[00:00:00] Dror Avieli: In my responsibility today, I obviously have the customer success management. I also have the support organization, both B2B and B2C. And I think it's a very important ingredient in this total customer experience, and that's why kind of, for me, it's extremely important that it's in this customer success organization. I have, also, site reliability engineering because I think it's the foundation. If you don't have availability, scalability and secure environment, eventually the support organization and then customer success manager will suffer a lot in terms of protecting the churn. So it's all kind of in one umbrella.

[00:00:36] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product?

[00:00:38] VO: You need to invest

[00:00:39] VO: And you saw this different…

[00:00:40] VO: Don't just gut for revenue in the door.

[00:00:43] 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.

[00:00:55] VO: How do you build a habit forming product?

[00:00:57] VO: We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn.

[00:01:01] VO: You need to invest in customer success.

[00:01:03] VO: It always comes down to retention and engagement.

[00:01:06] VO: Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.

[00:01:09] 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. Hey, Dror, welcome to the show.

[00:01:22] Dror Avieli: Hey, good morning. Thank you.

[00:01:23] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Dror is the Managing Director and VP of Customer Success at ConsenSys, a complete suite of trusted products to build anything in Web 3. Dror brings over 25 years experience in leading success organizations in the software industry, and prior to ConsenSys, Dror spent over 11 years at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and was their VP of Customer Success. So my first question for you today, Dror , is HP and ConsenSys feel like two fundamentally different businesses? What would you say is the biggest difference? And then what is the common thread between the two companies?

[00:01:58] Dror Avieli: So first of all, yes, good observation, a huge differences. And one of the reasons I really enjoy joining ConsenSys is that the phase that I joined in my career was to do some major change in my life and in my career. The biggest differences is the internal culture that drive a lot of the stuff. Hewlett Packard Enterprise was a major, one of the biggest, back then, one of the biggest companies in the United States in terms of market cap, in terms of revenue and also in terms of number of employees. We had more than 300,000 employees at the peak and that was driving a lot. And I will call it kind of a real corporate America and everything that is driven.

[00:02:41] Dror Avieli: And ConsenSys is when I join an important startup in web-free ecosystem that is really different and basically calling to make a lot of changes in society, in financial systems, and in the way that we are also operating as a body that we call companies.

[00:03:03] Andrew Michael: Companies. Yeah. Definitely see some big changes. And I think this is what we were discussing before the shows, that you've had a long career and what we call custom success and you've been through two fundamental shifts and changes. Obviously this being one of those changes going from Web 2 to Web 3. But I'd like to start today, maybe at the start of your career, because I think it was definitely a very interesting time back then you mentioned to me before the call that you just got started around 2003. And success, like maybe we can go back to those very early days and talk us through a little bit what that was about and why it came to be.

[00:03:36] Dror Avieli: Yeah, so in the early days I was working for another software company called Mercury Interactive that got acquired by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and back in 2002, 2003 there was a suggestion by some of the people to take one of the perpetual on-prem software that we had and I think the two definitions are important, perpetual and on-prem, and convert it and run it on our own servers. We didn't call it cloud, we didn't call it SaaS. We simply said, we probably will have some customer, who will appreciate reducing the overhead and using, over the internet the product and not install it in a server room internally in the company.

[00:04:15] Dror Avieli: And by doing that, we also changed the commercial agreement and we moved from perpetual license to subscription base. And quite quickly, we realized that the churn is much bigger than with the perpetual on-prem licensing schema and implementation modeling. And we were trying to realize, what are the reasons for that. And obviously we actually believe that it's about the people that are making decisions about the product and with SaaS offering one, it's easier to shift. Second, you didn't have, upfront crazy cost of the perpetual license. So, it’s kind of in your mind easy to, okay, let's drop and move to the next one.

[00:05:00] Dror Avieli: And I basically suggested back then to the, we were in part of a kind of a business group. And I said, you know, it's about the human factor, not computers are making decision to churn and we need to actually work with this customer and making sure that they will do, adoption, that they will be satisfied. And with adoption and satisfaction, you actually will get the necessary result. I thought it would be very easy. And to be honest, we actually saw amazing results. And we started with a small pilot just in the East Coast. And quite quickly, we were growing it to all of the other regions that we had. And the results were good, but it wasn't easy. And since then, that was kind of a big transition in my own career. And I went into this segment of what I called SaaS Customer Success Management.

[00:05:48] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's super interesting because we talk a lot on the show as well. Like I think for customer success side of things, it is fairly early in the days. It's not like something as well established as marketing or sales where these playbooks to follow and there's been proven practices for years. This is even taking that a step back because I think the first, like known team for customer success was only around like ‘97, ‘98, somewhere there with Salesforce and Benioff introducing it. So definitely at your time, it must have also, like as a pilot, something that needed a proof of concept for people to understand the value.

[00:06:21] Andrew Michael: What happened post that? So you introduced this pilot, things started to look interesting. You started to say, okay, it was no longer just about like selling licenses and the software. It really was a people component. Like maybe sort of like, what was the main reason that you realized this being the issue? Like, okay, yes, this is a people and process component. It's not a software and product problem.

[00:06:41] Dror Avieli: Yeah. So I will go to a previous transition with that. That was three years before in ‘99. I was a developer and in a small startup and Israeli based startup. And one of our biggest customer was Palo Alto. And back then, TVDs, you burn the software to a DVD. You go to a server room, you put the DVD. It sounds like a horrible experience right now but that was kind of the, being very sophisticated back then. And we realized that we need to do, a lot of changes. And me, as a developer, I joined my CTO and we went to two weeks to Palo Alto to actually work on, you know, making changes, burn the DVD, run to the server room, test it in production, and everything that related to that. And that was my first time being, actually at a customer site and talking with customers and talking with the stakeholder and understand their motivation.

[00:07:38] Dror Avieli: And I realized, you know, I came with this developer mindset that, you know, in code we trust and we drive the world and everything that, related to that. And then I realized that there is this people factor just by being there for two weeks. And that was a major change for my life because when I came back after these two weeks, I went to the CEO and I said, I need two changes. One, I don't want to be a developer. I want to be in front of customers. Second, I want to move to the United States.

[00:08:06] Dror Avieli: And it took us like six months to nine months to formalize it. And I actually did the two changes. I moved to the United States and I actually moved to work in front of customer. Back then it was, I would call it more, kind of this professional services type of approach, but since then I realized the power of the people that, you know, on the customer side and the power of the people that, on the vendor side and how critical and important this relationship to provide success. It's not just about the code, not just about the implementation, it's about how you manage this relationship and drive the different types of projects.

[00:08:41] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's very interesting sort of, that revelation, I think on your end, it's something we discussed in a very recent episode with Tatyana Mamut. We were talking sort of about customer feedback and how you make requests and the best way is actually to put a customer talking about the pain points and sharing that directly with your engineering and product teams and nothing allows them to empathize better and understand when they hear the pain points from their customers' mouths directly, but then also, this is a step further now in your case where you're interacting with them. You're building a relationship and now you've decided, okay, this is the way forward actually, it's maybe not by writing another line of code, but it's about understanding the customers and then how we can enable them to get more value out of our product or service.

[00:09:18] Andrew Michael: I also found it crazy as well. And I heard stories previously on the show of, and maybe this still happens, but with on-prem solutions where like big companies like Cisco or Google, if you sold a contract to them and it was a meaningful amount, you would actually set up, office in their offices and in their campuses and go around and educate the team on how to use the products. And I see you nodding and smiling. Like, is this something that you're familiar with, this playbook?

[00:09:44] Dror Avieli: Ah, yes. I mean, our largest customer all over the world got different level of attention. And sometimes, first of all, since it, you know, software in many cases is very global, yes, the traditional software versus Web 3. I would say usually we'll start with the Western world. You know, some companies will start in America and then we'll go to Europe, Australia, New Zealand. Some will start in, or most will start, you know, sometimes Europe and they will grow like that. Web 3, it's totally different, but we'll get there. But we also, I mean, at least in Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we also went to some of the other, let's say, countries like Japan and, you know, things like that. And quite quickly you realize that culture is also making an impact. And the size is obviously making an impact.

[00:10:30] Dror Avieli: And then you create, different implementation from the people perspective. Sometimes you will have local people in, country that are servicing this important customer. In some cases, we actually had a presence inside the company. We also have stories with, for example, the DODs, Departments of Defense, in different countries, mostly in the United States. But we obviously had a totally different approach that you actually had people inside fully certified to work in this type of environment. And actually we had weird stories that they will see it and will tell someone from DOD what to write on the, how to use the application, but they will sit next to them and are not allowed to touch the keyboard and things like that. So yeah.

[00:11:14] Andrew Michael: Code pairing on another level. Yeah. So it's interesting as well. Like you say, you went through this transition where it was on-prem and it was software based, moving to the cloud. You saw a churn and you said, okay, this is not really the software problem, but it's more around the people problem. I like, you mentioned in your highlights, it's sort of the commitment level wasn't as heavy and as intense there. So, and then the switching costs were a lot easier for this.

[00:11:37] Dror Avieli: Yeah.

[00:11:38] Andrew Michael: What were some of the first things you introduced as part of this pilot success team, how were you working with companies back then and maybe what's one thing that you still do today that you think you did extremely well back then that is a practice now that's been adopted all throughout.

[00:11:52] Dror Avieli: Yeah. So I think the things that are kind of still the same is the concept of what I call total customer experience. And it starts from the way that they are purchasing the software, deploying it, the initial onboarding, and then obviously this maintenance until kind of the renewal, kind of cycle that it's projects by itself, that has a lot of components. And for me, you need to remember that your best bet in order to reduce churn is to start extremely well in the beginning, okay? And in order to start well in the beginning, you need to have the right. Obviously, all of the experience of buying the software need to be seamless and good for the customer, but usually this wasn't my responsibility. I will just provide some feedback.

[00:12:39] Dror Avieli: But once customer purchase something that is, I call it the passing of the baton internally from the sales organization, regardless if it's direct, indirect or whatever, but someone need to pass the baton to someone else and passing the baton is with a lot of parameters. And then you need to make sure that customer will get onboarded extremely well. Again, documentation, some type of the CSM will have, I'm a product manager now, kind of a thing and will drive this onboarding implementation. Sometimes it's an hour, sometimes it's weeks. It really depends on the software or the implementation itself, the use case. And then creating the right level of playbooks that will allow the relationship to stay because this relationship provide you a lot of knowledge, what is actually going on and advance alerting mechanism to understand if you see some concern.

[00:13:34] Dror Avieli: And the concerns from measurement perspective, I always say it's usually around adoption, usage and satisfaction. So in most cases, if the customer is using the product and adopting it very close to what they actually purchase, and they're overall satisfied from using the product and also using everything else on top of the product, for example, like support, or if you have a professional services component, if you are overall satisfied and adopting, it's probably an easy renewal once renewal time will come. If it's not, and you have advanced notice, you actually work with the internal resources and external resources on the customer side to find why they're not adopting, why they're not happy. What do we need to change?

[00:14:17] Dror Avieli: And if you provide the right level of attention based on some capacity planning and that's the other side of leading customer success organization with capacity planning need to be extremely well designed and executed. Then the concept of deploying the right person into that usually will bring the good results.

[00:14:36] Andrew Michael: Yeah. You're talking a lot from, like hindsight now and the experience of over 20 years or so in success. I think obviously you didn't have that in the early days when you got started. And I'm keen and interested to hear like, what were some of the first pieces of this that you figured out? And like adoption, obviously, as you say today, I think it's obvious now in the markets and people understand it, but I don't think it's the first thing necessarily when people do and they say, oh, we have a churn problem. Like most people, their initial reaction is like, let's go speak to people that are churning and understand why. As opposed to realize, okay, this is actually an onboarding issue and an activation problem that we need to give value to our customers.

[00:15:11] Andrew Michael: But what was one of the first things that you did that you think went well in the early days when you set up that pilot and what was something that you believed was going to be a success and potentially like ended up scrapping as part of the experimentation of figuring out what success was?

[00:15:24] Dror Avieli: So I think the first thing is related and you mentioned that it was the onboarding. You need to remember when you transition from perpetual on-prem, the responsibility on the onboarding was on the customer side. Sometimes they actually invested money and they purchased professional services and sometimes kind of a lot of money got invested into that, but the responsibility to make it happen and the timeline to make it happen was on the customer side. And we, as a vendor, we're not in a rush here. That's your problem. You already paid me this huge perpetual license. Yes, the churn on the subscription base for the support, what we call maintenance and support, was kind of important, but on, the first year, you paid us a lot of money. We are not in a rush.

[00:16:07] Dror Avieli: So the first thing I realized, the time for ROI is extremely important. And not only this, if we will do a very good onboarding, the customer will, probably will stay with us. And it's basically the responsibility actually immediately moved from the customer side to our side as a vendor. And some of my argument back then with some of the leaders was I was basically telling them, we need to invest in the onboarding. We need to put resources. We need to put money. I need also some technical people that will come with me in some of the cases and will help the customer to finish the onboarding quickly. So for me, that was kind of the first project into, you know, reducing churn because I realized how the onboarding was important.

[00:16:54] Dror Avieli: And back then, let's remember, many of this SaasSfied product, because I don't call them real SaaS, weren't the best product on the planet. They took code that is supposed to work like that and they created a multi-tenant implementation and it was kind of clunky at times. And so the onboarding was kind of a bit more difficult. So the onboarding was extremely important back in the days.

[00:17:19] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's, crazy thing as well, how much software has changed. And I think this is what at the same time, how much people's demands for products have changed as well. So like back in those days, the level and quality of software was not amazing as it is today, and I think people were a lot more forgiving that stage, early adopters moving to the cloud, like they could accept components. And I think customer success in a lot of ways today is probably quite a bit more difficult from this perspective, is that customers today are a lot more demanding and what they expect.

[00:17:45] Dror Avieli: I will add, also that the purchasing was totally different. Back then it was, really central command approach. Someone in the, you know, procurement will make all of the decision. Today, so many, depend on the organization and the level, but let's say, you know, mid-level and up, any director can purchase now something and you have so many different SaaS products that are running in the… in every company. And then there is some consolidation that the procurement teams will put into place. Back then without procurement, you will not be able to purchase anything.

[00:18:17] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's interesting because we previously had Sean Klaus on the show, we're talking about Atlassian and they sort of had this land and expand model where some small team in the company would start, they would sign up, they would create a few licenses. And then the same process would happen in a big organization like four or five times until the procurement came along to, hey, wait a minute, like we're paying for five or six different licenses, let's bring this together, let's roll it up for the organization. And like you say, anyone with a credit card in the company could go ahead and do this. So interesting times, then back then, like trying to figure this whole thing out, what is success?

[00:18:49] Andrew Michael: You then had an incredible career, working as well at HP and other places, defining and refining the craft as well. You've taken on a new completely different challenge, as you mentioned now, moving into Web 3, where churn and retention are different, all and be still together, in some ways non-existent and in other ways, more critical than ever. And success, I think, must be different in this context as well. So I'm keen to hear as well, what are some of the differences that you see between Web 2 and Web 3 companies and how you're operating now from a customer success standpoint?

[00:19:19] Dror Avieli: Yeah. So the first item is some of the entities are not necessarily companies. Some of the entities, what we call DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous Organization, that are managed kind of in a community approach based on voting rights that they have based on their staking in the token of the DAOs. Many of the companies that we do have in the ecosystem are very small but extremely successful. They don't need a lot to be this successful and they also don't need a lot of time to be successful. So sometimes you don't know who is the future OpenSeal or the future Uniswap that are starting with, few developers writing some codes and quite quickly it will catch up.

[00:20:04] Dror Avieli: And the last, from my perspective, it's extremely different. Most of this, again, I will say entities driven by very technical people. It's really kind of an engineering-led ecosystem in many of the cases. And this business perspective, and again, the ecosystem is changing, but the business perspective is, I will say in many cases, kind of secondary to the technical, when in the Web 2, it was the other way around. Obviously, we are talking about, technical world, but the business perspective was primary and then secondary was the technical implementation and everything that related to that.

[00:20:43] Dror Avieli: So for example, a discussion on the best ROI and what it means was much easier for a CSM in the Web 2 world talking about ROI and by the way even mentioning success management in Web 3, something that some of the people will feel uncomfortable. I'm personally considering changing the name of the title to morph and engagement manager and it's all about the engagement and the keyword of engagement is also something that, going to, you know, our communities in the ecosystem operating. I will also add that in my responsibility there is, also a lot of activities that we need to do, not only to keep companies or entities like that, but also to keep users. We also have B2C product lines that are generating, by the majority of the revenue for consensus. So that was another component that was really different for me.

[00:21:35] Dror Avieli: And so, I said it's the last one. I have one more. We are global from day one. And when I'm saying global, 200 countries. Crypto or Web 3, once you have an idea, boom. It's all over the world. You don't need to implement heavy sales mechanism like in Web 2. So the adoption can go anywhere and you have so many places with small communities of crypto, Web 3. And if you wouldn't identify a good product to use, they jump on that. And you basically have this coverage of 200 countries.

[00:22:07] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Crazy. And I think the B2C product you're referring to, MetaMask.

[00:22:12] Dror Avieli: Correct.

[00:22:12] Andrew Michael: The wallet. Yes, I can see that being.

[00:22:14] Dror Avieli: It's B2C and B2B. And by the way, the terminology of B2C and B2B is not something that people like in crypto. I'm using it as an old timer, but because many of the products have both, because MetaMask for developers is extremely important for us.

[00:22:30] Andrew Michael: Yeah.

[00:22:30] Dror Avieli: And obviously, yes, MetaMask for the user is–

[00:22:33] Andrew Michael: Is the main driver there. It's interesting as well, like you say, in terms of the terminology, because I think customer success overall, all round, is one of those terms that maybe could have been better defined because it's always one thing internally, like the company's job to make the customer successful. So why is there a single department called custom success? And what does that mean? And like it raised, like the word itself is like marketing itself is a little bit abstract, like it's not really directly related to what the goal of the business is, let's say, one of the outcomes of the jobs to be done of a business. So I can see that also being pushed back now on Web 3 where, in my opinion, the marketing is terrible in Web 3 and people haven't still figured out a good way to communicate effectively, but definitely rethinking some of these things might make sense in this new space.

[00:23:21] Dror Avieli: So you're touching something very important for me personally right now, because first of all, in my responsibility today, I have also, I obviously have the customer success management. I also have the support organization, both B2B and B2C, which is totally different. And I think it's a very important ingredient in this total customer experience. And that's why kind of for me it's extremely important that it's in this customer success organization. I have also site reliability engineering because I think it's the foundation. If you don't have availability, scalability and secure environment, eventually the support organization and then customer success manager will suffer a lot in terms of protecting the churn. So it's all kind of in one umbrella and I'm questioning the name, customer success and customer success management. And I'm looking for the new name. And I don't know if you get this kind of debate now, but I think as an industry, we probably need to realize something.

[00:24:18] Dror Avieli: The marketing of customer success is extremely important, internally and externally. I think now there is a lot of realization in the market that it is kind of an important ingredient like marketing and sales, at least in most of the companies, still not 100%. But I also think that the position that we, the leads in this industry that we are putting into place, I think it's in front of some type of transformation, at least in terms of how we market it again internally, externally, because, yeah, the whole company owns total customer experience and the whole company on customer success.

[00:24:52] Andrew Michael: It's interesting you asked that because we've never, I don't think on the show we've ever debated like what the name should be, but more what the definition should be of it. And I think that's also like one of the things as you say, because in so many different companies, it can mean different things and the way you operate. And especially like in your case, I think you're the first time I've heard, SRE, like site reliability being part of customer success. I think in the way you've described it, it makes sense to agree, but typically that's something you would find in engineering and part of that org. So we recently talked, like with Chris Regester about this on the show, chief customer officer, and his sort of definition was, and if I might be butchering this, but it's long-term customer management is like what he saw customer success as. So it’s interesting like figuring this out because it's not, I don't think anyone has a really good definition for what it is. And then I think partly that comes from the name itself where it causes the confusion. And–

[00:25:46] Dror Avieli: Yeah.

[00:25:46] Andrew Michael: So if you do come up with something interesting, let me know. Definitely can. I want to buy a few people and see their thoughts and I don't think we're going to rename it at all, but it would be nice to see some progress and some agreements in the market. And so working on this environment, you can say it's like, it's incredibly challenging trying to figure it out because things are moving so fast all the time. As you mentioned, you're not always dealing with companies. Sometimes you're organizing with these DAOs and decentralized to autonomous organizations. The thing I'm interested, is, like, how do you actually work with these companies? Now, is it a typical, or these DAOs or these individuals, are you operating like your typical customer success would, where you have your onboarding, you work through the customer journey as it is in like B2B SaaS, or you, redefining that completely too.

[00:26:27] Dror Avieli: Yeah. So I will start with what I was trying to do on the support side five and a half years ago, a little bit after joining ConsenSys. You know, I came as this Web 2 expert and the first thing that I needed to do is to establish a better support mechanism. And I said, Okay, the users and the customer will use my Web 2 methodologies and they will get in line and they will open a ticket. And basically, the ecosystem showed me differently. They will go anywhere to seek support and they will go to Discord, Discord, Twitter, even on the app store when they will give a feedback to the product, they will sometimes ask questions. So they will go everywhere. And I realized that I need to be everywhere. I can't force this global ecosystem in 200 countries to do things the way I want. Okay, they will demand it and they will get it either for me as the vendor or from other players in the ecosystem.

[00:27:24] Dror Avieli: And sometimes it can be a bad actor that will use this kind of trust when I'm helping someone to gain something and usually give me all my [sixth raise] and I control your wallet, send me [E-A-T], whatever it is. Okay. So that was on the support side. Then I, over the years, when we actually deployed the core of this customer success management, we first started with what I call the most Web 2 offering or the most B2B offering that we have. And the idea was to implement the same kind of playbook. It's about the relationship. We start early with the onboarding. We follow the kind of the product. What we realized that first, the appetite to, annual contract is very low in Web 3. They don't want to commit for more than a month. And when you have monthly recurring contract, it's extremely difficult. The whole concept is falling because you don't have this alert mechanism and time to fix stuff and all of the leverage is on the customer side. So what do you do with that?

[00:28:26] Dror Avieli: And then we also realized that the pace of changing technology in the Web 3 crypto world is so fast. They find something shiny, new, boom. They move and they move back. Sometimes they will deploy the same service by different vendors for various reasons, sometimes as a backup, because sometimes you have different issues. Sometimes for us to kind of fight on the best contract and things like that. And that forced us to do different types of projects. First of all, from, you know, marketing sales and protecting churn, the position, why we are better. And that's like in Web 2, when you have competition. Second is actually to do program that would push customer and the right customer to form MRR to ARR. Because I think that's the most important one in terms of this ability to protect churn. Otherwise, it's extremely difficult.And I'm talking about the larger accounts that we're preferring monthly. Okay. Ignore the long tail.

[00:29:25] Dror Avieli: And then also the power of this, what I call the communities, and doing a lot of exercise online and also in event. We have a lot of events in crypto. And basically engage customer together and for me this is totally different from the old days, in the old days when we had a customer event, we’ll bring customer yes. We will socialize together but it's events that we are running. We will create some executive forums and you know, we will kind of spoil them in some different shape and forms and in crypto, most of the events are not ours, so we'll do some side events and activities. The only way to spoil them is to give them some t-shirts, not more than that. A nice dinner. It's yeah, it's nice, but they don't need it. And they really need this connection. And all of the other people from other entities, customers will be talking together about technology, what are the benefits, and it's really going to the basic of the basic of what we are gaining from the different products that we are providing and obviously comparing us to competitors.

[00:30:28] Dror Avieli: And we are doing it online. We are doing it obviously during crypto events that are happening again, all over the world and flying this week to Seoul, South Korea for an event. So all of these types of activities inside the communities are extremely important to keep them with us and understanding our level of service, roadmap, how we are approaching things and everything that–

[00:30:54] Andrew Michael: I think, in the Web3 communities is a whole new ballgame and a whole new beast on its own. Like you said, I think because it is fairly early stages still in the space, there is the, sort of like knowledge sharing happening in these various different communities and these interactions where in a lot of ways, it is very supportive. We're maybe in the B2B environment, like there's just so much more competition now where everybody's, like after everybody else's business and you don't have that sort of vibe of like, in like, we're all going to make it up, seem like on Twitter and things like this, and the sort of phrases that come through in crypto, I think they probably down now quite a bit, but it definitely is, I think community being in a crucial and vital point of interaction with your customers, and they support. They're going to go everywhere. But at least, you know, in the communities, like that's where you can really engage and interact directly.

[00:31:46] Dror Avieli: And by the way, [inaudible] that we are doing now, because until now we actually deployed customer success management framework to customers that actually signed on a contract with us and are paying money to a product, a product and a service. We realized that we have many customers, entities, I don't know how to define them, that are extremely important for us because they are referring users to MetaMask, new users. And because, and we call it, decentralized application. But the decentralized application, it's part of our flywheel. You have the developers inside the different dApps that are basically recommending Metamask as the best wallet. And then new user when they hear about the dApp, because some users are coming because of use case in crypto and not because they heard about Metamask. So, and this referral of user to Metamask is extremely important because any new user potentially in the long run will contribute a lot of revenue to us in terms of all of the features that we have.

[00:32:50] Dror Avieli: And I will say first engagement and then some potential revenue. And we don't take fees from everything, but it's only from a few components. So you get the engagement, you get eventually also, revenue stream. But there's no contract with this customer. Nothing. And we actually decided in the last six months that we need to deploy and again, I don't know if I can call it customer success management. It's not a customer. What is successful? It's all kind of different, but we realized that this going back to 2003 for the mechanism of people relationship, different projects within this timeframe, extremely important, even with the fact that there is no kind of beneficial baton that is moving and things like that is an important component.

[00:33:35] Dror Avieli: And on top of this, deploying this customer success management concept on these, non-contract dApps that are using our product, we also are establishing now, we call it customer enablement team. And the idea is to go to this type of dApps and from time to time actually help them using our own resources. So they don't pay us anything and we will go and help them to use our product better and help them with some specific use cases. All from this concept that you will use a small, you will use this MetaMask SDK or MetaMask Snap or just the generic MetaMask. And in the future, you will bring a small–

[00:34:14] Andrew Michael: More business, developer relations. It sounds a lot like you're, it's still like a new interesting point as well in the customer success journey. Starting out in the early days, figuring out what it was and sort of perfecting it, that over time when the B2B perspective and now it's a totally new ball game in a way and it's going back to those roots of figuring things out and it's a big change and like you say it would be interesting. I think we could continue talking for hours but I see we're up on time now so I have one question before we wrap up today and that's what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:34:48] Dror Avieli: I think you mentioned it in the beginning maybe before we started recording. It's not easy. I'm not sure who, choose this path, but no, I really enjoy it, but it's not easy. And I think the reward in my opinion is I, when you do it correctly and you have success because it's not easy. Oh yeah. I thought it would be easier.

[00:35:09] Andrew Michael: Nice. Very nice. Dror, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting today. Is there any other final thoughts you want to leave the listener with, anything they should be aware of from your work?

[00:35:17] Dror Avieli: I would say embrace changes. I think that led me to a lot of interesting things in my career. I also think that change is, you know, it's very basic, but change is happening all the time. So find ways to embrace it, enjoy it, and lean in, into changes and don't be afraid, from that. So I know now that we need to change something and we'll find the right path and we'll change. Embrace change.

[00:35:42] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I love that. I know that's one of my favorite quotes that have been given to me and piece of advice and especially in startup spaces, embracing uncertainty. Like you need to learn to embrace uncertainty and it's very similar to embracing change. Otherwise you really can't survive, I guess, in this kind of a business where things move so fast and very nice. Well, for listeners, we'll make sure to leave anything we discussed today in the show notes for you to check that out later. Dror, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining and I wish you best of luck now going forward as you try to figure out this new path in your customer success journey.

[00:36:11] Dror Avieli: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. First of all, memory lane and second, the discussion itself and I probably will have some ideas out of that. So thank you. I really get it. Yeah.

[00:36:20] Andrew Michael: Amazing. Thanks. Have a great one. Cheers.

[00:36:30] 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. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you.

[00:37:00] Andrew Michael: 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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