How Gainsight CEO Jamison Hill grew Gainsight to $200M revenue and 1K customers in 2025.

what's up guys special guest today my guest is nick meadow with gainsight customer success software aficionado leading the company uh launched many years ago uh customer success companies the brand today a five-time forbes cloud 100 recipient their team is now nearly 700 people who have created the customer success category that's currently taking over their sas business model worldwide he's been named as one of the top sets ceos with a software report three years in a row nick you're ready to take it to the top awesome to be here nathan thanks so much you know we were joking about football last time you were on i think back in 2018 2019 we have the washington football team my team has passed dwayne haskins on to you guys i will say don't don't get too excited i'll just leave it at that okay he's doing okay the preseason surprisingly so i don't know but yeah he seems like he can't count on him so we'll center pressure chokes under pressure we'll we'll see we'll see anyways um you're on a tear so so i guess one thing that i want to sort of get focused on really quick your product lines it seems like you're expanding product lines very aggressively you used to just be like how do you comp your like customer success reps and now you have like way more product lines where is the product today how are you thinking about product totally i think a lot of people go through this nathan you've seen this from some other companies you've covered where you start out um solving a point problem and then you're like there's a much bigger problem to solve when we started out with gainsight the point problem was there's a new role in companies called the csm and they need to figure out which customers to reach out to how to effectively manage them identify risk and we'd still do that with a lot more to do there but why do people have csm teams they have csm teams to improve net retention in their company they want to keep their customers they want to get them to spend more money they want them to be bigger advocates that's net retention the number one valuation driver in sas is net retention and we want to be the company to help businesses improve net retention now to do that it's not just about the csm team because you need the sales team to learn how to sell new things to your customers the product team needs to build products that are easy to adopt and use from the beginning and so we went from a single product company to now portfolio products that we call customer cloud customer cloud and i think there's four key things here there's success engagement experience and expansion right yep so customer success which is where we started scale your cs team how do you not have to throw people at it there's customer experience measure how your customers feel about you in terms of surveys nps in application through email and then really deep and natural language processing to understand what are the themes that are coming up are people upset about your pricing model are they really happy with the sales experience number three revenue optimization that's all about now that you have these great successful clients how do you get them to spend more money so forecasting your renewals driving expansion identifying the cross-sell opportunity accounts and then finally product experience which says okay the most important thing is to make your product awesome because everything else doesn't matter if your product isn't awesome so in the app you drop in a small amount of code onboard your users more easily get them to try out new features get feedback from the user in the application and give them in-app support to guide them to the right experience to get them the most value out of your product and nick when you're thinking of these new product lines to go into i now understand the net dollar retention figures like the driving force it sounds like between your sprint cycles on the engineering side but there are as you know multi-billion dollar companies doing just like one of these things i mean look at pendo or product engagement right how do you decide what wedge to launch with in the product engagement category and then decide what order of operations is in terms of what you develop next on the product side in that category a great question and we when we when we decided to go to a multi-product the first thing we got into was px the the product experience area and there's great companies in their pendo walkman they're all very good companies what we heard from our clients over and over again when we asked that if we had a magic wand and we can do one thing to help driving that retention your company every cs leader said product every single one the number product better data about how people use the product better engagement in the product better feedback from the product and so we found a great company that hadn't really launched yet called app forensic we bought them integrated indoor suite and what we're seeing from our clients is they don't want a disconnected experience between what the csm is telling the customer what the sales person's telling the customer and what's happening the product they want all of that connected together companies like adobe splunk autodesk they want all of that stuff tied together versus being silos so it's you know there's great point companies in the space and they do other things that we don't do but we're the only company in the world that can really link together cs product and sales to improve net retention now the last time we came on the show was back in uh again july 2019. you shared with me at that point you guys were working with about 700 customers nick where are you guys today yeah we're close to i think about a thousand customers now a little bit more than that but the asp has gone up a lot too so sort of as you know nathan one of the things that happens when you're multiple products is you actually can drive a lot more spend from your clients as well so yeah so this is something i want to go deeper on because this is net dollar retention we're going to get meta well you like how i see what i did there so you were back then you told me that average rp was around eight grand or annual ac about a hundred grand i imagine you significantly expand that at this point yeah it's higher than that we're as we get bigger it's a little harder to disclose all the metrics now because you can imagine for obvious reasons we feel more careful but um yes it's significantly higher than that which means other people are both buying more of our core products cs but also more of those other products as well nick let me ask you sort of interesting question here if you could not add any new customers no more new logos you could only sell more seats and more products to like your current logo base how much could you grow over the next year well you know it's interesting that that um it uh if you look at our business there's a few factors that drive very natural organic growth there's more csms in the world every year and so that naturally drives growth of our rcs product right and then most of our customers about 17 of our customers have our px product today that means there's 83 still to go buy it so you can go drive more sales there we have these new modules revenue optimization customer experience and then we're launching more and more modules both organically as well as at some point probably some other acquisitions so i can't give you an exact number but it's significant there's a lot of opportunity in our base for sure so then if we combine all the new customers you're going to add here in 2021 plus the expansion historic ones you don't have to give me a flat number but what do you think percentage-wise you guys will grow at this year again these are the kind of numbers unfortunately i'm such a transparent guy i love sharing that stuff but now as you get you know further along you know for disclosure reason we can't share that stuff like we used to um but um what i can tell you is that we think that we grow in some ways gainsight is a derivative off of sas right so as more companies go into sas i mean honestly nathan you're the person that for me to talk to because all these people you're documenting and interviewing and your great list that you build all those companies at some point are like god we got to focus on that retention we got to do this thing called customer success who knows customer success they get to gain sight we've been fortunate to be the leader in the space and so there's this natural tailwind for our business which has been really really cool but one thing just piece of advice for entrepreneurs i think that as you know if you're in a new category the question nathan's asking is actually a really hard one because you can't just go to some industry report right nathan like that's something that in an existing category you go to some report that says oh the market is growing by x but if you are the market if you're creating the market you don't nobody else knows except you and so one of the things we do a lot of is look at primary data like for example bain consulting group did a study for us and found that csm kind of teams are growing about 30 a year overall that's that's include some that are going super fast and so i'm just getting started right and so there's a lot of data out there that helps us understand what our growth rate should be long term well again it's a hot space now what you you sit on all this data on other companies for someone listening right now that's maybe trying to scale and go between 10 million in revenue up to 50 million revenue what is like world-class net dollar retention for that...