[00:00:00] Advith Chelikani: I think reframing the problem always and keeping it framed that way as you're building the company is super helpful around problem first and then figure out what tools you can use to solve the problem. In the engineer's world, it's like not getting too excited about like a programming language, but like understanding what the problem is and then figuring out what set of things can be used to address that problem. So I wish more people, I guess, were super focused on the problems that they want to tackle as a business that feel like they can build a big business out of.

[00:00:33] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.fm, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:45] VO: How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.

[00:00:58] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:01:09] Andrew Michael: Hey, Advith, welcome to the show.

[00:01:12] Advith Chelikani: Hey, Andrew. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me on.

[00:01:15] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you for the listeners. Advith is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, the all-in-one B2B customer support platform. Prior to Pylon, Advith was a senior software engineer and team lead at Samsara. So my first question for you today is where did the inspiration and motivation come from to build Pylon?

[00:01:35] Advith Chelikani: Yeah, really it was me and my co-founders always wanted to start a company. And so we were kind of aligned in the school of like, how do we build a big business? Can't really imagine a life without getting to be a founder. And so we're just like all that type of person, if that makes any sense. And so that was like the inspiration for starting a company. And that came before the actual idea.

[00:01:53] Advith Chelikani: So it's not like we're passionate about customer support or customer success. I think we're the type of people who can get intellectually, or intellectually curious and so we can get excited about most types of things and go pretty deep on things. And so all of us did this entrepreneurship kind of fellowship in college called KP Fellows. And there's a lot of like getting to meet other founders and getting to be with other people who are both like high caliber on some technical thing, but also like the type of person who wanted to be a founder.

[00:02:19] Advith Chelikani: And so in terms of how we actually came up with this idea, right after the pandemic happened, there's a lot of time to explore different spaces. And so kind of both altogether, all three of us, Robert, Marty and I, and separately explored lots of different ideas in different spaces. And if I were to skip ahead to the lessons we learned in terms of what company we wanted to start, it was something that was in the B2B space, just given our background and giving.

[00:02:40] Advith Chelikani: And that allows you to kind of micro pivot after you start the company because the space is so large where you necessarily will like find something that becomes a big business. I think if you are adept enough at maneuvering and being willing to change what you're working on and two, there have to be a really compelling why now. As in if you started the company two years ago, it would have been too early on either the dimension of like problem didn't exist, solution, tools first building a solution didn't exist or willingness to pay didn't exist or did it two years in the future, other people would have already started and you'd be at a disadvantage. So those were the vectors we were looking at.

[00:03:11] Advith Chelikani: And then for this idea specifically, the why now for this idea is B2B, it felt like B2B companies were having an omni-channel moment the same way consumer did maybe 10 years ago where all of social media started blowing up and you started reaching out to brands on like Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or WhatsApp in order to get help for the t-shirt that didn't arrive for you. The same idea for B2B, it felt like was happening post pandemic where a lot of businesses including pre-legacy businesses started moving online, using platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams to talk to customers.

[00:03:41] Advith Chelikani: That felt like it caused all your business tools to break. And how do you run your support motion or success motion when you're at scale, have people DMing you questions about pricing and renewal or asking you support questions in an anonymous Discord? How do you actually scale your business? This is the new way of businesses interacting. So we were just talking to tons of people and uncovered that as a trend in the world. And so we're willing to bet that that trend was going to blow up over time.

[00:04:06] Advith Chelikani: ChatGPT also came out at exactly the same time. It was like, okay, if we own conversational data, then we can do a lot of pretty interesting things with driving workflows. So that's like the TLDR.

[00:04:18] Andrew Michael: Very nice. And I like this sort of the thought process, starting off like with the market, understanding that if you able to adapt and maneuver around, like you'll be able to find something in that space. And like just really thinking that, asking that question of like, why now? Why should this exist today?

[00:04:36] Andrew Michael: Cause I think often as well, like you can either do either way or the other. You can start something and it's just like, it's just too late and you're into this red ocean or too early and you're into this blue ocean, but the market's really not ready for what you have to build. And I think startups like many, many startups have died, I think, for either one of these reasons. So getting the timing right is, is really important and critical.

[00:04:57] Andrew Michael: Nice. So tell us a little bit about like where you are today. Obviously it's been how many years now? Three years since you started the company?

[00:05:05] Advith Chelikani: Two years, two years and two months. I've always started in November 2022. And yeah, in terms of like where the business is at, we're 23 people today. I started last year with six people and then grew to 20 people at the end of last year and then hoping to bring on more people this year. Half the company is engineering and then half and then the rest are split between kind of everything else. So got a couple of AEs, have ops, design, marketing, support, customer success. So kind of first over second, I know a lot of the functions.

[00:05:31] Advith Chelikani: Customer base is like around 400 customers who definitely have a very scaled type of customer base where the spread between the smallest and largest customer isn't what you'd see out of like a company that kind of has mega seven-figure deals. And so we're very horizontal products so we can sell to lots of businesses. Essentially any business that has customers that sells to other businesses is in our long-term ICP. And at least today, we focus on companies that are tech or tech-adjacent. Somewhere in the like 100 to 500 company person range is like kind of target ICP for us.

[00:06:02] Andrew Michael: All right, very nice. And you obviously, your introduction introduces the CTO of the company, but prior to us chatting as well, you mentioned that you actually also owned the support and success functions. To start, I'm keen to first of like dig into that decision. How did you come up with it as founders to say, okay, Advith, the CTO should also look after support and success.

[00:06:24] Advith Chelikani: Yeah, I think though all three of myself, Marty, Robert and I are all technical, we all used to be engineers, I think we are kind of here to build a big company and are the type of people who like to just problem solving. And so we flex between a lot of the different challenges that come up as the company's growing. And so I think we would do whatever needs to be done that we find is interesting, which is like most things in company building, I think.

[00:06:44] Advith Chelikani: And so I don't think there was a great explicit decision. It was more just I started taking on that work. And one of my co-founders, Robert, also kind of helps out a lot with that and just started running from there. It's also very useful for our type of product. This is not a reason we had in mind ahead of time. But looking back, it's helpful to have product very aligned with post sales for us specifically because our product is in the post sales space.

[00:07:06] Advith Chelikani: And so we held on to the support and customer success roles as doing it as founders for as long as possible because we don't have that background. So it helped inform... like If I'm doing 100 support tickets a day, then I... And I'm using our product to do it. I have a very good understanding of what workflows we might want to productize or where the pain points of the product are. Just getting an intuition on how to run the post sales motion by doing it ourselves. So that's been great. Yeah. Looking back,

[00:07:32] Andrew Michael: I think it's a very interesting, like, obviously, like a lot of companies try to adopt this idea of having engineers, like answer support tickets. And I've seen it be very effective first hand as well. When I was previously at Hotjar where we used to have meetups and one of the days, like everybody needed to answer support tickets during those meetups. And I think like, it always used to be the scenario where like an engineer would hear this bug once he'd answer it.

[00:07:55] Andrew Michael: And again, answering these like, why am I answering this? Let me just go fix it. And then sort of like end up creating this really good feedback loop. And I think we used to see some of like the fastest turnaround in changes and fixes on those days, because as you feel the pain yourself, like having to do repetitive tasks, I think nothing's more painful to engineers than that. So being able to automate it and fix it.

[00:08:18] Advith Chelikani: Yeah. So people on the team, they have a lot of agency to like see what is happening from customers directly related to the areas of the product they're touching, be it people reporting bugs or feature requests or improvements. And they can just see that because we're dogfooding Pylon ourselves to see all the customer communication and they can jump on those things.

[00:08:35] Advith Chelikani: And then I think, as I was saying earlier, also, we have this nice property because post sales for us is very aligned with product where a lot of the stuff we build is for customers. So if that makes sense versus for prospects, obviously, we're trying to close deals and grow the company. That's the goal. But inevitably your prospects have the same needs to some extent than your customers. And it's very important to keep customers happy or specifically the way we think about it is customers are always right about the problem that they're facing, maybe not about the solution they suggest to that problem.

[00:09:04] Advith Chelikani: Our job as like the company to look across the customer base and, and identify that, you know, these five customers are complaining about this problem. We maybe have the better skill set for understanding the technology and the current state of the product and how we can expand it to address the problem. But it's great to be able to draw from customers on the problem. And I think staying close to that is important for as long as you can.

[00:09:26] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And so talking a little bit about customers and product perspective, how do you see sort of this feedback loop coming in? So obviously one channel is the direct support tickets that are coming through. How else are you collecting this feedback and how are you staying close to customers at this stage?

[00:09:44] Advith Chelikani: Yeah, I think probably 90% of our communication with customers is async and we dogfood the same trend that the entire company is based off of, which is we open up a shared Slack channel with all of our customers, at least the ones that use Slack, which means they feel very empowered to just like give feedback or ask questions with a very low barrier to entry and then it's our job to figure out how to using our product to scale that high density of people giving us feedback and talking to us.

[00:10:07] Advith Chelikani: So that's like 90% of the volume of things that we get from customers. It could be bug reports, feature requests, upsell renewal like asks, any number of things. And then we also, at least today, I probably do like 6 to 8 customer calls a day. That's just a combination of commercial stuff or actually trying to upsell or renew someone or walk them through an add-on or onboarding or like, oh, this person is not getting value out of the product. How do I talk them through understanding their business use case and what our product and trying to recommend a solution?

[00:10:38] Advith Chelikani: It could be like, oh, they got a new VP and talking them through like oh, we're a new player in the space. Why does it make sense to stay on us? So like all of those things help shape the perspective on both the product and like what the messaging should be and you know, what our differentiation is against existing people. So that's kind of how we stay close. I guess, just like making sure we're okay with getting overloaded with kind of customer saying things and then figuring out processes on our end to make that scalable.

[00:11:02] Andrew Michael: And scalable. Yeah. And I definitely see sort of that being a challenge as like a new entrance in the markets, like as you mentioned, like VP is coming and saying, okay, why should we like trust the startup two and a half years, as you mentioned, which is one thing, a barrier on like the sales front, I would say. But what are some of the barriers you're seeing sort of on the retention front then for the business? Like what does retention look like for you? I imagine the product is very sticky, but there's almost no business that doesn't experience some level of churn. So what does that look like for you and how are you approaching it?

[00:11:34] Advith Chelikani: Yeah, we track churn pretty closely. Luckily, I think given the type of product we are, we're a system of record that supports a core function in the business, sometimes even several functions with any post-sales folks, like customer success account management solutions, professional services folks also using the product. I think we've had under 20 customers churn, mostly, I guess what you'd call, unregrettable churn of people who's... We sell also SMB, mid-market and so people get acquired or their company goes out of business. That's been, I'd say, 15 of those folks.

[00:12:08] Advith Chelikani: We've had a couple of folks where it's like fixing a perception problem around, hey, we know we can do what they need, but we haven't conveyed that properly. And then they think they need to upgrade to like a more standard legacy tool. That's happened twice, I think, and one of those customers is coming back now. So I'm excited about that. So that's one reason. I think we actually... Product velocity for us covers a lot of sins in terms of not being scalable yet on the post-sales front.

[00:12:36] Advith Chelikani: And it's just been myself and now we have Dan, who's been awesome, our first CSM. So what I mean by product velocity covered all sins is we're just pushing out so many new features, I think, with pretty high quality that at least I feel from my conversations with people that they feel the kind of current of the company, if that makes sense, like moving them forward.

[00:12:53] Advith Chelikani: It's like, oh, you guys have so many new stuff. You're like, I'm reimagining a lot of workflows. Even if I am not getting that much value out of the product right now, I know that I can get a lot of value out of the product because of all the stuff you're pushing out. And we're lagging behind on actually enabling that if that makes sense. And so I think for us, product velocity covers a decent amount of sins that we have to catch up with on the post sales front. So that would be, I guess, our secret weapon for retention today is that we're just shoving out a ton of features.

[00:13:21] Andrew Michael: Yeah, very nice. And yeah, as you said, I think you mentioned around 400 customers previously, 20 of them churning over the last two and a half years. I think that's a really great start. But to your point, those are like, it is a product that becomes the system of record. And it tends to be a lot of sticky product.

[00:13:37] Andrew Michael: And I think like, there's this interesting idea as well. Like one of the things that I have on my list of like to do is when I'm thinking about company is like, how sticky is this product going to be before thinking about building it and definitely like pile on text the box for that, because like, it's one of those things that maybe it might be a little bit more difficult to convince and sell into orgs, but once you're in the org, then it becomes very difficult to pull out.

[00:14:02] Advith Chelikani: That's a nice property of this type of product where yeah, it's hard to get in and maybe hard to displace for a large company, their existing system. But once you do, you have the same positive property that you get. And so as long as you keep innovating as a product, I think, and keep doing all the necessary things to enable people, then you get to stay for a long time and you get to expand to adjacent teams. Yeah. And so that's nice.

[00:14:23] Andrew Michael: Very nice.

[00:14:24] Advith Chelikani: One more point on the retention, I think, is that a lot of our churn is also from monthly or like I would say like 80% of that churn or 90% of that churn is from monthly customers. And so that's folks where we... this is like the scariest set of customer because they are mentally not committed because they weren't able to pay the yearly price upfront. So they're not sure yet if they're going to get value out of the tool or like what state their business is in.

[00:14:47] Advith Chelikani: And so they're unsure and then that also makes us unsure. And so that's like definitely a big basket of people that we're now explicitly trying to identify. Who has high ARR and is monthly and like, why are they monthly? Is it because some compelling event that it's okay. It's like, oh, I have a contract for my legacy provider that runs out in a couple of months. That's why I'm monthly. Okay, that makes sense. But, oh, if I'm monthly because no specific reason, then that's scary. Yeah.

[00:15:12] Andrew Michael: Yeah. No, for sure. And I think for a product like yours specifically as well, it is a scary signal. I think there's a lot of other products where monthly would be acceptable, but in this case, it's that system of record. Like it's one of those things you don't want to pull out. So why would you not benefit from the saving of the product side of things?

[00:15:28] Advith Chelikani: Exactly.

[00:15:33] Andrew Michael: Nice. And so the team today, you mentioned like half of your engineers, like how much of your engineering team then is actually doing like success and support? Are there others, or is it just like the three founders that are focused on it today?

[00:15:46] Advith Chelikani: Yeah. None of the engineering team is focused on success and support. As I mentioned, we just hired Dan, who's our first customer success manager. And then we've had John on our team for three or four months, who's been doing all of our support and adding another person under team Matt next week who will help be helping out on the support front.

[00:16:02] Advith Chelikani: Stuff gets funneled down to engineers when required for like making a change of the product or debugging something. But generally speaking, no, the engineering team is pretty focused on just features, net new features. Yeah.

[00:16:14] Andrew Michael: And what is like one of the biggest things that's keeping you up now as an early stage founder?

[00:16:20] Advith Chelikani: Yeah. In terms of business overall, probably the biggest thing is like hiring and keeping the hiring bar high. I think we understand like the great benefits you receive when you hire someone who's great. And so though it feels like the limiting factor of the growth of the company is people, especially on the kind of post sales and go to market front, probably not having as many people as we'd like and being prepared for continually trying to scale up the venture pace.

[00:16:43] Advith Chelikani: It's just how do you actually, how do you do that? How do you hire great people at a faster pace than you were before? Most of the company today is like directly in network. And so I want to say a half plus of the team is directly from my last job, which has been awesome getting to work with a lot of those folks again. But the benefit is it's a known quantity. And so you know what folks are good at and what they're bad at and like what they're going to crush. And so you know what you're getting into, if that makes sense. And so that's awesome.

[00:17:06] Advith Chelikani: So how do we like reach out to their network or keep unscalably hiring ideally even for this year? But scalably, unscalably hired by building processes to squeeze our network for all the people that we really want to bring onto the team. So that's a big thing that we want to do a great job at this year.

[00:17:24] Advith Chelikani: Another thing has been, oh, we don't know these roles. We have previous jobs only hired for engineers largely. And at Samsara, I also was on the panel for hiring customer support people. So I have a little bit of a sense on what to look for there. But we don't know any of the other roles we've never hired for. And so it's like ramping into like understanding what great looks like in a lot of the roles that we ourselves have never done or don't even know many people in.

[00:17:49] Andrew Michael: And how are you approaching those hires then? Is it seeking like external guidance? Is it you actually taking on those roles to begin with and figuring things out? It's like, what does that look like?

[00:17:58] Advith Chelikani: Especially, it's especially the second thing. At least I personally think that slope trumps experience always. And so if you're a smart person, you can always figure out any role that doesn't require hard skills. Maybe if you're not an engineer and you need to figure out how to write code on the spot, it's a little hard. But for roles that are mostly soft skill-based, I think if you're willing to learn and put in the work and you have a high rate of learning, you can figure that out.

[00:18:20] Advith Chelikani: And so that's been great for us going into all of these roles, making sure we can do it and specifically how it needs to be done for our type of business. And then in terms of actually ramping on what a good person looks like, it's been literally just talking to a lot of people, interviewing lots of people for the given role. And then once you talk to 50 people, you have a rough idea of the archetypes that kind of are out there that usually consider that role, whether or not you want those archetypes or you want to like, go make the uncommon hire.

[00:18:47] Advith Chelikani: Like, for example, Dan, our CSM who just joined. He like studied computer science at Stanford and then was at McKinsey for a long time. And so it's not a standard customer success hire probably, but somebody who I think would be able to ramp onto something very quickly and kind of set up processes and figure out what needs to be done next for the role. So I think those type of people are great. And so it's just been talking to a lot of people that's been discovering what things are required.

[00:19:11] Andrew Michael: Yeah. From my experience, I don't think there is a standard CSM path. Like I was talking to so many different customer success leaders and operators and everybody all has sort of a unique way that they got into customer success. It was never like, this was what I always wanted to do. And I just landed. It's always been a different path.

[00:19:31] Advith Chelikani: Yeah. Cause I guess no one in school knows about this as a role. So that makes sense.

[00:19:35] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah. So obviously, like you mentioned, you've grown quite fast as well then over the last couple of years, like head counts. Almost three X-ing last year, and this year you plan to grow some more. What are the motivations to keep like growing the team size? Obviously you mentioned as well at the start that some of the benefits now from LLMs and like there's a trend now in most companies to try and see how we can be more efficient and optimize and how are you thinking about that balance between efficiency and scaling head counts as well?

[00:20:03] Advith Chelikani: Yeah, because the market we're in is so large, it feels like it's okay to get efficiency later if that makes any sense. People are already efficient now and that efficiency, I think, comes from hiring great people and then sure, giving them tools. The whole engineering team uses Cursor, for example, and that I think has made people way more productive than previously.

[00:20:24] Advith Chelikani: We've actually had less, I think, tool adoption on the non-engineering side for AI tools explicitly that are like they're supercharging what we're doing. Our product, I guess, is one that's been helping a lot for our post-sales motion. But in terms of how we think about efficiency versus, I guess, growth, we're just trying to... Grow is definitely still top of mind because it feels like the market's so big and we have so much momentum that we can just keep doing that.

[00:20:48] Advith Chelikani: The people is like a second order effect. And so it's more like, how do you grow? Well, you need to build more product and then sell more product. And then when you're selling more product, then you have more customers to support. And so you need more folks supporting those customers. And basically I'd rather last give up kind of getting a lot of feedback from customers only when it feels like things are really breaking rather than like push customers away because we need more efficiency for whatever reason. And so I think we're trying to punt on some of that stuff until later, if that makes sense. Yeah.

[00:21:17] Andrew Michael: Yeah, no, it makes sense. I think anyway, you're still a very small team in like the grand scheme of things, especially when you think about like the product, the market that you're going after, so. Just curious to see how you're thinking about it as like an early stage startup now, and I think there's definitely like two schools of thoughts on this thing. And definitely sounds like there's a big opportunity in front of you to go out and attack and like building a really solid team is the best way to go and do it.

[00:21:44] Andrew Michael: So the product then is like now being operated as well from the feedback that's being looped in. Churn and retention is like pretty minimal for you today. How are you thinking about growth then from a product perspective? Where are you seeing like opportunities in the market and how do you see things changing now in this evolving market? Cause I think what were guaranteed channels before now has slowly started to evolve and how do you see growth and how you thinking about it to pile on?

[00:22:15] Advith Chelikani: Yeah, I think two types of two, like, I guess, levers. One is like in the product in terms of expanding the surface area of the product, which is basically we sell into some team at a company, usually customer support or sometimes customer success. And so how do we expand the surface area of the product so more people are getting value, which for our pricing model correlates to say like more seats in the product or more a higher tier because more features are being used.

[00:22:39] Advith Chelikani: And so for us, that's a lot of the features in our product today are about kind of reactive things, which is typically what you associate support with. It's like customer rights in and then how do you run your business workflow on top. We're expanding more to like proactive features more useful for like customer success account management.

[00:22:55] Advith Chelikani: Like how do you run your renewals process? Or how do you know what's going on with a specific customer before you hop into a call with them? So these proactive features increase the footprint within the org that we can sell to or that people will find value in the product from. And so that's been one.

[00:23:11] Advith Chelikani: Another lever we have is add-ons, I guess. And we've been using AI for this where we have two different AI products on top of our core platform. One is AI agents, which are these execute more fully end-to-end autonomous things. Today we have what we're calling conversational agents where people ask a question, how do you just deflect the question based on some set of knowledge that you might have.

[00:23:32] Advith Chelikani: And the cool thing is our product has a knowledge base in it as well. So a lot of people will store their documentation inside of us as well. And so we have like a full ecosystem is within our product for a lot of people, if that makes sense. And so that's one. And that's actually got pulled out of us from buyers because I think in the type of segment we serve, which is B2B companies, like people don't... I don't know if people should automate all of their questions right now or try to...

[00:23:56] Advith Chelikani: To your point earlier, I don't think efficiency should be top of mind for some of the people where it is top of mind. It's like if you only have 50 customers, unless you're trying to build maybe a certain type of bootstrap business, you don't really need to try and automate everything immediately, it feels like. As long as you know you're doing stuff in a way that can be automated later, it feels sufficient.

[00:24:13] Advith Chelikani: And so we built these agentic features more to prepare for the future, whereas a lot of this technology is getting way better pretty quickly. And so more and more stuff can get automated. And also, people are getting obviously more friendly to that idea of automating some amount of their work. And so that's why we built those.

[00:24:29] Advith Chelikani: And then the focus is, at least in the short term for a lot of what we're calling AI assistant features, which are human in the loop type AI features, or can you draft an answer for me? Or can I search across all of these customer conversations to identify product feedback or trends in the bugs people are reporting? Or I can ask about surfacing anomalous interactions with customers where people are unhappy? So those are two things we're upselling to our customer base now as like other vectors for growth, I guess.

[00:24:55] Advith Chelikani: And then another vector we're thinking about is continuing to go upmarket, which basically just increases ACV and product is stickier for larger customers. And a lot of the features we're building are actually more valuable for people with bigger teams and more complex use cases. So that's like my vomit of like maybe growth ideas on the product side.

[00:25:13] Advith Chelikani: And then maybe I'm gonna go to market side. We've been getting a lot of success from LinkedIn. Marty, one of my co-founders, been doing a great job of just like kind of posting about what's going on in the company, industry things, getting a lot of eyeballs on the company. And so that's been a big channel for us. And we're not sure how far it scales, but it's been scaling pretty well so far. And we think it can keep going for a while. And so that's one channel.

[00:25:35] Advith Chelikani: And then a nice property of our product is that we're end user facing. So our customers' customers engage with our product when they get support or they interact with our customers, if that makes sense. And so we have this end user virality. And because we're a horizontal product, end users [inaudible] us.

[00:25:51] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah. I think that's like a very great loop that you can keep driving. And obviously the more customers, then the more exposure you have for your product and interest there as well. And I think that the LinkedIn one is well, like I've seen like many, many companies now these days, like really taking advantage of it and seeing excellent results as well, that would definitely like for me starting something new again, would be like one of the main channels I'd want to get started with, speaking to because it just feels like one of these high leverage things. And at the moment, at least the algorithms seem to be in the favor of the start-up content and making it work.

[00:26:28] Advith Chelikani: No, totally. Yeah. So we've been seeing a lot of success from that. So that's been awesome. And I think my co-founder, Marty, also does a great job of identifying things that we can post about where it's like, people just want to see- what's a lot of the content we post is also people just want to see what's actually going on and we're actually the type of people who live close to stereotypical startup life, just because it's fun and that's the type of people we are. And so we just post about what we actually do. And I think people find it interesting.

[00:26:52] Andrew Michael: Amazing. And you obviously as well, you raised the series A not too long ago. I think it was from A16Z. What was that like? What was the process like for you? Obviously A16Z being one of the like top, top venture firms globally. Like how did that go down? How does it feel today? And have the pressures changed?

[00:27:11] Advith Chelikani: No, pressures haven't changed because the goal hasn't been achieved, I guess. So it's a nice fun moment, and we have more money so we can try to do more things. But I think feels like we have the same set of stuff to de-risk and kind of keep being great about our execution.

[00:27:28] Advith Chelikani: The process was thankfully, went pretty smoothly for us because one of the investors on our cap table was actually a general partner at another fund. And so she had been seeing our investor updates. And as we were able to show momentum in the product and revenue. She approached us like being pretty interested in doing our next in our series A. And so we're able to use that as a moment to consider whether we should fundraise and then run a quick fundraise process.

[00:27:53] Advith Chelikani: We talked to a handful of people that we already had existing relationships with for the most part. And so Jennifer, who's our partner at A16Z has actually, we've known socially for a while. So she did this kind of same internship program that me and my two co-founders did. And so we've known her in that capacity for a while. And so it was great. It's kind of maybe great to get to just reach out to her and have an existing relationship. Already knew she was smart and, and then we'd probably get along with her great. And so I made things easier.

[00:28:20] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah. Actually I spoke to Jennifer like probably two, probably four years ago now with a previous startup at some point. So familiar.

[00:28:29] Advith Chelikani: Nice. Small world.

[00:28:30] Andrew Michael: It is a small world. Very nice. Okay. I have a couple of questions that I ask every guest. So I want to make sure I ask you as well. The first thing is what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish in you when you got started with your career?

[00:28:45] Advith Chelikani: At the risk of like repeating a point, I guess it's like the product velocity can cover your churn since for a while. It's like, if you're- technically speaking, right, if your product is great solving a use case for people, I think at least in the early phase of the company's life, you can- without a strong, like actual explicit focus on that, if you're just building something people find value out of, that's like how people keep using that thing.

[00:29:09] Advith Chelikani: And then I think as the company scales, you have all these other problems that pop up because of the customer base where it's like, oh, even though I have a ton of awesome product, like we have so many different use cases we're catering to, how do we make sure each person's use case, they know how to get the product to fit their use case, especially if you're building this kind of horizontal product.

[00:29:27] Advith Chelikani: So I think we naturally had high product velocity from the beginning because we're all engineers and like that's in our blood. But just like, if I knew how much that can cover for that that would be nice to know ahead of time. Yeah.

[00:29:41] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. I think definitely as well, like from the perspective, I like the quote as well that you mentioned around the velocity and like covering all sins, the way you mentioned it, like churn sins. I think that makes a big, big difference. So, because ultimately, as you mentioned at the start is that like, really people come to you with a problem. And if your product solves that problem, like there should be no reason for churn that are within your control. Obviously there's things that are outside of your control and the velocity and the speed at which you can meet those problems and solve them for customers, like really has a huge impact.

[00:30:14] Andrew Michael: So I think maybe like in the context then of like building startups and I'm sure people come to you and ask questions and I'll seek advice as well from you. What's one question that you wish more people would ask, but they don't?

[00:30:27] Advith Chelikani: I think a lot of people maybe get stuck up on the solution part of building a company rather than the problem part. I think if that makes sense, if you're building a company to address a specific problem. And so I think a lot of people, especially maybe this top of mind because it's now where people ask about like, how do I use AI for this, which I think is a wrong framing of a thing.

[00:30:50] Advith Chelikani: It should be like problem first where like this is my problem. And maybe I think AI could be the answer to a lot of problems to be clear. But I think reframing the problem always and keeping it framed that way as you're building the company is super helpful around problem first and then figure out what tools you can use to solve the problem.

[00:31:06] Advith Chelikani: In the engineer's world, it's like not getting too excited about like a programming language, but like understanding what the problem is and then figuring out, you know, what set of things can be used to address that problem. So I wish more people, I guess, were super focused on the problems that they want to tackle as a business that feel like they can build a big business out of. Yeah.

[00:31:22] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's that saying like sort of fall in love with the problem and not the solution and be willing to be able to discard solutions and sticking to the problem. Very nice, Advith. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting today. Is there any sort of final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with? Anything they should be aware of or keep up to speed with your work?

[00:31:43] Advith Chelikani: You can find our website at usepylon.com. We're building a bunch of pretty cool stuff in the post-sales space. So if you're a B2B company who doesn't love the options out there for how to support your customers, we have to please give us a look. And then we're also going to be putting out way more content on like how we're doing post sales and just like how we're thinking about things because we're in the post sale space as a product, we get to talk to like hundreds of companies doing post sales and getting to aggregate like kind of how they do stuff. And we're going to be putting out more content. So excited about that.

[00:32:13] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah. So for listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything in the show notes today for you. Advith, thank you so much again for joining and I wish you best of luck going forward.

[00:32:22] Advith Chelikani: Cool. Thanks, Andrew. Nice chatting with you.

[00:32:25] Andrew Michael: Cheers.

[00:32:26] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm.

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[00:33:03] Andrew Michael: Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.