Announcing Our Series-A Funding: Helping Businesses Turn Customer Success Into A Company-Wide Mission
Today we announced our Series A funding: a $15M round led by Accel. Full Press Release
What does the funding mean for the Customer Success community?
When Kevin and I first started Catalyst, we understood customer success is more than just a department. From Trader Joe's to Adobe to Slack, the success of the customer is the most important driver of a world-class company.
The best businesses in the world prioritize customer success as the responsibility of the entire organization:
Product and Engineering Org uses customer feedback to inform the roadmap - including what to build to enhance the existing product and how to innovate on features that will excite new prospects
Sales Org funnels feedback on what potential customers do/don’t like about the product
C-Suite and Executives leverages customer health reports to make informed decisions for the long term goals of the business
These are just a few examples of how each department is responsible for company outcomes using the voice of the customer.
Often times, these departments work independently from each other - not talking to one another, and not aligning the customer voice in an optimized way.
If you read our post when we first launched 2 years ago, Catalyst was derived from an internal tool we built to solve this exact problem. The internal tool was used to manage 1M+ customers and 100M in revenue, but more importantly, that single tool was used by every department as the single source of truth for the health of our customers.
Fast forward to today, Catalyst is now used by some of the fastest-growing companies in the world, and what we’ve built will change the entire future landscape of customer success.
Customer Success - A Company-Wide Mission
One of the things we learned early on from Customer Success Leaders is they struggle to get other departments involved in what they are doing. This is problematic when product managers are building features without seeing customer feedback and C-level executives aren’t in sync on what health scores to monitor.
According to Deloitte's 2019 Enterprise Customer Success (CS) Study, businesses that adopt customer success broadly across their organization “drive deeper customer relationships and uncover more revenue growth opportunities they might have otherwise missed.” However, the study goes on to report that “very few companies have been able to elevate the strategic importance of CS within their organizations.”
When companies first deploy Catalyst, our primary measurement of success is the ease of getting all of your customer data into our platform. Once onboarding is complete, we’ve seen Customer Success Leaders organically start to invite key stakeholders from other departments to join in on using the platform. Because of our ability to easily ingest 3rd party data, layered with a beautiful user experience, the Catalyst platform is very inviting to other team Leaders. Catalyst creates an immediate knowledge share across the organization highlighted by feedback the Customer Success team is gathering at the ground level.
Below is what one of our customers has to say about their experience first hand:
“I’ve never seen a tool get adopted as quickly as Catalyst,” said Joshua Sanders, Head of Customer Success at Tray.io. “Not only does my team use it every day, but our engineers, product, and executives all want access due to the context it surfaces regarding customer engagement and their corresponding projects.”
Future of Catalyst
In the past year, Catalyst has more than doubled our employee count, and we’ve experienced record revenue growth month-over-month. Our product has matured from supporting small teams to now enterprises with sizable customer success organizations.
As you can see from our NPS feedback below, even as a young company, I’m proud of the product our team is building and the impact it has on our customers.
But we’re not done growing. We have a lot of work ahead of us to achieve our vision of Catalyst as the world’s most impactful Customer Success Platform (CSP). Some of our upcoming goals include:
Integrations - Continue to build deep ties with all the tools our customers use. The challenge will be figuring out how to ensure an integration makes sense in the overall workflow of the Catalyst platform. We’ve already started this development through our investment in integrations with Salesforce, Zendesk, Mixpanel, and Segment.com.
Automated Data Recommendation - I’m excited by the amount of data we are gathering from our customers - usage patterns, spend fluctuations, customer health, etc. The ability to crawl/understand this data and provide automated recommendations to our customers regarding churn and upsell will be key. Sure, there will always be necessary manual involvement from the Customer Success Manager who owns the customer relationship, but we aim to do even more of the heavy lifting when it comes to identifying customer risks and rewards.
People - No matter how powerful our CSP becomes, it won’t matter if we do not have a world-class Customer Success organization at Catalyst. Going above and beyond for our customers, being in the trenches solving problems, and ensuring they have the best end-to-end experience on our platform will continue to be an area of pride and focus for us.
Funding
It took a tremendous amount of hard work to get here. The Catalyst team took a moment to celebrate this Series A milestone last week by taking a trip to Sag Harbor, NY together. Amongst all the pool basketball, BBQ, board games, and laughter, it was clear to me we have the best team in the world.
As a small group, in just 2 years we've been able to build a product that transforms the way organizations manage their customer base. I’m still mesmerized by a moment recently when one of our customers praised the Catalyst product and indicated she thought we were a team of 100+. When I clarified we are a team of 18, she was shocked. Small but mighty.
With this new funding, we plan to significantly increase our team size in the areas of marketing, sales, customer success, engineering, and product. If you’re interested in joining a company whose mission is to build the world’s most intuitive and beautiful SaaS software, learn more here.
I want to personally thank all of our amazing supporters and customers who have come with us on this journey. We look forward to bringing you more features and maintaining the world-class experience you’re accustomed to.
