Ragnarokast Episode 14

Spencer

Hi there, Colin. Welcome. 

Collin

Hi, great to be here with you both. 

Spencer

Thanks for, thanks for coming on. Would you mind introducing yourselves for our lovely audience today? 

Collin

Sure. So I’m Colin Nederkoorn, founder and CEO of Customer IO. I grew up in Singapore and London, and I went to college at RPI in upstate New York. I’ve lived in Houston, Boston, New York, and now I live in Portland, Oregon with my wife, two kids and five-month-old yellow lab. 

Steven

Adorable. It’s like an American dream, right On the podcast right here. 

Spencer

Cool. So, you know, Steven and I are co-founders. Obviously if you, if you listen to the intro, but, you know, we have, we, we have a, a, a founding story that maybe we can talk about if we have time. But aS founders of a, of a company, be great to hear your, your side of the story. ’cause I don’t, I don’t like, I, I think, I don’t know if we know your story, so it would, it would be great if you could put it in your own words. 

Collin

Sure. So it’s late 2011. That’s, that’s when we started kicking around ideas. 

And my co-founder and I were working in New York at the time at this venture-funded startup. I was head of product, my co-founder was head of engineering, and we explored a few different ideas around real time analytics and we started talking to some companies we thought would be great customers, but the feedback that we kept hearing was these companies had like 10 tools that would show them what people were doing inside of their product. And where they really needed help was trying to influence the behavior of those people. 

That was their big pain. And so we thought, what if we built on top of the, the best ideas that we were seeing in this, like, new wave of analytics products that we’re starting. But instead of used that data to generate charts and graphs, we used that data to try to trigger messages instead and nudge people towards things like converting from free to paid or taking the next step in an onboarding process or coming back to some product that they had abandoned. And so the first version of customer io we built, which was, I mean, it was a lot of smoke and mirrors in, in the very early days, like sort of mid-2012. 

But the first version, the whole focus of the product was all about triggered emails. And we evolved from there to support, you know, every channel you might wanna reach customers on and any type of message you might wanna send, like broadcast or transactional messages as well. 

Steven

Interesting. So you’re, you’re coming doing that around 2011, right? Which is essentially at the point of which we are still very much in the, I think we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re in coming into, we’re very close to the acquisition of Salesforce buying out 

Spencer

Exact Target. 

Steven

Yeah, exact target. Yeah. We’re we’re like responses and, and all these, you know, we now consider kinda legacy platforms, you know, let me, let me clone my SQL database to your, to your marketing system and have the thing, you know, refreshed six times a day or something like that. Right. There was some real, you know, there were some real challenges to doing, like triggered email or automated email. So was it, you, you, you kind of mentioned you sort of stumbled upon it from kinda like an analytics perspective, but was it, you know, you were, you were also kind of maybe also addressing a gap in the market, which was, you know, at the time when maybe like sail through was starting out in these like maybe event based first or event based triggered, you know, platforms were, were really kind of nascent, not really popular at all at that point. 

Collin

So we were really naive. I had never heard the word exact target when we started, didn’t know what responses was. I think the, and I started to hear those names after we had written code after we were, we, we had the really, like the first version of the product and, but the gap in the market that we were trying to fill was the, the company that we worked for used MailChimp for our, for our newsletters, and we had SendGrid that was integrated into our application. And so there were these triggers in the application that were in code written by developers. 

And the opportunity that we saw was like, why A, why are we using two tools that essentially both send an email and B it sucks for our marketer that they have to ask the development team to like make a change to one word in an email that we’re sending to customers. 

And so we saw this amazing opportunity, what if, like, if this is just data that’s like, there’s the logic for when to send a message, but that’s, if we can pull that out of our code, then the marketer can change it whenever they want and they can log into a system and they can see how it’s performing and all the metrics. 

And from there we kind of pulled on that thread and said, hold on a minute, if in order to send these triggered messages, we need to segment the customer base and segment all this data. But isn’t that what a newsletter is? It’s like a targeted, you know, you, you have this group of people who are inactive users and you wanna send a newsletter to them. Well, hey, we’ve got all this data, you can do that too. And so we just kept pulling on the thread from, from that initial realization that a product company should probably be using one tool, not two or three. And if you extract, if you pull the data out, you can then empower the marketers. 

Steven

Yeah. 

Spencer

And so to make it about us, you know, the whole thing’s about us snowcap to make it about us momentarily here is like, and then bring it back to a new question, which is when Ragnarok started, we were, you know, we were doing something that we felt at the time was needed, which it was. 

But as time moved on, we, or as time marched on, we started shifting. We called our product, but really it serves, we’re a services company, but we shifted our services around how the market was changing, how the tools were changing. 

And we continue to do that every day because, you know, we exist because of the MarTech stack and it’s something that we have to do every day is innovate, get new certifications, figure out new platforms like when partners like yourself add new features. We have to make sure we’re up to date on that and trained. 

But, you know, with all these changes, so we, we started in 2012 just slightly after you, well, I’m sure you started personally before 2012, but maybe you, you know, look old for your age. I’m sorry. But how, how do you, like, through that time, how have you found that like the founding principles, ’cause obviously like Best in Breed is much more appreciated now. Like they’re, people aren’t sending stuff through SendGrid, you know, I mean maybe they are, I, I don’t know, but hopefully not, you know, like now that a lot of the things that you’re talking about have been adopted, how do you find yourself, how does customer io find itself, like staying true to, its, its sort of initial mission and continuing to solve problems that, that surface today, if that makes sense. 

Collin

One of the benefits of, of the problem we decided to try and solve is that it’s so big and part of the problem is a, is a tooling problem. Part of the problem is how like it’s, it’s internal to companies and how they are trying to solve these problems. So like, I don’t think our work will ever be really done, but the foundational stuff that, that drives us is that we, we believe that, that the best companies, great companies wanna communicate with their customers in a way that feels really personal, that reflects a deep understanding of every prior interaction that their company has had with that customer and is and respects the customer as well. 

And that takes work as the world gets more complex, as the ways that customers interact with companies gets more varied. People are going into a store, they’re, you know, talking to people on the phone, they’re interacting over email, text, and all of these different channels. It’s just, it’s more complex to manage. 

And so, our work has never felt like it’s done. Oh, like, we nailed email. Good. We can pat ourselves on the back and, and stop there. No, like now all of a sudden push is really more important. And in-app notifications became really important. And so I think the, the thing that, that that’s the thing that we stay true to is that we’re trying to help companies not look foolish, right? Like, not look like they have no clue that, you know, you’re as a, as a customer of theirs, you’ve interacted in all these different ways or you’re, you know, you had a problem with the product and all of a sudden they’re like emailing you something that seems totally tone deaf. 

And I think that the data is there, it’s possible, it’s just a question of like having the capabilities and the time and the knowledge to, to set things up in a way that really makes the, the creates that one-to-one experience that between that, you know, if you as an individual look at someone’s profile and all of their history, you can make really thoughtful decisions. And so how do you build automation as a business? How do you build automation that feels like that, that’s, that’s the mission that, that we are on and trying to help, our customers achieve. 

Spencer

So as an extension of that, so your customers through your platform are able to activate on all this data that they have about their customers, but this could be advice, general advice, or just your own methodology for this, but how do you and your team keep your finger on the pulse of not necessarily just what your clients’ customers want, but your clients themselves? Like, like what is, what is, how is the market moving? What are the pain points that they have? 

You know, kind of like a, we talk about like a, like a cultural fit almost for you and your, your customers. How are you kind of keeping your finger on the pulse there and adapting to that? 

Collin

The challenge that we have is that we serve the broad market horizontally. And so we’ve got companies that are early stage starting up, and the benefit there is we, what they’re asking for, oftentimes at a certain level of maturity, what they’re asking for is what later stage more mature companies will be doing in 12 months. 

And so we get a lot of great input and, and we get pushed by a lot of our, you know, earlier stage customers. But then, you know, it’s challenging definitely to, to keep iterating on the product and building it for this, this market horizontal. 

But a lot of times I think similar to the, the well-known consumer tech companies like, like Apple we’re, we’re sort of, we’re taking input from a lot of different places and then we’re, we’re synthesizing that and making decisions about what, what we think our customers are gonna want, that they’re, they don’t know how to articulate yet. And we’re building towards that. 

You get into a trap if you build exactly what customers are, are asking for. And I think the, we made this deliberate decision early, early on that we wanted a lot of customers rather than having 10 really big customers because we didn’t wanna get the product destroyed by listening to our customers. 

And so you listen, you gotta, you gotta synthesize it and then build what they want, not what they tell you they want. Right? 

Spencer

What, and we always like to say here internally that it’s, it’s called customer success for a reason and not customer service. They’re two very different processes and ideologies. 

I hope I don’t get lampooned for saying this, but the customer is not always right. 

Steven

Wait, what did you say? Can you say it one more time for the 

Spencer

No, but I mean obviously it’s, it’s, it’s collaborative. Like if, if you just do everything that the, the, the client says, then you’re gonna end up with a product that’s like Frankenstein because seven different people told you seven different things and it just doesn’t make any sense. Yeah. And I 

Collin

Yeah. And IThink, I think you just have to go a layer deeper, right? When they say I want this, you say why. 

Spencer

Yeah. 

Collin

And then make sure you really understand what, what the root of it is and then solve that problem. 

Spencer
We are everyday users of customer io. We are practitioners, we’re fans. We’ve been using the platform for six years now in contact with your team for six years now. So you don’t have to convince us, but for the general public out there, you know, how in this day and age, how are you standing out from your competitors? Like what is in a, in an increasingly crowded market, you know, Steven sent me an image the other day or sent a team an image of the MarTech space and it’s like, it gets bigger and bigger with smaller and smaller icons all the time

Steven

Yeah. It was Scott Brinker’s latest state of MarTech NASCAR slide that he puts out. And it’s, it’s so, there’s so many now you have to literally zoom in multiple times to actually read the logo. It’s, it’s so yeah. So many now. 

Spencer

But that said like, you know, Customer io is clearly successful. So how, what, what’s worked for you to, anything you’re willing to share publicly that to help stand out from the crowd? 

Collin

 think a lot about where, where we sit in the market and one of the, one of the choices that we made was we wanted to bring enterprise-grade functionality to like an earlier section of the market. One of our approaches has been to try and help companies early in their life and then grow with them. 

That’s, that’s worked pretty well for us. With the type of product that we have, there’s an upfront lift to integrate it and get it working within your stack and the, the, it’s not by design, but there’s some switching costs there. And so we wanna, we wanna work with companies as, as early as they can and help them be successful and then continue to grow with them. 

I think  , when we don’t work with companies super early on, then we can still close them later. And one of the ways we differentiate ourselves in the market is like, you can sign up for a trial and, and, you know, and that’s sometimes that’s a, that’s a signal that this is not, this is not the right software for you. I think in, in our case, a lot of folks, especially more now, the practitioners are part of the buying process. 

And so when they hear from a vendor, you can’t see the tool until you sign the deal that makes practitioners uncomfortable. They wanna kick the tires and they wanna at least explore a little bit. And so just having that, knowing that that’s available to people helps us stand out in, in, in the space or in, in the market. 

And I think the, the other thing that we’ve done early on is we, we’ve been globally distributed since before the pandemic. And so we were able to offer, we have a pretty big international presence. 

I think something like 50% of our revenue is, is in the United States, but the rest is all, all global. And we’ve had, our customer success management team has been globally distributed. Our technical support team has been globally distributed. And our site reliability team, the folks keeping the infrastructure up have been globally distributed. And so we can have someone, if not in the same country as our customers, at least in really similar time zones. So we’ve got CSMs who are in, in Dubai, we’ve got CSMs who are in New Zealand, and that gives us the ability to deliver a really high degree of service that’s very local to, to customers that we were able, we’ve been able to do since we were smaller and now we’re, we’re a little bigger, we’re still not huge, we’re like two hundred and fifty, two hundred sixty people, but we’ve been able to really provide a very competitive service by delivering enterprise functionality super early, being global before we really, you know, had the size to, to be able to do that and just being very accessible to customers so that they really know what they’re getting when they buy from us. 

Spencer

And I have to say, whenever I’m vetting a new platform for us internally, I am, I drive a very, very hard bargain. I’m like, listen, I’m not buying this until, unless you provision me a trial account and I wanna say that nine times outta 10, it works. Just saying that out there, I’m, I’m very glad that you already have that in there because people like me would be a pain in the butt if you didn’t already have that. 

Before we move into some of the technical questions, one big thing is, you know, you’ve had a, you’ve had a brand refresh recently. What, was the thinking behind that? Like what was the impetus and, and how do you feel that’s gonna affect things going forward? 

Collin

The way that I’ve thought about our, our brand over the past few years prior to the refresh is our product maturity was, was really high and our brand maturity was kind of low. And so there’s a big disconnect between what we could offer to customers and how we were talking about ourselves. And my, my ask to the marketing team about a year ago was, help me bring that into parody so that the way we present ourselves to the market reflects the quality of the product that, that we’re selling. 

We did this refresh that came out I think about a month or two ago now. And the whole, the whole goal there is to just make, make sure that companies feel really comfortable to do business with us and that it’s just a pretty normal maturation as a company grows. And it felt like it was time for us to invest a little more in the way we present ourselves to the world. 

I’ve always had this aspiration like I wanna build a world-class company. I think we are a world-class company at this point, and I want the brand to reflect that so that when, whether it’s a large enterprise or a, an early stage company, when they look at us, they’re like, I wanna do business with that company. And the brand gives me comfort and is not like, hey, that’s a little too quirky or, or there’s not a, I think it’s important to have, have personality. And so we, we were able to retain personality, we made decisions like I, I refuse to be a blue company. There are so many blue SaaS companies out there and yeah, didn’t wanna be a blue company, so we’re a green company, but we were able to retain a bunch of, of personality and I feel really proud of how this reflects the work of our team and who, who we’ve built or I guess what we’ve built over the past few years. 

Steven

Yeah. I have to say, you know, we’re, we’re kind of in the same boat, right? We, we wanted to be a purple company. We were in Orange for a while, then we, then we became purple and now everybody else wants to be purple. But we set the trend, you know, like we did 

Spencer

Purple first, we were way ahead of the curve there. Oh 

Collin

Yeah. I think purple’s a great, great color. That was our old primary color. It’s still secondary for us, but I I love purple. It’s, it’s regal. 

Steven

Very regal. You’re, and I have to say the name, I mean it’s so, I mean it’s funny ’cause you know, we’ve worked with lots of clients who use customer io and they don’t call it customer and they don’t call it CIO, they just call it customer io so everybody knows where to go, right? Like it’s easy to get to, you know, the brand is the destination, so to speak. 

Collin

Yeah. And we, when we bought the domain in 2011, there were, we were just fortunate that this word customer was available on the.io TLD and we’ve had the opportunity, I mean, we own customer io.com as well, but we’ve had the opportunity to, to get customer.com and it just doesn’t do any, it doesn’t do anything. 

Steven

No. Yeah, 

Collin

The customer.io is, that’s our identity. And I I think for a long time, companies, as you mature, you buy the.com Yeah. But there’s no, unless we do a a name change, it doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense to buy a.com. Right. And so we, we decided to just own it. 

Steven

I love Yeah, I mean, it, it, it really fits. It is definitely one of those things where it’s like, like it used to be amazon.com and now you call it Amazon, but you know, it’s Customer io and it’s always Customer io or Customer.io. It’s one of the other, right? I see the cadence there. Choose your own adventure. 

Steven

We are in the unfortunate camp where rag ragnarok.com is owned by some guy who won’t give it up in the last 10 or 12 years we’ve been pursuing it. So maybe one day we’ll get it. But 

Spencer

As you were saying that, I literally just looked it up and it still says this page is on his construction coming soon. So I think it’s, last I checked, it was someone in I believe Metro Louisiana might have to make a trip down there at some point. 

Steven

Yeah, yeah. Just go knock on doors and be like, Hey, can we buy your domain from you? And it’s like, it’s gonna be some like, you know, grandma who like doesn’t even know she has it, you know, type of thing. 

Spencer

I would love to know how grandma didn’t even realize that she owned rag ragnarok.com, but that’s a different story. 

Collin

You could try leasing it. Have you, have you tried asking about leasing the domain? To like a 10-year 

Spencer

Ooh Lease? Look at you. No, I actually, I didn’t even know that was a thing. 

Collin

I’m sure it can be done. 

Spencer

We’re still Ragnarok NYC even though there’s only like four of us in NYC at this point. The rest of us are kinda like yourselves. We’re global. Like, you know, Steven moved to Philly. I’m in Durham, North Carolina, and we have a, we have a Spain team, we have people in the Philippines. 

We’re increasingly and a bunch of people in Austin, in, in Texas. So we, we need, we, we chi our URL is marketing rag rock marketing.com but it’s still, like our email address is stil Ragnarok NYC. And I’m like, I’m holding out for that ragnarok.com but it might be a pipe dream. Yeah. But 

Steven

Maybe, maybe we get one on the lease, you know. 

Spencer

Yeah. Maybe we can get it on the lease. I don’t know. If you’re out there, ragnarok.com owner please, please gimme a call. 

But, so, okay, so before we move into some of the questions we have about CDP, one quick thing is, so Colin this is new for us as well. We’re really interested to hear about it. Could you tell us a little bit about Parcel?

Collin

I think a year and a half, maybe two years ago now, we acquired Parcel, which is a code editor for email. And if you use VS code, you can kind of think of it as like VS code, but totally designed for email developers with all of the tools and assistance in there that you need. If you’re writing email code 

Steven

Like an advanced MJML sort of, 

Collin

You could write H-M-J-M-L in, in parcel. Hmm. Some of the some of the things that parcel has are like 

it, so you can, you can run your tests and different clients write in the parcel. You can, you, you have a bunch of like email accessibility stuff baked into parcel as well. 

And it’s just, if you are, yeah, it’s, it’s totally designed for the email developer. There’s approval workflows in parcel as well. Like everything you need to write an email from scratch, Parcel is great for that. 

And so we, we, the reason we acquired Parcel is one, we think that that community is amazing and we wanted to support that community and, and two, we wanted to, we wanted to sort of build, start with that as an amazing foundation and build the layers on top of that. Recently Parcel just released their, their block-based editor. So you can, if you’re an email developer, you build these blocks that are in your brands that adhere to your brand guidelines, they look perfect and folks on your team can now add these blocks to an email. They can drag them around and they can customize the blocks as well, customize the content, and tweak some of the design as as well. 

And so what we’re building towards is, you know, we saw this gap where a lot of the block-based editors, they start visual and the code underneath is really messy. 

And so we wanted to start with code that developers would be proud of and let them control the amount of flexibility that other folks have. So, you know, designers can design, developers can develop, marketers can, you know, create the content in there. There’s a, there’s an approval process and what ends up coming out of the other side is like the, everyone has the control that they want at the right part of the stack. 

And it’s today,, it sits alongside Customer IO journeys, but over time it’ll be more deeply integrated into, into Journeys. But our commitment is that you could use parcel if you started with it today, you could use all of this technology and, and export, the content or export the messages and use them with another product. 

And doesn’t have to be part of Journeys. What 

Steven

We see a lot in the space is, you know, maybe a little bit more of that movement towards like a, like a b free editor, right? Where it’s much more visual kind of drag and drop and it seems like you’re going a little bit more towards the more sophisticated, we’ll say, marketer or developer marketer who’s, you know, actually gonna continue to write HT ML code. And there, there’s obviously a lot of trade-offs there. One kind of main thing is you, in the, in sort of the drag and drop editors, they use an excessive amount of code to do something that could obviously could be done with, you know, a third less of the, of the amount of, of code, which you may not seem like a lot of impact upfront, but you know, Gmail and these other clients have clipping rules around, you know, literally reading how much HTML you have and that will significantly impact how much you can actually include in a message. 

There’s obviously a lot of philosophies around that, but I’m curious why, you know, you, you’re, you want it to go more down this like something that’s maybe a little bit more coder friendly or has more of that reputation of being a coder friendly platform compared to something more like a b free, which is like the, the like the non-coder friendly version of it. 

Collin

Yeah, I mean, I think the opportunity is that you can solve both of those cases. 

So we’re, we’ll, we’ll have great customizable defaults that someone can, you know, they, they would come in, they might upload them, their logo for their company, they might set some default colors and then they can drag in our default blocks and customize them to their heart’s content. So that’s, that’s a pretty similar experience to what people get in, in these more, in more traditional drag and drop editors. Yeah. But except underneath the code is all clean. And so when they then decide, hey, I actually wanna go, I wanna get a little more sophisticated here, I wanna customize this footer block a little more, they can drop into code should they need to do that. 

And, and I think it’ll provide the best of both worlds. I mean, we’ll see, what roadblocks we hit. I’m sure there are reasons why the code in these visual editors, it becomes a spaghetti mess. Yeah. But our aspiration is that we’re going to serve both the, I never wanna touch code use case. Yeah. And the, I really care about the quality of my code use case. Yeah. So that’s, that’s the, that’s the holy grail we’re pursuing. I think the, the other thing to note here is we’ve got other content creation experiences like our in-app. In-app notifications. Yep. And so our plan is to use the same editing experience to power both of those things. 

Steven

That’s awesome. Yeah. I always really admire you guys for very early on having your like templating system in place where you kind of kind of have like different, almost like scripts I guess, of different structures, whether it’s your header, it’s your footer, it’s your, it’s your actual, like content itself. 

We’ve seen that, you know, more modern platforms, a lot of platforms kinda added on those features over time, but that almost came native with customer io. So I always love that you had that kind of like, scale-first mentality around the, the, the, the building operation, so to speak. 

Collin

In the, in the initial, in the initial approach, I was really inspired by Jekyll, which was this like you, you would separate the style from the content Yeah. And the content was typically written in, marked down, and then you would wrap the style around it. Yeah. And so I was really inspired by that. I, and I thought, why, why wouldn’t email be built that way too? 

Steven

It makes a lot more sense. Yeah. I remember that being one of the, one of my favorite things and, and learning about it and being like, wow, this is really cool. Like, why doesn’t everybody else do this? And then, you know, a few years later they did. But yeah, it was, you guys were definitely at the, at the, the point of innovation there. So speaking of innovation, you know, there has been this, this long standing thought process that that marketing automation platforms will turn into CDPs and CDPs will turn into marketing automation platforms. I think Twilio beat us to the punchline on that one with sort of in the, the Twilio engaged Segment, or sorry, SendGrid and Segment product kind of coming together and, and forming what was, you know, sort of the, I’ll say kind of a bit of the pioneer in that space or obviously it’s been some other smaller players in there, but there’s certainly one of the largest ones. 

And you have now kind of entered the same thing. We’ve, you sort of built a separate, almost like, well, I mean it’s part of the core platform, but you’re sort of packaging it as a CDP and it combined with customer io it very much feels like a CDP, right? Because you have the kind of audience saying, and the, and the sort of user and segmentation capabilities combined now with the, the pipeline intake. I’ve always found you guys have been very flexible with the way you take in data. You have one of the best outta the box Salesforce integrators out of any marketing automation platform that’s not Salesforce or, a traditional B2B tool. 

And so I think there’s, you know, a lot of, you know, it almost feels natural for you to kind of go in that direction. But, you know, I also know on the other side of this, like you’re a huge partner of Segment. You know, a lot of our customer-owned clients are on Segment. You know, like how do you, when you’re kind of thinking about the CDP product, you know, how do you think about it from both, I mean a capabilities perspective like your, you know, what problems are you trying to solve with your, with your clients that, that you maybe you weren’t seeing completely filled by the market. And then B, how, how does somebody choose between, like when are they, you know, at the point of like, they’re like, this is probably somebody who needs more of a traditional, you know, more of a legacy CDP or somebody that’s been in the space for a lot longer versus what we have to offer. 

Like, like where are you kind of positioning your CDP product? 

Collin

So maybe it’s helpful to talk about why, why we ended up building a CDP. 

We, saw that when companies were using A CDP in front of customer IO journeys, they were more successful. They, were sending cleaner data into, into the product. The data was just in a better, in a better state to use a product like Journeys. Yeah. However, over time we saw that the CDP market was getting overfunded. There were too many players and there was all of this pressure to raise prices and it, I think it became just a very customer-hostile place where a lot of companies that were coming to us stopped using CDPs. They, were coming to us without integrating a CDP and they were looking to us to build features for them, like data warehouse importers or, or SQL importers. 

And they were looking for more of that flexibility, from us rather than using a CDP in front of us. And so, for a long time, we absolutely recommended and yeah, still recommend that companies use A CDP in front of journeys. 

When we looked at what capabilities, you know  as the space evolved, there are all these differences in what, what CDPs did. And, so one piece of it is this like real-time streaming data integration into your, into your product. Another piece is the data warehouse integrations, and then another piece is application integrations, like to pull data out of A CRM. Yep. And I think those are the three main ones. Do you guys see anything? Did I miss anything there? 

Steven

Pretty much I think from like the data, the the data transfer space for sure. Yeah. I think that covers it. 

Collin

And then you, you know, you have identity resolution, so making sure that when you’re pulling in from data from three different places and it’s all about one person, you can all associate it with that one person. Yeah. And so down we are downstream from that and we wanted to, inside of Customer IO ideally, when you have a profile and you have data about a person, it’s all resolved data and you don’t have a, a whole mess in journeys. And so when we looked at what we had built, we had to build infrastructure to collect a high volume of real-time data. We had built some of these integrations, into data warehouses to pull data in. 

But, we were missing a few pieces. We didn’t have any transformation capabilities. To, you know, associate this value here with this identifier or this, you know, this key here with this key here. And so we, we built some of that and exposed or, and, and released our data pipelines product. And the goal there was really like, we want more of our customers using A CDP.. Not fewer over time. 

And for us, this is like our Costco doorbuster, like it should be really easy for people to get started. 

We, you know, ideally like want them to use this and not think about it. Yeah. And so we, we got the pricing wrong initially and so we’re in the process of, of updating the way we think about pricing in, in data pipelines. 

But we think that over time, you know, there will be a hundred percent of our customers are, are using this infrastructure and then there’s gonna be a subset of customers that use Journeys and a subset that don’t. 

And it was really important to me that this was not just a way to lock people into our ecosystem. That this was like an unmet need in the space for our customers and our perspective customers. And if they could use this alone and get value from it and connect to BRAISE and get value outta that, that’s fine too. 

Steven

So you sort of envision maybe not everybody is is is now like a, like I think you call it the Journey platform. I think of it as like the email or the, you know, the, the sort of channels that you actually activate. You can almost be just a data enrichment engine as opposed to a, as opposed to where people do their marketing out of 

Collin

Yeah, absolutely. I, and I think that the, you know, the best experience is when people are using parcel, they’re using Journeys and they’re using data pipelines altogether. Right. However, it’s really important to us that you could use one of those pieces and get value and Yeah. We, I mean we see that, we see that today and we’ve had customers, I think like for us as an acquisition, as as different acquisition channels, we’ve had companies start with parcel and then buy buy journeys later. We just wanna be in the consideration set and we think we can provide value in a bunch of different ways so that it gets us in the conversation when someone’s contract’s up for renewal. 

Spencer

That makes sense. You don’t necessarily need to be the one size fits all if it’s, they just need a certain portion of what you do. 

Collin

Yeah. 

Steven

I have to say, one of the strengths that we’ve seen in the data pipelines pro, especially early on before, you know, it’s kind of been released under that branding, was just how you handle object data comparatively, especially sales, Salesforce, a lot of other marketing automation tools out there. It seems to always be one of your significant strengths. And, and very interesting I would say is that, you know, you kind of built that, again, pioneered this sort of way of thinking about how to handle like product data or Salesforce data ultimately is what we, we end up seeing a lot of it in and, and having a way to kind of leverage that within an email marketing system that, you know, maybe didn’t have so many, so many consulting dollars attached to activating it, not taking a jab at Marketing Cloud, but am at the same time. 

So just curious, like as you think about kinda the future of that, you know, kind of the data pipelines or just the CDP product, like what, what is, what are, what are, what are you kind of thinking about, you know, how are you thinking about keeping it relevant for the market and, and, and, and you know, your point, whether it’s, you know, you being the journey activator or you being a pastor to it to some other tool, what does that kind of future roadmap for you look like? 

Collin

Yeah, I think, the Salesforce integration is one of our most recent things that we’ve done. I’m, I’m really proud of that as well. The team did an amazing job and it gave us an opportunity to connect the work we were doing in, in around objects to help model all of the complexity that’s in, in salesforce.com And made for a really cool experience to, you know, you can pull in your opportunities, you can pull in what, you know, whatever it is that’s in salesforce.com, you can now create objects in, in customer io to store that, that data and then activate it in in journeys if you like. 

Spencer

And that’s a big B2B use case for you guys as well, not just for brands. 

Collin

Totally. Yeah. I mean I think, and, and when we built objects, the easy mode version of that would be you create companies and, you know, accounts and profiles. Yeah. And you just add that one layer. We decided to do it the harder but more flexible way where you can add multiple things and it’s up to you to define what those, what those structures might be and what the relationships are to other data that you have.

Steven

Yeah. 

Spencer

Yeah. I think that’s one of the big differentiators for us between like other platforms in the space is that that is like a, I think a big, a big selling point for us when we’re, we’re talking about customer io with potential Customer IO clients. 

Collin

Cool. Good to know. 

Steven

You know, one of the, one of the things, again, as you, you’re now kind of servicing, you know, three different, we’ll call ’em like major product verticals, but at the end of the day, is it changing who your customer is, you know, or, or your customer io sorry, but you know, like you’ve, you’ve always kind of catered to the marketing team, the lifecycle marketing team. We’ve, we’ve come across many clients who have development development resources in there, have product resources in there, but the core buyers is the marketing team. Right. Are you sort of starting to, you know, are, as you kind of go through these acquisitions and also plan out, you know, a bit of that product roadmap are, are you, how are you kind of catering this, this, this sort of future state of customer io you know, is that are you sort of broadening who the Customer is or is it, you know, still at the core it’s, it’s, it’s sort of that lifecycle marketing team? 

Collin

So data pipelines branches off into their, their peers who are responsible for data rather than just the person creating automations and writing content. I mean, those might be two people, those might be the same person in a company.. And then the person who’s writing the email code might be another person in there. And so we, I think it’s, as companies go from one product to multiple products, the it, it’s a big risk to try to serve a completely new buyer. And so we’re not trying to do that. I think that would take our, take our attention away from serving our core customer, but it’s really the, the folks who are in the room that are evaluating journeys are the ones that we’re serving. 

And you know, that’s the data team, that’s the developers who might do the implementation, that’s the, the designer who’s making sure that the messages that get sent look good and are on brand. It’s all of these folks around the process of sending really great messages to a customer that we’re building for. And we’ll, we’ll continue to expand like that. If you see more products from us, it’ll, but there’ll pro always be a connection back to this is about creating great experiences for the end customer of a company. 

Spencer

It seems like with a, you know, with a lot of the stuff you’ve been working on that could be B2C marketing teams, B2B marketing teams, product teams, there’s a lot of different teams that, at the core of what you said is that they’re, they’re sending messaging, whether that’s to acquire new users for, bring users back, have ’em try out different features. 

At the end of the day, it’s I wanna say it’s one big team like, but I I think it’s great that it enables, especially the B2B side, which is really cool to me, allows an maybe whether it’s the attention or not, but a, a larger section of a company to use your tool, which is great for, for making yourself sticky and also just making for consolidation exercises, rather having like a Marketo and a this and a that you can kind of all combine it together, which is great. 

Collin

Yeah. you mentioned earlier in the episode you mentioned best of breed. I think we started trying to be a best of breed tool and I think what we’ve seen over time is that companies, companies really, you know, they want you to solve their problems broadly. And I think that my, my hope at the time was that there would be this amazing stack of best of breed tools and what we don’t have control over is what happens to our partners. And so partners need to sort of buy into that idea. And the, there’s certainly companies that we really like working with, but I think for us to provide this end-to-end experience for our customers, then we, there’s a lot more value we can provide on the data side, on the design side, on the, on the coding side that if we purely rely on partners, we may not be able to get there for our customers. 

And that’s, and that’s letting them down. 

Spencer

If everybody stayed in their lane and, you know, stayed the course, it would be a lot easier. But of course some people get bought out, others try to be everything for everyone and it doesn’t work out. So it’s, so, I mean, you know, Steven and I deal with this on a daily basis, which is just the delicate prediction of what partners are gonna do and what companies are gonna do. And sounds like you guys have the same challenge. 

We’re pretty much out of time here, but I would say, Colin, thank you so much for joining. 

For those of you who have just joined us, I doubt there’s anybody who skipped to the end in Spotify, but we talked about Colin’s origin story, Customer IO’s origin story, and most pointing a lot of the new products that they’re gonna be releasing or, or already releasing in our kind of iterating on including their parcel product and their CDP product. 

Steven, is there anything that you want to close us off with here? 

Steven

No, I just think it’s ama, I mean Colin, obviously you’ve been in the space for, you know, over a dozen years now. It’s been really awesome to see your guys’ evolution over time, especially in the last couple years, just to put significant changes and growth you guys have had, and just excited to be a part of the journey with you. Like I said, customer, I always, always been one of our, one of our favorite platforms. I think you’re, you know, the, you mentioned yourselves a small, but you’re very mighty and I think you have a very, a very good tool and it, and it works and it’s, and it’s very scalable and I think that goes a long way in not only acquiring, keeping customers, but also in just being a kind of a leader in the space, which is where we see you guys and so excited that you’re continuing to kind of move up in the enterprise market a bit, but still maintaining and being accessible to somebody who wants to graduate into more capability but isn’t quite ready for the, you know, maybe the price tag that comes with a more sophisticated tool. 

So just, yeah, I just gotta say we really, we love having you as a partner and yeah, just, just really great to, to have you on the pod. 

Collin

Yeah, thank you both. It’s, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. 

Spencer

Alright, thanks, Colin. 

Steven

Thanks Colin. 

Spencer

Have a good one. 

Steven

Yep. Bye.