Onboarding & Activation
Designing first-run experiences that remove friction, personalize the journey, and lead users to an early win.
38%
Best tweets about Customer Success
50 Best Tweets About Customer Success (2026)
Discover the best tweets about customer success, covering onboarding, adoption, retention, expansion, health scores, support, teams, and operating playbooks.
Customer onboarding, adoption, retention, expansion, health scoring, support, team operations, metrics, and firsthand company lessons.
- Creators
- 46
- Updated
Original Xholic analysis
What 50 top Customer Success posts reveal
Customer Success discussion is concentrated in onboarding/activation and retention/churn themes, each representing 38% of the 50 tweets. The posts commonly advocate reaching an early value moment, examining usage and customer feedback for retention signals, and maintaining contact with customers. AI-related posts describe automation ideas alongside more hands-on, outcome-oriented service roles.
- Dominant tone
- Positive
- Median score
- 7.19
- Leading format
- List
- Recent posts
- 54%
58% of posts
All-time engagement
34% of posts
Published in 90 days
Conversation map
The themes creators return to
Retention & Churn Prevention
Retention, churn prevention, cancellation learning, reactivation, and lifecycle touchpoints that keep customers engaged.
38%
CS Team & Service Delivery
Customer success team design, domain expertise, responsiveness, empathy, and outcome-oriented delivery models.
24%
Expansion, Renewals & NRR
Expansion, renewals, net revenue retention, and turning existing accounts into compounding revenue growth.
24%
Time to Value & Aha Moments
Reducing time-to-value by guiding customers to the key workflow or aha moment that predicts durable usage.
24%
Voice of Customer
Using customer interviews, advisory boards, surveys, voice-of-customer programs, and feedback to guide decisions.
24%
Customer Health & Metrics
Customer health signals, behavioral monitoring, cohort analysis, and metrics used to diagnose risk and prioritize action.
18%
AI-Powered Customer Success
AI-driven onboarding, proactive intervention, and agent-assisted customer-success workflows.
8%
Tone and stance
Sentiment Positive leads
Author posture Supportive leads
Performance benchmark
- Median likes
- 24
- Median reposts
- 1
- Median replies
- 6
- Median views
- 1.8K
Posts with media make up 38% of this collection. Their median all-time score is 9.49, compared with 6.33 for text-only posts.
Format mix
- List 34% · score 6.33
- Opinion 32% · score 5.95
- Case Study 26% · score 7.89
- Announcement 4% · score 179.8
Consensus and debate
Where creators agree, and where they do not
Shared view
Activation starts with an early win
A recurring theme is reducing friction before the first meaningful product outcome. Posts describe interest discovery, a single first-login action, and delivering core value before nonessential verification, profile setup, or tutorials.
Shared view
Retention is examined through behavior
Posts frame retention as something to study through behavior: identify returning-use patterns or an account milestone associated with continued use, then orient onboarding and measurement around reaching that point.
Shared view
Customer proximity guides decisions
Direct customer conversations, structured feedback, and company-wide voice-of-customer sharing are presented as inputs to decisions and relationship-building.
Open debate
AI expands automation and delivery-model options
The posts present distinct AI-enabled CS approaches: onboarding and intervention agents, forward-deployed engineers focused on customer outcomes, and CS Ops health-score workflows.
Open debate
Growth sequencing has enterprise trade-offs
One post argues that investing in customer success and time-to-value before scaling paid acquisition can produce stronger unit economics. Other posts describe product-led growth through customer expansion and caution that enterprise-specific requests can consume roadmap capacity.
What performs
Patterns behind standout posts
Specific onboarding approaches appeared in top outliers
Three of the highest-scoring posts focus on onboarding or time-to-value: X’s interest-discovery work (343.23 all-time score), a KYC onboarding lesson about audience quality (126.20), and an AI onboarding-agent blueprint (124.15).
Operational lists appeared among score outliers
Two list-format posts were score outliers: a weekly-metrics post including NRR and churn (162.69) and a first-90-days decision list that includes retention over vanity metrics (57.69).
AI CS posts cover agents, signals, and delivery roles
AI-related posts cover onboarding agents, daily review of usage signals to identify users who may need help, and forward-deployed engineers who work with customers on outcomes.
Statistical standouts
- View standout post 1 Score 343.2 · 47.74× median
- View standout post 2 Score 162.7 · 22.63× median
- View standout post 3 Score 126.2 · 17.55× median
- View standout post 4 Score 124.2 · 17.27× median
- View standout post 5 Score 57.7 · 8.02× median
Creator landscape
Who shapes this conversation
The five most represented creators account for 18% of the selected posts.
-
1. Harshil Tomar
@Hartdrawss
2 posts
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2. Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin
@jasonlk
2 posts
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3. Luke Sophinos
@lukesophinos
2 posts
-
4. Nick Mehta
@nrmehta
2 posts
-
5. Adam Rahman
@AdamrahmanGTM
1 post
-
6. Alexa | Startup founder
@alexabelonix
1 post
Harshil Tomar writes about early product experience
Harshil Tomar’s two posts address early product experience: one offers a first-90-days startup checklist, while the other recommends one first-login action, visible progress, and persisted onboarding state.
Jason Lemkin emphasizes customer-connected leaders
Jason Lemkin advocates customer-connected leadership, recommending that CEOs speak directly with customers and that senior CS or sales candidates be able to introduce former customers.
Luke Sophinos connects time-to-value and domain expertise
Luke Sophinos argues for managing time-to-value as a retention input and, using a CourseKey hiring lesson, argues that vertical-SaaS CS teams need industry credibility.
How this analysis was made
Themes, sentiment, stance, and post format are classified per tweet. All counts, shares, medians, creator concentration, freshness, and performance comparisons are then calculated directly from the published snapshot.
Xholic's all-time score compares engagement while accounting for reach, post age, and creator consistency. It is used for relative comparisons within this collection.
This report analyzes the exact 50-post snapshot shown below. AI identifies editorial categories and drafts explanations; all statistics are calculated from the snapshot, and every narrative claim is checked against cited posts before publication.
Best Customer Success tweets
Top Customer Success tweets from 46 creators
Ranked 01–50
- 01
@nikitabier ·
Before I took this job, I got breakfast with @joshelman, one of the first product managers at the company and my mentor for the last 10 years. He said getting new accounts ramped up on X has been one of the app's toughest challenges -- and the most important thing to unlock growth. And it's obvious to people who use the app: once you get out the mainstream timeline of news & politics and into your niche, you really unlock the magic of X. However, X is an interest-based graph, you can't simply "sync your contacts" and have a relevant feed. Power users like me have spent years finding accounts and curating our timeline. But that problem is now getting fixed: Over the last 6 months, we've been iterating each day to make it quicker & easier for new accounts to find their interests on X. The pieces are finally coming together -- and it's been amazing to watch.
- 02
@aymanalabdul ·
Metrics you should track weekly as a CEO: • Cash in the bank (not just revenue) • APRR (A-Player Referral Rate) • NRR (Net Revenue Retention) • Customer Acquisition Cost • Revenue per employee • Lifetime Value • Churn Let me break these down: 1. Cash in the bank Cash in the bank is the only number that cannot lie Revenue is an opinion. Profit is an opinion. Cash is reality If revenue is growing but cash isn’t: - You’re over-hiring - Over-investing - Over-reinvesting - Or getting killed by taxes, inventory, or burn If there’s only one metric I’d bet on long-term, it’s this: Is cash growing year over year? 2. APRR (A-Player Referral Rate) If your A-players: - Refer other killers → culture is healthy - Don’t refer anyone → secretly working on their side hustle High performers wouldn’t recommend places where they wouldn’t work long-term Low APRR means your best people are quietly hedging 3. NRR (Net Revenue Retention) High NRR means: - The product is expanding - Customers are upgrading - You’re solving a real, growing problem Low NRR means: - You’re leaking value - Or your product is incomplete In simple terms: do your customers want more of you, or can competitors steal them away? 4. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) If CAC isn't shrinking year over year, you're not building a brand You're renting attention Rolex advertised like crazy in the 60s Now they throw a Rolex on a celebrity, call it a day, and they’re sold out for years 5. Revenue per employee How much revenue does each role actually unlock? Founders often over-hire in anticipation of revenue You hit $5M, think you need a bigger team to keep growing, so you hire Revenue stays flat What happened? You hired to make work easier for existing members - not to remove the bottleneck that was actually blocking growth If a role doesn't pay itself back in 90 days, you end up with twice the overhead for half the profit 6. Lifetime Value LTV measures whether you're solving the whole problem or just part of it e.g. most gyms solve one problem: working out Lifetime Fitness solves the entire problem stack of their average gym-goer: childcare, pools, date night drop-off, cafes, & co-working $30-40 in extra operating cost for 10x the membership price If you're not expanding to serve your customer end-to-end, someone else will 7. Churn The inverse of NRR. The percentage of customers who leave One of my clients found that if a customer makes it to Day 74, they stay forever They built an entire team around those first 74 days - usage, onboarding, engagement, everything And 2025 was their best year ever Find your Day 74. Then engineer everything around getting customers there Track these weekly And I will see you at $100M 🤝
- 03
@ArcadiaGTM ·
We helped onboard 250,000+ KYC users for a company less than six months old. Here's what we learned. Vanity metrics are easy to celebrate. Verified users are much harder to earn. Our team spent months aligning the product with the right communities before scaling distribution. When the right people arrive first, conversion becomes much easier. Growth starts with audience quality.
- 04
@JasonrShuman ·
The best vertical AI companies in 2027 won’t just have an onboarding team. They’ll have a team of onboarding agents. Onboarding doesn’t fail just because it’s slow. It fails for two reasons: First, the setup never gets finished. The integrations stall, the data migration drags, and the customer is stuck in a half-configured product that can’t deliver value. Second, even when setup is done, nobody engineers the jaw-dropping moments that make a customer feel the ROI. They get a generic walkthrough instead of an experience that changes how they work. AI solves both sides. If I were building a vertical AI company today, here’s where I’d invest before hiring a single onboarding rep: https://t.co/gWIzCzQRpi config and migration agents. An AI that interviews the customer about their workflows, auto-generates the system configuration, connects their integrations, and migrates their data. The 3-week services engagement that delays time-to-value is gone. This is the foundation. Nothing else works until this is right. 2.A digital twin of the customer’s real environment. Clone their actual data, workflows, and integrations into a sandbox. Every demo, every training moment happens in their world, not with fake data they can’t relate to. This is what makes the magic moments feel real. 3.A cross-customer activation engine. Study how your highest-value customers reached their aha moment. Find the pattern. Auto-sequence every new customer through the fastest path to value based on companies like them. Don’t hope they find the magic. Engineer it. https://t.co/LT1fDAT34v AI voice agent that delivers the magic moments live. Not a chatbot. A voice agent that calls the customer on their schedule, walks them through the specific workflows that will blow their mind, and doesn’t move on until they’ve felt the product working for them. https://t.co/L7XHvCJHbN AI avatar that makes onboarding feel human. A synthetic video persona that greets the customer by name, references their specific use case, and walks them through the workflows that matter most to them. Not a Loom library. A 1:1 experience at scale. 6.A predictive intervention agent that protects the magic. AI that detects when a customer is drifting, skipping logins, ignoring features, disengaging, and autonomously re-engages them with the next jaw-dropping moment. Not a drip campaign. A system that continuously pulls them back to value. The mental model shift for founders: onboarding is a two-part problem. Get the setup right so the magic is possible. Then relentlessly engineer the moments that make your customer feel the ROI. The companies that nail both sides will have activation rates and NRR their competitors can’t touch. Dialed in on this in Vertical AI? I want to talk.
- 05
@Hartdrawss ·
The 10 decisions that determine whether your app survives the first 90 days or joins the graveyard : 1. the problem you pick : if people won't pay before you build, you don't have a product, you have a hobby. 2. who gets the first 100 users : 10 people who'd pay before launch beats 10,000 signups from a Product Hunt spike that never come back. 3. the first screen : we redesigned one onboarding screen for a client and conversion went up 2x. 40% of users drop off before they see your core feature. 4. your pricing model : one paywall decision in week 1 determines your max revenue for 12 months. most founders set it too low and never recover. 5. retention over vanity : 500 daily active users is worth more than 50,000 downloads with 2% retention. 6. your tech stack : that free Supabase tier handles 500 rows. 50,000 users hitting your API costs $1,200/month. choose early, pay later. 7. where you launch : shipping on a Tuesday afternoon gets you crickets. a coordinated launch with a pre-built list of 200-300 warm clicks changes everything. 8. the first impression in the store : your first screenshot drives 70% of conversion. most founders spend weeks on the product and 10 minutes on the listing. 9. how you handle auth : broken login on day one kills more apps than bad code. authentication that fails under load is a silent churn machine. 10. whether you keep building or start distributing : the founders who win ship fast and spend the next 90 days on marketing, not features nobody asked for. get these 10 right and everything else is just execution noise.
- 06
@codyplof ·
I know I talk about Claude a lot lately but there’s another thing I’ve been just as obsessive about lately and that is talking to customers. I have a Customer Advisory Board of 250 customers currently and I’m the only one in it right now. I talk to them daily, send multiple surveys per week, etc. We also have a FB group of 90k people that I’m active in as well daily. Not only is going above and beyond extremely important to us but our # goal this year is to be customer obsessed. We now won’t make any decisions without their input. In planning some in person forums as well. Almost no cost but the value has been insane in just a few months. And there’s really no reason anyone can’t be doing this.
- 07
@DanielSmidstrup ·
Hermes is my first employee. Its job is to find ways to create value for ClimbX every day. Without a clear use case, AI agents become another distraction. So my first real use case is "customer success" for ClimbX. It runs every morning and reviews: 1. Trial and paying user counts 2. Login-to-trial conversion 3. Unusual user behaviour 4. Users who may need help 5. Features people are not using It only has read-only access to usage data. Every morning, Hermes then gives me three actionable things we can do: 1. Get more data 2. Talk to a specific user 3. Keep improving ClimbX based on what the data shows That turns product activity into a simple daily loop: 1. Find the signal. 2. Take action. 3. Make the product better. The goal is simple: turn product activity into clear actions before small problems become churn.
- 08
@Nate_Google_ ·
i keep getting asked about Grapevine -https://t.co/feTkRO9eTu we use this to decrease our churn and increase our subscription rate by learning the psychology behind why customers buy our products here are the exact questions that i often start with: 1. "What is the #1 health goal you are hoping to achieve with this product?" Insight: Allows you to send personalized education/reminders based on their specific "Why." 2. "How often do you plan on taking this supplement?" Insight: Identifies if their subscription frequency (e.g., every 30 days) matches their actual usage to prevent "product stockpile" cancellations. 3. "Did you switch from another brand to try us today?" Insight: Helps you understand what the "other guys" did wrong so you can double down on doing that right. 4. "How would you describe your experience with [Health Issue] before finding us?" Insight: Captures the "pain point" language you can use in retention emails to remind them of the progress they are making. 5. "How did you first hear about us?" Insight: Identifies which marketing channels bring in the most loyal, long-term subscribers versus "one-and-done" buyers. 6. "What was the main thing that convinced you to buy from us today?" Insight: Tells you if they value your science, your price, or your reviews, so you can reinforce those values in your churn-save flows. 7. "Have you ever tried this type of supplement (e.g., Magnesium, Collagen) before?" Insight: New users need "how-to" guides to prevent churn; experienced users just need easy management of their subscription. 8. "What is your biggest concern or hesitation about starting this new routine?" Insight: Lets you address fears (taste, side effects, price) immediately in the post-purchase "thank you" flow before they decide to cancel.
- 09
@askwhykartik ·
Mobile app onboarding structure that helped my client hit $300k monthly. Most Founders skip this. Don't. Quiz → User answers questions. Invested before seeing a single feature. Results → Show where they stand. Emotional hook locked in. Symptoms → Amplify the pain. Every screen makes them feel understood. How App Helps → Reveal the solution after they've felt the problem. Reviews → Social proof exactly when self-doubt peaks. Features → They're already sold on the feeling. Features just confirm it. Custom Plan → "Built for you" converts 3x better than generic pricing. Paywall + Discounted Paywall → Full price for the ready. Discount for the fence-sitters. Nobody leaves without a path to convert.
- 10
@jasonlk ·
Customers love, love, love to hear from the CEO This alone is one reason why start-ups have an edge Take advantage: - Go talk to 10+ of them a week - Do a user conference, it's OK to start small - Meet every larger customer in person - If there are bumps, just email them directly It's not perfect. It doesn't always work. But it is ... magical
- 11
@Hartdrawss ·
PRO TIP for FOUNDERS : your onboarding screen is the second UX decision your user experiences. most products nail the auth screen and then completely abandon the user the moment they log in for the first time. here's what we ship on every first-login state : 1/ give them a win in under 60 seconds > empty state is not a blank page. its an invitation. show them exactly what to do first > one action. not five. if the first screen has 5 CTAs the user does none of them > progress indicator if setup takes multiple steps. users dont abandon flows they can see the end of 2/ design for the confused user, not the happy path > tooltip on first login, not buried in a help doc > pre-filled example data where possible. blank forms are terrifying > "skip for now" on every non-critical setup step 3/ trust signals before they do anything > show them what they're building toward. screenshot, preview, or sample output > name them. "welcome, harshil" beats "welcome, user" in retention data 4/ then lock the backend > session scoped to the device. cross-device requires re-auth > onboarding state persisted so they continue where they left off, not back to step 1 the first 60 seconds after login determines whether they come back on day 2.
- 12
- 13
@MakadiaHarsh ·
My exact onboarding process that keeps clients from ever saying "this isn’t what I expected": Day 1: - 45-min kickoff call - I record everything - Client gets the recording Day 2: - I send a 1-page scope doc - Not 20 pages - What we're building - What we're NOT building - When they'll see it Day 3-5: - I build the first thing they can click on Day 5: - Loom walkthrough - Here's progress - Here's what's next - Here's where I need your input Expectations aren't set on the sales call. They're set in the first week of work.
- 14
@mynameisyahia ·
No Y-axis will be shared, but I wanted to show what the ARR journey looks like for a product-led company You give up the massive early spikes that come from enterprise deals and focus almost entirely on building something people (in my case, developers) genuinely love The goal is to reach critical mass: enough developers love the product, share it with their network, and eventually each customer brings in more customers From what I’ve learned so far, product-led growth so far has come down to four things: - How much new revenue you can drive - How much existing customers expand - How many people discover you organically - How much enterprise revenue you layer on top (getting better at this now) Enterprise rev isn't included in this chart btw, this is just pure PLG ARR by week over the past 15 months
- 15
@bodefreelance ·
I really thought the way for SaaS to grow is… -> Adding more features. -> Making the UI smoother than others. -> Consistently talking about the app. Which worked a bit, but… Where I saw the most growth was when I started: -> Understanding the audience. -> Speaking with them daily to understand their pain. -> Asking for feedback consistently on their experience. That’s what actually works. If people feel cared about, they will stay. And even more… They will recommend their friends to you. You should focus more on the people than the product itself. How are you currently interacting with your ICP?
- 16
- 17
- 18
@alexabelonix ·
The hidden revenue channel is keeping contact with people who already trust you. Most founders think revenue growth means more acquisition. But expansion and reactivation are often sitting right there: old customers old pilots old waitlist old users old champions old “not now” old newsletter replies old communities Build a touch system: product update case study new workflow relevant insight feature release personal check-in renewal reminder expansion idea The point is not to “nurture leads” like a dead marketing PDF. The point is to stay useful until timing becomes real.
- 19
- 20
@seraleev ·
Does onboarding drive purchases? YES, and the impact is real. Even with a free trial on the weekly plan, some users skip it entirely and go straight for the annual plan. Not because they have to, but because they’re already sold on the value. I rewrote our onboarding copy multiple times. Turns out it was worth it. Getting your value proposition right doesn’t just improve conversion, it changes the entire economics of your product.
- 21
@daviefogarty ·
We launched EPL Oodies for kids and their parents and had no idea if the collaboration would work. We originally launched without a clear angle. We knew matching outfits could work, but we weren't sure how to market it. Then in a voice of customer meeting, we saw multiple customers commenting: "It was so fun to have a matching outfit with my dad at the game." Voice of Customer is a monthly presentation where our customer experience manager shares consistent feedback to the entire company. So we took that feedback, and it became the marketing angle. Father-son game day moments. The whole purpose of VOC is to surface marketing angles you'd never think of in a conference room. It also catches operational issues before they become disasters. If fulfilment is slipping or product quality is dropping, customers will tell you before the metrics show it. But if you want it to succeed, make it company-wide. Everyone from product to marketing to ops needs to hear what customers are saying. So if you haven’t heard of this before, set up a monthly Voice of Customer meeting. You’ll be surprised at the benefits it provides your business.
- 22
@SimonHoiberg ·
I get nervous when a small SaaS I really like celebrates its first big enterprise customer too much. The contract is bigger, the logo looks good and then suddenly everyone forgets how expensive weird requests are. Custom report here, strange SSO setup there, one-off onboarding, special invoice terms, some permission thing nobody else needs and now half the roadmap is just keeping one customer happy. I have seen this too many times now. If one customer gets that much influence over what you build, many otherwise great products just starts degrading really fast.
- 23
- 24
@floriandarroman ·
The mission is simple: → get to 20 trials a day → never get a day with 0 trial Since Monday we went all in into distribution and customers feedbacks. April 5th was our last 0 trial day. The goal is to reach a 20 trials/day average as fast as possible. We are pushing daily on: - Reddit - X - YouTube - Linkedin Until we find what works and double down on it. We also split our time with customers feedback (a lot of calls) to understand why they stay or why they leave. Then add the features missing. 2 rules: - Get a lot of customers. - Make them win.
- 25
- 26
@ttunguz ·
What happens when technology evolves faster than your sales process can adapt? The last fifteen years, startups focused on building software around very well understood processes. We had built an assembly line for software sales, SDR to AE to customer success manager. We calculated ratios between these three total cost of sales and drove the factory to ever improved yields. AI is upending all of that. The underlying workflows are changing so quickly, software buyers no longer know what the ideal processes are, much less which is the best software to buy. Model capabilities have evolved at 10x improvements every two years. Users are grappling to understand how to take advantage of these advances while boards are pressing teams to adopt AI. A combination of all these factors has led to a reinvention of customer success : the forward deployed engineer. Forward deployed engineers (FDEs) are the new customer success managers, the new solutions architects. They spend their time working with customers, understanding business challenge, and using technology to solve them - selling usage & outcomes. In a software sales environment where buyers seek education, the underlying technology is advancing very quickly and there’s no stability. There’s no surprise that this role has become critical. OpenAI has offered consulting services as well as Anthropic for custom enterprise deployments. Anthropic builds specialized enterprise implementation teams. Sierra employs agent engineers. Palantir created this model. Their core insight, success comes from delivering outcomes on some software platform is now the standard for mid-market and enterprise software. The costs simply don’t justify themselves below price points of $100,000 or less per contract. Staffing a FDE costing $200k for a $10k contract - the math doesn’t work. These forward-deployed engineers take the core platforms of AI and then mold them and tune them to work, defining new ways of building sales and marketing. Marketing and engineering teams - for example, agent managers. The ability for customer success managers of the future to vibe code new platforms to deliver success on a basic platform is real . And it will be a requisite for these teams in an age where customer expectations of delivering value are shorter than ever. https://t.co/luEvGhkxgd
- 27
- 28
@lukesophinos ·
Customer retention is an output. Outputs do not matter without the right inputs. The input that drives retention: time to value. Time to value is how long it takes a customer to hit the moment where your product clicks. The "aha" moment. The faster you get them there, the lower the churn. The longer it takes, the higher the risk they leave. Dropbox figured this out early. Their TTV metric is a user uploading their first few files. Once someone uploads a handful of documents, churn drops dramatically. So they optimized every pixel of the UI to push users toward that moment. Bumble did the same thing. Their former COO said the most important metric was successful conversations, defined as users trading phone numbers. Everything was built to create more of those. How to build your own TTV metric: Study your best customers. What do they have in common? How fast did they onboard? What did they do in the first 30 days? Study your worst customers. What made them unsuccessful? Where did they stall? Pick a metric and iterate. Speed matters more than perfection. Once you have the metric, hold people accountable to it. Tie compensation to TTV. Bonus teams quarterly on it. Track it weekly. Money drives behavior. Then bake it into the product. Build UI that pushes users toward the aha moment. Make TTV the center of your onboarding process. Talk about it constantly in all hands and standups. Strong time to value equals high retention. High retention is the foundation of every durable SaaS business.
- 29
@Zubairey0 ·
One of the most underrated ways to beat competitors is not pricing. It’s not even always product. It’s customer success and response time. Saw this happen last week while helping a client with card issuance. We connected them with a few providers. One provider took days to reply. The other was responsive, clear, and kept the process moving. Guess who won the client? The responsive one. Same category. Similar offering. But one made the client feel like they were already being taken care of before the deal even closed. That matters more than people think. If a prospect has to chase you before becoming a customer, imagine what they think support will be like after signing. I even DM’d the other team and told them straight up: you didn’t lose because the client wasn’t interested. You lost because you were slow.
- 30
@nrmehta ·
In enterprise AI startups, one of the top things I’d recommend hiring for is Empathy for the Enterprise. I proudly live in the Bay Area and have since college (don’t ask how long ago!) I love the spirit here: * Constant reinvention. * Not getting tied to the past. * Risk taking. * Copious wearing of Patagonia vests. But I also think those same virtues can cause people here to not be able to connect with corporate customers. I’ll often hear language like: * “What does that company even do anymore?” * “Do they still exist?” * “They have no idea what they’re doing.” * “Big companies are all politics.” I get it because you have to internalize the Goliath mindset and consider the David to be a lumbering giant, if you want to defeat your large competitors. But when you start applying this same psyche to your clients, you have a big problem (or at least I have a big problem with hiring people like that). Alternate framings are: * “Wow it’s incredible they’ve evolved what they do over time. Marriott Hotels started out as a root beer stand?” [true story] * “I’m so impressed by how they’ve weathered the storm and stayed alive for many times the amount of years I’ve been alive.” * “It must be so complex to run a company that big.” * “I can see why an organization that large has warring factions over time - each is operating from a point of logical local optimization.” Ultimately, I think it’s about curiosity. Curiosity about your customers, their business, their history, the tough tradeoffs they make and the humans that make them. Way back in time (like 3 years ago!), SaaS was a bit easier. You were selling more of a tool. So you needed to be somewhat curious. But your software was still slightly more abstracted from the client’s business than AI software is. Then still, the best Sales and Customer Success people (and founders) were deeply curious about clients. With AI, the bar has been raised. If we want our AI startups to transform enterprises, we’d better start getting as curious about them and empathetic for them as we are about the latest X fight over open versus closed models.
- 31
@darkmarketio ·
i have experienced a very interesting tension that arises in many startups i have worked on. sales runs ahead of product, burning trust with core icp. by the time the product is ready, you’re paying down gtm debt with the exact customers that benefit most from your product. a few tips we've implemented @usebreezebaby to achieve success with core customers: -gate outbound sales on repeatable wins -sell roadmaps only to design partners -let product alone set the sales throttle
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@lukesophinos ·
Stop hiring "SaaS" Customer Success leaders for your vertical business. That CS leader with a decade at Salesforce or HubSpot? They probably won't work out. Here's why: Horizontal SaaS CS is built for sophisticated software buyers. Your customer is a VP of Marketing who's implemented fifteen tools. They understand adoption metrics, QBRs, and feature releases. Your CS leader drives product adoption, identifies expansion, manages renewals. Clean playbook. Vertical SaaS is different. Your customer is an HVAC contractor who started as a field tech twenty years ago. Works seventy hour weeks. Never used Salesforce. He doesn't trust the "Cloud" because he got burned by QuickBooks Online. His previous software was a filing cabinet and a spiral notebook. When your SaaS CS leader schedules a QBR to review adoption metrics, he has no idea what you're talking about. He just wants to know if his techs are logging jobs and whether he can stop doing payroll manually. The credibility gap kills you. At CourseKey, we sold to trade schools. I hired a CS leader from horizontal SaaS. Smart. Great resume. Within two months, customers said: "They don't understand our business." The breakthrough came when I hired someone who'd spent twelve years working at a trade school. She'd implemented technology. Lived through software migrations. Understood the pain intimately. When she talked to customers, they immediately knew she got it. Our retention went up twenty percent plus over the next twenty-four months. The rule: In vertical SaaS, industry credibility beats SaaS expertise every time. Hire someone who's spent five to ten years working in your target industry. Not selling to it. Working in it. Someone who's implemented technology and lived with the consequences. Trained users. Proved ROI. Dealt with the field tech who refused to use the tablet. You can teach them SaaS metrics in ninety days. You can't teach them ten years of industry knowledge. Hire from the industry. Teach them SaaS. Watch retention transform.
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@TheJobfather__ ·
Customer Success Operations is a sleeper role for people who understand customers, systems, and retention. CS Ops helps teams track renewals, onboarding, customer health, churn risk, and support handoffs. To build proof, create a mock customer health score. Include usage, support tickets, renewal date, NPS, and risk level. Then explain how a CSM should prioritize accounts based on that score. That is practical, visible proof.
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@neilpatel ·
Most products make users jump through hoops before delivering a single moment of value. Email verification. Profile setup. Forced tutorials. Plan selection. That's not onboarding. That's a gauntlet. The brands winning on retention flip the sequence. Core value first. Everything else second. #SaaS #ProductMarketing #CustomerRetention #GrowthHacking
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@AdamrahmanGTM ·
The outbound closed loop: + Identify best customers (highest retention + expansion) + Extract shared firmographic patterns + Rebuild ICP around those patterns + Target lookalikes with outbound + Track which new customers retain and expand + Feed results back into the loop Every cycle makes your targeting sharper.
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@frog_omo ·
Your best ops person just put in her notice. She runs enterprise onboarding. Every client. Every time. You open Confluence, looking for the process doc. There's a page called "Enterprise Onboarding." Last edited 14 months ago. Three bullet points. A broken Loom link. You call her and ask her to write it down before she leaves. She tries. But 4 years of instinct doesn't transfer to a Google Doc in two weeks. Your next enterprise client onboards at 68% success rate instead of 91%. This is not bad luck. This is the most predictable failure in SaaS, and almost nobody catches it until it's too late. 89% of SaaS companies hit a growth wall at $10M, $30M, or $100M ARR. The common diagnosis: wrong VP hire. Market fit. Sales execution. The actual cause: your business runs on memory, not systems. Researchers call it the OS gap, the distance between how your company actually operates and how your dashboard says it does. Three companies closed this gap on purpose. Here's exactly what they did: → @GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij (@sytses) wrote the first handbook entries himself. One non-negotiable rule: "The work has to end up in the handbook." Not Slack. Not memory. The handbook. 1,300 employees. 65 countries. Any employee finds answers without asking anyone. Any hour. Any timezone. Enterprise implementation success? Moved from 68% to 91% after formalising the process. → @Stripe In 2014, Stripe's long-term company goals weren't written down anywhere. COO Claire Hughes Johnson joined and wrote a 2-page document in her first week. Those same goals stayed relevant for 8 years. She replaced slide decks with narrative memos. Written decisions are circulated before every single meeting. Her framing: "Companies that don't document how they want to grow let external forces make that decision for them." → @zapier 100% remote since 2011. 17 time zones. 42 countries. They formalised the management structure at 15 employees, before it hurt. CTO Bryan Helmig's (@bryanhelmig) mandate: "All communication must be effective asynchronous." Remote stopped being a constraint. It became a competitive advantage. The pattern across all three: None of them documented everything at once. They identified the highest-risk processes first. Built from there. 80% of processes at most companies live only in someone's head. When that person leaves, the process leaves with them. Your enterprise onboarding shouldn't depend on one person's memory. One process. 90 minutes. This week. That's the move.
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@keean_edward ·
you can learn a lot about what makes a good product by trying different SAAS products and observing your own behavior. today i've looked at two different tools for growing on X and within 10 minutes of using both, i canceled. i was genuinely interested in the idea of those products, it would be nice to have more followers. what i realized is that the reason i canceled those subs right away is where i've made the biggest mistake with my own SAAS. within 5 minutes of using a product you should know how to extract the value for your use case. good onboarding is not enough - you need to specifically direct people to the value and to do that you as the founder need to know exactly what specific part of the problem you're solving.
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@fbrsaas ·
everyone wants their SaaS to print money and every growth strategy works ads that work. pricing that converts. upsells that land. but you can't skip this part. here's the actual sequence: 1. diagnose what's broken can't fix what you don't measure stop guessing which parts of your product suck 2. ruthlessly simplify onboarding complex onboarding kills activation you're losing 90% of signups because they got confused in step 3 3. build retention loops keeping customers is 5x cheaper than acquiring new ones retention doubles LTV 4. optimize value delivery users need to experience value before they'll pay you more what breaks if you skip steps: skip diagnosis: waste months fixing the wrong shit skip onboarding: activation stays at 10% forever skip retention: 50%+ churn kills everything else skip activation: can't charge premium because users don't see the value if you fix the internal experience first everything else falls into place then you can actually print money
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@jasonlk ·
"When you hire a VP Customer Success or VP of Sales, before you send the offer letter ... Ask them to send you 2 customers to talk to. Any strong leader here will have 2 customers they worked with, that will take your call. Any."
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@TheChowdhary ·
Almost every YC founder I speak with has a "product graveyard" Here is ours: A few months ago we launched GitHub data as a new source I went through hundreds of sales demos, Intercom messages and feature requests... It was obvious that the market was looking for GitHub data at scale, mapped to the right person It would unlock several use cases: sourcing engineers by what they build, dev-tool companies building target lists from repo activity, screening candidates by commit history,... We pitched it to customers and they got excited, so we got excited Our data and ML team spent weeks mapping millions of GitHub profiles to the right entities and we scaled our infra to support this new use-case Months later - after launching all of this, only 48 customers have hit this endpoint in the last 90 days Even though the customers who did try it use it heavily, every day, the usage we expected just isn't there yet Was it our marketing? Was it a nice-to-have all along? we're still trying to figure it out Every company has a "product graveyard" - I don't think you can really avoid it We do everything it takes to minimize the amount of these features And while I still believe in this use-case (especially for recruiting) This is what we learned to do when we joined YC: 1) When someone asks for a feature, ask if they'd expand their contract if it existed - and quantify it as much as possible. by how much? starting when? 2) Try to sell the feature before building it - a contract contingent on shipping by a date. we did this in the early days and I push our sales team to do it today as well. many customers love thinking about new ideas and features, but it's literally not part of their buying decision 3) Every launch gets an owner. their job is to research - who asked for this feature? is it a must-have or a nice-to-have for them? - and then follow up with every one of them the day it ships
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@bmykhaylivvv ·
what %? what % of the problem will it solve for you? last week I was doing a research on one of the functionality at AiSDR and before talking to our Customer Success team I had 2 approaches for the implementation 1. quick-win which would take us 1-2 days to implement 2. pretty large architecture change which will give us 100% flexibility on the functionality we want, but it will take us the whole week to implement and will affect core of out system Oleg Zaremba suggest to ask “what % of the problem each of the solutiob will fix?” on the call with CS team and it appeared that our “quick win” solution will fix ~90% of the CS team problem having this information we should measure where it is worth spending such much more time on complex solution which will give us about 10% of the outcome 2 keyaways: 1. Talk to your team about the problems they have and do not guess 2. Ask right questions
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@chrisbarber ·
The value of ai coworker products is proportional to the integrations that someone has, data in and data out. AI companies would benefit from spending a lot of time observing users that do and don't have integrations set up. What are those who have it set up getting the most value from? What are those that don't doing without as workarounds? And, observe people in the onboarding/integration setup. Which points are confusing? Which permissions are scary? Goal is to remove the confusion and also show the benefits up front. Think about how this often happens in person or over text: you show your friend something cool, they ask how you did it, you show them, and then maybe you help them set it up. In that scenario, you've a) made the perceived reward really high and b) reduced the perceived effort and uncertainty. You want to replicate that experience for all users. How can all users see as much perceived upside, and have as low uncertainty, as one who got a demo and a personalized onboarding from their friend sitting next to them? (This applies both to signing up for the product in general, and to setting up each high-effort feature, e.g. each integration)
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@nrmehta ·
Be Curious: 5 Weak and 5 Strong Questions to Ask B2B Customers: Everyone in B2B, whether you're a brand new AI startup founder, an experienced software exec or a customer-facing individual contributor, wants one thing - stronger customer relationships. In a world where software is a commodity, relationships are often the difference between a win and a loss, a "closed" and a "not now" or a renewal and a churn. I've written about techniques to meet with customers. But what do you say when you see them across the Zoom screen or Starbucks table? I've been there when I asked the weak questions that showed a lack of curiosity, no point of view and no confidence: 1. "What's your feedback on our product?" (maybe they didn't even try it) 2. "What feature do you like the best?" (the buyer may have no idea) 3. "How do we compare to our competitors?" (me me me) 4. "What are your goals?" (as if the buyer wants to just open his/her OKRs and share them) 5. "Are you ready to buy this quarter?" (umm...) The common thread between those weak questions is that they are about you, not the customer. By contrast, there is a plethora of powerful questions the best ask. I've stolen many, including: 1. "I was able to meet with a dozen CIOs last week. Every single one seems to be struggling to figure out the productivity impact of AI. How are you handling that? I can even send you a survey we did around this." (shows you have expertise) 2. "I noticed your team was called out in the last earnings call in a good way. That's amazing. How did that make you feel? What are you doing to sustain the work?" (shows you're paying attention) 3. "I'm hearing more and more that this budgeting season is hard since 2027 is so murky. How are you approaching prioritization?" (shows that you get the real world) 4. "I can only imagine how many vendors you get pitched by about AI. Who are some of the best partners for you and what are they doing to truly help you?" (shows you want to be a true partner too and are open to feedback) 5. "Ultimately, software - including ours - are just tools. I've found that the real impact comes in making sure its rolled out aligned to the client's goals. Is there one company priority that you heard about in your CEO's all hands that we should align around for the deployment? Is there a milestone where a win by then would help the company?" (figure out how to strategically ladder up and start identifying a compelling date) As one of the all time great entrepreneurs said, it's about being curious...
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@joshuapliu ·
The real measure of success for your Health Tech startup’s partnership with a health system is NOT the ROI you demonstrate - it’s actually this: Whether the health system renews your contract, year after year. I can give you many painful examples I’ve experienced at @SeamlessMD where we hit all the targets and demonstrated ROI, only to ultimately fail: → The health system that used our product to cut LOS and readmissions across many service lines enterprise-wide… only for our executive sponsors and service line champions to all leave the organization, and the new folks who took over, just wanted to do things differently. → The hospital who piloted our product and reduced readmissions by 50%+... only for the CEO to tell us that if he reduced readmissions, the government would think he needed less money next year and fund them less. → The health system we helped cut LOS and readmissions across a few priority service lines… only to find out their C-suite signed a broader partnership with a “similar” vendor so we were disposable Early on in my career those were gut punches, but now that I’m 13+ years into this journey, those are just par for the course. Now I know better. I now recognize that having C-suite buy-in and alignment with a strategic priority matters more than any amount of ROI and clinical evidence we could generate (but we do work hard to measure results anyhow, because we care that our Tech actually improves patient outcomes!). If anything, my recurring experience is that “ROI” is used to justify a decision already made. I now recognize that for innovation that improves clinical outcomes - which often is not as important a priority as increasing revenue or decreasing clinician burnout - having strong champions is absolutely critical. And your champions won’t last forever… many often change roles, change organizations, etc. If you don’t continuously mobilize more and more champions all the time, one day you’ll wake up with a great ROI and no one who cares to fight for you at the annual budget meeting. Which means Health Tech startups need to earn those contract renewals year after year, and it’s not just about the numbers and ROI. Sometimes it is, but often it isn’t. It’s about engaged C-suite, engaged champions, deep integrations/workflow alignment, and so much more. Yes, this means you can’t “set it and forget it”. Most Health Tech startups aren’t selling Office 365 anyone can buy with a click - most of us are selling a mixture of Tech + Services + Transformation. That’s a lot of change. Which means you don’t truly know if your innovation is sticky until a health system actually renews. And even if it’s sticky right now… it may not be sticky forever. Even if you cut LOS and readmissions by 50%... it’s often not enough. You have to earn it. Again. Every single year. But if you do… you can have amazing health system partners for life.
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@mdjunaidap ·
The 3 questions I ask every customer call: 1. What were you using before this? 2. What stopped you from signing up? 3. If we disappeared tomorrow, what would you miss? Their answers tell you: ➭ Your real competitors ➭ Your friction points ➭ Your actual value Ask these. Take notes. Build better.
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@vascoabm ·
revenue expansion in SaaS is a great way to make extra cash two easy ones: - upsell users on credits - micro services that complement their subscription & your team can fulfill quickly with an SOP these two payments are exactly from that use Claude to come up with complementary services you can charge your users for, I'm sure it'll come up with something you can test
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@crunchbasenews ·
Strong SaaS metrics don’t necessarily mean a company has a strong strategy, argues startup strategist and Crunchbase News columnist @ItaySagie. In his latest column, he explains why boards should look beyond headline KPIs like LTV/CAC, net revenue retention and the Rule of 40 to understand what is actually driving customer acquisition, retention and long-term growth. https://t.co/hPV6JvBS0X
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