Customer.com

Brad Barnbaum had spent the last 20 years building customer support companies. His first major exit was Assistly, which sold to Salesforce for over $50 million and became Desk.com. After three years at Salesforce learning the enterprise SaaS game, he wanted to strike out again. He briefly served as CTO at Airtime (Sean Parker's social network venture), but realized his heart was in B2B, not consumer. In August 2015, Brad and his long-time co-founder Jeremy Seeley (who had worked together since 1996 through multiple companies) decided to launch something new: a modern customer support platform for the post-Salesforce era.

Customer.com was incorporated in September 2015, but Brad and Jeremy made a deliberate decision not to rush to market. They spent the first 18 months building a proper platform—one designed for scale from day one, with extensibility so others could build apps on top. "We set up the company that way. We structured it. We capitalized on it. We wanted to build the proper product for scale," Brad explained. First customers started getting the product in November 2016, and they officially began billing on April 1st, 2017. This long build phase meant they were "in market for five quarters" by the time of this interview, even though the company was founded in 2015.

The platform's value proposition was clear: most customer support systems use basic ticketing that knows nothing about the customer. If someone emails saying they have a problem with pants they ordered, the support agent can't correlate it to their order, invoice, SKU, or size. Customer.com solved this by pulling in data from Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Spree, and custom proprietary systems. When a customer contacts support, the agent sees everything and can take action with a single button push instead of navigating three to five systems. Brad focused on mid-market companies and above, targeting customers with ACVs over $5,000. He had zero net churn and was seeing existing customers expand by 40% quarterly—some growing from 10 seats to 100 seats in 12 months.

Their pricing model was simple: $50/month, $100/month (enterprise), and $169/month (ultimate), with seat-based expansion as the primary lever. Most customers landed on the enterprise tier. Rather than chase SMBs on the $50 plan, Brad doubled down on mid-market and above, where 80% or greater of recent deals landed. By the time of this interview (June 2017), they had between 1,000 and 10,000 customer logos, though some had thousands of seats, meaning impact far exceeded pure customer count. They had fortune 50 companies using the platform. The VC rule of thumb is triple-triple-double-double growth; Customer.com was 6X'ing revenue in their first two years post-launch, which Brad noted was "quite strong compared to other companies at our stage in time of market."

By June 2017, Customer.com had raised $38.5 million across a seed round of $2.5M, Series A of $10M, and a Series B of $26M (just closed). They had 52 employees, all in New York originally but expanding to the Bay Area, LA, Austin, Seattle, and Toronto. With the fresh capital, Brad said they would "get a little more aggressive" on payback period, entering "hyper growth mode." The average customer paid about $100 per month with expansion driving net negative churn well into negative territory. Brad's advice to his 20-year-old self: he wished he'd thought about SaaS earlier. His on-prem struggles in the late '90s and early 2000s could have been avoided with a cloud-first mindset from day one.