Episode 496 | "The Press Covers Exceptions, Don't Compare Yourself to Slack or Zoom"

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This interview was recorded several months ago, but is still relevant despite the pandemic. Colin Nederkoorn, the co-founder of customer.io has taken a unique approach to building their company. Customer.io does marketing automation for the entire customer lifecycle. They have raised funding, but not traditional venture money, and they've run it more like a self-funded SaaS. Colin and his cofounder John left their jobs with no savings, and they set out to build an analytics tool. Their story is powerful because of their unconventional approach and ability to persevere through hard times. The finer points of the episode: 4:05 - The customer.io founder journey 5:23 - Their approach to selecting investors 7:01 - Reflecting on how Colin and John bootstrapped a SaaS app after leaving their jobs with no savings 8:02 - Why they pivoted from an analytics company to selling marketing solutions 13:15 - Finding the balance between innovation vs following the best practices 18:37 - How customer.io became a remote company, and the advantages/disadvantages of building a remote team 22:05 - What customer.io is doing to support the bootstrapping startup community (and why they care about bootstrappers) 24:30 - Marketing approaches that customer.io used in the earlier days 31:55 - The highs and lows of building customer.io Items mentioned in this episode: customer.io helpfounders.com hugo.team customer.io/bootstrapper Connect with Colin on Twitter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this week's episode of Startups for the rest of us. As always, I am your host, Rob Walling. Thanks for joining me this week. Also, thanks to everyone who reached out about last episode, 495, where I went solo. I got more positive feedback about that episode than I have in, I don't know, six, eight, nine months. And I appreciate folks reaching out and letting me know, let me know what I'm doing
0:21.9	right and let me know what constructively could be doing a bit better. In this episode, I air an
0:27.6	interview that I did months ago. It was certainly pre-pandemic and it may even have been
0:32.1	before the end of last year. So while there are no mentions of COVID or coronavirus in the interview,
0:38.3	I think there are so many lessons learned from the journey of this founder, Colin, the co-founder
0:42.8	of Customer.io. And Customer.io has taken such a unique approach to thinking about how to build
0:49.4	their business and the way that they got it started and the way that they didn't go down the venture track,
0:55.1	but also didn't straight bootstrap, and they were one of the first companies that I had ever heard doing that.
0:59.8	But before we dive into that conversation, if you haven't heard of helpfounders.com,
1:04.2	you can head there, and it's a collaboration between a bunch of podcasts that are intended to help bootstrap founders
1:10.6	and folks who maybe, I don't know,
1:13.6	maybe are impacted by COVID or maybe it's just an effort to kind of give back. And so different
1:18.7	podcasts, a lot of us in the bootstrapping space, offered up just a couple, I'll say it's an ad
1:23.1	slot, but really it's just more of, hey, here's this company, here's what they do, just to make, you know,
1:32.0	the startups for the rest of us listenership aware. So this is all volunteer. It's a nonpaid sponsorship. It's really to give back to the community. So the company I want to talk about this
1:35.7	week is called Hugo, and it's at hugo.com. According to the founder, Darren Chait, he says
1:41.6	Hugo is centralized, searchable meeting notes that connect with tools such as
1:46.2	Zoom, Slack, Zendesk, and HubSpot, and it's free for up to 40 users.
1:50.8	The target market is SaaS companies of all sizes, including brands you already know,
1:54.7	such as Atlassian, Shopify, and Spotify, and that they're a good addition to the other
1:58.8	work-from-home tools that are growing in popularity.
2:01.1	So if that sounds interesting, head over to hugo.team.
	...

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