Welcome to the latest instalment of SaaSlife SPOTLIGHT, where we shine a light on innovative SaaS companies and their leaders. Today, we are thrilled to feature Matt Brown, CEO and Founder of CustomerOS.
Matt shared insights into his founder journey, the challenges of building a startup, and the exciting future of CustomerOS.
Welcome to SaaSlife Spotlight
Dan: Hey there and welcome to the latest episode of SaaSlife Spotlight. It's my pleasure to welcome the CEO of CustomerOS, Matt Brown. How are you today, Matt?
Matt: Very well, thank you.
Dan: Thanks for having me on.
Matt: No problem. It's always our pleasure. So, good question to ask, I think, given where we are in the time of year. How was your Q2?
Matt: Q2 was actually great for us. Q1 was a bit rough. Going through Q4 of last year, into Q1, was a little bit dicey as the market has kind of gone into a bit of a panic, and we were waiting for things to settle. Q2 started to stabilize, and towards the end, things really took off for us. So yeah, it's been good.
Dan: Awesome. Plenty of late nights. Late-night celebrating yet, or is it too early for that?
Matt: I mean, we'll celebrate at the end, but plenty of late nights for sure. We have a lot of business out on the West Coast of the US with tech companies, so we end up working all hours.
What is CustomerOS?
Dan: The first question I ask every founder, every CEO that's on, is if you can please describe CustomerOS to anyone who's never heard of the organization or come across it. Explain it as though you're speaking to a 10-year-old—what you do and the value you bring.
Matt: We've built CustomerOS to track the entire customer lifecycle from lead engagement all the way through to the day they churn. It’s a horizontal platform that touches on your sales, marketing, account management, customer success, product teams, and support teams. The idea is to take your entire go-to-market motion and put them together in the same platform, collaborating and working together to solve customer problems. This drives efficiency and allows you to grow faster for less money. Think of it like Google Docs, but for growth.
Dan: Well, you're connecting all the dots and having all the relevant parties from your business in the same place, collaborating with a common goal of customer success and growth, right?
Matt: Yeah, exactly. At scale, 85 to 90% of your revenue growth is going to come from your in-life motion anyway. Let’s close the loop between what’s working and who’s growing and expanding with you. Then let’s feed that back into the acquisition side of your business so that you actually know who to target and who has a high likelihood of being a profitable customer.
Real-Life Success with CustomerOS
Dan: In terms of CustomerOS in real life, do you have a case study in mind where a business has seen a real-life ROI, showing why everyone should be moving over to CustomerOS tomorrow or today?
Matt: Yeah, because we’re such a broad platform with so many touchpoints, the ROI becomes pretty self-evident. The first thing we do is integrate with 112 different applications and platforms to bring all your customer data into a single spot. Within 48 hours, our customers get a single comprehensive view of all their customer data. Because we don’t charge per seat, it’s available to everybody in the organization. This democratizes data access across the business. From there, it often comes with tool consolidation. We’ve taken a lot of business from HubSpot and other CRMs as companies look to consolidate onto a single platform. We’re also consolidating productivity tools like Notion, Smartsheets, Google Docs, and even billing and invoicing solutions like Stripe. Typically, within the first six weeks, there are considerable SaaS savings, tool consolidation, and efficiency gains by democratizing the business. The actual numbers vary, but it’s always meaningful.
Dan: I mean, 48 hours as an onboarding time to see all the data across the organization—that’s pretty special. Surely that’s not the norm, right?
Matt: No, absolutely not. We spent a year and a half and well over a million dollars building out what I call our integration layer to ensure that a developer never has to get involved to bring the data into the platform. They’re one-touch integrations. You want to bring in your HubSpot or Salesforce or Intercom? It’s literally two clicks. We create the connection with your third-party platform, start pulling in that data, structuring it, and making it available to everyone. Even if you want to continue using your Salesforce or HubSpot, we can mirror that into our tool, reducing the number of licenses you need to buy.
The Founding Journey
Dan: If we go back to the beginning with CustomerOS and your journey, can you talk me through the founding days and what led you to this point?
Matt: The idea for CustomerOS was born out of a company that me and my co-founder Jonty Knox exited back in 2020. We were part of a business called VoxBone, which was like AWS for real-time communications. We powered Twilio, Microsoft, MessageBird, Google, and others. We sold that for just over $500 million in 2020. I took a number of go-to-market lessons from that experience that led to the original idea behind CustomerOS. The first lesson was that at scale, almost all your revenue growth comes from retention, expansion, and price increases, but there’s very little systematic way to measure and monitor that. The second lesson was that your customers renewing and expanding inform your ICP, but there’s almost no tooling to data mine that and push it back into your acquisition funnel. Previously, I built some tooling around this internally across multiple businesses, but it took years and millions of dollars. The original idea was to create an alternative to the VC hyper-growth model, where you light a bunch of cash on fire to hit escape velocity. We wanted to build tooling that would allow founders to raise less capital, reach escape velocity, and own more of their business at the end.
Overcoming Challenges
Dan: What’s been the biggest challenge since setting up CustomerOS, and how have you overcome it?
Matt: The biggest challenge was coming up with a standardized data model for B2B SaaS, end-to-end, throughout the entire customer lifecycle. That was non-trivial, and when we set out, we didn’t even know if it was possible. But now, I’m convinced it is. We had to rethink how to manage the underlying data infrastructure behind customer data. Most customer data either lives siloed in your SaaS tools or ends up in a data warehouse, locked away from business decision-makers. We needed to figure out how to connect everything in real-time, bring the data in, clean it, normalize it, and make sense of it. Ultimately, we settled on a graph-based architecture. Our product builds a knowledge graph of all your customers, relationships, touchpoints, and products. That data infrastructure, to my knowledge, has never existed anywhere. To do that on a multi-tenant level at scale, with privacy and compliance, was a massive challenge. It took us a couple of years to really get it off the ground.
Looking Ahead: The Future of CustomerOS
Dan: So, going forward for the next 12 months, where would you like to see CustomerOS? What would you like to see develop as a business or brand? If we had this conversation in 12 months, what would you be telling me you’ve achieved?
Matt: I hope I’d be sitting here with numerous case studies about how we helped founders at seed or Series A companies reach profitability without needing that next round of funding. That’s really why we’re in business. There’s obviously a bunch of features and functionality to build between now and then to make that a reality. But I hope we’re back here having that conversation.
Dan: Are you able to shed any light on the feature functionality, or is it all under wraps?
Matt: No, happy to talk about it. This week, we’re releasing new functionality around ICP scoring that allows you to build your own ICP models using our tools or data-mine your existing customers to derive your ICP. We’ve got target persona builders doing something similar but focusing on the right people to engage with inside those ICPs. We’ve built out our email infrastructure for outbound emailing, LinkedIn outreach, and in-life customer communications. We’ve also built tooling around our invoicing and billing product, which is live now. We’re going deeper into integrating with your accounting system, doing revenue recognition, and tying it back into your SaaS metrics and reporting. Some early stages of this are already live, but that’s where we’re going.
Dan: I imagine longer term, if you’re targeting your Series A organizations, being almost a one-stop shop for the entire customer journey gives you the opportunity to customize the journey based on the client, right?
Matt: That’s right, and it allows us to commoditize bits and pieces of the journey. We have a free forever CRM at the base of our platform. We’ll never charge for it. We view it as a commodity that should be available to everyone. We make our money in value-added flows over the top, like ICP scoring. Seed stage or early Series A companies have crazy expenses as they scale, with 15-20 different tools. They don’t have time to manage all that. They need to focus on building, closing, and delivering value to their customers. Our goal is to take away all the tooling headaches and let them focus on what’s going to deliver value for them and their business.
Personal Growth as a Leader
Dan: Looking at the journey ahead, in 12 months’ time, how would you like to see yourself develop as a leader and founder? Are there areas you’d like to see growth?
Matt: I’ve always been a private person, not one to put myself out there much. But I realize my experience and opinions are somewhat unique, and by sharing them, I can add value to others going through similar journeys and attract like-minded people who would benefit from our tool. One thing I’m working on is making more appearances like this and getting in front of the right audiences to add value by telling my story. I believe that if I do a good job of explaining the why behind the brand, both the brand and I will benefit.
The Culture at CustomerOS
Dan: If you were to describe CustomerOS as an organization, the culture of the business, how would you describe it for anyone building a mental picture of what it’s like to work there?
Matt: We’re still a small team—11 people globally distributed. Three of us are based in London, with teams spread across Paris, Poland, Romania, Moldova, and South Africa. We hire the best talent we can find, and we believe A players want to work with A players. As a result, there’s a lot of autonomy in working here. We had to figure out our flavor of holding each other accountable in a remote work environment, but I think we’ve hit our stride. It’s largely collaborative, and I think everyone enjoys coming to work. We haven’t lost anyone, so I guess that’s the ultimate test.
Advice for Aspiring SaaS Founders
Dan: Final question for me, Matt, a question I always ask: What advice would you give to anyone with an idea, thinking of setting up a SaaS business?
Matt: First and foremost, follow the idea. You don’t want to be lying on your regrets. Chase the idea. The way I would validate it is I wouldn’t build anything first. I’d build out some basic marketing, maybe do some cold outbound, and try to sell it. In SaaS, you sell to figure out what to build. You don’t know what the customer wants until you ask them to pay for something. If people are willing to pay, then you’ve got a business. Then it’s time to evaluate whether it’s worth going all in. But yeah, go sell it.
Dan: Great advice. So, anyone listening with an idea, just go get it—go sell it, see if someone will pay. That’s it for today. Thanks, Matt, for spending time with us and introducing us to CustomerOS and telling us about your journey. Much appreciated.
Matt: Yeah, thanks.
Dan: No problem. Thank you very much.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Matt Brown's leadership at CustomerOS showcases the power of innovation and determination in the SaaS industry. With a visionary approach to streamlining customer lifecycle management, Matt has successfully built a platform that not only integrates diverse business functions but also delivers rapid, tangible ROI for clients. His commitment to simplifying complex processes and empowering businesses to grow efficiently is a testament to his expertise and passion. Under Matt’s guidance, CustomerOS is set to continue making a significant impact, helping companies achieve profitability and scale with confidence.