How Customer.io CEO Colin Nederkoorn grew to $100M revenue and 2.9K customers in 2025.

it's my pleasure to introduce our next speaker Colin neor he's the founder and CEO of customer.io so welcome Colin uh when I was in my mid-20s I rode my bike from San Francisco to Boston and it was about 4,000 miles and took uh 57 days of riding and there was a great time to go through a trans and kind of figure out what I wanted to do next and while I was writing I was applying for product management jobs uh and I was expecting to move to San Francisco I like sold all my stuff packed some boxes and shipped them all off to San Francisco and then I got a job in New York and so I had to go to San Francisco get these boxes and then ship them back to New York and um in New York is where I met my I I went from like one product management job to another product management job and at that second one met my co-founder and started customer IO and 12 years later and it's been like beyond my wildest dreams in terms of how how the company's done um and um there's uh I I've attended a bunch of talks like this where someone tries to share their lessons and most of the time I like listen I'm like yeah I'll remember that and then I make the mistake myself uh and and I sort of remember the the talk and remember the lesson I'm like I I sort of I think the best I can hope for is that you feel a sense of affinity or like closeness with me when you make these same mistakes um and if you avoid them great so um the the period of time that I'm going to cover in this talk is from 1 to 10 I'll talk a little bit about the first million um but but this is the period in uh the colored area that I'm going to talk most about and where where we made these mistakes and so over the next 20 minutes I'll I'll briefly touch on our founding story talk about some of the decisions that we made and uh what I think we got right and then when we talk when I talk about the the mistakes there's three categories of mistakes and then three mistakes in each category um and then I'll briefly touch on 10 million plus but actually just curious in the audience how many folks here are like uh below 1 million in ARR and then 1 to 10 above 10 all right cool so yeah this is like targeted at the one to 10 folks uh I guess on the earlier stage of 1 to 10 but hopefully there's some lessons in here for everyone so um it's probably no in in retrospect it's probably no accident that I'm still working on this business after 12 years and I think there's a bunch of decisions that we made in the early days when we were trying to figure out what type of company to start and so we came up with this criteria um we wanted to build a SAS business because everyone knows especially in this group SAS businesses are awesome uh and we wanted to sell to our peers and we wanted it to be connected to a company's Revenue so that if there was a downturn people wouldn't turn it off um and so we we focused on um the the product was originally focused on helping people get more customers from like free to paid and we wanted it to be technically hard because that would keep it interesting um and so the the original product emailed People based on what they did or didn't do in your application um and the technically hard part is to make sure you're confident enough in what people didn't do um because if you look at analytics products especially in this era 2012 when we started like a lot of them are doing sampling and you can't sample in order to send an email message that's like perfectly targeted and so when we started we our our goal was to get five companies paying us 10 bucks a month and so we started in April 2012 with uh with those five companies and as I Was preparing for this talk one of those companies is still our customer today and is like a 100K LTV plus so it's it's like it blew my mind that they're still around and still on this on this Revenue chart so um fast forward two years and we get to a million in AR um and basically the story growing from 1 to 10 from the product point of view obviously it got it got a little more refined a little better but we were still giving people the same fundament fundamental value that we were going from Zer to one we added these things like uh sending a transactional newsletter or sorry a transactional email which is a little bit easier than a trigger based message and then sending a newsletter which used the segmentation we had built to send triggered messages except you're just sending it to the group all at once and so we added those and and but really that fundamental um thing that we did for companies was what helped us scale from from 1 to 10 and there's also a ton of mistakes in here even though the revenue curve looks a little bit a little bit smooth tons of mistakes in here which is why you're at this talk so the mistakes that I want to talk about the first category of mistakes are these things that don't make the beer taste better if you haven't heard that quote before uh it's from uh what's his name Jim Jim Cook who's the CEO and founder of um of Sam Adams or the beer company behind Sam Adams and basically the idea here is that you want to spend as little time as possible uh or as little effort as possible on the things that don't make the core customer experience better or the core thing that customer value better and as much time and effort as possible making that uh improving that and so easy way to remember it is focus your thing uh Focus your effort on things that make the beer taste better and then people uh people problems are always going to be there so I'm going to cover three that we made uh in in this stage and then the the other mistake that that I made was thinking we could do it all ourselves and not looking outside of the business to to get some help from other folks so first up things that don't make the beer taste better this is a picture of a bridge it's the monor Lang laa bridge in Quebec uh and we had our servers in a data center in in Quebec because early on we thought that it was more much more cost effective to be on bare metal really beefy servers um and we and and we put them in Quebec um partly because well we thought like if you're a European company maybe it's like okay to have your data in Canada if you're worried about it being in the US and if you're in the US you still have like good latency between the US and Canada in any case the reason I know about this bridge is the fiber got cut and our very cost effective servers didn't have a fat enough pipe as backup so they were totally inaccessible and at this point um I think we had a few hundred customers but all of the data that they were sending us was not making it to our servers fortunately we we were using AWS in front of these servers so we were like queuing up the data but um I I didn't expect to be having to think about physical infrastructure um and learning about you know how long is it going to take to splice a bunch of fibers that got cut I don't even know if it got Cut Above the bridge or below the bridge but this stuff shouldn't be the things you're spending your your time and energy on as a as a company just trying to get started and so you know it it took a while we had a bunch of other issues at the data center which I won't cover today but um we ended up moving to to Google Cloud eventually and um realized that you our customers don't care where we host they care that it's super reliable and the servers stay up and running and the next um the next thing we did that didn't make the beer taste better uh was picking this amazing distributed data store to use and it was a Clos Source database we we had all these requirements we were trying to fill and we ended up uh picking a database that was essentially like a single database but you could throw as many servers as you wanted at it and it would just scale up and um that this database company ended up getting acquired by Apple they didn't renew our service contract and so we um we encountered this issue where we were trying to scale up and the entire cluster fell over and we couldn't you know it was really hard to get support because they the company had been acquired and um I'm sitting at about hour six of 12 thinking about the letter I'm going to write to our customers we had millions in AR at this point and we have no path to recovery we don't know if this is going to come back and I'm thinking about like we're probably going to have to shut down the business and what am I going to say to them that we can no longer service them and we can't recover um and fortunately I was like reaching out to people on LinkedIn and eventually got someone super experienced on on the team that got acquired to help us recover but it took us because we were on this like really I mean it's it was amazing Tech but because we were on on this very special technology it took ages to we had to rewrite our entire backend in order to migrate off of it and now all of our customers every customer has like a mySQL database backing up their work we don't need a distributed database to do our service and it's way more reliable and interestingly when you have a distributed database you actually have a single point of failure and now we don't have a single point of failure for any or every customer has a single point of failure uh with backups of course but you can't like take out our entire customer database um and then I'd say the last um the last mistake we made super early on was at this time there is this like PR eration of all these JavaScript MVC Frameworks and we decided to to bet on one and in retrospect the lessons I learned after we sort of gone through it was well we were on it before version one and the difference between version 0 something and version one was so significant that we had to rewrite our application that's not something you really want to be doing in addition to that when we hired folks I either they had to be experienced in in this technology or we had to train them up so the onboarding time for new Engineers was was longer and then even though it's gotten some decent adoption over the years like it's still not it didn't take over the industry so we're on this technology it's still in our stack um but as as our products gotten more mature we tried to diversify away and pick pick other technologies that are kind of easier to get started people are more familiar with and um yeah I think that like ultimately everything we imagine that like oh this will help us build a more responsive application it'll feel more like a native app customers didn't care about that like they just wanted to use a crud app and for our servers to like do the hard work behind the scenes they didn't care about the the interface um as much as we had expected and so th those are all the things that don't make the beer taste better um and these are my my people mistakes so I think that the the mistake here is not either one of these not you you need Scrappy people or you need like systems Builders it's that both are appropriate for a different stage of your business and and a different part uh a different time in your business so when you're just getting started and you need like your you know you need to spin up your first sales contract a scrappy doer is who you want that person will just get it done and figure it out um or you're trying to get a new high your first like hiring process figured out that that person's great for that and when it's time to scale up and that Scrappy process starts breaking they won't be able to tell you that they're going to continue doing it that way and continue approaching the work that way but the way you figure out that you're not doing it right anymore is you talk to people who are um whose businesses are a little bit ahead of you and you talk to the people in those roles and and then you realize all of the things that that you're doing wrong um and then you have to replace that person with a systems Builder and that person it's not it doesn't make sense to hire the systems Builder too early because they probably need a team around them to help them um accomplish all all the things but like you can't scale by being Scrappy um because it it just doesn't work and everything breaks and people get frustrated um and so you know both of these work it just totally depends on where you are in the maturity of that part of your business and then um a mistake that that we made for probably way too long and I feel like I'm on the other side of not valuing sales um but in in the early days like we wanted to build a business like MailChimp that was all self-service and people people would send us emails and say heyy I um can I talk to someone and I would get on the phone with them and they would ask me about the product I would understand their business I would help them understand if we were a good product for them and if we weren't I'd sort of like send them somewhere else and I didn't realize at the time but this was sales um and when we tried to ramp up this process I created uh I I hired people who were salaried and I called them onboarding Specialists and um you know they they were sort of order taking as people would like come in and want to buy and want to talk to someone and it took us many years to get from that and in many incarnations to what we have now where we have a more traditional sales process with accoun execs and um you know we have a chief Revenue officer and um our sales process is way more way more typical now but it took me way too long to just get you know get to the understanding and you if you're there now trying to figure out how you're going to reinvent how people buy from you stop like just call it sales is my advice um and then the last thing which is sort of not inside of your business but we got um we got bitten a little bit by this like not understanding the people outside of your business and your and your customers one of the things that happened to us a lot is that as um as our customers got bigger either they they started small and they grew really quickly or we acquired larger customers they were more complex organizations and we'd find that especially the growing ones they'd hire a VP of marketing and then rip out customer IO and want to replace it with something else um we didn't have any connection inside of the organization and so this always caught us as uh by surprise and I think what's what's on screen is maybe a uh the when Shopify canceled with us so they were like our largest customer back in 2013 14 and then canceled I think this is in 15 and um you know I think like after this happened a bunch of times where we kept losing our largest customer we created customer success and now the job of one of the jobs of customer success is to have the pulse inside of the customer inside of the customer's company to help help us understand when things are not going quite right or when there's a risk of change um and or a risk of cancellation so that it gives us time to address the whatever the issue is um now this this team in our company is about 35 people who are who are csms today and then the we we tried to do it alone a bunch or we tried to go alone um and in our first year towards the end of 2012 we almost ran out of money and I tried to raise over the like November December period uh and VCS go on holidays like Angels go on holidays like everyone's on vacation from Thanksgiving to the new year and so it's like near impossible to get anything done uh then I didn't I didn't realize this and that experience of like this the business being being so new and almost dying made me not want to rely on investor money in order to stay alive and so it was really important to me to be to get to cash flow break even as as soon as possible I think the the mistake that we made here is we had a really complex product that required a lot of people that I think the size of our team now 250 people it feels really comfortable to run the business now but back when we were 10 people everyone was burning out everyone's like exhausted all the time our product needs to be on you know up and running in performant 247 365 because we're Mission critical for our customers businesses and um basically like by when we didn't raise so the the chart that's up here is is something that I came up with called the strap ratio which is how much money have you raised total divided by where's the revenue like like what's your ARR in your business and I think that for me super early on it's not healthy to be below one when you're like trying to invest in building all of the stuff that you need in order to build a scalable business it's fine like you want to be there later on um because that's it's not good to just raise a ton of money and then never make ARR that justifies the amount of money you raised but early on you can really hold your business back and stop yourself from scaling by not having the the team and the resources around the company to do that and then I also didn't formalize a board until 27 I was like I think like most firsttime CEOs I had read these horror stories of VC's firing CEOs and I was like I don't want that to be me um and so I resisted the idea of having a boss um we did like party rounds of investment so that nobody had too much skin in the game but by 2017 5 years in I really wanted a boss and I wanted someone else looking at the business from the vantage point that I was looking at it um and so we started doing those quarterly board meetings it was hugely valuable uh and I it's like my favorite thing now is to prepare for and go to our board meetings because I I was deliberate about the board that we created and um really enjoy the people that that I work with there and then the the last thing uh which I didn't do soon enough was getting a peer network of of CEOs around me I think about two years ago I started meeting with this group and the these CEOs are all around the same size as us and um you know we talk about our our challenges together we cheer for each other it's like amazing we get together a couple times a year but I've known all these folks since before we had a million in revenue and we could have been doing it ear earlier but I didn't make that happen and I was sort of living in my own head for a really long time um and you know I I think it's great to meet other CEOs and and stay connected with them um so I think I'm at time so uh this this part if you want to learn about all the mistakes we made here you'll have to come to my talk mistakes from 10 to 100 million um but I I can tell you like the the one thing that you'll need to figure out when around about the time you get to 10 million is what do you want from from the business because at about 10 million you could sell unless you've taken a ton of money um if you're bootstrapped and you get to 10 million incredible but you can sell the business and it can be life-changing for you but if you keep going and you keep building there has to be some other reason um and and for me the the reason is the opportunity to like make this a much bigger outcome for like everyone on the team and I get I get to enjoy working with a really talented team of execs around me uh and we're fortunate to have this like business that seems to keep scaling um and so that's that's the why for me and uh also making like a massive impact for our customers and on the industry so that's that's my advice figure that out by the time you get to 10 and it'll help you be clear on what what's the out you want to drive for um so over the past 20 minutes talked mostly about these uh these mistakes that I made from from 1 to 10 and uh thanks [Applause]