[00:00:00] Elias Torres: You know, there are some companies that will create pods and teams to manage a group of customers and work as a team. Right. And so I think that we should see more of that and those teams be able to handle more than what they currently had handled today, right. At scale. I mean, I… I'm envisioning, you know, a world where this, there was just too much, as specialization, right. Because we were not able to train and to teach, right. And manage people doing multiple roles. But I think it's inevitable that we're gonna have a little bit more of that consolidation to avoid so many handoffs, right?

[00:00:00] 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.

[00:01:01] 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.

[00:01:14] 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.

[00:01:25] Andrew Michael: Hey, Elias, welcome to the show.

[00:01:27] Elias Torres: Thank you for having me, Andrew.

[00:01:29] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Elias is the founder and CEO of Agency AI, the AI agent for B2B customer success. Prior to founding Agency AI, Elias was the founder and CTO of Drift and the VP of engineering at HubSpot. So my first question for you, Elias, is what motivated you to build a new product in the customer success space when your prior startups have focused on acquisition with sales and marketing teams?

[00:01:55] Elias Torres: I think I want a bigger problem. I think I'm looking for a harder challenge. I think partly it's motivated by my experience at Drift. It's fun to market. It's fun to say you have a great product. It's fun to convince people. There's a thrill I get from closing a sales deal. It's amazing. But the reality is that you close a deal as a founder and then you move on to close another and then you hand off the customer to somebody and customer success.

[00:02:27] Elias Torres: And then you don't have time for that customer. It's like you're always obsessed with closing new deals and growth and new revenue. But then that doesn't give you a legendary company. It's not something you can just throw people at the problem. It's not something that you can just ignore. It comes back to bite you. And so I think that lesson of me not being able to build a 30 billion, a $10 billion company with Drift kind of left me with something, something left to finish, right?

[00:02:59] Elias Torres: And so instead of trying to build another acquisition, big magnet, I said, why don't I go and help other businesses being able to build their own legendary companies, right? By helping them really attack this problem head on.

[00:03:14] Andrew Michael: I like that a lot. I think, like for the most part, like everyone listening to this will always like, Drift was a huge success, exited to Vista for around 1.2 billion, I think it was. And you, coming at it and saying, well, that's just hasn't scratched the surface yet. Like I want to build this legendary company. And it's interesting that you sort of landed that this was the space. This was the way to go about doing it because I think this was not, like sort of the natural thought process for most founders and it's still probably not to date.

[00:03:40] Andrew Michael: I'd say it's definitely shifted over the last few years where more and more founders realize, okay, like we need to pay attention to this retention thing and sure. And if we really want to build one of these legendary companies, but it's interesting that you've come to this conclusion, even after like perceivingly what seems to be a huge success from the outside of Drift as well.

[00:03:58] Elias Torres: Yeah, it's a big problem. And it's such a big problem that even there's a huge difference between B2C and B2B. You know what I mean?

[00:04:08] Andrew Michael: Yeah.

[00:04:08] Elias Torres: It's so, I think that that's something that people need to dedicate a lot of time. I mean, if you, I think in a company, right, the most important things in a company for it to be successful, it has to be people, then product, then be able to get customers, market acquisition sales. But then the hardest part of a business is managing the customers, right? And I don't think we devote enough time to that. I think it's the least developed part of entrepreneurship in the world.

[00:04:39] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, and I think it's because like, naturally like the steps to get there and just the rate of failure is so high at those first few steps that we've had a lot more practice, I guess, at the earlier stage. And then there's a lot fewer people to talk about the later stage success and like the hard work that comes after the messy middle of retaining and keeping customers because yeah, I think from that point onwards, like a lot of times, I think startups get to this point where they hit this growth ceiling and it's like this oh shit moment.

[00:05:06] Andrew Michael: Okay. Like if we don't fix this churn thing, we're actually not going to continue to grow no matter like, these current growth rates. And that's when things start to be taken serious. But I think the number of startups that actually get to that point are few and far between. So it's, I think, natural why we don't spend as much time focusing on the topic and discussing it.

[00:05:23] Elias Torres: Exactly.

[00:05:24] Andrew Michael: So tell us a little bit about Agency AI then, like, what is the focus? Where did the inspiration for the product come from?

[00:05:30] Elias Torres: Yeah. I mean, I think the inspiration comes from multiple angles. I was, after Drift, I took a little bit of, first time I was able to take a break in my life, you know, where you have that feeling where you don't have to work. You can, it's okay. You can just like not worry, take a month off, maybe take two months off. I ended up taking seven, made a lot of friends, went to different places in the world.

[00:05:56] Elias Torres: But then ChatGPT came out and I was like, this is the moment I've always dreamed of, right? As an engineer, as a builder. I'm like, I was tired of creating database wrappers, right? And just put a little database on the cloud and you know, store some fields and send them over a messaging app. It was email or chat. And this is something that I've been looking for, as… since I was a kid. Right.

[00:06:23] Elias Torres: And so I think, to me, I said this, I got to go back and I have to figure out what to do. I was introduced to OpenAI and I started consulting for their clients. And that's how I found myself learning how to use the LLMs. You know, now I'm here coding them. I forget. Where's my book? I'm coding my own, you know, LLMs by hand. And then in those consulting gigs, I was consulting with a public company that I'm close to. They were asking me to improve their product.

[00:06:55] Elias Torres: And what I was doing was really, what they asked was really, help us generate advice for customers. If I give you a customer, can you generate advice for the customer based on what the other customers have done in our app? And so it was really a product feature that I was being asked, but then he hit me when I was like, wait a minute, if I could do that, I could help the CSM prepare.

[00:07:27] Elias Torres: For the QBR, you know, if I can do that, I can help them send this strategy right to the customers. And so then I started playing with avatars and I started playing with the LLMs and the scripts and the presentations and so forth. And that's when it hit me where it's like, this is possible, right? It's possible to scale and make the process more efficient to reach and help more customers than what we're doing today.

[00:07:56] Andrew Michael: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, like the moment in time now is really amazing. I was listening to a podcast as well with Jensen Huang this year of Nvidia, I think it was on the G Squared Podcasts and sorry, B Squared Podcast, and I was like, amazing just to hear from his perspective as well as like, this is like a once in a lifetime moment in time as well to be building.

[00:08:17] Andrew Michael: And I think from your side, coming from that perspective, like seven months off, like you probably could have just continued that trajectory, but then yeah, this new exciting technology. It's interesting because like most of my friends are, like I've spoken to the bad exits afterwards. They always have this itch. And like, I only really have one friend that I go to today that every time I speak to him, Hey, what's going on? Like, what do you think about doing?

[00:08:38] Andrew Michael: He's like, ah, I'm good at the moment. I have a few topics I'm interested in learning and like he's been on this trajectory now for three years, but like he's definitely a rare person. I think most people that go down the path of entrepreneurship, like you have this bug and it keeps at you all the time. And I can definitely see, like ChatGPT being like one of those pivotal moments. It says, Hey, like you need to come back and work on this. And there's something exciting. Yeah.

[00:08:58] Andrew Michael: So it sounds like as well, then like Agency AI is really trying to help automate a lot of the backend work that CSMs are doing today when it comes to like preparation for QBRs, putting together playbooks, and how are you going about putting this together in as well? Because obviously on the show, we have a lot of CS leaders listening in, and what does it look like on the back end? Like, are you working with any design partners, and how are you going about putting the product together?

[00:09:21] Elias Torres: Yeah, we're working with design partners, and really trying to figure out who the right design partners are, right? Like, I think this is similar to what we said at the beginning of the podcast, right? It's like I have access to a lot of people and a lot of people want to work with us and build something together, but I cannot serve 100 at this stage. I want to pick the right people.

[00:09:47] Elias Torres: We're in that phase. We have many people in line that would like to, but we want to make sure that we really understand the problem. There's multiple problems in this space. There is the problem of helping, I call it co-pilot versus agentic CSS, CSMs, right? It's like, we could help a company that has 10 CSMs and has 100 customers or 200 customers, right? And help them on a daily basis.

[00:10:14] Elias Torres: But we also have customers, design partners right now that are on the, you know, 100,000 customers. And they're saying, please help us. Like, how do we do this, right? On a more, you know, autonomous or guided way, right? And so I think that that's really what, we have different types of design partners and different problems. I think what it's important to understand is to accept the state of the world today. And I want to understand, you know, people's urgency and ability to, or interest in innovating, right?

[00:10:49] Elias Torres: But I think what I realized is that most people don't get that we truly have to build a customer intelligence, like a customer brain. Right. That's first and foremost. We can't just start, just dropping emails or a transcript of a call and expect that to be AI, right? Or expect that to be an agent. We really have to create, and that's kind of what we're doing, is that you have to create custom models for, and use a lot of data, right?

[00:11:17] Elias Torres: To understand what's really happening with your customer base, right? I think those old customer health scores that people have been building for a long time are useless. I just don't think so. I mean, if it's red, if you see a dashboard and you have like this five, this 10 customers, this 20 customers are red, does it tell you what to do? Does it tell you why? You know, this tells you what the… And so like, we need to just raise the bar and understand that we need to be building something way more intelligent than what we built in the past.

[00:11:52] Andrew Michael: That's, yeah. Now I think like definitely all products are being rethought today in the context of AI and how do we move away from the sort of traditional data in, data out to really like this building a level, layer of context that you can then dive into and gather information and get insights from actually.

[00:12:10] Andrew Michael: Because I think most of the problems today is that like in the CS space or depend, you can like pick a product, but like most of the experience is lying in individuals heads and it's like within the experience of the individual CSM and that sort of doesn't translate in across the board and across the team and the same thing happens in data as well.

[00:12:27] Andrew Michael: Like the only reason we need data analysts is because they have the context of the business and they understand what's going on. And the same thing applies across the board in different roles. And being able to build a context layer, I think, is going to be definitely an interesting challenge for companies to crack.

[00:12:42] Andrew Michael: You also mentioned, as well the challenge, I think, on the data front that, depending on the customer type and the design partner, you have the high-touch model where it's almost like a one-to-one managed account versus this tech-touch model where you want to deliver a better experience from a customer success standpoint, but you just cannot do it at scale.

[00:12:59] Andrew Michael: And which direction are you leaning towards? Because my assumption would be that there'll be more data on the tech touch side and the higher volume. But then that may not necessarily be the truth in the context of like, what is in the context layer and what do you understand about these customers? Because at the handheld side, you're actually having these more personal relationships.

[00:13:18] Elias Torres: I think there's enough data on either side, right? Especially if you look at the enterprise, right, which is the kind of the place that I'm playing on, right? I think most of the larger companies that I'm speaking with, they have both models within the same company, right? And that's something that it's just painful to be able to say, like, below this threshold, you do not get a CSM. No human for you. But there's a lot of usage data, there's a lot of calls.

[00:13:48] Elias Torres: And what you learn from the high touch could be leveraged into the no touch. The brain is the same. There's just so many things that we're doing wrong in CS. It just gets me fired up because it's like, oh, you're a touchless customer, therefore you must not be human. You must not have needs or you might not have money or you must not have feedback that is important to us or you might not have a great reputation.

[00:14:15] Elias Torres: You know what I mean? It's just silly how we slice our customers based on your number of employees at the company or based on how much you pay in the contract today, right? And so I think what I wanna do is be able to build one brain that understands every single one of your customers and how they use and benefit from your product, right? And use that intelligence to help each one of them as if they were your only customer.

[00:14:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah. No, definitely. I think that's like one of the challenges, though with business, as you say is, like you spend so much time trying to acquire them, you have this handled experience. And then as soon as you pass them off, like that's like set and forget almost for the most part, and especially if they're on that lower end.

[00:15:00] Andrew Michael: I think though today things are going to shift dramatically. And I think customer success is going to become more and more important as we move forward into this market, especially with the way pricing models are evolving now towards this sort of, like outcome focus, as opposed to a standard subscription fee or per seat. Like you see, like a lot of companies now innovating really on like the number of tickets resolved or the number of like completions or whatever it is.

[00:15:23] Andrew Michael: And in that scenario like, usage becomes, like, vital and your customer success now becomes a central point in terms of growing revenue. Whereas before, like it was, to some degree there, but it wasn't, like ultimately like you actually need to get them to the successful state. So how are you thinking about this in the context of the business now and the way you're approaching?

[00:15:43] Andrew Michael: Like, because at the same time you're trying to build a product for, like the market as it is today, but that market is evolving rapidly. And how do you think about that and where do you think it's going?

[00:15:53]  Elias Torres: Yeah, I think that, absolutely. Like I will not. Yeah, my, our business will have to be outcome based on, right. It's… There's no other way. Right. And so, you know, we probably will be, you know, charging upper customer manage for different levels of intelligence that you are asking us for different types of works and functions and workflows that you want us to execute for you. You know, for some of the customers where we're managing the renewal process, right?

[00:16:24] Elias Torres: And so those are different things, right? So it's completely exciting for me to go, move away from the seat based approach, right? Where we were charging someone for barely using a seat, right? Or having too much fluctuation. And so I'm really excited, right? And I really wanna help our customers switch to that model as well, right?

[00:16:47] Elias Torres: And I think that, that in itself, the shift in billing and pricing could be one of the major forcing functions for a huge switch, right? And a rebuild of the old companies and allow new companies to come in, right? And so I think this is really exciting, right? It's gonna create that platform shift, that seismic shift that we, the up and coming entrepreneurs are looking for, right?

[00:17:14] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And I think that's also like, for the CS listeners of the show as well. Like I think that's where the role becomes also a lot more important and like it becomes more a company function as well. Like in the past where CS was like, seen as an individual team that managed it, I think slowly more, okay, like this is something we need to be embedding in our systems from day one throughout the process and thinking about retention and customer success throughout.

[00:17:39] Elias Torres: Yeah. I mean, I think you hear this a lot, right? It was just like, you know, there are some companies that will create pods and teams to manage a group of customers and work as a team, right? So I think that we should see more of that and those teams be able to handle more than what they currently handle today, right? At scale. I mean, I'm envisioning, you know, a world where there was just too much specialization, right?

[00:18:09] Elias Torres: Because we were not able to train and to teach, right? And manage people doing multiple roles. But I think it's inevitable that we're gonna have a little bit more of that consolidation to avoid so many handoffs, right? To the point that, will CSMs become more salesy or more sales people become more CSMC, right? And come together to focus on the journey of the customer. Right? Because they'll have support from the AI side to manage and scale those relationships.

[00:18:41] Andrew Michael: For sure. I think that's one thing that most customers are not going to miss is going to be the handle from sales to CS. Because it is definitely one of those points in friction where it's something where you have this knowledge existing already and then you're going to, repeating the same things to like one CS empty sales. It's like, it's a point of frustration for customers more than anything else. And like, this is something that can be automated and with a bit of assistance with agents can help for a long way.

[00:19:05] Elias Torres: I think that that's a huge source of pain, I think, for everyone. And I wonder, how do we make it better? What I'm doing at Agency is that all customer communication comes to my email. There will only be one email. It's always going to be to me. I'm going to be managing the discussion with every customer. And so will be my agents. And so will be the rest of the team. Right. People will participate in communications with the customers and different channels, but the front door, the main channel, is my email forever.

[00:19:43] Andrew Michael: Yeah. How do you scale that?

[00:19:46] Elias Torres: AI agents.

[00:19:48] Andrew Michael: So in practical terms, like how are you thinking about doing that as well? Cause obviously it's one thing saying AI, but what does that really mean in practical terms, like from an inbox perspective and like supporting different quests flying into the inbox.

[00:20:00] Elias Torres: So like, that's what we're building at Agency, right? The ability for me to be able to communicate with all of my customers, right? For example, like, imagine you had, like everybody in my company reads my email. I have three people, for example, right? That can reply on my behalf to a customer. There's so many communications that I don't need to write that message myself, right?

[00:20:28] Elias Torres: It's like are you available to meet tomorrow at eight o'clock? Right? And like the person's, you know, so I can scale much, much larger, right? Than most founders at this stage, right? That they're struggling to keep up communication with the customers. I can manage a huge pipeline of design partners and relationships with them because I have a help, right? That starts with human that is aided by our system in AI that is like, for example, with Agency.

[00:20:58] Elias Torres: There's never an email that is forgotten. There's never a message that a customer sends that we forgot about it, it fell through the cracks, right? Because Agency is attached to my email and is managing all my communication with my customers. He knows who my customers are, he knows what they ask, he knows to follow up. And that in itself already allows me to be three to five X.

[00:21:22] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I can see that. So it's almost like the Copilot now for like a Cursor AI in programming, but really trying to unlock that on the CSM front.

[00:21:32] Elias Torres: The problem is that, think about it, you have a CSM, right? And so a CSM to be effective, they would technically have to, every time they lift their finger to do something for a customer, they technically should be writing a reminder task for that task that they did.

[00:21:52] Elias Torres: If I email you to schedule a QBR, I should put a reminder that I emailed you and you haven't booked a meeting. Then I should put a reminder that I need to work on the deck. Then if you booked a meeting and you cancel it, then I need to put a reminder to remind me to schedule you again. You know what I mean? Every time I meet with you, I should put a reminder to schedule a follow-up. And so it's like we are asking CSMs to do something almost impossible.

[00:22:21] Elias Torres: Every task that you do as a CSM generates five other tasks. And each of those tasks generates five other reminders. And so you would spend all day writing reminders. So what if I completely offset all of that? That's just basic project management that is redundant, it's boring, it's just unnecessary. We need to alleviate that. But what's most important is, be able to understand the customer.

[00:22:51] Elias Torres: It's like, if I can have AI understand all of the customers and their needs and answer their questions thoroughly without me having to go look at that information, how much time is that going to save me? It's just, I think people have not been able to taste what the possibilities are with AI because there's not many systems besides ChatGPT and they have seen what I've been building and so like people are still stuck with like, how is this going to work? But I get to live in that future now. Right. And so It's really exciting for me every day. Right.

[00:23:22] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I mean, I'm amazed every day. And like, I actually had to come to like, I met up with a couple of friends on the weekend and I called him old because they were like, Oh, I don't see like, this ChatGPT, whatever, it's nonsense. It's just an LLM. And I was like, you guys are like, I, just so far out of things. You don't see what's coming. Like I get to play with the stuff every day. And like, and I think it's like, Oh, you hear this often as well. People are like, Oh, I tried ChatGPT. It's useless. It didn't do this or didn't do that.

[00:23:44] Andrew Michael: And I was like, I think if you know how to prompt it well, and you know how to get the most out of it, it's amazing. But if you like just going to go and I think one thing I've ever realized still today, like, is the sort of a level of like expertise required to get the most out of these things. But I think that's only a point in time now where that is a requirement. And it's one of these things, just like a version in time and like things are going to get better, they're going to evolve and the rate of speed of change is going to just be insane at this point. And I think what–  

[00:24:10] Elias Torres: Yeah, but I think people don't understand this though. This is, the systems are already extremely powerful today. Like what you're saying is maybe true of ChatGPT but the problem is that I'm amazed how little applications have been built on top of these LLMs. I'll give you the opposite. And I'm surprised every day using my product when I have customers say, when I'm demoing something and they're like, I'll give an example, right?

[00:24:39] Elias Torres: So I was like. No, actually, this story is different. I was talking to Sequoia, right? So I have frequent meetings with Sequoia. They want to know the progress. And I opened my email to show them how far I was in legal conversations and security with the prospect, right? And it was like, look, look at where… We're like, almost there. I can't believe I'm getting this level, this size of a customer across the line, right? And they're like, why are you showing me this in your email?

[00:25:11] Elias Torres: Why don't you show this in your tool? Right. And I was like, sorry. And so then I went and they say, why don't you ask the question, what's left to close this deal with so and so. And I said, I don't know if, you know, if, I don't think he's going to just, you know, and so I tied that in.

[00:25:36] Elias Torres: And it was an answer that made my jaw drop, right? It was… I didn't need to open my email and show some red line as an evidence. I had the entire answer of what were the missing steps and what had happened, right? That most teams are just always scrambling in the CS world to get to the, you know, and say, like, figure that out. And so I didn't need to have a complex prompt. I just asked the question, what does it take to close Android today?

[00:26:06] Elias Torres: That's all I ask. And so that's what I'm saying. We're at a level of living in this world that I can't wait to give to everybody, right? And because it's like, we gotta move forward fast, right?

[00:26:21] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think that's still at this point though, like you need to build the product around the technology that you have as well. Like it still needs a little bit of like, guidance and guardrails and pushing in the right direction.

[00:26:33] Andrew Michael: I think that's going to change over time though, as well, but like you're creating this experience agents, Agency around like an LLM specifically as well. And like you're giving it the guidance, you're prompting it in a direction and then you're giving it like freedom to ask these questions that you've asked, but it has a lot of context and has a lot of understanding.

[00:26:50] Andrew Michael: And like, so I think that's the problem with ChatGPT today is because it's so open-ended when you ask anything random, you get back good answers for the most part, but if you try be specific about your job or your role without the context, it's missing there. You end up thinking that this thing doesn't work and you don't have the expertise or understanding of how to inject it with the right context and knowledge to be able to get back what you're looking for. Right.

[00:27:14] Elias Torres: What I'm saying is that that's the difference between ChatGPT and Agency, right?

[00:27:18] Andrew Michael: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:27:19] Elias Torres: It is built for one purpose, one purpose only, right? It's built for you to understand your customer. Right.

[00:27:26] Andrew Michael: Exactly. And I think that's like where the magic lies now is like the, creating these experiences on top of this technology that are really, really specific and then allowing those different experiences to communicate with one another, like in this form, you're building an agent and I think it's like incredible just to see daily, like what people are just thinking of and coming up with and yeah, it excites me, like to know and it's incredible.

[00:27:49] Andrew Michael: So what does the future look like then for Agency for you? Like paint us the picture of like five years from today. Where is the product? What is the vision that you sold Sequoia and others? And I think Brian as well from HubSpot Ventures joined. So what does the future look like?

[00:28:05] Elias Torres: The future is one where people can pursue their dreams. I think that the entrepreneurs, right? I think people can build great companies. I think the problem is that to build a great company, you have to learn and know so many things, or you have to hire all these people that know all these things.

[00:28:24] Elias Torres: And I think that that's the difference with AI, right? Is that we are going to be able to leverage other expertise available and all the skills that just work instantaneously, right? And allow us to focus on what we wanna do. Let's say that me, I wanna focus on serving, mine is a little meta, right? But I wanna build a great company that teaches me how to serve customers at scale.

[00:28:51] Elias Torres: Okay, so that's what I wanna do but maybe I'm not good at marketing. So wouldn't it be great if I had AI help me do marketing? Wouldn't it be great if I had AI that helped me with benefits for my team? Wouldn't it be great if I had AI that helped me with payroll? Wouldn't it be great if, you know, and so, because I don't want to be an expert at all those things in order to be successful. And so success to me with Agency is that we allowed people to pursue their dreams of what problem they wanted to solve, but didn't have to learn from scratch.

[00:29:23] Elias Torres: How to manage their relationships with their customers, how to be a founder, how to be a CEO, how to be a customer leader, right? Because they're struggling of, like, just being super reactive and just like, I need better tips of how do I answer more email? No, it's about the customer. Focus on the relationship, focus on the trust, focus on the education, right? And that's the goal, right?

[00:29:51] Elias Torres: I think we built in five years, we are a $10 billion company with maybe only 100 people on the team, leveraging AI to the fullest. Everybody is a doer. You know, you're either building software or you're taking care of the customers. That's really all we need. We are really regarded as the leader in the space. We're the ones really breaking the new ground away from the incumbents.

[00:30:16] Elias Torres: The incumbents keep repeating nonsense that they already fixed. They already built agents and 10,000 customers are already using their agents and that is not true. We're still building this and figuring this stuff out. But in five years, pretty clear, we have thousands of customers using it and we, still a small team that is mighty and successful. And yet those customers see us as they can have a direct relationship with me. That's kind of like, the dream.

[00:30:47] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. I think it's like also this narrative that's been in different news cycles as well recently sort of like, and discussions, I think the first billion dollar company from a single like solopreneur coming and it sort of speaks to this idea that you're talking about having these different functions as AIs and then working towards that.

[00:31:07] Elias Torres: Like the only way that that's going to happen is with Agency being successful, right?

[00:31:12] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Agency or competitive agency.

[00:31:16] Elias Torres: The thing about this, if Agency is not successful in figuring this out, you're not going to be able to have a billion dollar one person company. And obviously you're going to need more things, right? You're going to need, probably something like, Agency in the software space, right? You're going to have to build something in the marketing space. So there's different components to allow one person to say, I want to build a healthcare company.

[00:31:43] Elias Torres: A healthcare benefits companies for immigrant workers or something like that in the southeast of the United States. Okay, you build a company, whatever, right? And you say, but you don't need to have all these people with all these different expertise. It's your Agency that said, I want to solve this for this group of people. And we come and supplement you with the ability to deliver all the functions that a company needs in order to be successful.

[00:32:09] Andrew Michael: Yeah, no, I've already seen, like personally, some huge advancements. Like, I mean, previously in previous startups I had, we needed to hire, like a number of different engineers. I could have like a team of eight to build a product. Like I've built products on my own now from scratch, from the ground up and deployed to production as like, and now I wouldn't consider myself to be an engineer, just like, have enough understanding how to make things and put things together to work.

[00:32:32] Andrew Michael: And like, I see that only getting better over time as well. And yeah, so I think definitely, like I see it. I don't know if the solo person, because I think even at that size and scale, it still feels like you would get to the point where you're going to need, even if it's just company along for the journey. But I don't even see your vision keeping things really, really small, nimble, like less than 100 people, everybody doers, and then really leveraging the advancement sets.

[00:32:55] Elias Torres: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, we have a lot to build. So there's no way that this could be a one-person company. But the facts are there. To reach a million in revenue, has dramatically been reduced to easily one person. And so it's just natural that we already got to one person, gets to one million, then obviously we're gonna set the goal to be, okay, how do we do one billion? It could be valuation, doesn't have to be revenue, it could be that kind of stuff.

[00:33:23] Elias Torres: And that's possible. We had companies like WhatsApp being with 50 people would be worth 19 billion, right? We got Instagram, a few dozen people would be worth a billion, right? That already exists, but how do we make this more accessible to more people if they're able to find the right customers in the right pain?

[00:33:44] Andrew Michael: Absolutely. Well, it sounds like a very exciting future. I see as well we're running short on time now, so I also want to make sure I ask you a couple of questions that I ask every guest. What's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:33:59] Elias Torres: You cannot solve it just by hiring more people. You cannot solve it just by looking at these boring cohort charts or just static data. You have to go and meet the customers and get to know them, but you need super intelligence to analyze every single piece of information. It's just not possible with the way that we were building, with the technology that we had pre-neural networks and deep learning. It's just not possible.

[00:34:26] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think like it's the, what's in the why together for the first time being, like really effective. Like you understand, like the data is telling you what's happening. And then the customer conversations and the relationships are telling you why. And like in existing software, there's a big disconnect between the two for the most part, and there's no way to actually perceive to be able to go through all the information that exists. So it's definitely an exciting time.

[00:34:48] Andrew Michael: So my next question, I'll, maybe I'll ask it then in the context of AI now. And I think like when it comes to AI specifically, what's one question you wish more people would be asking you, but they're not.

[00:35:01] Elias Torres: I wish that most people realize that customer success is a hair on fire problem. You know, and I wish more people were saying, we're asking to raise their hand. To use the technology. I… I've been talking to a lot of people and a lot of people are like, we're busy right now. You know, we were closing a quarter or we're going to buy some existing platform and that's really where we are.

[00:35:29] Elias Torres: Or our security team is busy or we don't want to, the security, you're not going to pass the security or the legal team here, right? And so I wish people were asking, how do we experiment with this, right? How do we learn? How do we try more? Because you're losing revenue, you're losing customers, you're losing your reputation every day. And that needs to stop now if you want to survive.

[00:35:55] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I see that like in the context and I'll be making assumptions here, but I think a lot of teams that would maybe come from that perspective who have a positioning problem with customer success, I would assume, in the sense that if they're not really responsible as a revenue driver and they're more seen as like this glorified support channel.

[00:36:13] Elias Torres: You'd be amazed. You'd be amazed.

[00:36:14] Andrew Michael: I’d be amazed.

[00:36:15] Elias Torres: I'm dealing with… Sometimes the CS leaders of public companies, responsible for the renewal. Right. And I'm just like, Wow, this is incredible. It's a, this is a problem that is a little bit self-inflicted too. I don't think we can just blame the CEOs for not, you know, racing the CS position in the company, right? I think sometimes, themselves see it as a, just block and tackle and just keep things okay when they can be using that to turn the company around.

[00:36:47] Andrew Michael: And for growth. Yeah. Now I definitely see this like in a couple of inflection points. So the show has been going on for five years and, like I think, just looking at the metrics of interest when that spiked in churn and retention was like two key moments. And the first key moment was COVID. And when that happened, everybody just started listening to the show. They wanted to figure out how to solve for churn and retention.

[00:37:07] Andrew Michael: And then more recently, when we saw the downturn as well, the focus has shifted back again to churn and retention. So I think it's definitely like the hair on fire moments are when shit gets bad. When people start seeing, okay, growth is stalled and that's where we really need to figure this thing out. So we stop bleeding customers.

[00:37:23] Andrew Michael:  Unfortunately as well, fortunately, I think that's going to continue now. This trend is always like more and more startups building the access to, building more software, cheaper, easier competition rising, like it's just going to become a lot more cutthroat and competitive.

[00:37:38] Elias Torres: Exactly. And so protecting your customer base is going to be the most important thing. Being able to listen to everyone at once is going to be very important. Right. And so you would think that people will be more receptive now, but you'd be amazed. They're still not. I mean, I am really, really, really surprised why there's not a stronger pull in this space, but I'm very confident that I picked the right problem for the next 10 years of my life minimum.

[00:38:03] Andrew Michael: Amazing. Well, Elias, thank you so much for joining us. I really, really appreciate it. For the listeners, we'll make sure to leave anything we discussed today in the show notes. You can check it out there. Is there any sort of final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with before we wrap up today?

[00:38:17] Elias Torres: I would just ask CS leaders, right, to really demand more support and more opportunity and more breathing room to explore technology, to innovate, right? And not just assume that the resources you got are limited and that's all you got to deal with. No, no, you got to ask for more because this is where companies are going to die if they don't adopt and change.

[00:38:40] Andrew Michael: I love that. I think that should be like a little clip as well that we leave on the side as well that you can share directly with your CEO for some info from Elias.

[00:38:49] Elias Torres: Elias says he wants to talk to you personally and tell you how important customers are.

[00:38:56] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Will do. Well, thanks so much, Elias, for joining us. It's been great chatting today and a wonderful learning for me. Wish you best of luck going forward.

[00:39:05] Elias Torres:  Thank you. Thank you.

[00:39:06] Andrew Michael: Cheers.

[00:39:13] 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. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[00:39:39] Andrew Michael: If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew@Churn.FM. 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.

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