Hi, I'm Colin Nederkoorn co-founder and CEO of Customer.io.
The customer is always right (so they say). For startups especially, the instinct is to do whatever it takes to keep a big customer happy. But when one customer has outsized leverage over your business, the relationship stops being a partnership. It becomes a dependency. We have a rule of
The latest US-East-1 outage sparked the debate around bare metal vs the cloud. We did the opposite in 2017. We went from bare metal to the cloud and it saved our company. As Customer.io crossed $100m ARR , I was reflecting on our journey. The period of time
At the end of 2012, Customer.io was running on fumes. Our revenue was $2500 a month and growing. We'd need about 10x that revenue to to get by with our team of 3 people. We had raised some money and hired a first team member. However, we
People are impatient for things that have a slow burn. The progress when you're learning a language or an instrument feels painfully slow in the beginning. If you're trying to get in shape, every squat or pushup burns at first. Over time if you just keep
Companies are lining up to do business with my friend's company. He has a sales person handling inbound interest who is doing an OK job.   There's enough proof that he can sell in to the enterprise. He could replace his OK salesperson with a great
The real competition, the way you get better, is by competing against yourself and where you are today.
Being an "A" player is contextual and not a reflection of someone's worth.
Make decisions quickly by pushing them down to the people responsible for executing
Your approach needs to change as you scale
Downsides you should know about before jumping in
Small changes can have big quality of life improvements
We took the long way around to appreciating the value of sales.
What kind of business do you really want to build?
If you had to pick one, which would it be?
One of the most powerful ways to create change in a capitalist society is to spend your money with companies whose behavior is consistent with your values. Are you unhappy that a free service is using your private information? Turn it off and pay for a service that won’