The Next Generation of Customer Success - with Jamie Davidson, Founder and CEO Vitally.io

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Jamie Davidson, the founder and CEO of Vitally. We'll be covering four main topics with Jamie today. First, the impact of the Catalyst and Tartango merger and the customer success category.
Second, Jamie's vision of how the role of customer success will evolve over the next few years. Third, how the measurements of customer success need to evolve to measure the ROI. And then fourth, discuss Jamie's role as CEO and how it's evolved since the early days of Vitally through their funding round. So Jamie, would you mind taking a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast?

**Jamie Davidson** (1:25)
Sure. First, thanks for having me. I've been in startups for, I don't even know, 12 years now or so. I have been a CTO of two companies before this. One of those I was our co-founder of. So Vitally is my second go-around of starting my own company. And I got into customer success. So Vitally, for those that aren't familiar, we're kind of a next-gen, a very modern customer success platform, but I think a unique take on sort of the space and how we facilitate customer success. I think we invest more heavily in like sort of workflows, day-to-day workflows, project management, collaboration, automation, to really back a really functional, impactful customer success experience. But yeah, it might seem a little odd that a two-time CTO is or decided to start a customer success platform. I actually was chief customer officer for about a year at my last company.
The last like year of my tenure there at that company, sort of due to just some randomness almost, like there were just some problems that needed to be solved. And I above all things, probably I'm hopefully a pretty decent problem solver. And so I kind of thrust myself into customer success. This was back in 2016 and pointing myself chief customer officer of that company. That was my introduction to not only customer success, but the space of customer success software. And as I got familiar with that space, I got very intrigued at the market at the time and the opportunity I saw in the market. And so I decided to pursue that opportunity and start Vitally. It's been an interesting journey for us over the seven years, I guess, now that we've been in business.
Currently, we're 85 employees.
We actually just publicly announced it across 500 customers last week.
But for about four years, it was like five or six of us working on limited funding, just really focusing on the product. And so it's a very unconventional journey for a founder to take from that perspective. But now, we're back by the likes of Andreessen, Nex 47 and others. We raised about $40 million in funding and excited for the future of customer success.

**Ray Rike** (3:30)
Well, you know, you're the second founder of a customer success platform company that didn't grow up with customer success, but saw the issues when they took over customer success. So it's the story of so many founders, Jamie, is they've seen a process. It's broken. So they decided to go out and fix it by creating a company. But let's start with the big news of the month in the customer success space.
And that's the merger of Tatango and Catalyst. What does that say to you about this category, Jamie?

**Jamie Davidson** (4:05)
Well, I mean, I'll answer it from two perspectives. I mean, one, it's certainly good and bad. Like it's certainly good for vitally the business, which is the selfish answer to the question. I mean, there's there's no denying that.
It's an unfortunate distraction for probably some other customers.
I am but that's that. A customer-assessed platform is critical for a lot of businesses. And so when yours faces an uncertain future, it leaves you with a bit of a tough decision to make, a distracting decision that comes out of nowhere. Do you write it out? Do you look at the market and whatnot or whatnot? And so it certainly isn't going to be positive for all involved by any means. But to answer your question directly, what does it say about customer success?
I think it just says that these customers thought, I mean, sorry, these competitors thought that this was the best move to try and compete in the current market. I don't think it says much of anything, honestly, about customer success.