colin nederkoorn

I’m speaking with Colin Nederkoorn, CEO and co-founder of customer.io. Colin was an absolute pleasure to speak with. He built customer.io in 2012 with his co-founder John, and have been exploding ever since.

For those who don’t know, customer.io is a SaaS company that gives companies one place to manage all of their their emails, push notifications, SMS’s and other messages that come from their product  to their customers.

Customer.io is now doing over $10M in annual recurring revenue, they’re fully remote, and have a team of over 50 employees worldwide.

We’re talking about how customer.io maintains a positive company culture while being remote and distributed, how they’re maintaining their steady and consistent growth, how their product team has evolved over the years, and much much more.

I had a great time speaking with Colin, so much that we lost track of time so had to cut it a little but short at the end. But nonetheless, a ton of great value in this episode, I hope you enjoy!

PS. Thank you to my friends at Humi for sponsoring this episode. For everything Payroll, Benefits & HR, Humi has you covered. I got my listeners 30% off their subscription. Sign up here to claim the promo, you won't regret it!

On this episode Colin Nederkoorn shares lessons on building remote company. Colin is a CEO of company called Customer.io where they help companies automated communication with customers. This week we cover lessons from building and running a remote team.

In this episode we cover following topics:

• Lessons on building a remote company
• Transformation into remote company
• Difficulties explaining running remote back in the days
• Getting people to socialize on remote teams
• Issues when hiring remote talent
• Diversity advantage in remote teams

Notes and links:

• Customer.io
• Slack
• Zoom
• Weworkremotely
• Disagree and Commit
• Jeff Bezos Letters
• High Output Management

Colin Nederkoorn

• Customer.io
• Website
• Twitter

Credits:

• Gramatik for intro music

Customer.io is a SaaS product that allows companies to create, manage, and send all of their messages between their apps & their customers. The software solves a common headache by providing a no-code-required solution for product teams — one in which you can pipe in events from platforms like Segment and then drag and drop automated email messages.

Since their launch in 2012, Customer.io has grown rapidly — to 41 employees and more than 1200+ customers ranging from SaaS to lot and beyond!

In our conversation with Colin Nederkoorn, the CEO & co-founder of Customer.io, we’ll cover the origin story and how he powered early growth through directly talking to customers. Then, we’ll dive into why word of mouth has been such a powerful growth method for their brand. Finally, our conversation dives into how Colin is approaching the development of paid & partner marketing, fundraising, brand, and remote culture.

0:00 — Introduction
3:25 — What is Customer.io? What’s the origin story behind the company?
4:46 — Email felt like the universal thing we could affect. We were email only for 3 out of the 6 years.
7:45 — Learning to describe your customers is important — we sell to product teams
8:30 — Who do people switch from? What’s the use case for a product team using customer.io?
9:25 — How did you get your first customers?
9:45 — We reached out to talk to and learn from future customers in forums and on Twitter
10:45 — Playing the long game is important. Early conversation with marketer at (Moz) became a sale 6 years later when that person was a CMO at another company.
11:22 — Launched in private beta in April 2012 with 5 companies paying us $10/month. Then opened as a public beta product about 4 months later.
12:05 — "People have their guard up when they think any conversation is going to lead to a sale at the end... If I was starting a company from scratch again, I’d start talking to people even if I had nothing to sell them”
13:05 — How are you acquiring customers today?
13:50 — The way Customer.io supports agency clients differently
15:00 — Customer.io’s entrance into paid marketing
16:18 — As a CEO, how do guide your CMO to approach entering the paid space?
19:30— What levers are you thinking about pulling when you are focused on growth?
20:30 — Branding and messaging is important. We’re in a crowded space. You really quickly want to give a customer value.
22:20 — “So much of what people consider conventional has never felt right to me and our company”
23:20 — Colin’s decision in having a fully distributed team
26:18 — Customer.io's untraditional approach to fundraising. “We view funding as a tool to get to the next stage of the business.”
28:40 — CEO to CEO, what’s the best thing you’ve done to develop yourself?
30:48 — Why we sleep
31:45 — The Salty Six

This is an actionable episode — we hope you enjoy! Get ready to #ScaleOrDie...

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