Episode 496 | "The Press Covers Exceptions, Don't Compare Yourself to Slack or Zoom"

This interview was recorded several months ago, but is still relevant despite the pandemic. Colin Nederkoorn, the co-founder of customer.io has taken a unique approach to building their company. Customer.io does marketing automation for the entire customer lifecycle. They have raised funding, but not traditional venture money, and they've run it more like a self-funded SaaS. Colin and his cofounder John left their jobs with no savings, and they set out to build an analytics tool. Their story is powerful because of their unconventional approach and ability to persevere through hard times.

The finer points of the episode:

• 4:05 - The customer.io founder journey
• 5:23 - Their approach to selecting investors
• 7:01 - Reflecting on how Colin and John bootstrapped a SaaS app after leaving their jobs with no savings
• 8:02 - Why they pivoted from an analytics company to selling marketing solutions
• 13:15 - Finding the balance between innovation vs following the best practices
• 18:37 - How customer.io became a remote company, and the advantages/disadvantages of building a remote team
• 22:05 - What customer.io is doing to support the bootstrapping startup community (and why they care about bootstrappers)
• 24:30 - Marketing approaches that customer.io used in the earlier days
• 31:55 - The highs and lows of building customer.io

Items mentioned in this episode:

• customer.io
• helpfounders.com
• hugo.team
• customer.io/bootstrapper
• Connect with Colin on Twitter