I did, and then we'll be able to go over to like kind of what you can ask you one more, not to get you out of loop.

So it's just on the Vista stuff. And for folks that don't know Vista, it's probably the largest PE acquirer backer of SaaS companies at scale, right? Maybe Tomo Bravo is bigger. I don't know, but they buy public companies anyhow. So they have all these great companies in their portfolio. And I was, I was catching up with Kyle Porter from Salesloft, right?

Oh yeah.

And he's like, the board meetings now are 70 pages of data.

Yeah.

And he was kind of pulling his hair out a little bit. But my question to you is, as, as one of the thought leaders in the space, what, what, what's one or two metrics or data point you learned from Vista for Gainsight sitting in those board meetings? Where— how did it change your focus as a CEO, if it did?

It's a great question. I get that all the time. And by the way, Mike, although Kyle is amazing and I love the guy, my experience has not been the same. Like, if you look at our board deck, It's literally, you know, expansion strategy, TAM, key hires. So that's for me, not, not that different. But if you said, what have I learned? I think the thing that I've learned is that eventually you can sort of build a model to show how you can create sustainable value to a company that's not just based on a revenue multiple. So cash flow, right? Like it sounds obvious, but for a lot of people, if you're only done startups, you don't realize Over time, if you do it right, SaaS companies generate a ton of cash. So, you know, we went from losing money to now we generate double-digit millions of cash flow every year, and that'll eventually get to hundreds or whatever, right? And so I think the biggest thing is learning the power of the SaaS model, which is kind of obvious. But I think if you're in an early stage model, you just don't see that other side of the spectrum, you know, once you get to a little bit more maturity. And then the other thing that you learn is like, what are the ways to kind of drive more enterprise value? One of them being M&A. So a lot of these private equity firms are very good at growing through like more products to sell to your customers or more segments. And so we've done 3 acquisitions and we, so we have 4 products now and it's been great. And just knowing the math around those, which, you know, fundamentally for folks watching, you, you might be selling your company at some point and there, the math is pretty simple, which is like you're, you know, you're selling, you buy a company for X as a multiple, you hope for your company's value at a higher multiple. You can pay some of that with debt, which doesn't cost you any equity. And then over time you pay the debt down and you grow that company. And then you, I mean, you can make so much money off that. This is why the private equity people all have like 17 different houses and private jets or whatever. They probably have done better than some of the VCs, right? Because the model really works.

Yeah.

And so those are the two things I've learned, like the, the, the how do you get to profitability and then how the overall model of value creation works. So, It's like, I mean, you know, it's like, it's a pretty common next step nowadays for companies. Once you get to, you know, $50 million of AR, $100 million of AR, there's one door, which is you go public. But I don't know how the door is. That door is not open very wide. It's like there's a, I don't know, maybe one or two people. It's like a very popular club. Like if there's a bouncer there and they're not letting that many people in, um, and like you have to have somebody go out to, for somebody else to go in. And the IP, so that's the IPO door. And then there's this other door, which is like private equity. And frankly, can be great outcome for a lot of people. So I'm seeing a lot of companies looking at that now. So awesome. Well, we keep that free conversation going. I'm just gonna share a couple things of what we've seen in the, like, from my perspective, and then I want to kind of go back to a great blog post Jason did, which kind of basically motivated this whole thing. So let's talk about, you know, predictions for this, the future. And I can only ever do predictions one year out, and usually I get those wrong too. So I'll say that with humility that, you know, these ones here I mean, nobody predicted a year ago ChatGPT would change the world. So, but before we do that, we like to do icebreakers and all our things. So let's do it, you and me, and then let's have the folks on chat type in there. So on the chat, type in your New Year's resolution if you've got one, or intention, or there's all, people are using all these cool words now. Like somebody said, it's not about a resolution or an intention, it's about choosing a word. So that, so what's your word for this year? So Jason, if it's a resolution, it's an intention or a word. What's New Year's for you?

Well, look, mine is, it's probably— it probably could be the same one since 2002, but wow, it's, it's hire one more game changer to the team.

Oh yeah.

The rest, nothing else matters. Nothing else. Once you, once you have some scale, whether you're at Gainsight scale or even SaaS or has a brand, we have scale. We have scale. Not the same way, right? Nothing like nothing else matters. Everything else is a Band-Aid. And we have some game changers on our team. But one more, that, that's, that's where you get the magic. And there's a moment when you're one per— things are going— you can get a lot of crap done. But when you have like 4 or 5 magicians on your team, right, then those are moments when you just, you just excel, right?

I love that. And it's funny because I remember it. I mean, I don't know how many posts you've written about that or tweets. It's a ton, right? And it's probably one of your more common things you write about. And it's funny, you can hear something over and over again and it's just always true. Like that's perennial for me too. Like I'm, I'm hiring somebody right now, like, um, you know, CPO or maybe head of, you know, the, the product and engineering side. Right. And it's like, oh my gosh, like there's so much more we can do now. We all have the, I don't know if you do, but battle scars of getting it wrong. And therefore I think some people are like, I'm not gonna hire anyone. Right. I've been through those phases. But I'm like, you got to, you just got to even got it.

I mean, you got to keep it probably at this level where we all get where just a pretty good person in that role, right? Whatever we call it, CPO, CTO, SVP.

Yeah.

A pretty good person gets overwhelmed by technical debt. The fact that some of your app was built 10 years, they just, they can't get it done. Yeah. They're overwhelmed even if they're smart. And, and that, that, that game changer though will come in and just like you won't even hear about that crap anymore. Like it's just, it's being solved.

I love that.

It's being solved. But that's the problem at your level. If you hire some CTO or someone that wears a tie and a blazer to meetings and isn't really a hacker anymore and doesn't understand, like everything's just too hard. Like 90% of the energy goes just to maintaining the platform, which is the easiest, uh, peril to fall into. Yeah. Right. All the energy is maintaining.

There you go. I like this. Except I do better.

Don't lower the bar. Don't lower the standard.

Do people wear ties anymore? Is that a thing? I— that's a whole different— yeah, you said—

No, I, I wrote, I wrote an old post about the tells that a CTO or VP of engineering is gonna wear at— and one of them is they wear a tie to a board meeting. And it's still true today. It's still true today because I'm not saying they wear a tie on Zoom when it's the team, but they get like a great head of engineering or product doesn't need to wear a tie to make Nick and Jason at Sequoia Capital comfortable. A great head of product engineering comes in and says, This is what we're getting done, guys, and I'm going to increase velocity 50% and I'm making these choices. And if you want to wear a black t-shirt that's a little scruffy around the edge that says Gainsight at SaaS 2015, fine. It don't matter. Right. But that tie and coat make up for the fact of they don't really know how the platform, the software on the platform works.

That's such a good total tell.

And by the way, if they show up, walk them out the door, apologize to them because you hired them. It's not their fault, as we agree, right? If you make a mis-hire. And give them a gift card to Nordstrom for another 100 ties and thank them for joining.

Well, if they show up at Gainsight in a Taylor Swift era hoodie, they definitely get above the interview line. So mine, by the way, is, you know, last year wasn't— outside of work was hard. And so somebody gave me this thing which was like, choose a word for this year. It's like 100 different words. One of my— she'd gone through some hard stuff too. And the word I chose was next. And I think it's an interesting one because it fits work too. Like what's next in SaaS? Like we have been through the craziness of 2020, 2021, 2021, 2022. And now it's like, what is next? Which is a perfect setup because that's what we're gonna talk about is what is next for customer success and SaaS. And so let me get mine. So I'll say upfront that like, you know, it's hard to know about the future. It's just happening all the time. Einstein has a great quote on this, right? But let me try. Okay, so 5 things that like I've seen, love to hear maybe each of these, you comment, tell me if you disagree, whatever. So gross retention, net retention, I think everyone watching knows that those are things. Everyone also, if you've been running a business, knows the last few years, those have been, last year or so, it's been hard, right? What I hear from customers is gross retention dropped for 2 reasons. One is if you have an early stage company and people think it's kind of nice to have, unfortunately, you know, some of those things churn. And then even if your stuff is sticky, people were cutting licenses. They wanted a discount. They said all of our vendors need to cut 20%, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's funny because we've had experiences where we're, so we're, a customer of ours will be like, hey, our procurement team has asked everyone to cut 20%. Now we sometimes are a customer of theirs too and we're like, so do we get the 20% discount too on the other side? And they're like, no. We weren't planning on that.

We're raising prices, Nick.

Exactly. And so I have a chart, you know, there's this, if you don't follow, number one following SaaS is Jason M. Lemkin. One of the top ones after that is this guy, Jimmy Inval from Cloud to Judgment, and he does this great analysis of public companies. And it's pretty interesting because this like tells the whole story of the bubble. The net retention went up a lot for companies and then it started dropping and it goes to the same thing. People aren't adding as many seats or whatever your entitlements are. And so this kind of free growth, it's still there, but it's not nearly as high as some people. Net retention's 100 now, some have dropped below 100. What are you seeing in terms of gross retention, net retention in, in the industry?

Well, first of all, looking at this fresh, um, dude, it's still 112%.

Yeah, it's still not— it's still— you're growing 12% per—

when we're talking about customer success, and this is the meta topic here, okay? We can't— even if you had a hard 2023, don't forget the magic in this chart. If you, if you make your customers even somewhat successful, you're going to get 112% revenue retention each year.

You don't even—

like, I wrote up Elastic this week. Elastic's growing 100— growing like 17% at $1.2 billion, and its NRR is 117%. They don't need to close any logos.

No, that's literally—

and their stock's up over 100% the last year. Their stock's up over 100%. So if we want to— if we want to turn our frown upside down, Nick, and this is the meta issue, is look, this is actually— and we're going to talk at a lot of things that are at odds with this. This chart says And then I'm going to answer a question. This chart says never stop investing in customer success. For real. Never stop. Because if this was 80— and look, some folks had tough— like, you know, one of our favorites, Henry Shuck from ZoomInfo. We can talk about them. They got hit hard.

Right.

And I want to talk about why. If we get into it, they went from like 120 to 90-something.

Yeah, right.

But it's heavy scrutiny. Their GRR actually wasn't hit that bad. It was tech and scrutiny. It's like, okay, like, I only want 2.5 SDRs and 1.2 ways to use the product, which was great. But before— and there's a lot— and I know it's stressful for folks, but, but especially for leaders and founders, take a pause if you had a tough one and look at this chart, get it right, dial it in, do more, build more software that's better, fill those feature gaps, make them happy. And like, you just, you just can't kill a company with 112% NR. That's the Vista learning. No, these babies, right?

So that's exactly right.

And related to this, he has another one. Jamin has another chart to answer your point that I wrote it up where he also does something— this is really good, but everyone has versions of this data. His is just the best presented. He does a really good job that other people don't do, which is he layers all the folks' new bookings ratios, right? Year over year.

Yeah, I've seen those.

And when you layer them, you'll see pretty much on average Q2 of last year, of 2023, was the low point. Was the low point. And not that it was good on average after that. Right. But, but bookings, year over year bookings started to increase. Right.

That's right. It was just a decline. Yeah.

So we're going to look back and I don't think 2024 is going to be like, like, you know, it takes a while to dig out of holes if you're in one. And to be clear, not everyone's in one. Not everyone's in a hole, which is a myopic thing.

Right.

But if you are, I think we're going to look back and say sometime around Q2 '23, it was hard to tell, but that was the low point and we came out of it and maybe 2025, I think, will be pretty awesome.

I agree. And I think one of the things I believe is going to happen under the covers is like In the bubble, people just gorged on software. Like, they bought lots of products, but also the entitlements, like the seats or whatever, they just bought a ton. You know, for example, we would see companies where they're like, yeah, we have 10 CSMs today, but in the next 3 years we're going to have 30, so let's just buy ahead or whatever, right? And you were saying this earlier, people don't buy ahead anymore and they have so much overhang.

Yeah, that was Henry's point. They don't buy ahead at all.

In 2023, 2024, they're like, processing through that overhang. It's like after Thanksgiving dinner, you're not, not eating a little bit, not eating after that for a while. And so you're going to have processed that. So what I see when I talk to CS teams, they're like, yeah, we have downsell right now because the customer bought too much in 2021 and the renewal's coming up. They're like, we don't need those extra 100 seats. That'll eventually go away because that overhang of all that extra excess capacity will be gone. And then it won't— I don't think you go back to 2021 levels, but we'll at least get back to some kind of growth level. I think you and I are both old enough to remember the dot-com. This kind of happened, right? Like people bought too much of everything in 2016 too, right? That mini SaaS crash, right? It was both of those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I think so. I think, I think there's two, but I think there's two things, Nick. I think one is lapping tougher times, right? That always helps, right? That was sort of your point. Worst case, worst case lap. And Henry made the same point. If you go through a year of downgrades and other things like they're not, they don't keep downgrading, right? They've done it. And so you got to lap those. Yeah. So everyone should get a little bit of boost over the next year, right? That's in the enterprise. But I think the point that people maybe don't get as vendors working at tech companies that I saw in my tenure at Adobe in a big tech company is like, look, there's only so much energy you can put into, into cuts and app layoffs and everything. You get it. You can do it for a year. Like you get all the SVPs and the VPs together and you go around and everyone's got to cut something and someone cuts like a beloved app, right? And like the whole Salesloft outreach gong and you got hit because people had to rationalize to 2 instead of 3.

That's right. Yeah.

But the, what people don't get, and, and, and I think this, this should inspire founders, is it takes so much energy to do that. This is not a 5-minute decision.

Yeah.

And as soon as there's even a little bit better times, people are gonna put a little energy into that. Right. But they're not gonna spend half the time.

No.

And not only do I see it at the apps, it's funny, we see it we work with a couple hundred CMOs and marketers as like sponsors and partners, right? And the amount of energy they're putting into cutting their marketing budgets, it's profound. But does that— is that gonna help them hit their, their commits for 2024 and 2025? No.

No.

The amount of energy they put in cutting their budgets, but you don't get any points for that at the end of the day.

No. And it's interesting cuz you can't cut your way to prosperity, right? You can't save your way to prosperity.

So you— but the energy it takes to cut 50 apps and discuss them, right? You know what? At the end of the day, yeah, the amount of energy it takes, like, because Henry was great to share the data, the amount of energy it takes to go from 115% NRR to 95% at ZoomInfo, it's so much work. You got to get the whole team around. Nick, do you— are you really using it? Jason, when times are good, you're like, eff it. Like, I need 100 seats and I need it tomorrow because we're growing, man. I don't have time to argue over whether Elaine is fully using her license to ZoomInfo. It's dumb, right? So we're in this mode, but it can't last unless we're in a global meltdown, which we're not.

We're not. And I think that the key thing is like, at the end of the day, software companies are valued, of course, on some efficiency and profitability, but also on growth. And if you don't grow, you will never be that valuable. And actually, like Byron Dieter, another kind of good friend of both of ours, had this good, Bastien had this good thing on like rule of 40, which for folks that don't know is your growth rate. Minus your cash flow margin or profit margin. And the idea is trying to make that subtraction above 40. His point, their point was actually when you do the correlations, it should be like your growth rate is worth twice as much as your profitability. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be profitable, but don't forget, I think we always over-rotate. In 2021, we over-rotated towards doing everything we can to grow. And now we've over-rotated towards cut every single thing you can, but you're like, we have to grow again, right? And you're probably seeing this a little— people are probably too conservative now in some cases, right?

It's even worse, Nick, because what a lot of, uh, founders were told— folks that aren't public believe that like growth doesn't even matter at some level, right? VC— and that's almost— it's almost toxic in a way that folks all across tech and SaaS have internalized that growth doesn't matter anymore. Right. And, and even worse, then they go out to fundraise and they're like, hey, I'm at $52 million ARR. I mean, the year before I was at $54, but we're cash flow positive. You want to invest?

Yeah.

And they're like shocked when they get a no.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Nobody would want, you know, hopefully that company figures it out, but nobody would want to invest in that company. And I think that like what's interesting is having been through a few of these bubbles, there is always this kind of thing in the water of like, it's always terrible. You got to cut. If you remember in 2008, Sequoia had this very famous blog post called RIP Good Times, Rest in Peace Good Times.

Yeah, I deleted it.

And it was like, yeah, well, it's funny. There's no disrespect to Sequoia. They're great. But if you read that blog post and you bought tech stocks that day, you would have made a ton of money. It was like, that was the bottom. And I kind of feel like we're at the bottom. It's not going to come roaring back. But if you're in a world where you're just like, the next year is still battening down the hatches, you're probably missing out on opportunity. You don't have product market fit.

You're missing out.

One of the two. You're missing out. Yeah, you're missing out. Figure it out.

If you're battening— I'll go even further. If you're battening down the hatches too far into 2024— now, a little bit we may have to do, right? Especially if you raise too much money, too high valuation, we could go down a rat hole.

Totally.

But if you're literally battening down the hatches, here's the— Here's the tough thing, Nick, and it ties to one of the messages in NRR. Like, you may have fallen out of product market fit at some level too. The world does change. It doesn't change in SaaS in 8 months or 12 months. But as founders, as CEOs at the top, we have to be religiously honest and have— are we in product market fit? And our job as leadership in SaaS companies is to change the way business processes are done, to add tremendous— we forget to add tremendous value to organizations, not a smidge.

That's it.

And, and if you can't close any, if you have a brand, if you're north of $10 million and you can't close customers right now, you do not have product market fit. You do not have product market fit. It's a fact.

It's true. And that's like, in some ways this stuff papers over that. It's a good segue cuz the second thing I'm seeing is, you know, 2023 there was a lot of focus on fewer vendors, you know, vetting like some, it's funny if people that have seen the movie The Purge, like If you've seen that, like horror movies, it's like the purge of software, right? And a lot of our customers, they'd have a spreadsheet of like, here's all our vendors and like ranked, you know, 1 through N and top 1 or 2 are your HR, your Salesforce, whatever. But after that it's fair game. What do you cut? And, and so for people watching, it can kind of cut 2 ways. You know, you look at it, this is actually a great chart from our friend Godard at G2 where it looks at like basically how buyers, you know, as of last year, were like, I want to have fewer tools, I want to have smaller, you know, I would rather buy stuff from existing vendors, right?

Yeah.

And so what that means, if you're watching, is if you're in a situation where you actually have a value prop that's like multi-fold or multi-product, go get more people to use more of your stuff or buy more of your stuff, right? And that'll make you way stickier. If you're the, um, point solution startup, which by the way many people are, that's how you get started, then you have to realize this is like the tidal wave you're fighting, and therefore you have to add tremendous value. This is, I think, the challenge in a bubble is you get a point solution that doesn't add a lot of value, but customers are willing to try a lot of stuff and they have budget. And now I think the bar is just higher. So like you said, if you're not adding tremendous value, you don't have product market fit. You don't, right? And this is, I think, the thing to think about if you're a startup.

Yeah, I do think though, like the Slutman thing, this, this, this conclusion and data I think folks are taking the wrong conclusions from it.

Mm-hmm.

First of all, let's step back. What have, what have we learned since that 2015 SaaS annual, right? When no one had gone public, Box went public that week when Aaron came to 2015. Okay.

Yeah.

So much data.

Yeah.

First of all, we've learned, roughly speaking, to get past $200 million in revenue, you've got to have a solid second product, right? We've just learned there's this physics of the number of— there are exceptions. There'll be Canva.

We've had it.

But unless you bleed into consumer, like Okay, so we learned this and then we learned that the best ones all figured it out. All. And there's extreme ones like Datadog that where everyone buys 8 products. Yes.

Right. Okay.

So, yes. And we've also figured out that one of the reasons that works is we trust everyone. You know, Datadog is really expensive. Put aside cost. You won't find a developer that doesn't. I mean, you'll find one or two. Everyone loves Datadog. The only thing a developer is going to say is, my God, I paid $800,000 for Datadog last year. But I love, I love, I love it, right?

Yes.

Okay. But, but if you have to have worked at a bigger company, you have to have been on the other side of the table to know that in good or in good times, good times, good times, good times, the CRO and the CFO get what they want. And often the chief security officer too. Okay. Yeah, they get what they want. And we're not— we probably won't talk about security. The reason it took me a while to figure out the reason security is an evergreen category is the threats are ever new. And if this— if security wants a new— Gainsight Security, and they're convinced this will solve a problem, they'll get budget. That's why security is actually 100% one of the most wonderful categories, because by nature there is budget in the enterprise every year for new vendors.

Okay. That's right.

Now, when— for whatever we went through, I tried to coin this term that didn't take off. I tried to coin it the app layoffs of 2023 and app layoffs.

That's cool.

I kept saying it didn't— it didn't take off, but it's really what happened. There were app layoffs, which you and I have never seen in our history. We've never seen app layoffs because this, this, this weird turn— I don't think it's a downturn. It lasted so long that we were able to go through waves, like multiple waves. Yeah, layoffs. Okay. And it happened. But let me tell you, if my plan, Nick, at some big tech company was— or even midsize— was to grow 50% this year and I hit 70, I get any app I want in sales.

Yes.

You do not argue with the CRO. You do not argue with the CFO, and you don't argue with the CISO. And so And they will want their product. They will want their product and they'll get it. And if last year they consolidated everything on Gong or Outreach or Salesloft, they can start on one. But you know what? Fine. But you know what? I like Gong as a standalone tool. As great as those pieces are in Outreach and Salesloft, I want Gong. Gong is better. Okay.

Because it's all—

it's where they— it's not— it's not that there's anything wrong with their— and they're going to get it. And if they want $200 grand or $400 grand or $500 grand and It's, it's their app. They're going to get it. And so I think we're confusing the fact that you have to be 10x better as a vendor. Forget about point solution. You just got to be 10x better in general.

That's a good point.

And, and yes, we went through weird app layoffs and we forced people and we're confusing forcing people to simplify, which isn't going to last with another trend of like HubSpot. Hey, they're doing $700 million in CRM. Like, that's pretty cool. Or Datadog.

That's amazing.

Yeah, but I don't think that means there isn't room for other vendors. The Datadog-HubSpot thing. I think that's where we're confusing consolidation with multiproduct. I think they're different things and we've gotten good at multiproduct as so many folks are above a billion in ARR, but that doesn't, it's not the same as consolidation. It's, it's like a cousin, but it's not the same effect.

Yeah.

It's not always budget driven. Right.

I think it's a great point. I mean, I honestly might tweak the wording here even for myself, cuz I do, going back to one of the first things you said, hire a great leader, right? Like hire another great leader. And when you hire a great leader, if they need some software, they get what they want. You give it to them because otherwise, like, you know, you're hiring a new sales leader and you're going to be like, oh no, you're not allowed to use Vendirect. It's like, no, no, no, whatever you need, just grow our sales. If you need some Gong, which are all— these are all great technology. If you need that, that's fine. Grow our sales. I'm going to only judge you not based on your software spend. But your ability to grow. So I love it. I mean, in a downturn, people overreact to the negative. In an upturn, people overreact, you know, to the buzz. So I think the third one—

So I guess the point is not— I don't wanna keep going. I think we should just not confuse, uh, multi-product vendors and vendor with consolidation. I don't think there is. I think if you have, you have to have 10x features until you're at Gainsight's level and maybe even beyond. You gotta have a— founders have to have a 10x feature in your pocket. You gotta walk into that room and have something that's 10x better. And if HubSpot doesn't have it in their CRM, you'll, you'll still be able to get that customer. They're not— this consolidation is not— it's only a threat to folks at the edge of product market fit.

That's right. And the other thing is, if you're a younger company, you're serving the people that have, real needs. Like, like in other words, yeah, maybe the mainstream—

why else would they buy your product? Yeah.

Yeah. They're the people that have these differentiated needs. Those are the early adopters. There's the innovators and they have real needs. I remember like, some Paul Graham post years and years ago. He's like, don't go after a huge market, find the like small subset that's dissatisfied, then you grow that market, right? And, um, you know, if you're a small company, you know, you have the benefit that you don't need a billion dollars of revenue tomorrow, you need 5 million, right? Or whatever you're at, you know. So as you said, as you get bigger, the second act, like we're in 4 products now, we had to do it. So the third thing I think is you and I talked about this, things are bouncing back and they will, and they won't be like as big of a bounce as we all want. But, um, they, the hiring won't bounce back the same way. I don't think this is just true for CSM, it just happens to be the world I live in. I think that people are not gonna be like, oh, we're growing our company 30% again, I'm gonna grow my team 30% again. Yeah, they're not gonna do it. But like we were talking about in the pre-show, they might've been growing their team 40% even if their revenues go, cuz they're like, we're gonna grow ahead. And I think you had a good way to say this, like, we're not— nobody's going ahead anymore. What would you say they're doing?

We're hiring in arrears. We're hiring in arrears.

Hiring in arrears, right? That's a good way to say it. So you're, you're only doing it after the fact if you know the growth came, basically, right? Uh, yeah, that's— I think it's a good—

I think there's a— I think it's interesting. I think there is this question of if things get a little easier, will we go back to the old ways, which you're saying you're not. It was, you know, I think I asked, I asked Aron from Monday at SaaStr Annual, this last one, on stage about it, and he was great because because Monday was one of maybe 80% of the public SaaS companies that in, in 18 months went from negative margins to positive margins. Everyone did this, right?

It's amazing.

And the way they did it was not actually— not was— they all paused hire. It wasn't really layoffs. That doesn't help. It was pausing hiring for a year. Grow and don't hire, you get profitable. It's really that simple, right?

Um, that's the thing. Yeah, SaaS is amazing that way. Yeah.

But I asked him, okay, great, you did this, Are you going to keep the discipline? Are you going to keep to these margins? He's like, we have now instrumented it across Monday and we are going to hire less than we grow forever.

Yeah.

Now, that's interesting. And I don't— since this is a founder-led company, Kosi, I don't— I think it's true. I don't think Monday will go back. I don't think they will ever go back.

Yeah. And I think that's a good— I mean, you look at it, it's funny because like one thing I think we all can do as business people is study like non-tech companies because eventually like tech matures and they'll never, it'll never be the exact same, but there's commonality. And I remember listening to a Procter Gamble, you know, big, you know, consumer packaged goods company earnings call or something, which is why, why am I listening to Procter Gamble earnings call? You can, you can, you can question like what I do on the weekends, but Jason, you're equally nerdy. So I was listening to this call and they're like, we grew, you know, 6% last year. And they're like, 7%, so more than the 6% was due to, um, basically, uh, inflation and raising prices. And, um, and then they see we grew our earnings or something 15%. Now, how do they do that? Well, they're hiring less people and spending less money as a relative basis to where their growth is. That's what happens as you get bigger. You get more efficient, you get more scale, you get more leverage, whatever version you want to say. And so some data to support this is pretty interesting. Both the what I'll call like maybe muting the bear case a little bit, but also muting the bull case too. So this chart, which is slightly different than the one was posted that you were alluding to, this actually looked at, um, over the time period of 2021 to like late summer 2023 when we ran this on LinkedIn, change of the number of people in each of these roles. So 20% growth from the beginning of 2021. So there's like bubble and the downturn together. And sales grew a little less. So what does this mean? Well, people did invest a lot in CSM and they kind of— I'm going to show you the next chart, but in our data, they weren't cutting as much as that other data might have suggested. I think the difference is like our data skews towards probably companies $20 million ARR and higher. And, you know, that other data set might have a lot of early stage startups. Probably. This next chart, though, is probably even more interesting. This is a little hard to read, so I'll just explain it. The bottom is the bubble and the top is kind of the downturn. So the bottom is like different bars representing the year-over-year growth in the number of people with a CSM title on LinkedIn by company size. So, you know, you can see, for example, the yellow bar is like companies 800 employees to 1,000, and so on, so on. And so what you can see, the like combined one, the total, if you look at 2021 to 2022, sort of the bubble peak, you know, the CSM population in the world grew roughly 20%. If you look at 2022 to 2023, kind of like the downturn, It grew basically 0%. And so what did that mean? Well, so of course some people are hiring and some people are laying off. Some companies are doing well, not the net was zero, right? And so what does that mean?

Like we talked about with Monday, flat, flat, flat.

And people, that means people are grinding out 'cause they're big. SaaS growth did not drop to zero in terms of revenue growth. So what that meant is people are grinding it out. They're just saying, you know what, we're not gonna hire anyone, take on more accounts, or maybe tell the customer to go do it themselves. Like maybe some of your vendors—

Fewer customers get covered, fewer customers get covered.

Fewer customers get CSM, whatever. And so to me, this trend is not, we're never gonna go back to that. Like, yeah, I'm growing my business 15%, I'm growing my team 25%. Nowadays, I think if SaaS gets back to growing, you know, 15, 20%, my guess is the teams are going, you know, 5, 10%. Like, like in other words, people are gonna wanna get leverage, whether it's exactly that math. I know the hiring in people is not gonna be the same as the revenue growth.

Uh, at least one, one asterisk and dagger that it, I don't think I figured out until last week.

Okay.

Because we're all, we're all watching everybody else on X and social media and everything. Okay. The handful of companies I've invested in that are growing at 2021 or higher rates. Okay. The ones are, for them, with one exception, I just put this together. They're spending like it's 2021. They're hiring like 2021. Do you think, let's do an extreme example. You think OpenAI isn't hiring like it's 2021?

No, they should.

Every, every investment I've made, they're hiring CEOs like it's open to the 2021. I know we can talk about that, but my point is, but there's a larger one. My point is everyone I've invested in that's north of 10, okay, that is growing triple digits, okay, that did not raise a multi-unicorn round. So they're fracked, right? They didn't raise it $5 billion, right? They are running their companies essentially the way they ran them in 2021. And I think this is going to confuse people in 2024 because they're going to see for like, look at Deal. Deal announced this week they're hiring 1,000 people this year. Okay. And I will bet you those are good-paying jobs. And I will bet you there's some flexibility on attainment and there's some— and that the CS coverage is higher than it might be in a more mature— they're hiring 1,000 people and the vibe at a Deal is going to be a lot different than at a SaaS company that has decided to grow 12% this year profitably. And it will confuse everyone in the industry because there's is this by— when we started in SaaS, Nick, we were all kind of the same. We all kind of ran like, yeah, some folks went under, right? But, but mostly we all kind of— the one— those of us that hit $8 or $10 million, even that, but we all kind of were running the same playbook. We were growing 100%, 80, 120. We're all— but now there's this bifurcation and OpenAI went from what, $10 to $100 to $1.2 billion ARR in one year. You can have a few extra CS, uh, account managers.

Yeah, pretty good growth.

So, so we're gonna hear these stories and it's gonna create ennui And it's going to create disillusionment and it's going to create bitterness and it's going to create quittitude and it's going to create a general malaise, which I think has infected us in SaaS and tech. And the fact that some people still are spending like 2021 is going to confuse everybody. It's going to because it's, it's at exact odds. Listen, here's Mr. VC on whatever South Park saying, guys, don't spend anything this year, cut everything. But my hot company, do you guys need another 50? Because I haven't deployed anything the last year. You guys need another 60.

Totally.

You need another 80. And so they're getting radically different advices in these two boardrooms. And people work at these companies and they're going to— there's going to be this— there is an island of 2021 of which OpenAI is the funnest example where every year I get a tender offer. Every year, every engineer can make a couple million bucks. That's good because there's a tender offer every year. Like, that's good times, man.

I love that. And, you know, by the way, I think we all have won in this webinar because we heard you use ennui and quittitude, two very good SAT words. So well done.

I'm not sure quittitude is a real word, but we'll try to coin it.

It's okay. It's all— we can use all these words that SaaS are kind of made of. So, okay. So the next one is, you know, at least from my experience, we're seeing customer success scale in different ways than just hiring CSMs tied to that last point. Obviously there's automation, but there's also like pushing more to the client, which clients may or may not like that, more self-service, so to speak. And then more into like your internal go-to-market team. And this is kind of the, you know, argument that like you should have more sales, marketing, and CS together. We're seeing more CS teams moving under like a chief revenue officer, not just the sales leader, but the whole— Yeah, it's happening. Now, just to give you an example of like pushing that more to the client. So this is Gong actually, they have this, you know, great you know, kind of self-service site. You know, they use some of our tech and some other stuff, but they have a, you know, ask for help, community, self-service training. And I've seen people invest more in this. We have some products in this area, so I'm seeing it firsthand where people are like, you know what, I wanna do more self-service, I wanna do more digital, I wanna push more to the customer, and then I wanna enable my go-to-market team to do more. Now, I agree with you maybe where it can go too far. And you end up in a situation where, yeah, I pushed it to the customer, I pushed it to my sales team, but now my customers aren't getting value and they're churning, right? And so that's like the— or they're not growing as fast. So I think there's a good trend here. And like everything, we can overreact and overrotate. And I think in some software categories, in my opinion, you can make the product great and you can have a great sales process and great self-service, but it requires change management in human beings. Like, you know, Workday is a big Gainsight customer and We, you know, when you roll out Workday, it's like a ton of change management. It's nothing you got the work product.

It was 2 years when I was at Adobe to roll it out.

It was 2 years.

Right.

HCM is a human capital management is a hard problem. You have to change human beings, how they do performance ratings, how they all this stuff. And so to me, there, whether it's professional services or CSM, there is a still a need for humans to help companies deploy software, particularly if the customers are big. And so if you're watching, like, I think you should have self-service, you should have digital, you should enable your go-to-market team, but be careful. Like if your product is, requires change management, don't just abandon that cuz you're gonna get a lot of shelfware and churn over time. I don't know if you agree with that or not, Jason, but I think, I think, I think that, um, yes, I will.

I want to think that in 2024 more founders understand what change management is, but I think a lot of first-time founders or folks that, or folks that went from SMB organically upmarket, they don't get, yeah. What a big deal change management is. It is a huge deal. And if you cut back your CS budget, whatever you want to call it, your post-sales budget, and do not implement world-class change management, if you don't get your customer and if you don't measure it, okay, what is my goal? 80% go live by 30 days for SMB. Yeah. 90% go live in 90 days for enterprise, whatever. If you don't measure it across the company and do it, you're— it'll be bad as it is, and it'll be even worse if you cut the function, right? People—

that's exactly right.

Founders don't get this, and I'll sure tell you, salespeople don't get at all what it takes to deploy the product, right? They don't get that it doesn't really matter if your product costs $10 grand, $20 grand, or $40 grand. If it takes a year and 20 people to deploy it, you're gonna negotiate over price, but it doesn't matter, actually.

Yeah, exactly right.

So it would be a real shame if, if, uh, if we cut implementation, deployment, onboarding as part of this process. But what I have seen, I do not like— I do not like customer success reporting to sales, but I think that ship has sailed partially. Where I have come around when I watch companies is there are many cases when implementation should report to sales if you have the right CRO. If— and I like it only when the CRO raises her hand and says, look, this isn't getting done right. Okay. I worked so hard to close Gainsight. It took me a year to close them as a customer. And my CS team is all focused on other crap and I need a team that is only going to get Gainsight up and running. That's it. And if they raise their hand, I think it should be part of sales without question. If they raise their hand. Right. But it's a— you got to own it.

And that's a key thing. And I think that's the difference between being a sales leader and I love sales leaders and being a true revenue leader. And I think one of the challenges is you move this stuff under a sales leader who thinks of their job as the 90-day quarter and this other stuff's an afterthought. That's a problem, right? If you have a more like a true like GM, president, CEO, I think that works. Last thing I was gonna share that when you—

Assuming they still like to close, Nick. Assuming they still like to close.

And see, they still have to close. Yeah. That job doesn't ever go away.

A little skeptical.

The last thing is I think in every, yeah.

Yeah.

In every category, we're all thinking about using LLMs and generative AI and so on. And everyone watching, probably you're building in your own products. What I'm seeing is the post-sales world, no surprise, is ripe for opportunity. 2 kinds of opportunity. One is true, like just automate a role like support. You know, people are looking at that. But in the world of customer success management, what's quite interesting is there's a way to make them, uh, CSMs way more productive, but also happier. We did this interesting survey where we asked people, what are the things you love about being a CSM? And what are the things you hate? Like the things you don't enjoy in your job. And actually, funnily enough, we took the survey results and put 'em into ChatGPT. So The finding, I'm not gonna read through 'em, but you know, no surprise, you know, people love things like building customer relationships and providing solutions and being strategic, da da da da da, right?

Yeah.

And so you can see this is a list of things people wish they did and this is what they want their job to be. And then there's a list of, okay, what's your frustration? And it's things like manual work, updating data, you know, internal collaboration. And what I think is interesting is you can imagine if you're building a product in your own category, You have the same kind of list. What are the things that people love about their jobs? Yeah. That you can preserve? What are the things you can— they don't like that you can automate? And so I will say that the opportunity to use generative AI, we're doing a lot in Gainsight, but just in general, to do things like eliminate data entry or improve internal communications, it is real now. And so if you're not thinking about it in your post-sales team, you should be. And I've actually seen some early-stage startups, quite interesting, where they're like, I want to do this right from the beginning. I actually want to like automate a lot early on, not the human relationship change management. That part you need a person. Yeah, but all of this other administrative stuff, I think you can actually automate a lot. So we're seeing more and more of this as well. I know, you know, I'm sure this is like 90% of the pitches you get.

Yeah. And this is what I would— if I were the CEO of Gainsight or was on the Vista board is what I would actually say is I think it's even more than this. It's not just AI or ChatGPT or GPT-3. The fact that we aren't gonna rehire all these people in CS, the fact that yes, this is becoming a sales-driven function. The fact that all these changes have happened means I think this whole category, I think we need more customer success software, more because we don't have the people.

Yay.

But, but Nick, it's gotta be, we've gotta remake the whole category from scratch. We've got to— it can't just be a wiki. It can't just be a crappy bot. It can't be like, if we're not going to— if we're going to replace people with software, we got to do it for real. And then it's worth a lot of money. Okay. And just as, just as in our old days, you know, the early days of customer service software was all basically red light, green light, yellow light. And that was pretty great in its own way. Right now, I think it's got it like someone— these, the leaders, and you are the number one leader. We've got to do even more because the people aren't coming back.

That's exactly right.

Just throwing AI alone does not accomplish this goal.

It's gotta be part— it's just a tool. Yeah. So I wanna go to your predictions cuz there was a couple interesting nuggets. I know we're basically outta time, but you had this great blog post about like what happened the last 15 years. I think we hit a lot of these. I won't do the sales ones, but I think that what's interesting cuz you hit like, you know, number 3 and number 4 efficiency, et cetera. I think the thing that's interesting is you overall wrote this as like the end of like customer success as we knew it, and there's something new. If you want to encapsulate maybe the summary of all that into like a couple sentences, what would you say the takeaway is for you?

On the second point, you mean?

Oh, just in general, the end of customer success as we knew it, and there's a new version coming.

What is it? Well, look, I think I would tie it back to where we started and the first conversation we had, the original goal, the original Look, we've had account managers since the 18th century enterprise software. We've had account managers. Every industry has account managers. You know, the refrigerator company has account managers. People, everyone's got account. So this is nothing new. Like, forget about what we, how we define AM in SaaS. We've always had folks that manage accounts, right?

That's right.

And in fact, in other industries, we often get better support than we get in SaaS. We get better support at lower price points. Okay. So, so this is nothing new. Um, what, what happened was, and so we took, when we started in the SaaS journey, CS became that, that account manager and we would throw a smart body that cared about customers and that liked software.

Totally.

You had to care about customer. Nothing else mattered. You could have come out of any industry. You have to, you had to be that quirky kind of person that bleeds customer, right? And that likes, and that likes, and then on the weekends plays with software. And if you hired her or him and threw them at your top 10 customers, like magic happened, right? And that just doesn't work today anymore. That— and that's where I was. And that's how I had so much success in the day. I think we all did. But everything has gone mainstream in tech, right? There are so many— everyone graduates from college and either they go work for a tech company or they start a company in YC. When you and I— yeah, even when you and I first met, even, even like doing a startup was still seen as weird or quirky.

Going to YC was weird and hard, right? Yeah.

And now that we're not hiring folks that are these quirky, nerdy software customer-loving folks that just can't code, it's just normal people, normal folks graduating from college and normal jobs. And we, as we put them in the sales team, has changed. We lack that, that true champion of the customer. And I just don't see it as much in the industry. And I, I could be critical of it. I am very critical, but I just think it's part of the maturation of an industry and the sheer number of bodies. Like, you can't all have outliers in every category.

Yes.

When you're, when you're tiny in your company or in an industry, you can have outliers now. We got to have mid-packers and they don't always stay. And I'll tell you, I ask like every CS— I interviewed like 50 CS folks. I asked them all the last 18 months, like, what percent of your customers show up to QBRs? Oh, 10%. Great.

Yeah, great.

That's adding a lot of value.

I know. That's it. And I think maturing is the only way to close out because I know we're up on time. I'll just say two things. We're going to send a follow-up. The SaaS team sent a follow-up email. One thing we're doing, which is pretty cool, is like a benchmarking tool. That's actually like very, very data-driven. You can filter on your company size or whatever, number of accounts per CSM. And if you wanna see some things we talked about how they're changing in the industry, you can go, we'll send the link out to this. This will be great. And just maybe final thing, practicing what we preach of what you, everything you talked about, Jason, like we're evolving to be like more of a customer platform where it's about scaling through CSM, it's about driving adoption of the product, it's about building customer community, it's about training your customers. So our own product stack is evolving. And I think this summarizes like what's happening in the industry. It's gotta evolve, it's gotta change. It's not going away. And I think you and I both agree on that, but it can't just be the same as what we've been doing because the world's changing. So I'm so grateful to you for writing that post, for having me here, um, to everyone for watching, great attendance here, and, uh, a lot more to talk about in the future.

Cool. Yeah, great combo, guys. We had so much chat, uh, so many conversations, so many people networking and helping each other in the chat, which is awesome. We had, um, a ton of questions. So Nick, we'll be following up with you and Jason so we can get some of these answers and figure out some future, um, post or another maybe AMA where we can address some of this stuff. Obviously a very important topic and really hitting home for a lot of folks. Um, but thank you both so much, and thanks to our attendees for joining. If you want to check out more workshops just like this, we host them every single week, um, virtually in Zoom. Um, and you can sign up for them here at the link for Workshop Wednesday. We have a different SaaS operator or investor every week sharing great insights like this. So we'd love to see you there. And, um, Nick, we may be having you on soon so that you can help address some of these questions we didn't get to.

Um, sounds great. Thank you, Taylor. Thank you, Billy, and Jason. As always, it was awesome.

Yeah, and I like that. Um, I hadn't seen the benchmark tool, so let's look at it together. I'll write it up on Saastr too because I suspect there's a lot of interesting data in that, even on the slide I saw, right? Yeah, so I'm going to write it up for sure. All right, man, talk to you soon. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.