Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Hey, I'm your host. Scott herf. Today I had the honor of sitting down with J. Nathan, a customer success veteran and expert. He's the chief customer officer at hierologic and the co founder of the Gain Grow Retain customer Success leadership community. Now, this is one of the premier customer success communities out there. It's 12,000 members, tens of thousands of week Lee readers. Check it out. If you can Gaingrow Retain in this episode, you're going to learn how to lead and scale SaaS customer success teams. And that's really important to do it efficiently because this is a world where there's no more free money. So I also want you to be ready. You're going to get to hear a little bit of breaking news on this one, so please enjoy.
SUP, Jay. Good to see you, man. I figured we'd start by just chatting a little bit about what you're working on now and what you're into.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Yeah, sounds good. Good to see you, Scott. As you mentioned in the intro, I am the chief customer officer and actually slightly modified role at Higher Logic, too, where I'm the general manager of one of our business units. And so my days right now are occupied with sort of pathfinding on our go to market strategy. We're working really hard on a partner strategy at Higher Logic for the products that my team sells, working real hard on that. The ecosystem play is so important these days, and so we're putting a lot of energy into it. Other than that, it's just keeping customers and retaining them. I also do a lot of writing, so got a couple of projects there I'm working on as well, which is impressive.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: I mean, I find it writing to be clarifying, but finding the time for that, carving that out, it's like getting your reps in or eating your broccoli sometimes. But then once you do it, you feel amazing, right?
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Yeah. There's no such thing as an overnight success, right.
Most people that appear successful out of nowhere have been diligently working away at things for years sometimes. And writing is just one of those things for me that, to your point, it does help clarify my thinking, whether it's thinking about things that are happening in my personal life or things that I'm trying to accomplish from a business perspective. And I think that has been one unexpected benefit of spending so much time writing, is that it's just clarified my thinking so much. And now it's more of a habit than anything to just write every single day.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: I love that, and I like how you format it, distribute it, distill it down because it's so consumable. But so you can tell it's just been refined. Right? It's that the phenomenon of the rock tumbler Steve Jobs used to talk about where you've got all these ideas working together.
I'm going to butcher the metaphor, but everything seems just so punchy and refined, and I always come away after reading one of your posts like, oh, okay, I'm going to pause and think on that. So I appreciate you putting that out into the world. And then you've got gangro retain, right? Your huge community of CS professionals.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Yeah, great call out. We launched a community called Ganggrow Retain. We call it GGR for short because it's a little bit of a mouthful, but we launched it back in. So we started a podcast back in 2019, and of course we had a blog and everything. I had a consulting firm back then and we were using this community strategy and the blog and the podcast, much like we use it here at Churnkey. Right? You use it to help educate the market, draw attention to the brand. We were doing the same thing for the consulting firm. We worked with B, two B tech companies on their customer success strategies. We're up a management consulting firm, basically, is what we were. But we built this community, and during the Pandemic, it just exploded. People wanted to talk to each other. They wanted to figure out, okay, we're seeing this at our company. Are you seeing the same thing? And what are you going to do about it and how's it going to work? And we just sort of caught lightning in a bottle. Back in early 2020, when the Pandemic started, we started it actually, the community was really started with a weekly zoom call. We called it CS Leadership office hours. Wow. And first week we had 50 people, the next week we had 75, then we had 125. And it just kept growing and growing and growing, and people started to pull from us. They said, hey, if we're getting together every week, we'd love to be able to chat in between these calls as well and make personal connections and have content.
We built an online community. We now have live events that are part of that. We still run those office hours calls, which are really important to create person to person connections, because that's really what community is, right? It's all about connecting people and knowledge and ideas. And so it turns out to have been one of the more fun, professional things that I've done in my life. And it was almost completely serendipitous. Like, we did not set out to build a community of 12,000 people. We just didn't. It just happened. And our mantra from the start was, let's just give as much value as we can just give and over time, it's come back tenfold to us, but we just continue with that mantra today. How do we keep giving our community members more value?
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Yeah, it's fun to see that DNA still carry through with the office hours. I mean, that schedule was incredibly robust and that's tough to pull off and it's really impressive, especially with that scale of people.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Yeah. We had to learn how to facilitate big zoom calls. We were using zoom. And luckily Zoom was available to us in 2020. So, yeah, it was a new skill set. We had to learn to be able to facilitate that. But lots more stories we can share from GGR as we continue to chat.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Right on, ganggrowretain.com.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: It's good stuff.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: You've been thinking deeply about SaaS companies and customer relationships for a long time, and what we're seeing now, and we're feeling this at Cherry too, where market correction in search of efficiency and the realization that cheap money and spending your way out of problems is no longer the reality. And I want to get your perspective on what needs to happen within SaaS companies to maintain deep customer relationships while being efficient, because that's the root of all SaaS success, really?
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Well said. I often say that SaaS companies are customer success machines, right. You have to make your customers successful if you want to win as a business. There's no separating the two because the cost of acquisition is so high for customers, and if they only stay for a year or 18 months or 24 months, you're probably going to be upside down as you continue to grow. I think if you look at the past ten or 15 years in the SaaS ecosystem, as you pointed out, there's been a ton of money that's been pumped into here, and a lot of the folks that institutionally invest in companies like Chernkey and Hire Logic. They know on the surface level that you need to have a customer success team. Right? Everybody should just have that. And we want you to go scale up sales and marketing. So you need to go hire some more BDRs, you need to go hire salespeople. But there's a lot of nuance in each of these businesses. And what I found is that even customer success teams have sort of just thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, and it's not been very efficient. Customer success, as it's sort of grown and evolved over the past ten or 15 years, has really come from a place of very high touch. So think like high touch account management calls with your customers every week. That's one thing. If you've got big enterprise customers, you have to do that, right? You can't avoid that. But there's a lot of companies out there, especially a lot of the types of companies that Chernkey serves, that serves hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of very small businesses. So what does customer success look like there? It's completely different, but some of the same technologies and techniques that you use to engage large audiences also work in enterprise. Because guess what? Enterprise companies don't necessarily want to be on the phone talking to you every day because they use 20 other products just like yours. Right? Right. So they need to know it's working. They need to know that if they have a problem, they can submit an issue to the company through the support channel, and it's going to get resolved correctly and quickly. And then they want strategic guidance. Like, what do my peers look like? Am I performing as well as they are, or do I need to be doing things differently? So when we think about scaling customer success, we think about content, the best practices, the webinars, the office hours, all the kind of stuff we did for GGR. We think about the same kind of techniques for scaling and making that customer success function more efficient, because it really is all about enablement in the product, enablement of the best practices and processes, and then making sure that customers are adopting and getting the usage out of the product that they need to prove its value. It's really interesting.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: You connecting growing GGR in a way that you would scale a customer success team or operations. It's really interesting comparison. Kind of like turning the light bulb on in my head right now. But I think it's interesting that customer success has this high touch enterprise reputation. And it's one of the more interesting dynamics about the topic, in my opinion, because I don't know why it's gotten that reputation of being sloggy and expensive. And I got to get on a call again with this guy, right?
[00:09:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Because it has been it has been sloggy and expensive and inefficient, in my opinion. So I think you're spot on.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And that segues. When we spoke earlier, you said something that I loved where when you're advising companies, your question is, well, how can I convince you to not create a customer success team?
[00:09:28] Speaker A: That's what you do.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: This is your role. This is what you love to do. But hearing you say that, I want to know what would you do instead? Why is this what does that mean?
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. I had a call with a friend of mine from the community a couple of weeks ago, and he's in a new role. Company just got a big funding round. It's a Series C round of funding, big one, like a nine figure kind of deal. And he's like, yeah, I got brought in to build out the customer success function, and I asked him a bunch of questions. And first question is, like, what is your gross retention rate? Well, it's above 95%. That's fantastic. That's world class, right? So where's the problem? What problem are you solving? And it's CSM teams because that's sort of the thing, right? In customer success, you often think about a team of CSMS, but that's a blunt force instrument, right? A CSM team is a high cost blunt force instrument that's only going to give you so much reach across your customer base because it's so high touch. So when I think about customer success, I think about it as that's the outcome that we're trying to drive. It's not renewals, it's not upselling, it's not advocacy, it's not even adoption. It's like is the customer getting what they thought they were buying? Are they getting that result and that outcome? Now, how we help the customer get that is what we call customer success. It's like a team or a function. It could be CSMS. CSMS are a customer success channel or a channel of engaging with your customers, but there's other things you can do. It comes back to this community concept. Every company, I think, should have an online community. Of course, I think that because that's the product my company sells. But it's a way of letting customers connect with one another, right, and learn from one another. Because oftentimes customers have better insights because they sit in the exact same role as your other customers versus you. Your CSMS don't necessarily have that direct, hands on, been in the seat experience. So communities are really important for helping drive just the overall feeling that I'm part of something bigger, right? Like, yes, I'm buying a product from Churnkey or from Higher Logic, but I'm actually part of their ecosystem too, and they have tons of resources and people for me to network with, so I can become better at my job and better at using their products. That is powerful. That's one thing. When I think about the statement that I made to you about I'm going to convince you not to hire a CSM team, the question that I asked my budy when he described what he was looking at doing is okay. The other thing he shared with me is that there's an account management team who's doing a lot of the quote unquote, customer success functions. Like, they're meeting with customers, they're handling escalations, they're doing the value and ROI report outs with the customer, the kind of thing, the proactive engagement you'd expect from the CSM team. My question is, well, okay, if you look across that team, it sounds like they're already doing a lot of this work, but what's one thing that they're doing? And if you could take that one task off of their plate across the whole team, what would that look like? And could you specialize a role to just go do that one thing? So we talked about billing inquiries, right? They handle all the billing inquiries. Well, why not centralize that in one person who can just go handle that? Maybe they're part of the finance team, maybe they're part of the renewal team. So to me, it's all about looking at what's working today. How do you leverage that without creating something brand new? If you don't already have it, like, if you don't already have a CSM team, why create it? But do start layering in things that give you leverage and scale on what is already working. So maybe it's billing inquiries, maybe it's a support team, or maybe it's an onboarding function that just specializes in that onboarding, that new customer implementation motion that has to be done well and done right. Every single without fail. Right. And so I think of the world as you grow a SaaS company and as you scale your customer success practice. I think about the world in terms of creating specialist roles that handle very specific moments in the customer journey along the way.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: That's powerful, and I love to jump into that. I love process and examples of the practicalities of things. And what would you say are the top few practical achievable examples of scaling customer success? So you mentioned one, a few there, but what are some must haves in.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Your experience early on in a company's stage? When you're at the seed round or maybe even your a round of funding, you may just have a team of what people might refer to today as like a full stack CSN. Like it's a person who handles the support requests. If a renewal is coming up, they might have a conversation with the customer. They're doing it all. They're a Jack or Jill of all trades. Right. Oftentimes the first functional roles that need to be scaled inside of a SaaS company are going to be your support team, your support function. Right. Because it's very specific. When a customer reaches out to you, you want to be able to respond to them as quickly as possible and solve that issue as fast as possible. The other one, like I mentioned, is Onboarding or implementation, however you look at that, but it's getting your new users off the ground. And if you have enough new users coming in or new customers coming in, onboarding, it's a little bit like support, right? When a new customer comes on board, you have to react to that. You have to go do the work to get them implemented. Now, in a product led growth model, your product may guide them through that process, but for anything else, onboarding is super critical in SaaS. Right. It should be specialized pretty early in.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: My right, because the customer's cleared time in their schedule. Maybe they've gotten engineers, whoever on board, we're teed up, ready to go, the button is not working or whatever.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: Right, right. I need an answer now, right? Because I'm trying to use a product, but now it's not doing what it's supposed to do. So that's got to be lightning fast and there's got to be a deep connection with the engineering function for that type of issue, right. So we can get it resolved quickly. Once a company gets their first tranche of customers through the initial term of their agreements with you, some companies sign customers up on a monthly recurring basis and you can turn it off or on anytime. In a lot of enterprise SaaS B to B, you're actually signing annual agreements for things. It may be a one, two, or three year contract, but when those contracts start coming up for renewal, you need to be able to reliably renew those contracts. And to do that, one of the roles that I've had a lot of success creating in my career is a renewal manager role, which basically takes all the commercial negotiation of a renewal off the plate of a CSM or off the plate of a sales team who needs to be ideally booking new business, new logo bookings. And it centralizes and you can have one or two people be really good at renewal price increases annually and maybe a little bit of expansion there as well. And so that, at least in my experience, is much better done centralized into a specialist kind of role. And there are a number of other roles like that. When you think about developing content in webinars for your customers, like who does that right? The run of the mill CSM doesn't have experience. That looks more like a marketing kind of role. When you think about the tools and the process of facilitating a one to many engagement with a customer, whether it's around the product roadmap in a webinar or it's around a certain topic that we're trying to educate our customers on in the product. So there's all kinds of opportunities for specialization as you grow, right? And you have to sort of think through it as you grow.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: In that example, would the customer success role be leading that webinar or would they be feeding marketing the content for that? Or maybe both?
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Maybe both. Yeah, it's really a matter of who's organizing that program because back to the skill set thing. Traditionally the CSM skill set is a relationship manager, a product expert, a coach consultant. So when I think about they're going to get a lot of stories that come out of their interactions with customers and they're going to be able to identify, okay, this customer, they're really doing things better than anybody else and we should put them in the spotlight. So they can be a really valuable source of recruiting people to participate in these things both from as a participant and as a leader. And then they can also be a valuable source of content because their ears to the ground constantly and they're getting great feedback. Now what we have to train CSMS to do is be attuned to what they're hearing and know that the role they play is more than just the conversations they had with those customers that day. Yes, that's important, but it's also important for you to bring those insights back to the business so we can load up our scaled programs with great content, great ideas, and great people that they're coming across in their day to day work with them.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Yeah, that's one thing we're trying to work on at Chernkey where both to recognize patterns and to recognize new developments, but also not to be what's the phenomenon where a doctor learns about some disease and then they diagnose that disease every time they're after for a little while. So not to get too stuck in the mud on certain feedback on certain days. Right. So it's a very human problem, but it really is. I'd rather have that than being caught by surprise with cancellations or negative feedback or whatever.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Right. 100%.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: Who are some customer or what companies do you admire that are customer centric and that are doing really innovative things with customer success?
[00:19:03] Speaker A: Great question. So I have a little bit of recency bias on this, too. You were mentioning there with the doctors, but I've been reading Invent And Wonder by Jeff Bezos, and basically Invent and Wonder is the collective writings of Jeff Bezos. So it's really just a collection of his shareholder letters and other writings on certain topics that he's done over the years. And Amazon probably doesn't even have a customer success team, right?
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: I mean, they may somewhere across their vast empire. They probably have a CS team somewhere. But what I love about Amazon and why I consider them one of the most customer centric companies in the world is because their innovation is based on customer centricity. They built Amazon Marketplace to show third party seller products next to products that they sell. Right, right. And many people, including many members of their board, were like, you are crazy. What are you doing? Why would you do that? Cannibalize your own sales? Because they know that it's not about maximizing the value of any single transaction. It's about maximizing the lifetime value of that customer and having them. I mean, Scott, how many things have you ordered off of Amazon in your life? I couldn't even tell you at this point.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: It's probably embarrassing for me to tell you over the past 15 years. It's nuts.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: Exactly. Right. Now, we go back there because we know we've got the best selection. Another thing, when they made the decision to allow reviews of products on the site, people were like, Why would you do that? What if they give negative reviews? Well, it's all about the customer. So the customer is going to be better educated. They're going to trust us, and they're going to come back and buy more. And you see that flywheel he calls it a flywheel of growth a lot in how they've built that business, and it just permeates through every part of it. Amazon, Web Services, Marketplace, prime those are all very customer centric ideas that they knew were going to be costly when they launched them. But they had faith that they were going to feed that flywheel. And the sum of the lifetime value of transactions was going to far outweigh any single transaction that they could do with their customers. So Amazon right now is just my favorite, and I love reading about them and learning more about their culture of innovation for customers.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: I was actually working in Ecommerce when they launched the third party marketplace in Raleigh. Actually kind of your neck of the woods back in, like, seven. People were calling them crazy. You're competing against yourself, but it was enabled by this other innovation they had, which seems obvious at the time or now, but it wasn't at the time where their main competition was ebay. And if you search for, say, I don't know, I'm looking at my kids Lego set. So search for a Star Wars Lego set. You get different listing pages of the same product. Well, an example of them being customer centric was, well, that product should have one know and a single what they call the then, you know, all these listings roll up under that page, and it's just a better search shopping experience for everyone. Enables reviews and all that stuff.
[00:22:09] Speaker A: So ebay's never recovered from I mean, they're still doing okay, right, but they're a distant second. And the cool thing about the way that works culturally at Amazon is they tried an auction site, too, I believe. Yeah, they did, with Ebay, and it ended up failing, and they said, all right, let's move on to the next thing. So they're not afraid to take chances on behalf of their customers to find it's like the overnight success thing. Right. Marketplace wasn't a success overnight. They had two or three failed tries at it before they hit on what the right idea was with the product pages that you mentioned and everything.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Yeah. And many companies would have just ditched it after the first one, right?
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. Or they would have tried one of the tactics they would have tried to copy one of the tactics that they saw their competitors doing that worked in isolation, of having the whole culture of innovation, of driving prices down, of making selection bigger, of making information more like that's a cultural thing. And if you do any one of those things in isolation, another very customer centric company is Southwest Airlines. But they start by being very clear about who they are and who they are not. They'll tell you, like, if you want a first class seat on an airplane, don't fly Southwest, because we're not doing that. They know who their customer is, and they serve them relentlessly. So other airlines have tried to copy the cultural, the fun aspect of what Southwest does, and they've tried to pare back some of the benefits, but they haven't adopted the entire mindset, the entire culture that Southwest Airlines does. So all they're doing is adding more cost and less revenue to their books. Right. And they're not actually winning culture, winning formula. Yeah, exactly. Love it.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: Well, I want to shift back to you and the work you're doing real quick, and we got a little breaking news here. You're joining Chernkey's Board of Advisors, which is something we're all extremely excited about and we're finally ready to let out to the world. We've been chomping at the bit to tell people about this. We're huge fans of your work and your thinking and just admire how you reinforce the importance of being customer centric. It's one of our values. But also we just discussed the practical realities of actually doing that. It's not just some platitude or whatnot. So yeah, we're crazy excited. Breaking news here, guys.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Yeah, very exciting. And it's almost like Serendipity in a lot of ways because half your team based here in Charleston, which how many software companies are actually based here?
Not that many. And then to have a software company with half of its team in Charleston focused on essentially what is a subset of customer success is just super exciting. So I'm just happy that the network, the skill set, the exposure that I've had over the past 20 years just happens to be it happens to line up perfectly with what you all are doing and I could really does about it. When I looked at Chernke, I've known Baird for a lot of years actually. I used to work with his wife at a former company that we were both at. And here's some good advice, maybe for your listeners at least, I think it's good advice when you're evaluating a company, whether it's to invest in or join as an employee or become an executive of or join the advisory board of, there are three things to look for. Number one is are you in a good market? You really want to be when you choose a company to do anything with, you want to be on top of a wave, not under it, as I say. And I mean, just look at the world of subscriptions, right? It is exploding right now. Not only can you buy software on subscription, which of one of the earlier companies take advantage of this? But look at Costco, right? I'm a member at Costco. I can get my hair cut and my car wash. I can buy that on subscription now there's so many. I heard the other day that Taco Bell was trying out a subscription service. Did you know that?
[00:26:09] Speaker B: Sign me up supreme.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: Yeah. TaaS, I don't know if that'll stick or not, but it's clear that Churnkey was on a market wave right now. Found the right wave. So excited about that. Number two thing I look for is the product. Is the product good? Because if the product sucks, it's going to be a slog. And I've been in situations where the product was not in a good spot. We had to really work at it to get it into that spot. But just looking at the product and how clean and tight it is, obviously it's only been born over the past few years. It's on the latest and greatest technologies, which makes it lightning fast for us to iterate on it customers, it's performant, it stands up to the task. So the product is excellent, by the way, the analytics capabilities of what Churnkey can do and the visibility that it gets. One of the things that I love as a customer success leader is working. With a product where you can very visibly see the outcome of using it. Right. Luckily, Churnkey deals with an area of the customer subscription model where you can actually literally give day by day, an ROI score. You know how you're doing, right? That's awesome. Not all software companies have that luxury. And then the third thing I look for is the team. Is the team good? And this team is small and mighty. Y'all have been together through multiple startups and had great exits and are committed to this thing as a group. And it's just infectious. So I'm super honored and excited just to be a small part of it.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: You're making me blush, man.
It's good to step back, know, take the wins and think through the success and how we've gotten, know, but we're looking forward to the next phase, to your point to adopt and change. Mark Andreessen's quote, subscriptions are now eating the world and they're everywhere, for better or for worse. But it's the reality. Subscriptions are an interesting thing, right? It's a relationship, it's an ongoing relationship, and in any relationship, there are tension points. And what we want to do is make sure that everybody who is subscribed to a product feels like they're seen, gets their needs met, and it's done in a customer centric, user friendly way. There's never any dark patterns, never any a billion emails if your payment doesn't go through once.
We want to bring respect back to this relationship at scale all across the world, and even legislation doing that in places like New York, California, and then internationally, europe and India have some really interesting laws around subscriptions. And because that respect hasn't been present, it's been abused. That relationship has been abused. So that's a big focus for us. And especially, too, on the data side you mentioned, we respect our customers, too, to show them how good we're doing. We're not going to hide that if we're not doing a good job, then we're all going to know about it and we can fix it. So that goes many layers deep. So, yeah, you're going to help us with the next phase. It's been two and a half years, kind of figuring out who we are and then off to the races for the next three to ten, right?
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it's exciting. There's a lot of headroom for what turnkey is doing and so just excited to be a part of it. Love it.
[00:29:32] Speaker B: Love it. Well, let's keep talking about you. I want to talk about just close out with a few questions and I just want to understand your love of customer success and what drew you in and what keeps you interested there. And this is a little selfish on my part, too, because I like understanding how people continuously stay in a single space and learn from it, enrich it and all that.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: I grew up working for my parents. When I was young, they were entrepreneurs they had retail stores. At the time, it was shopping malls. You don't see many of those anymore. I learned a few things from them. One is you just got to show up every day. You got to work. The other thing I learned from them is that the customer isn't always right, but they believe their perspective is always right and you have to be empathetic to that. And so I credit working in their businesses and watching my mom and how she served our customers back then. It sort of embodied that and it stuck with me. And then the third piece is quality. My mom used to do artwork on these products that we would sell. She would actually hand draw this stuff. Oh, cool. And if there was the slightest mistake in any one of those things, she'd toss the product out and start over, even if she was on the and I was like, man, such hard work. But she believed in making sure that the customer got what they paid for and that it was valuable to them. And so I've carried those lessons with me over time. Actually, when I came out of college, I was a techie. I mean, I was a developer, an engineer. I was working for a utility company right out of school in 2001 because the economy sucked, because the.com bubble had burst. This was just before 911 happened. So I learned what working inside of a big enterprise It organization looks like. I knew I didn't want to do that forever, but it was good to get that exposure. And then I got into sort of these consulting type roles where I was working with customers on a consultative basis for years. And even in my first software company job that I had, I was still in that presales and consultative architect kind of role. And so it was very high touch, right? But and again, back to the high touch customer success mindset. The work that I was doing hands on then was very much like hands on customer success is today. As I've learned more as I've gotten involved with SaaS companies over the past 20 years, that's been where I just sort of fell in love with the business model, right? The metrics are fun to think about. They're fun to try to figure out how to impact what's going on. Like churnkey, right? If you have a higher gross cancellation rate than you want, what's it going to look like when we put a product like Churnkey in the mix? Or when we add a CSM team to help drive account health preemptively? How do we make those bets and put our money in the right place? It's always intrigued me, and it's really more of just a pure business curiosity, I think, than anything. And then over the past seven years, I've just done a lot of writing like I talked about at the top, right as I've tried to assimilate or I've tried to process what I've learned. Writing about it has just helped me grow my love for SaaS and B to B technology, b to C technology and subscription business models more than anything else. So I don't know. Partly, I guess it's what I know. I've always been around this stuff, and that's what's kept me interested in it as long as I have been.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: That's powerful stuff. I didn't know about your parents and owning the shop.
So you said actual malls, you're in.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: The yeah, shopping wow. Shopping malls and, like, strip malls. It was like a gift and candy kind of store. So it wasn't rocket science. It was just good, basic, straightforward business. And you serve the customers, and you do in a high quality way. And there's other stories I could share from that, too, about how we tried to create quality products for our customers. And it worked. I mean, customers came back, and you could really see the value of the repeat business. Even if you sell a product not on subscription, you still need repeat business. That's how business grows. Word of mouth, repeat business.
Totally. It's all the same at the end of the day.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: If you don't mind my asking, are the stores still around?
[00:33:46] Speaker A: They are not. No, they are not. As malls got put out of business, they sort of went by the wayside, and we never transitioned that business to be like an online kind of thing. I think we had that opportunity, but we didn't know how to do it back then because it was new. Right. We had no clue how to really do it, and shopify didn't exist. Or we might have.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Yeah, you had to call up the gateway companies and whatever, all that stuff. Yeah, got it.
[00:34:12] Speaker A: Buy a million dollars worth of hardware to put in a data center, which we don't have to do any of that anymore, luckily. Right.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: So in terms of reading, watching, listening, anything you've seen, read, listened to lately that's had an effect on you?
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Yes. The thing that I am binging right now is a podcast called the Founders Podcast. Have you ever heard of this?
[00:34:35] Speaker B: So good.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: You like it? David Senra.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Yeah, he did one on Christopher Nolan recently, right?
[00:34:41] Speaker A: Yeah, it wasn't Christopher Nolan. Was he a director?
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Yeah, he did. Oppenheimer and battle begins and all that.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I haven't listened to that one all the way through, but so for people who don't know Founders Podcast, david Sinra highly recommend it. He goes through basically, he reads biographies of great entrepreneurs, so all the usual suspects. And of course, like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs. Of course, Larry Ellison, like all the big tech folks. But then he hits one of his favorites is James Dyson. Right. Have you listened to the Dyson episodes? That's the one that got me hooked to begin with.
[00:35:17] Speaker B: Okay, I need to check that one out. I've always admired the guy, and I read his book back in the day, but I haven't seen that one. So it's so funny. I initially wrote the podcast off in a way because it just seemed like such a simple thing, and like, well, I can read the book myself. Why would I listen to it? But then it's just accelerating your intake on the topic, and he breaks it down so well.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: Yeah, he also does a good job. Know, I was listening to he did an episode on I mean, that's the other thing. Some of these fashion, like, you have no clue the grit that these people had to go build their empires. But one of the things he'll do, like, even if it's Coco Chanel, right? He'll say, sort of walk through the story of their life and their business and what happened. He'll be like, yeah, this is just like when Warren Buffett says this or when Jeff Bezos says this. And he sort of a really nice job of bringing multiple stories together every time he tells the story. And to your point, you can consume basically the equivalent of a book in an hour, as opposed to, I don't know, I'm a slow reader. It would take me 12 hours to read some of those books that he's summarizing for me in an hour.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great point. When he's starting to create the connections of basically his notes and database and his thinking, that's when it starts to really like, oh, okay, the lights come on in my head. And then you start making it less about the person and more about a process or a way of thinking. Right?
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Yeah, that's cool. One of the things he says in there, which I really like, is history doesn't repeat itself. Human nature does. And when you think about the kind of determination and grit and beliefs that you have to have to get a company off the ground, it's like, this are just good reminders to have in my ear every day, right. Whether I'm building this business that I work in now, which is now currently my entrepreneurial pursuit, or anything else, or participating in Chernkee with you guys. It's all about the input. I love it.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: I'm going to go fire up some episodes after this.
All right, closing question. What's the craziest thing you wish you could do right now but can't?
[00:37:31] Speaker A: Oh, man. I don't know if it's crazy, but one of my ambitions professionally is to run my own company again at some point. So I guess you could call me the CEO of my consulting firm, which we were a very small firm, so CEO was definitely, in a grand eyes kind of title for what we were doing. But that's the thing I really want to get back to, is running a business in its entirety, and right now is not the time for that for me, but that's something that I'll do, hopefully, in the next five to ten years again.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: Awesome, man. Awesome. Well, hey, appreciate your time. Awesome catching up. And this is a great one. Appreciate it.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: You too, man. Let's do more of these.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: Definitely see it. Don't miss out on future episodes. Get alerts for new drops at subscriptionheroes co or follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Special thanks to Churnkey for sponsoring the show. Learn how to make customers happier while boosting revenue at Churnkey co. Your support for this show has been incredible so far, and let's keep the momentum going. We are all slaves to the algorithm. Ratings and reviews really do help. Please rate us five stars on your platform of choice. We'll be truly grateful. That's all for now. I'm Scott HURF, and this is Ben subscription heroes.
