How Customer.io CEO Colin Nederkoorn grew Customer.io 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...