From startup to $500M CARR, Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth at Braze, shares how Braze scaled a growth and customer success team.
We’re in a platform shift, just as in 1988 with the rise of computing in corporate environments.
A case study in the book In the Age of the Smart Machine, The Future of Work and Power discusses work at paper mills in the mid-1980s as that wave of computation came into industrial processes. Before computers, intuition was a key part of managing paper mills. People used their senses to understand the health of the operation, walking the floor and feeling a machine to test its temperature.
Computers disrupted all of that and changed the way people worked. This isn’t new. In this AI moment we’re in, there are still many moments in scaling a company where intuition still matters.
Let’s fast forward and look at the history of Braze.
Building Braze from $2M to $20M ARR
It was 2011 in NYC, and Spencer became the second employee at Braze. 2011 focused on the mobile ecosystem, as the iPhone had been released four years prior and the app store two years after that. At the time, the app store apps were calculators and sound boards before brands and streaming hit the market.
In New York, the tech scene was very nascent, with a couple of known consumer companies like Tumblr and Foursquare. But that was it. If you were building a career in SaaS, you were likely in Silicon Valley.
As an early startup team, you’re doing every job under the sun. You have to be scrappy at this stage, and Braze was trying to find product market fit with no product, no revenue, and no customers. There was no language around design partners or the customer discovery process.
In the chart above, showing the growth from $2M to $20M, you can see what product market fit looks like. This tremendous growth puts wind in your sails, yet it’s also scary because you go from having no customers to many new challenges.
You can see the tripling here in the triple-triple-double-double-double required to get to $100M. This shifted from doing odd jobs to a deep focus on customer success and scaling teams around customer success.
Hiring for Customer Success
When Braze was looking for their first customer success hires, you couldn’t find a CSM with seven years of experience in software because those people didn’t exist yet. So, instead, you had to search for the specific skills you needed for the role.
We get lazy writing job descriptions, and taking shortcuts is a luxury most startups don’t have. Think about what you want a CSM to be: technical, customer-facing, or have industry experience. Every incremental hire with a small team matters, so it’s worth being clear on what you want. Determine the skills you want and how you’ll discover them in an interview.
Customer success at Braze was a big umbrella, with onboarding, CSM, tech support, sales engineering, and more under it. Everything customer facing that required product expertise lived under the umbrella.
When to make the first customer success hire is a lot murkier than sales, but the recommendation is earlier than you think. You want to find a jack-of-all-trades CSM early on and embed a ton of ownership in these roles.
And for early hires at early-stage companies, think about your vision for your career path with the company. You don’t have to leave as the organization scales.
Scaling Challenges for Customer Success
How can you use tech to scale more effectively? The first stage within the CSM department at Braze was hiring leaders to lead sales engineering. They hired tech support people, and they got re-entrenched into the zero-to-one building mindset rather than the rest of the CSM function, which already had a little scale.
They built new processes and brought in new tools to create better alignment into other functional areas. This was around 2017, and CS became simpler and focused on post-sales, retention, and reduced churn.
At the same time, they saw how scaling tech support was critical for the product, and the customers were asking for it. So they pulled the small team they had out and created its own technical support department with an outside leader.
They did the same with their onboarding team. That evolution happened slowly because they didn’t have a playbook for it. Instead, they were careful about their choices and talked to people with more experience at similar stages of growth.
The More You Can Look into the Future the Better
Customer success leaders today often wear many hats, and an area Braze underinvested in early on was technical support. For CS, you’re likely building relationships, guiding strategy, and driving product strategy, which is a different motion from technical support.
You should map out what those things look like for your organization early on so you can look into the future. That might mean automating some tasks, just like the paper mill in the mid-80s. While nurturing relationships is important, teams should be optimized for first response time, time to resolution, and customer satisfaction.
The quicker you can be smart and make early investments that pay off, the better off you’ll be. Yes, that moment of change and disruption is painful, but it’s probably the right thing to do. You can anticipate this with scale and choose your tools wisely.
Choose Your Tech Partners Wisely
It’s important to choose your tech partners wisely, too, which is especially hard in post-sales because the RevOps team is probably highly configuring CRMs for the sales team. CS tends to be a second-class citizen in that ecosystem.
So, figure out what problem you’re trying to solve. Do you want a system that automates playbooks, presents usage data to the team, or creates and tracks a health score? Just like hiring, you don’t want to be lazy here.
Building an Experimental Team
They started a growth team at Braze that Spencer manages. Headcount isn’t the right story for them, though. It’s not about marketing or user acquisition. Instead, it was a cross-functional, data-driven, experimental team.
They took a team of five people, two data people, and an engineer so they could build real automation solutions with independence to do it on their own. Initially, they focused on all the challenges they faced in CS that they didn’t know how to scale.
Usually, your CSMs have side projects that get derailed by more pressing matters. The mythical 20% time philosophy is tough to do in any customer-facing role. Side projects are not a recipe to scale.
Braze invested in this, and the leadership team agreed to do so. That team became the home of business intelligence and the data team. They built an engineering team focused on automation and internal tooling and incubated several teams.
If you have a new idea or experiment, this is the place to do it because they are willing to shut it down if it doesn’t work. Eventually, this team moved out of growth, so their success wasn’t dependent on budget or headcount. Instead, it’s based on the company being successful.
Building Braze from $20M to $200M ARR
This was a novel approach, especially around tooling and data. This revenue chart is 2017-2021 before Braze IPO’d. During that time, Spencer’s team incubated and launched a certification program that served thousands of people, employees, partners, and customers.
Braze went public in November 2021. During the IPO process, they had to look at things related to audit and compliance. While sometimes boring, aspects of it elevated their data.
There are so many complaints about data for CS and sales teams. Garbage in and garbage out. You can’t have excuses like that during IPO, and it was a big forcing function to produce data at a really high bar.
Whether you’re a public company or not, you should hold your teams to that bar regarding the data on which you want to run your company.
Key Takeaways
- Look closely at side projects. It’ll be challenging for customer-facing roles to be successful in doing this at scale. A CSM with a big book of business who is busy fighting fires won’t have time to change a process or improve efficiency radically.
- Maintain a small company mindset to foster ongoing innovation and growth. It’s sad when a company loses that innovation mindset that helped it to get where it is.
- Think through your vision and what you’re looking for, whether in a technology platform, data system, or role you’re hiring for.
- Try to learn from history where you can. The news and cycle we’re in is noisy. There’s value there, but you want to be close to the technology and find something that speaks to you.
