Dave Blake is the founder and CEO of ClientSuccess, a customer success platform that helps B2B SaaS companies proactively manage their customer base, measure customer health, and maximize revenue by driving high growth and retention.
Hoping to learn more about his experience as a founder and the advice he would give to the next generation of entrepreneurs, we sat down with Dave for a conversation.
What inspired you to start your own company?
For most of my career, I've been a customer success guy. I started as a customer success manager at a company called Omniture in 2003. I helped build a global customer success team focused on their strategic enterprise accounts. I was fortunate to be part of Omniture’s amazing journey from startup to IPO. The company was acquired by Adobe, and I continued on that journey with Adobe to grow and scale the global customer success team.
However, we never had solutions that were tailored specifically for our needs during my journey with Omniture & Adobe, so we were forced to cobble together processes, workflows, insights, analytics, and dashboards across many solutions. After 10 years at Omniture and Adobe, I decided to start ClientSuccess to build solutions in the customer success space and really chase a passion and solve the pain-points that I experienced as a customer success professional and leader.
What advice would you go back in time and give yourself when starting your company?
In a SaaS business, product is king, so it's very important to hire the best CTO and product leaders from day one. Once you have the right product leaders and strategy in place, maniacally focus on your customers to build simple, elegant solutions that solve real business problems and pain points. Have a very customer-centric product strategy, with strong product leadership, will accelerate your path to product-market fit and growth.