Building a brain for your business

A brief prequel

In a previous life, we built a B2B SaaS company called Newton Software. We reached 2,500 customers by focusing intently on having a great product and keeping our customers happy. We got bought by a company with 25,000 customers. Growing our customer base from 0 to 2,500 and then rapidly to 25,000 taught us we couldn't answer even the simplest questions that inform health. If you want to grow your business, you know that selling stuff is #1, and keeping customers is a close second.

Sturdy was born to solve a HUGE business problem

So, why is it so hard to answer the questions that help you keep customers? Questions like this are almost impossible to answer with yesterday's tools:

• Who is the best CSM at keeping customers?
• Which of our customers asked about their renewal date last quarter?
• Can you let me know every time our buyer leaves the company?
• And the most important question of all, "Is our product annoying or are we doing annoying things?"

If you read this far, you are probably like many other Services and Tech leaders who spend a lot of time examining why a customer canceled. You have built a really powerful "customer morgue." We had one of the best morgues. What we realized, for our business, was that 20% of our churn was unavoidable because a customer went out of business or got bought. (We sold primarily to SMB)

The rest of our churn was entirely preventable. That's right, 80% of our churn could have been avoided.

99% of our data was wasted

What we realized is that 99% of the data that informed churn was read once and then wasted. Customers were telling us how to get better. These insights almost never got to a person who could fix them. Our improvements were built with scar tissue instead of data.

And so we said, long before AI was a thing, that we were going to build a solution that turned every customer conversation into something useful for our product, service, and management teams.

And, it worked.