CXChronicles Podcast 223 with Simon Taylor, CEO & Founder at HYCU

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #223 we  welcomed Simon Taylor, the CEO and founder of HYCU, the worlds fastest growing multicloud data protection company. 

Simon has more than 20 year's experience in go-to-market strategy development, product marketing and channel sales management for the tech industry. 

He has worked with leading companies such as Comtrade Group, Forrester Research, Putnam Investments and Omgeo. 

Simon is a board member at Uncornered, an active member of YPO, and a Research Fellow at Boston College. 

Simon founded, HYCU in 2018 as a pioneering enterprise software company specializing in data backup, recovery and monitoring for multi-cloud environments. In March of 2021 HYCU received an $87.5M A round investment led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV). 

In June of 2022 HYCU received an $53M B round with existing investors BCV, Acrew Capital and new investors Atlassian Ventures, Cisco Investments. Okta Ventures closed out the Series B in October of 2022 to bring the total investment to date to $140M. 

In this episode, Simon and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback and shares tips & best practices that have worked across his own customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #223 Highlight Reel:**

1. How travel & living abroad can make you a better customer focused business leader
2. Why placing all of your investment bets on sales & marketing doesn't alway work
3. Creating "customer blueprints" for every customer your business earns
4. Why your product or service has to work for your customers in order to scale
5. Prioritize socializing customer feedback the good, bad & ugly on the regular
 
Huge thanks to Simon for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Simon Taylor

Click here to checkout HYCU

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Transcript

CXChronicles Podcast 223 with Simon Taylor, CEO at HYCU.mp4

Adrian  (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady- Cesana . Super excited for today's show, guys. We have an awesome guest on who has just a super cool story, super cool background. And not only is he going to share a bunch of awesome things about the business he's building today, but this fella has built several businesses, and he's been able to work at a bunch of awesome companies, and he's been all over the world. So I'm pumped for Simon to come on the show and share his story. 

Adrian  (00:00:33) - Simon, say hello to the CX Nation, my friend. 

Simon (00:00:35) - Adrian, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. 

Adrian  (00:00:38) - A hundred percent. So Simon, I want you to start off the show like we start off all these episodes, man. Give us, spend a couple minutes today kind of setting the stage, bring us up to speed a little bit about your background and some of your early career work that you were doing that led you to where you are today as the CEO and the founder of Haiku. 

Simon (00:01:01) - I love it. Absolutely. Adrian, I always say I'm a serial entrepreneur, but that belies a very different past, which is I started my career really working at Forrester Research. And I was writing about all the cool things that everybody else was doing, but I didn't feel like I was taking my shot. And I ended up going to Thailand on a backpacking trip, met up with an old high school buddy of mine when I was about 23, 24 years old. And he said to me, what do you want to do? I said, I just want to start my own company. 

Simon (00:01:31) - And so I went back, I wrote a business plan, I raised a little capital. And the idea that I had was that, you know, if you thought about where all the engineering and tech talent was in the early 2000s, it was in Eastern Europe, but people weren't going there. They didn't know the people in order to be able to bring them over to the US and build business relationships. So I moved to Prague, sold everything we had, moved to Prague in the Czech Republic. And I started traveling. 

Simon (00:01:57) - I went Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, didn't know anybody, didn't speak the language. But my idea was to meet great tech companies and build a database of all of the engineering talent was out there so I can match it, you know, with buyers and companies in the US. I did that for a number of years, sold that to a gentleman named Veselin Evrasimovic, who owned a company called Comtrade Group. We started a second company together called Comtrade Software, sold that to Citrix in 2014. 

Simon (00:02:26) - And I was, you know, I was out in Vegas and I was, you know, honestly just celebrating the fact that 

Adrian  (00:02:31) - As you should, as you should, Simon. 

Simon (00:02:33) - I was in my early 30s and I bumped into one of the engineers that had been in my early platform. And, you know, we sit down and we go to dinner and we start having a conversation about what ultimately became Haiku. 

Adrian  (00:02:45) - That's awesome. So it was a wild ride. 

Simon (00:02:48) - But, you know, I think for me, the real excitement was being young, you know, having no boundaries, just saying, look, I'm going to go after this. I'm going to figure out how to work with these different countries, meet different companies, build different relationships. Sky's the limit. And when I look back, I sometimes go like, how did I do that? But I think when you're that young, right, you really, the aperture is completely open. 

Adrian  (00:03:16) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:03:16) - Believe you can do it. You can go out and do whatever you want. 

Adrian  (00:03:19) - Yeah, dude. A hundred percent. So number one, that's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Real quick follow ups. So I know, I know I called this out to you the other day, man, but like the first thing that I just hear in your background story and just that I want our listeners to think about is like having the luxury or the fortune or whatever you want to call it, of being able to go travel that many places across the world at an early age, especially men. 

Adrian  (00:03:48) - So everybody does it wrong, Simon, they work their 50, 60 years, they try to save whatever their goal is, and then they want to go explore the world when you're old. And like, you got to like, that's ridiculous. That's so I've loved that you, you know, early on, you decided, no, I'm going to go see the world. Number two, remember what I said to you the other day, brother, I just don't think people think about this enough, but like traveling is just such an incredible life changer, game changer and educational vehicle, right? 

Adrian  (00:04:18) - Like you think about here in America, anyway, everyone thinks about, oh, I got to go to college. I got to go to college. I got to education and I'm not hating on education, obviously it's critical, but like, I don't.

Adrian  (00:04:27) - I just, I'm one of those people that travel is the best form of education in the world. You probably met people, saw things, heard things, felt things, smelled things, that if you didn't have those experiences, would it have been as easy to put all this stuff together? Would it have been easy to connect the dots? Would it have, you know what I'm saying? So I love that you had that early on in your life and in your career. 

Simon (00:04:49) - Yeah, I mean, my first college, you know, I went to a bunch of different colleges, but I think while a lot of people focus on the pedigree, you know, how do I get into Harvard? How do I get into MIT? I was really focused on how do I go to a college where I can meet interesting people? And I went to a very small, no-name college, Schiller National American University in London. That's a whole couple. And when I got there, there was like, there was 200 kids and 92 countries represented. So 200 students, 92 countries, right? 

Simon (00:05:21) - So everybody, I mean, my roommate was from Uzbekistan. My best friend was from Serbia. I had another good friend that was from Kenya, one from Rwanda. And everyone who got there had an entirely different life story. 

Adrian  (00:05:34) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:05:35) - So you sort of, I was, you know, a nerdy kid with flip-flops and a T-shirt, you know, and I'm talking to folks who have been, you know, some of them had gotten through civil wars. Some of them had gone through genocide. Some of them had gone through, you know, real tragedy and come out on top. And you know, some of them were living the high life. You know, some of them, you know, were, you know, running gold mines and things like that. But so I really got to see this very drastic sort of cross-section of humanity. 

Adrian  (00:06:03) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:06:04) - And I think, you know, that's definitely, those experiences I've certainly carried into my business life and into the rest of my life. You know. 

Adrian  (00:06:10) - I love it, man. I love it. One other quick follow-up before we jump into kind of some of the awesome things that you and your team in Haiku are doing, but you mentioned on the second business, you were able to sell that to a very large company. So can you spend any time kind of digging in, even if it's a super duper high level, how long did it take to build that business? How did you know that there was going to be an end acquirer like who you just mentioned? That's a huge company. 

Adrian  (00:06:35) - Can you spend any time talking about that, even if it's just a high level? 

Simon (00:06:38) - Oh, absolutely. I think, look, there's the challenge that a lot of people have when they build companies is you have to go out on the one hand and say, we are the best thing in the world. Our technology is the best. Our business is the best. Everything we're doing is incredibly great and game changing. On the other hand, you have to be grounded enough to know where you actually sit in the ecosystem. 

Simon (00:07:02) - And I think by that is when we approached that company and started having conversations, we didn't go to them and say, we've got the best monitoring tools since sliced bread. Our monitoring tool is better than their monitoring tool. No, we went to them and just said, you are building a great relationship between Citrix and Microsoft. We think that our software will add value to that relationship. 

Simon (00:07:23) - So reframing our technological value as a means of driving their strategic goals and objectives, ultimately over the course of four years, that brought us from zero to 2000 customers with almost no marketing. We had almost no marketing money. I think we had five salespeople, and yet we were able to generate 2000 customers because we knew exactly who we were. We knew how to drive value and we knew how to sort of navigate our business so that we were going to be the best partner to that company. 

Simon (00:07:59) - And ultimately that paid great dividends for us and for them as well. And I think that's what it's all about. It's about really knowing where you want to go, how you add value. And in every conversation, we call it empathy, putting yourselves in the customer or partner's shoes, not just saying, this is the best tech, right? Everyone's got the best tech. If you ask any CEO and founder, they've got the best tech. 

Adrian  (00:08:21) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:08:22) - But if you sort of navigate your business so that it is looking through the eyes of the partners and the customers you serve, I think that ultimately is what leads you to success. 

Adrian  (00:08:36) - Yep, I couldn't agree more. And it's amazing how many companies miss the value piece. They miss the ability to quantify the value they bring. They miss the ability to be able to show different types of value that are coming from the relationship or the partnership. So I could not agree more. Simon, let's jump into the first pillar of team. Why don't you talk about the incredible team you're building over at HYCU? Number one, where are you guys located? Number two, what types of roles do you have on the team? 

Adrian  (00:09:04) - And number three, how did you kind of start thinking about what type of folks you needed to pull together to actually make HYCU a reality? 

Simon (00:09:11) - I love it. So, it starts again, back to customer value. We built three core pillars. We call it better with age, AGE, authenticity, grit, and empathy. And a lot of times I see company values and they're up on the wall and they look like they were written by a marketing person kind of thing. But this for us was actually, my core leadership team and I sitting around and saying who succeeds in HYCU. But forget about us. Who actually is successful and has a good career with us? 

Simon (00:09:41) - It's first and foremost, people who know who they are, people who are not trying to fit a mold, people who are different, people who are authentic for themselves.

Simon (00:09:50) - The second thing is grit. You know, one of the hallmarks of a Haiku career and building our team has been to make sure we hire the grittiest people. We want scrappers. You know, we want people who are willing to come in and get the job done. And the last piece is what I mentioned before, that empathy. You know, it's can you put yourself in the customer's shoes? You know, a lot of people talk about the, you know, the no asshole policy, et cetera. 

Adrian  (00:10:14) - Love it. 

Simon (00:10:15) - But for us, it goes beyond that. It's about how do you actually really demonstrate that you can think for the customer and you can think on behalf of the customer to drive real value. And so I think, you know, once you have that sort of core foundation in place, you need to look at, you know, what you care the most about. A lot of folks invest very heavily in sales and marketing out of the gate. We did not do that. You know, we invested really heavily in engineering and customer success and customer support. 

Simon (00:10:42) - Because again, we thought, you know, look, even if it takes us a little bit longer, right? Even if it takes us an extra year to add another thousand customers, the customers we have will stay with us. And that's paid great dividends. You know, our customer success team is incredible. Our net promoter score is a 90. And, you know, and we retain our customers. We don't lose customers, you know, for the most part, because what happens is when customers come to Haiku, they really feel they have a partner. 

Simon (00:11:10) - And again, you don't get that if you're a hundred percent sales focused or a hundred percent marketing focused. You know, yeah, you get this, Adrian. You've done this for years. 

Adrian  (00:11:20) - I mean, this is exactly what we talked about. 

Adrian  (00:11:23) - Wait, really quick. 

Adrian  (00:11:24) - The first, hearing you say this though, it's amazing, man. Like you can tell though that Haiku, you've done this several times. And the reason why I say that is because one of the big, it's crazy how many executive leadership teams miss the piece that you started with, which was like, you've got, be your authentic self, be gritty, and then, you know, make sure that like the empathy and the listening and all that is paramount. 

Adrian  (00:11:51) - When I hear that, that is like very clear, core value, mission-based, this is who we are, this is where we're going, and this is what we're doing. And what's crazy, man, is like, dude, I've had the fortune of talking to some of these executive leadership teams that are a hundred million dollar companies that don't have that. 

Adrian  (00:12:12) - So then when they wonder why their 1,000 or their 1,500 employees, first of all, sorry, let me get, before we even get to the employee side, when they wonder why they have churn issues, when they wonder why they can't succeed and they're missing upsell, cross-sell goals, when they wonder why they keep struggling, their average deal tender keeps getting longer and longer and longer. And then let's flip over to the employee side. 

Adrian  (00:12:35) - You got a bunch of employee consternation, people are kind of feeling like they don't know exactly what they're supposed to be doing with their role. What you just started with is like, that's one of the starting points, guys. Like, if you're not letting your team know where the hell you're going, I always say this, I use this analogy all the time, but like, you gotta let people know where the ship is going so that you actually have people getting out of the ship that even want to go in that damn direction. 

Adrian  (00:12:58) - Like, don't have a bunch of people getting out of ship that think they're going to Antarctica going off in the direction. Like, that's great. 

Simon (00:13:05) - I love that you say that. I mean, it's interesting because I've had people, you know, who come from different organizations and they say, oh, I'm not into all this kumbaya culture stuff you care about. You know, culture should just be an outcome. And what I always say to that is, it's true. Culture is an outcome. But if you don't put up signposts and you don't get them at that, how can you possibly expect them to get where you want to go? 

Simon (00:13:27) - And you've got to, you need to recognize that it's not going to happen because you label yourself with these values. But if you don't tell people these are the values we're striving for each and every day, you're never going to get to the outcome that you want or the culture you want to build. 

Adrian  (00:13:42) - Yep, I totally agree with that, man. And by the way, again, the comment I made about, you could tell you've done this several times and found success several times, that is definitely part of the magic sauce, Simon, for you. Because just think about it, like what you said, you cannot build incredible customer experience without incredible employee experience. Culture is imperative. Culture has to be a part of the fabric. And then the last part is, I just think we live in an interesting world, brother, where like customers feel this stuff. 

Adrian  (00:14:10) - Customers can feel when they're spending money or working with a business that's got, number one, got their shit together, but number two, every one of us has an example of what we've talked to an employee or we've talked to a staff member of a business where you're like, oh my gosh.

Adrian  (00:14:24) - Like, you could just hear it, whether they're down or it's not, there's no, and that's not, that's not great. It's not great. And then on the employee side, it's not a fun place to work. Nobody wants to show up to a place where you don't have other friends that are equally as excited or interested, or you push each other, or there's always tribal knowledge sharing, whatever you want to call it. But like, that's a game changer, brother. 

Simon (00:14:45) - Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Look, at the end of the day, I just think, startup is hard, scale up is hard. Building a company is hard. The old adage that, if it was easy, everybody would do it. You are, by the nature of the beast, expecting and demanding a lot. And I think leadership's example has to be that you're gonna be in a supportive environment, right? Like, you can be cutthroat all you want if you're Bank of America and you're a giant, giant company, right? 

Simon (00:15:17) - But if you're a startup and you're trying to build something and you're trying to keep getting to the next level, you gotta take people with you. And I think that's where those core values, we have to not only hire for them, we have to live them ourselves. And when we're not living them, we all have bad days, we all have bad moments. We have to sort of step back and go, I'm not doing it, right? Like, I'm not supporting the values that I care about and that we want to live by. And I think if you do that, it ultimately will hold you in good stead. 

Adrian  (00:15:45) - Yep, I love it, brother. Simon, I'd love for you to spend some time talking about tools. And you can answer this however you'd like, of course, but I'd love to, number one, just learn a little bit more about the tools at Haiku that you guys are building and delivering to your customers every single trade day. 

Adrian  (00:16:00) - And then I do have another question that I'd like you to kind of weave into it if possible, which is over all the different businesses that you've built, and then especially with what you're building with Haiku right now, I'd love for you to kind of give our listeners a thought or two around how they should be kind of thinking about the way that they're gonna invest in their tech stack and then the way that they're gonna manage that tech stack, manage the utilization within it. 

Simon (00:16:24) - Yeah. 

Adrian  (00:16:24) - And then more importantly, how are you gonna scale with this? Because every company does a little bit different with which tools they start with, which tools they invest in, but spend a few minutes talking about this, man. And I know you could talk about tools for days and days, but I'd love to pick your brain on this one specifically. 

Simon (00:16:39) - Yeah, no worries. So let's start with the problem that Haiku is trying to solve, right? So the challenge that Haiku saw in the market is that people had their data in too many different data silos. In the old days, like when our parents were working in IT, they had a bunch of servers, storage, sitting in the basement, and you were running maybe a DB2 mainframe or something like that. You had, your data was in four or five different places. You fast forward 10 years, and the advent of public cloud, suddenly you had your data in seven or 10 places. 

Simon (00:17:11) - Today, each one of the hyperscalers themselves has over 200 different SaaS services that they offer inside of each cloud. There's also 30,000 SaaS services that are in the industry at large. And the average companies, we did this analysis, that the average company today, mid-market, again, I'm not talking Bank of America, I'm talking mid-market companies, use their data in no less than 212 different services. So literally, the industry today, I always think of it, like an iPhone without iCloud backup, right? 

Simon (00:17:46) - Because you've got all these apps on your iPhone, but you know that if you lose your phone, you can get all that data back. 

Adrian  (00:17:51) - Totally, yep. 

Simon (00:17:52) - The crazy thing is that companies can't, because all of those different SaaS services use the shared responsibility model, which says that ultimately they'll provide the service, but the data's on Uniprotect. 

Adrian  (00:18:04) - Okay. 

Simon (00:18:05) - So you said, all right, there's 30,000 services out there, people have lost control of their environment. What's the first thing we have to do? We need to make it, we need to visualize for customers where their data is. And so this does two things. First of all, you plug in, you turn it on, it discovers your environment, and it organizes every department in your organization, tells you every service you're running for on-prem public cloud SaaS. And then it tells you, is the data recoverable or not? 

Simon (00:18:36) - The benefit here is that when our support organization or our customer success team is talking to a customer, if the customer wants, they can share that screen with us and we can tell them, okay, listen, you've got hundreds of different data silos, you're not backing up Salesforce.

Simon (00:18:53) - you're not backing up Jira, you're not backing up Okta, you can't recover that data if there's a ransomware attack. There's nothing you can do. And so I think the first value add there is our own tooling because we're actually eliminating shadow IT and making it easy for customers to actually regain control, remaster that entire sort of multi-cloud SaaS environment. And then the second piece of it is, we offer a marketplace so that you can literally turn on all that data protection. You can set your recovery point objective. 

Simon (00:19:26) - You can set your RTO, RPO. You can schedule all of your backups. You can recover your data at a granular level. One thing we realized is that, and this was really the secret sauce for us from a technical perspective, every single service has different kinds of data. And so recovering all of your data to like a big CSV file is useless for you. But you want to, like, if you're recovering Salesforce, you want to recover the opportunities and leads that you lost on July 15th. You don't want a whole big Excel file. 

Simon (00:19:57) - And so we actually have architected and patented an approach so that every SaaS service, you can recover that data exactly in the same vernacular and the same categories that you're using it in. 

Adrian  (00:20:07) - That's huge. 

Simon (00:20:08) - Yeah, so I think the very nature of what we do really helps to drive that. The second thing that we do that I think is really unique is we use NPS score across our entire development process. So, you know, I think everyone's familiar with NPS at this point. 

Adrian  (00:20:24) - You got a bunch of CX and CS nerds on this show, Simon. There we go. 

Simon (00:20:27) - So I won't bother with that, right? So people always say to me, 90 can't be real, right? Like nobody's got 90 NPS score. You know, one of the things, we raised about $140 million in the last couple of years. And one of the things I always encourage our investors to do is to audit our NPS because it does sound unrealistic. And, you know, I remember Enrique Salem who is the chairman of our board, former CEO of Symantec, Gerald Carter at Bain Capital. And he was like, what do you mean audit your NPS? That's a good way to do it. And so we did it. 

Simon (00:21:01) - And they came back and were like, wow, this is real. This really is a 90 plus, you know, in terms of NPS. And people say to me, so how do you do that, right? Is your product just that good? And the answer is no product is just that good. If you build something, it's only as great as you and your mom think it is, right? 

Adrian  (00:21:18) - It's literally that, yeah. 

Simon (00:21:22) - So the real value for us was our customer success team. Again, we spent a lot of, we invest heavily in customer success. And what they do is they go out and they blueprint every customer. They get to know every customer. And when we do an initial NPS audit, we get the real scores, but we make sure that all of their requirements are actually baked into our development process. And we actually use NPS to drive roadmap development. 

Simon (00:21:48) - I think a lot of people make the mistake of just going, you know, we're just going to build up technical debt and keep innovating. 

Adrian  (00:21:55) - Definitely. 

Simon (00:21:55) - It's great for PR and it's a lot of fun. 

Adrian  (00:21:59) - Yeah. 

Adrian  (00:22:00) - I love innovating. Yeah. 

Simon (00:22:00) - But at the end of the day, what I love much more is to have a happy customer who says, hey, you gave me what I wanted. 

Adrian  (00:22:06) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:22:06) - And you know, we're now more loyal to you. We care about you. We see this as a real partnership. 

Adrian  (00:22:10) - Yeah, and then I bet you your CFO appreciates it too, because- 100%. It's gonna go up. Just your general sustainability of accounts, your ability to get customer success qualified leads, where then theoretically, whoever your CRO is probably a little bit happier, because it makes his or her job easier, as far as just buying it. 

Adrian  (00:22:28) - You know, one thing that you're making me think about too, Simon, just from going through all this, this is awesome, by the way, but like, it's just amazing how many businesses, you're right, they, number one, actually, there's two thoughts I want to get into. Your comment about auditing the NPS, it's funny, you joke about that. I was telling you the other day, man, we at CXC, we've worked with a bunch of clients where one of the things that we do, one of the services we do provide, we'll do historical voice and customer reporting audits. 

Adrian  (00:22:56) - And big reason why we do it, there's a ton of companies out there that do NPS and CSAT math wrong. Don't even ask me how that's possible, but they do it incorrectly. There's also a bunch of companies that, your point about making sure you're taking the feedback. If you're gonna get feedback, go for it, do something with it. It's gas, it's gold, man. It's literally worth money. So use something with it. 

Adrian  (00:23:18) - But then the second part is to, I don't think, even awesome companies, man, I don't think that they realize that the faster you do that in the growth cycle, the faster you do that and the earlier you do that in your business, selling becomes easier because then in effect, you get, there's like, you increase your velocity towards understanding what the real true needs are of your ICP, then you also start to get better faster.

Adrian  (00:23:44) - need to have, nice to have, and then like dream situation. I see so many companies, well, you just mentioned the comment about the technical debt and the company's kind of pushing that off. There's, I'll give you some examples. We've had so many conversations with startup founders that are like, oh, you know, Adrian, we know that CX and CS is important, but we are not there yet. We have to focus on building this product or that service or this thing. 

Adrian  (00:24:08) - And I'm like, guys, who's giving you the fuel for innovation, for change, for disruption, and then most importantly on the product side, especially with all these SaaS companies, how are you getting the type of feedback to even know that what the hell your team is building or what your engineers are focused on every day is the right stuff? Like, how do you even know? 

Simon (00:24:28) - It's not, I feel for all those folks because there's a ton of pressure to just invest in sales and marketing, right? But there's a ton of pressure when you take investment to do that. You know, we're really fortunate we've got a board of directors and we've got investors who really want to see Haiku become a game-changing, disruptive platform in the industry. And to do that, you got to think beyond, you know, fancy salespeople and fancy PowerPoints. 

Simon (00:24:53) - You've got to think about, you know, are you building a real muscle, you know, when it comes to customer success and support? So one of the things we always do, you know, every company goes through its various different gyrations, right? We never stop investing in support and we never stop investing in customer success. You know, I think we've got a very clear metric, you know, which I won't share, you know, publicly, but we've got a very clear metric internally around how many customers, you know, equals one new support hire. 

Simon (00:25:23) - How many customers equals one new customer success hire. And, you know, the benefit of doing that is that it becomes very logical for folks. 

Adrian  (00:25:31) - Absolutely. 

Simon (00:25:32) - And the moment you say, I had somebody once say to me, you know, Simon, would you trade, you know, 20 million in ARR for 10 points of NPS? And immediately I thought to myself, this person's not, this is not the right person for us. You know, this is not what we do here at Haiku. You know, it was in an interview, and I just, I'm sure that person's been very successful since, but it was not, they were not for Haiku. Because our DNA is to drive NPS. It is to drive customer value. 

Simon (00:26:04) - You try to make, if you try to make trade-offs with that, it's like playing with your core DNA. Yeah, you end up with some sort of mutated. 

Adrian  (00:26:13) - Well, it goes back to what, it goes back to what you said at the beginning of our chat today too, which is like, you gotta be true to yourself. If that is, if those are one of those Northstar focus areas that you already know are going to eventually become extreme success, you don't deviate from it. The only thought is this though too, man. You work in a space where like, you've got, there's a lot of technical complexity. 

Adrian  (00:26:36) - And I think a benefit that you have, and then just from even some of your past businesses, not a lot of product builders that haven't had the experience you've had and hadn't had the success and haven't done several different businesses work. They don't realize the one comment you made about, nobody gives a shit about your product. If your product doesn't work extremely well, plus the value adding stuff. So not only does the product work well, but the Haiku team adds all sorts of value. 

Adrian  (00:27:05) - Whenever I have a problem, they already nine out of 10 times, they know about it before I even have to say something. They're literally watching and they're understanding the leading or the lagging signals that are gonna make a difference. It's such a game changer as far as just like pumping a subpar product down a bunch of people's throat and then just trying to throw gas on that fire. And then they wonder why things don't work out or they wonder why they have different cohorts that just completely fell. 

Adrian  (00:27:30) - They've got maybe a very small, maybe they have a lot of customers, but only a very slim batch of that portfolio that's really providing all of the usability, all revenue. And that's not, it's not great. 

Simon (00:27:43) - It's no easy thing, right? Like, I mean, I love everything that we build at Haiku. Of course I do. 

Adrian  (00:27:50) - It's my job. 

Simon (00:27:50) - I eat, sleep and breathe Haiku all the time. But what you have to do is I think it's take a step back and just go like, yes, I think this is really cool. I think this is amazing. But if a customer is not getting the full experience, that's priority number one, not Simon announcing some cool new feature, right? And so I think it's just reframing the thought process and realizing that without your customers, you're actually nothing. You are actually nothing. I think we are blessed with a giant tan. 

Simon (00:28:19) - People always talk about the value of companies in terms of is your total addressable market big? Ours is all the data in the world. So yes, it's very fair. 

Adrian  (00:28:28) - Yeah, that's a pretty big tan, Simon. 

Adrian  (00:28:30) - That's pretty big, right? Yeah. 

Simon (00:28:31) - And the second thing is, I feel really good about the fact that, again, every company has its challenges, but if you ask anyone at Haiku, past, present or future, they'll always say, yeah, the product really works. It's really, really good. But the product really working is the key. It's not all of the really sexy, cool things that we talk about in terms of our product are all true and they're all great, but it's the fact that it really works every time for customers that actually allows you to build a viable business. 

Simon (00:29:01) - And so I think changing our frame of reference from, wow, that's really amazing, cool tech, to that really works, it sounds more state. It's less, it feels less.

Simon (00:29:14) - incredible, right? To hear it, but it's actually way more powerful, you know? And I think having that sort of working that muscle so that you're listening for the right code words, right? It's not just like, oh, that's really cool. It's, no, no, no, this really works. That's the stuff that really gets me going. 

Adrian  (00:29:30) - Well, in today's world, man, and think about it, like we've got just so many different messages getting thrown at us every freaking day. And I don't even mean messages, I mean just in general, right? Like, so we live in a world where the abundance of distractions both in our personal lives, our work lives are at an all-time high. 

Adrian  (00:29:48) - When, with what you just said, when something just works instead of something being incredible, there's almost more, there's something more like believable about that, number one, like you can actually believe, oh, okay, if it works. 

Adrian  (00:30:02) - We're proud of them. 

Adrian  (00:30:03) - The other thought too is like, I have a very simple way of saying what you just said, which is like so many companies that we've worked with at CXC, success does not lead or success does not guide and support product. If anything, product builds over here, whatever the F they want, success just puts up with it and deals with it. 

Simon (00:30:26) - Picks up the pieces. 

Adrian  (00:30:28) - Picks up the pieces. And then what's crazy is so many times, and I love our product friends, Simon, I love the product. We would not live in the world today that we have if we didn't have all these incredible technical minded people, but more often than not, customers don't want the space lamp. They want the simple lamp where they pull the fricking light and then there's light in the room, right? 

Adrian  (00:30:48) - And so to your point about something just working instead of being incredible, like listeners, you got to think about that, whether it's your product that you're building, whether it's your service that you're delivering to your customers, not everybody wants a space lamp. They want a simple lamp. They want the light that works. And then guess what? It's easier to do success and support on that earlier piece, right? 

Adrian  (00:31:07) - The incredible part is where, unless you're really in it technically, and unless you have an incredible product leader and CS leader that are like actually working together, storytelling together, doing internal training, internal coaching, internal messaging, then doing external, the same thing where you're storytelling to your customers about all the different intricacies of your product, it's going to be hard. It's going to be tough. A hundred percent. 

Simon (00:31:30) - The other thing too, is when you think about customer success, people do learn, the entire company will see what you as the CEO care about. And I'll tell you when at the end of every quarter, the two people who are sitting to my right and my left at the table, the last day of every quarter are going to be customer success, the customer success lead, Shrishya Paimanur, who's an amazing, amazing customer success, VP of customer success, and my CRO, of course. And so when we look at that, people say, well, why customer success? 

Simon (00:32:05) - And I said, because every customer interaction, you know, when sales is going hard, right, and it's trying to close a quarter and these things, you need to make sure you're protecting your customers. every decision that happens in those moments is always taking the customer first and supporting what the customer ultimately needs in that customer bank. 

Adrian  (00:32:24) - Yep. I love it, brother. 

Adrian  (00:32:26) - I love it. 

Adrian  (00:32:27) - Simon, I would love to jump into, spend a minute or two talking about process, man. And I'll tee you up for this, but like over all the different companies you built and then today with Haiku, what are like one or two tips or tricks that you have for listeners around how they wrangle process as a business grows, as a customer portfolio grows, as a team grows? What are some of the things you've seen work really well for people keeping track of tribal knowledge, living playbooks, standard operating procedures. 

Adrian  (00:32:58) - And then on the tech side too, like, are there some cool tools or are there some cool pieces of technology that you guys have leveraged to do that? Or spend a few minutes just kind of talking about how you've wrangled process. 

Simon (00:33:08) - So I think a couple of things, there were a ton of tools, right. And I'm sure every listener here, you know, has the laundry list of amazing, you know, technology use. I'll talk more about the process. Cause I think that's really, you know, I think you need to start really early. I always talk about, you know, working the muscle, you know, and, you know, if you want customer success and you want to really build a viable business, that's going to focus on the customer.

Simon (00:33:36) - you need to know them. And it sounds really silly and simple, but it's amazing how many, you know, folks you talk to who they actually, they don't have a single source of truth for all their data. So they don't know, they don't, and they actually don't bother unless there's a problem. They take a very reactive stance. And so what ends up happening is everything becomes anecdotal. And if you're only talking to customers who are calling in with a problem, then you're getting a slice of customers. 

Simon (00:34:04) - You're not actually seeing the behaviors that are making you effective. Exactly. Right? And so in my mind, you've got to spend equal times talking to both. 

Adrian  (00:34:11) - Yep. 

Simon (00:34:12) - And I think one of the things that for us was really successful was customer blueprinting. So going through and actually having a standard way of helping to understand everything that makes up a specific customer. You know, whether that's the products they're using, the environment that they have internally, all of the things that make a customer's sort of DNA. Yeah. 

Simon (00:34:34) - And you can put those together and you can say, oh, you know, customers who are, you know, between 500 employees and 5,000 in the Midwest, you know, really seem to care about, you know, this thing. 

Adrian  (00:34:49) - Yep. 

Simon (00:34:49) - We've got to spend more time here. Or the challenges and problems we're seeing with this is every software has bugs. Every software has challenges. You know, I would like to believe that ours, you know, is less so than everybody else, but you can't look at it that way. You've got to come at it like, you know, of course we're going to have the same challenges and we've got to be proactive in them. So I think having a single source of truth in terms of where you keep all your data is really important. 

Simon (00:35:14) - Making sure that you are blueprinting every customer from when you were very small. 

Adrian  (00:35:21) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:35:21) - And building that muscle so that by the time you get to 4,000 customers, you know where everything is and you've already built that muscle and you're investing it. I think that's really important. And the third thing, this is very counterintuitive. As you get bigger, I think what happens is customer success become, they become known within the company as the folks who have the most access to customers. 

Adrian  (00:35:45) - Absolutely. 

Simon (00:35:46) - There is a constant threat to that, which is, you know, sales starts to understand that they know where the deals are. And there starts to become pressure to incorporate sales into customer success. The number one thing I would say about a successful customer success organization is they have to be the most empathetic. They have to be the most authentic. They cannot be your shadow sales team, right? They need to be actually quite separated from sales in that sense. They can inform sales. 

Simon (00:36:20) - They can provide knowledge to sales, you know, but I'll give you a real life example. When we, our R-Graph visualization software, you know, when we give that service to customers, it's free. You know, we want every company in the world to turn on R-Graph and be able to see where all of their risks are. And so we don't charge for it. And, you know, that puts us in front of thousands of different customers and prospects, right? Now there's two ways to approach that. You can have sellers on every call, right? 

Simon (00:36:53) - But again, then the customer or the prospect or the company is not getting what they signed up for. So what we do is we have customer success run that program. And because customer success runs that program, people don't feel like they're being sold to. They feel like they're getting the value they asked for. And it not only increases the uptake and the conversion rate, you know, but it also means that, you know, people walk away with a very, very high value feeling about who HYCU is and what it is we're trying to accomplish with customers. 

Adrian  (00:37:25) - Well, because when you do it the way that you just laid out, Simon, that's being a strategic partner, right? It's not just, you're not just buying my willy or my ware and then fuck off. 

Simon (00:37:35) - That's right. 

Adrian  (00:37:37) - You're a strategic partner. Like you are literally, not only do you know a ton about a place, a space, a thing that I need help with, plus technology, some of it free, some of it paid, of course, obviously, but then on top of it, you're literally taking the time to understand my business, understand my goals, understand my challenges, understand. That's being a strategic partner. Guys, listen, you wonder why you're running into retention issues. You wonder why you suck at selling. 

Adrian  (00:38:00) - Are you being a strategic partner to the prospects that are coming into your pipeline that you have an opportunity and the possibility of getting a nap afterward? Maybe not. And the ARGAP thing, and let's make sure, so we'll share this in our notes because I want people to be able to find this that are interested in reaching out to you and your team at HYCU, but like, that's brilliant, brother. 

Adrian  (00:38:21) - I know with CXC, although in very different industry spaces and even just points in our career, dude, I started with the CX scorecard because it was an easy way that I could at least have something that if anybody wanted to go see how they stacked up across team, tools, process, and feedback, start with the score. And then the other thing that's funny is I've got a ton of feedback over the years.

Adrian  (00:38:43) - There's like education inside of that too, and I imagine, sit, when you talk about part the like, you're literally, before you're even selling people, you're educating, you're informing. I guess, sure, this is great sales too, because you're also simultaneously you're showing your, your area of expertise and you're showing your area. But that's what it is, that's what it is, that's part of what this stuff is. 

Simon (00:39:06) - People don't need to be force-fed. I mean, like we all grew up now buying stuff off Amazon, right, yeah, and you know, sort of we're not used to having salespeople whispering in our ear. Yeah, and I think, as you know, it moves towards more marketplace, you know transactions and consumption of SAS, services and all these different things. Customer success becomes much more important because ultimately, the sales process becomes to some degree automated. 

Simon (00:39:34) - Yeah, and you know it's it's it's the ability to interact the customer and authentic, empathic, high-value way that's ultimately gonna, you know sort of, you know, create leaders in the industry. 

Adrian  (00:39:45) - Yep, I love it, man. Um. One last thought you just made me think of there, with that last comment too, is just: yeah, for our listeners, especially Simon, some of our listeners are literally, they're just getting things started. Maybe they've just raised some money, maybe maybe they got their first handful of customers in the door. For those folks right there, I think you just said something that I've seen with our clients at CXC countless times: don't try to slam the okay pods. I know pods can work. 

Adrian  (00:40:12) - I know that there's a number of different examples of companies that have had successful pods. But, like dude, we've seen some of these companies do exactly what you just said. Where they'll start to take the salesperson, the CSM, they'll try to pull some poor, poor, sorry son of a gun product person that literally is already behind by like a month on all of his or her deliverables. They'll pull that person in and okay, I know that pods can work. All I'm saying is that you're right, like that's pushing it, that's forcing it. 

Adrian  (00:40:38) - I also think that if you aren't at a place in your business right now where you can have one incredibly smart, incredibly connected, engaged teammate being able to have a conversation with a customer- yeah, being able to socialize that information, whether it's already through your normal daily reports, or whether you got you at the end of each month- you got your, your CS leaders right with right guys. That's like that's where you got to get to you. That's what we're talking about a crazier. This is literally what should be happening in your business. 

Adrian  (00:41:08) - If it isn't, you got to push your executive, your executive leadership team, on how to how to make it happen. And then, lastly, if you don't, if you- for some of our folks out there- they're listening- that feel like they work at a place where their executive leadership team doesn't have that buy-in. I hate to say this and I know mr CX and all that jazz, but, like you, might have to find another place or another executive leadership team that does buy into this stuff, that does believe in it and it does that. 

Adrian  (00:41:34) - That does take time, money and energy on a regular basis to invest in this stuff, because it really is. You do need top-down support and buy it to be able to get some of the stuff done. 

Simon (00:41:45) - You definitely do. You definitely do it and I think ultimately you know, with the mat, with the environment, the way it is like: the macroeconomic environments very influx, the investment markets very influx, all these things, what, what you know and everyone needs a reminder. I've needed this reminder a few times, from my head of CX as well. You know, ultimately, everything you've built right, everything you've built is Stan, stands to be at risk if you don't invest in customer success. 

Simon (00:42:15) - Yeah, and so it's very, very tempting, I think, for CEOs who you know, but they have work pressure, they've got their own internal pressure, they've got their right there. We're usually all a type personalities: you want to go winning, bro, you know, but ultimately you have to protect your base, and the way you protect your base is customer success. 

Adrian  (00:42:38) - Yeah, yeah, I love it. 

Adrian  (00:42:38) - Sorry, I mean, this is, this is awesome, brother. Before I let you go, before we start to wrap up the show, one or two, one or two points of wisdom from Simon around. 

Adrian  (00:42:50) - Maybe one point of wisdom around what people need to be thinking about for customer feedback, and then one point of wisdom on how our listeners need to be thinking about employee feedback as they get deeper and further and higher up in their careers. 

Simon (00:43:05) - Yeah. So, on the customer feedback side, again, it goes back to the blueprinting. If you haven't blueprinted your customers, you don't know who they are, then you need to start today. Don't wait. It can be as simple as an Excel file. This is, obviously, keep all of your data safe and secure, and don't put anything in there that's going to put anybody at risk. But you do need to understand who your customers are. That is a very simple product to start. It gets more elaborate as time goes on. There's tools to help you with it. But start the process. 

Simon (00:43:33) - Don't wait. 

Adrian  (00:43:34) - Yep. 

Simon (00:43:35) - And I would say that for the employees themselves and for people who are in customer success, I love what you said about finding a management team that cares, right? I think making sure that if you're at the head of customer success, your voice is being heard. 

Adrian  (00:43:50) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:43:50) - It's incredibly important. 

Adrian  (00:43:52) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:43:52) - And my advice right now is, with the macro environment where it is, with so many different things in flux, you know, your voice should be heard. 

Adrian  (00:44:00) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:44:00) - Because ultimately, you are the protector of the base. You are the ones who are going to ensure that all the hard work that's gone into building the ARR up to a certain point is not going to be, you know, for nothing. 

Adrian  (00:44:13) - Okay. 

Simon (00:44:14) - Customer success folks oftentimes are very, very humble and they don't say that. 

Adrian  (00:44:17) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:44:18) - Right? 

Adrian  (00:44:18) - Yeah. 

Simon (00:44:18) - The protector base needs to be the rallying cry for every customer success professional, I think, in the industry. 

Adrian  (00:44:25) - Yeah. I love it. 

Adrian  (00:44:26) - All right. 

Adrian  (00:44:26) - So two thoughts. On your first point of customer feedback, you would love this, dude. I had this awesome conversation with a retired CEO yesterday afternoon. He said something I'd never heard before about know your customer. So guys, to Simon's point, got to know your customer. That's freaking just, you have to. My buddy Dean, he goes, Adrian, you ever heard of three deep and seven wide? And I'm like, what the hell's three deep and seven wide? 

Adrian  (00:44:49) - He's like, if you don't have three incredible relationships with minimally your extended leadership up into your executive leadership, and then if you don't know on those three people seven things about each one of them, then I'm worried about that. I'm worried about that. He said this in two ways. If it's selling, fuck you. You're not selling that account. You don't know enough about that business. You don't know. You don't have the relationships built with those people. 

Adrian  (00:45:20) - You don't have the trust or the confidence built yet or the rapport to be able to close that deal. But I said to him, I'm like, Dean, what you just said, you're talking with a CX guy. I'm like, I'm going to start telling all these CS teams I coach the exact same thing you just said. Because in some of our portfolio reviews we do with our clients, dude, I'm talking to CSMs that make a buck 20 a year, and I'm going through line by line by line by line by line by showing people how we do customer portfolio reviews. Just like our sales leader friends. 

Adrian  (00:45:46) - Just pounded through them, right? And ask them. Same thing on the CSM side, if you don't know, number one, have multiple relationships within your account, and know seven things about those people where you intimate, you've clearly built a relationship. I'm talking birthdays, wives and husbands, names, maybe knowing at least yes or no one, kids, knowing where they live, where they go to vacation, how long have they been, guys, that's what you're getting paid for. 

Adrian  (00:46:10) - But if you wonder why you're not hitting goal, or if you're wondering why you're struggling, it's nice. You get the relationship is everything. That is what, that's why you're there, and that's what you're being paid to do outside of product and outside of, you know, cross and T's and dot and I's and all that jazz. So I love that thought. 

Adrian  (00:46:28) - And then on the second thing you said about employee feedback, this is why CXC brother, I'd say it all the time in this podcast, but I think that CX leadership roles are either the best position in a company outside of CEO, of course, outside of CEO, or the worst. And they're the best when you're at a business where everything we just talked about in this episode, you're getting supported, you're getting investments, you've got executive sponsorship and just general support and trust. 

Adrian  (00:46:56) - And then you're given the authority, the autonomy and whatever you need to get shit done. It's the worst role and part of why now I do this with a bunch of companies. It's the worst role when you work at a company where, you know, all the good, the bad, the ugly for the customer, for the employees that are serving those customers and nothing gets done. It's the worst role. So anyway, Simon, before I let you go, brother, where can people find out more about you or where can people get in touch with you and your team at HYCU? Go to www.hycu.com. 

Simon (00:47:26) - I am also the author of the book, Averting the SaaS Data Apocalypse. Nice. 

Adrian  (00:47:30) - Yes. Yeah. 

Simon (00:47:32) - And you can find it on Amazon as well if they want to learn more about, you know, all of the risks of the shared responsibility model in the SaaS universe and how HYCU can help. 

Adrian  (00:47:40) - I love it, Simon. It's been an absolute pleasure, man. I am super excited to have you on the show and I love the work that you guys are doing and I wish you guys the best of luck in the future. Adrian, this was amazing. 

Simon (00:47:49) - Great to see you, man. Thanks so much. 

Adrian  (00:47:50) - Thank you. 

Adrian  (00:47:52) - All right.