SaaStr Podcast #200: Brad Birnbaum, Founder & CEO @ Kustomer Discusses The Right Way To Think About SaaS Pricing Today
Update: 2018-11-16
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This post is by Harry Stebbings from SaaStr
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Welcome to Episode 200! Brad Birnbaum is the Founder & CEO @ Kustomer, the first intelligent platform for customer experience that enables you to know everything about every customer. To date, Brad has raised over $38m in funding for Kustomer from some of the very best in the SaaS business, including Tomasz Tunguz @ Redpoint, Ed Sim @ Boldstart, Canaan Partners, Box Group and Social Leverage, just to name a few. Previously, he was the Co-founder of Assistly, which was acquired by Salesforce and became Desk.com. Prior to that, he was CTO for Talisma and Co‑founder & CTO of eShare Technologies. In addition, Brad was also the CTO @ Sean Parker’s Airtime and VP of Engineering with Salesforce.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:- How Brad made his way into the world of customer experience and SaaS over 20 years ago.
- This is Brad’s 4th time at the roadshow, what does Brad believe the core benefits of repeat entrepreneurship? How did his prior experience change his operating mentality with Kustomer? What has he done differently this time? What worked and he has kept the same?
- Brad has made the transition from CTO to CEO, how did he find this transition? What were some of the most challenging elements? What have been some of the biggest surprises? What advice would Brad have for other CTOs who have made or are thinking about making the transition?
- Brad initially served SMBs with Kustomer but now primarily focuses on mid-level, what would Brad’s biggest advice be when it comes to finding the right go-to-market strategy for you? How did their transition alter their approach to pricing, product, messaging and distribution? Where does Brad see many people go wrong on go-to-market?
Brad’s 60 Second SaaStr:
- What does Brad know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
- When is the right time to pour fuel on the company fire?
- What would Brad most like to change in the world of SaaS?
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Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Jon Stein
Transcript
Harry Stebbings: You are listening to the official SaaStr podcast with me, Harry Stebbings at HStebbings1996 on Instagram with two bs and I would love to see you there, where you can both suggest questions and guests for future episodes. And speaking of episodes, I mean, my word, what an expert we have in store for you today, and I’m thrilled to welcome Brad Birnbaum, founder and CEO of Kustomer to the hot seat today. Kustomer is the first intelligent platform for customer experience that enables you to know everything about every customer and to date Brad has raised over 30 million dollars in funding for Kustomer from some of the very best in the SaaS business, including the wonderful Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint, Ed Sim at Boldstart, Canaan Partners, BoxGroup, and Social Leverage, just to name a few. Previously he was also the co-founder of Assistly, which was acquired by Salesforce.com and became Desk.com. Prior to that he was CTO of Talisma and co-founder and CTO of eShare Technologies. In addition, Brad was also the CTO at Sean Parker’s Airtime and V.P. of Engineering with Salesforce and I do also want to say a huge thank you to the very wonderful Mr. Ed Sim at Boldstart for the intro to Brad today. I really do so appreciate that, Ed.
Harry Stebbings: Well, Brad, it is absolutely fantastic to have you on the show, having heard so many great things, both from Ed at Boldstart and Gary at Social Leverage. Thank you so much for joining me today, Brad.
Brad Birnbaum: It’s my pleasure. I’ve been looking forward to being on the show for quite awhile.
Harry Stebbings: Well that’s very kind of you but I’d love to kick off today with a little bit about you. So Kustomer is your fourth time building a customer service company. I’d love to hear how did you make your way originally into the world of SaaS, and then what was that founding story with Kustomer in a very succinct two to three minutes.
Brad Birnbaum: I’ve been building customer service software since the mid 90s, had a bunch of very companies along the way. In 2008, I found myself selling my last company and looking for something new so I ended up working at AOL and running chat in 2008, and it was an interesting time to be there. While they were going through a lot of transformation there and after being there a little while I quickly realized that it wasn’t for me as I really like to build product and we weren’t able to do as much of that there as we could, so I was there with a of couple other folks that I’ve spent most of my career working with: Alex Bard, Gary Bennit, and Jeremy Suriel. We all decided to leave AOL at about the same time to do what we know and love, which was build customer service software. However, we said we’ve been building enterprise on-prem software for our whole career. Why don’t we try our hand at SaaS, because the world is quickly going to SaaS, and we saw the benefits of SaaS of not having to worry about databases and all the fun stuff around there, right? You know, you’re on this version of Oracle so we said we’re going to focus on SaaS and at the time I was doing a lot of traveling as an enterprise CTO for many years and I just had my first daughter and I said to the guys, I said I really don’t want to travel as much as I used to. Maybe we can try our hand SMB because the sale cycles are very different.
Brad Birnbaum: And that sounded like a great idea. So we ultimately formed Assistly in 2009 to do SaaS-based SMB customer support and it was a quick journey. It was 18 months from incorporation to acquisition term sheet from Salesforce. That product is now at Salesforce as Desk.com, and it was a great ride. I spent three years at Salesforce, had a really good time. After my 3 year journey at Salesforce was over, I went and worked at a different company called Airtime for a year which was something out of my core domain which was all about the next great social network…it was Sean Parker’s company–or still is Sean Parker’s company–the next great social network around group video co-consuming media together and it was super lot of fun. I really had a great time, met a lot of great people there, but realized I needed to get back to my passion and my passion was building customer service software. So Jeremy Suriel and I–he was with me at Airtime–we left and ultimately founded Kustomer. And the reason we did that is we just saw this really large opportunity in the market to do it right this time. We saw a lot of old school legacy players there. We saw a lot of point solutions and we saw an opportunity to build an amazing platform to enable next generation customer service.
Harry Stebbings: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more with you in terms of the opportunity there. I do have to ask before we dive in. You mentioned your time at Salesforce there. I’d love to hear, were there any big takeaways from the three years at Salesforce that you’ve maybe really taken with you to th
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