Building a company is hard enough, but what if there’s no clear market to launch into? That’s the situation Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta and CMO Anthony Kennada found themselves in when they joined the company that would become Gainsight in 2013. There was no playbook for category creation, so they built their own—and catapulted Gainsight into one of the fastest growing private companies in the world.
Join Nick and Anthony for an open and honest look into their playbook to building the Customer Success category: the needle movers, the mistakes, and everything in between.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Nick Mehta – CEO @ Gainsight

Anthony Kennada – CMO @ Gainsight

Nick Mehta: Hi, I’m Nick.

Anthony Kennada: Hi, I’m Anthony.

Nick Mehta: And we’re here to talk to you about how category creation isn’t something that you find.

Anthony Kennada: Category creation finds you.

Nick Mehta: I see what you did there.

Anthony Kennada: Thank you.

Nick Mehta: I like that. So category creation found me outside of 24 hour fitness in Sunnyvale. Strangely enough, when I got a call from an investor who is about to invest in a new tiny little startup that really got my attention.

Anthony Kennada: The category creation found me driving up the five freeway from Los Angeles to San Francisco when I got a call from Nick late one night saying that, “Hey, there’s this new company I’m thinking about joining. What do you think?” And the company was called JBara software. It was based in St. Louis and it was focused on solving the business challenge that we now know as customer success.

Nick Mehta: And customer success was something I’m super excited about before running now, Gainsight, before JBara, I’d run another SAS company and so I felt this pain first hand. I was like, this could be a new category. This is six years ago, I was like, “Wow, let’s dive in.” But interesting name JBara, two consonants at the beginning. That’s always interesting. So what am I gonna do with that name? I was thinking, well, the first thing we can do is we could dominate SEO. If we’re going to be a category creator, we gotta be able to dominate SEO. So I typed in JBara into Google and I found celebrity B list actor, Gregory J Barra.

Anthony Kennada: Hallmark movies.

Nick Mehta: He’s now the patron saint of Gainsight. And I figured out we can’t dominate SEO.

Anthony Kennada: Totally. And as a marketer, I clicked on the website and this was something like a Squarespace meets Wix.com thing. I think the font was slightly better than Comic Sans. I’ll admit my first thought was, I don’t think this is a category leader.

Nick Mehta: But luckily Anthony, I dug in and with an amazing team and it’s been about six years in the journey and as many of you know now, customer success is a real category. Obviously our company’s called Gainsight now, and it’s been an amazing journey which we think we’re just on the beginning of. But what we want to do is share some of the stories on that journey of creating not just a company, but trying to create a category as well. And hopefully these are lessons you can all benefit from.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah. And we woke up five years later and we saw this article called What it Takes to Be a Category King. And as we scroll down, we saw our name alongside brands like Slack and Salesforce and Marketo and HubSpot.

Nick Mehta: It’s crazy.

Anthony Kennada: Crazy, right? We’re like, this is awesome. Something might have gone wrong here, but we were pretty proud to be in that company.

Nick Mehta: But then we scrolled a little further. I clicked down, I found the byline and I realized this article was actually written by my mom. So made it a little bit less of a proud moment. I was happy my mom was happy with me and she thought I was a category creator. But a little bit of joke obviously, but we do think that category creation is something we hear all the time about. It’s something people would like to do and we get asked about it a lot and the goal here is to have a conversation, share some of our learnings.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah, and I think the reason is it’s both really important but also uncommon. You don’t actually hear a lot of tried and true best practices on how to do this.

Nick Mehta: That’s right. Exactly. Category creation if you think about it, there’s a lot of really interesting attractive things about it. First of all, if you’re in a new category for defining a category the right way, you often don’t have a lot of competitors that’s exciting in the early days, right? You can define it yourself. You also don’t have a lot of noise. I mean one thing that’s good in category creation is you’re not trying to sort out from 1000 different companies. You’re trying to create your own space. You also don’t have preexisting notions. It’s been cool to be able to define what customer success is. The bummer is you don’t have any customer because category creators usually start with no customers, right? So we’ll talk a lot about how you get that flywheel going from the beginning.

Nick Mehta: And one of the things we’ll also talk about is the fact that not every category creator is a category winner. You can think of a lot of examples throughout history where one company created a category, another fast follower kind of appended that company and took the category. Think of the first computer that wasn’t a Mac or a PC. Think of the first MP3 player that wasn’t an iPod or think of the first search engine that wasn’t Google. Anthony, I’m guessing you have no idea what these pictures are.

Anthony Kennada: No clue at all.

Nick Mehta: All the young people in the audience have no idea, but these were the people that didn’t reap the category benefits.

Anthony Kennada: That’s right. But I think that’s actually a really good point, Nick. It’s not just about creating a new category. It’s about being able to actually dominate the category that you’re creating because there’s a ton of shareholder value that steak for category winners. In fact, HVR had this article that cited 53% incremental revenue growth and 74% incremental market cap growth to companies that are able to both create and dominate a category.

Nick Mehta: But we talk a lot about the great things of category creation, in this talk we’re also going to talk about some of the challenges because if you’re doing category creation, and if we’re honest, you know it’s really hard. There’s actually an article that just came out as we’re preparing for the talk on how to create a category an article came out and said, “Don’t create a category.” So we said, “Okay, well we better read this one.”

Nick Mehta: And the reality is there’s a big dark side to create and category. It’s actually really hard because you’re trying to create something that didn’t exist before, educate people on the new way to do things. Some of you know that expression, fighting with your arms tied behind your back. It’s kind of doing that, but underwater, blindfolded and surrounded by sharks with lasers. That’s literally sometimes what category creation feels like.

Anthony Kennada: It’s a big metaphor.

Nick Mehta: Big metaphor. Yeah, exactly. Some of the best companies I’d argue including many in this room, probably didn’t create categories. You found a technology, that can replace an existing category and some of the best businesses out there were basically technology solving an existing problem. And Workday is a great example, many of Workday, a company that solved HR technology problems that have existed forever but did it in the cloud and it’s amazing business really built a great business. Only challenge with starting workday is the job requirement is you had to start PeopleSoft previously. Some of you know Workday founders started the previous company. So if you’re not fortunate enough to have started another company in the same category and you have to jump off the pier of creating your own category, want to talk about what we’ve learned from that process.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah. If you take anything away from today in the session, it’s this, don’t create a new category.

Nick Mehta: Don’t, just don’t it.

Anthony Kennada: Just don’t it.

Nick Mehta: We’ve learned that it’s not worth it. Yeah.

Anthony Kennada: That’s right. So thank you everyone, thank you.

Nick Mehta: So thank you everyone. Appreciate it.

Anthony Kennada: Appreciate it.

Nick Mehta: All right. I think they’re still here.

Anthony Kennada: They’re still here.

Nick Mehta: Okay [crosstalk 00:06:05].

Anthony Kennada: Okay, good.

Nick Mehta: We’ll keep going for some reason they want to hear more.

Anthony Kennada: That’s right. Well I think the audience wants to take the red pill in this case. So let’s follow the white rabbit. Let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Nick Mehta: 20th year anniversary of the matrix. Let’s do it.

Anthony Kennada: Pop culturally relevant.

Nick Mehta: Awesome. So what we want to do is share five must do things, at least from our perspective, if you’re going down the crazy path of category creation, five things to think about, at least for us that have worked and hopefully will work for you as well. And then five demons that kind of come with those activities.

Anthony Kennada: Yap. And so the first one is ignore analysts, at least initially. There’s been a widely accepted belief in B2B that analysts are the defining voice for new categories. They’re two by twos, they’re expert analysis. These firms have built very successful businesses offering up advice to companies who are looking for validation, validation on how to navigate categories of products and services and who the leading brands were. And that’s exactly the position we found ourselves in what, two weeks into the job I think Nick signed agreements with Gartner and Forrester.

Nick Mehta: I signed them all.

Anthony Kennada: So echo sign gone. And we briefed the analysts and we got them on the phone with our customers that gave you demos of the product and all of their feedback, surprisingly aligned to existing research areas that they covered. They said, “You are the proactive customer support company.” And we’re like, “Kind of, I think there’s a little bit there.” Or, “You are the next generation account management software.” And I’m like, “Yeah, maybe, but there’s still something missing.” And for us, the piece that was missing was that there was a job that existed called the customer success manager. And I think Peter of Salesforce gets the credit for creating this role and naming it.

Anthony Kennada: And at the time this role was a little under resourced, maybe a little under appreciated. And this is a group that would meet online on LinkedIn to kind of share and compare notes. They would meet in person and offices around the bay area. And whenever we would go and sort of observe, we would see that there was a ton of passion and excitement around this group. And I think this almost cathartic sense of finally I’m around other people that are thinking about what I’m thinking about, that are going through the pains and struggles that we are.

Nick Mehta: And that’s a good lesson by the way, in the audience. If you have customer bases that are doing meetups on their own peer-to-peer, there’s a sign you might be creating category.

Anthony Kennada: Totally. And so we found ourselves in this kind of decision, right? We could either go down the path of listening to the analyst position JBara software as the proactive customer support company or a pivot and say like, “Hey, there’s something about serving the customer success manager persona, really trying to resource them.” And that’s exactly what we did. And I was very fortunate actually to be on the SaaStr stage here in 2016 I believe with Aaron Levie at Box. And we were talking about a similar topic and he had this quote that I thought was so powerful. “Our job is to find a demographic that no company is paying attention to in a meaningful way and make them heroes, celebrate them, be the company out there, resourcing then.”

Anthony Kennada: So that’s what we did. And ultimately what we discovered was at the end of the day, it’s not the analyst that create the category. It’s the customers. And this is without any disrespect to the analyst community, but the world is changing. Customers have more voice technology such as G2 Crowd and TrustRadius has enabled companies and customers excuse me, to take to online and to help validate categories and the different brands that are leading them. So for us, fortunately I think we picked the right job as we looked backwards. Customer success has become one of most promising jobs globally, according to LinkedIn data, which is a great sign that a lot of the early bets and kind of the continued effort has worked.

Nick Mehta: But one of the hard things about kind of deciding to create your own category name versus just embracing something the analysts all agree with is in the early days, nobody’s going to tell you it’s the right idea and somebody in the audience can probably feel this where you’ve got a new category name and you’re telling people about it and they’re like, they’re smiling politely and they’ll say, “Have you thought about X, Y, and Z?” I bet some, I see some people nodding in the audience here. I think a lot of people have dealt with this and in my early days and Anthony’s, I’d go around to CEO friends in 2013 to VCs and they say, “Customer success. That’s cool. I don’t really know what that means, but have you thought about customer analytics?” And be like, “Yeah, great.” Have you thought about customer machine learning. Have you thought about customer business intelligence?

Nick Mehta: Kind of about customer insights, just like buzzword bingo, any technology things you can add in. If you kind of customer, artificial intelligence, literally these are things people said you should do this, not customer success if we’re doing it in 2018 and they would have said, have you thought about customer autonomous scooters?

Anthony Kennada: Clearly-

Nick Mehta: So I think it’s actually a really good business idea by the way. I want to-

Anthony Kennada: It’s fundable.

Nick Mehta: [crosstalk 00:10:38] if anyone starts that. So, but the point is you’re not going to get any validation from your VCs or your friends or other companies that’s going to feel super lonely and it’s gonna feel like you’re doing something dumb initially. And, I think one of the things that kind of keeps people going and at least kept us going is even though all of the peers and companies and CEOs and VCs thought this was dumb, the people in our community didn’t. And I think many of you probably have people in your community who think you’re on to something and I think that’s what keeps us motivating. So the second lesson we want to talk a little bit about is how you can focus category creation, not just on your product and your software, but actually on the people in your customer base and really make it a people centric model. That’s kind of what we very much focused on at Gainsight.

Nick Mehta: So the way we did that, actually going back to the beginning, so 2013 we’re just getting started. We’re in Regus in San Jose, Regus, if you don’t know, is like a really lame version of WeWork, right? So we’re in this tiny little office and we’re thinking how do we create this category of customer success and we’d seen some obviously seeing Dreamforce and things like that. We’re like, we should throw an event. In fact, I think I told you we should throw an event. This is you on the floor there.

Anthony Kennada: It’s an actual photo after planning it. Well when I heard event, I thought Nick meant, hey, this is a launch event, right? It’s got a startup tee shirt. Some bar in SoMa, put a credit card down and announce the brand. But what he really meant was host a conference.

Nick Mehta: A conference and conferences are easy.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah. Apparently. And this was only a couple of months on the job, right? Two, three months in. And he was tasking me and the team, the early team to build a conference around the job of customer success. And so it wasn’t a customer conference. We didn’t have that many customers at the time and nothing about our products or services. And so since we were actually still in the process of rebranding from JBara software to Gainsight, we needed a name. And so we decided to call the conference Pulse. And that’s a micro brand that we still operate today. And it’s become sort of synonymous with the customer success community or at least Gainsight’s thought leadership arm.

Nick Mehta: I think this is one big tactic, which is consider if you do an event, don’t name it after your company, name it after something bigger.

Anthony Kennada: Totally. And even in the early days and we looked an infused our somewhat weird sense of humor, which you can’t tell.

Nick Mehta: Likably awkward-

Anthony Kennada: Likably awkward.

Nick Mehta: My wife says, yeah.

Anthony Kennada: And so this is Nick and 2013 posing a for what I think is the Heisman and the amazing thing is even from our first year, that same energy that we observed from the meetups that we were attending sort of being the flies on the wall translated into the energy in the room at Pulse. And so over 300 people showed up, which for a company that had, like I said, very few customers and still in the process of rebranding, felt like a good sign of validation that, that there was something to this community.

Anthony Kennada: And we’ve seen a ton of growth in that conference overall. And so this year we’ll draw over 6,000 people to Moscone and the growth isn’t just in the US but it spawned consists of events in the UK and Australia and over 50 chapters of what we call Pulse Local, which are communities, self-managed. And there are folks that get together every quarter to learn to grow and network and customer success.

Nick Mehta: And if you talk to people who come to these events. The thing they love is it’s not about Gainsight. So again, if you’re going to do events or marketing, how do you make it about the people not about your company?

Anthony Kennada: That’s right. And we sort of draw inspiration from taking it as a conference brand and evolving it into something else. And it’s a word that we don’t actually use a lot in B2B. It’s building a lifestyle brand, lifestyle brand for the people that are in the job of customer success. We want to be career companions, we want to do life with them. And the notion of taking content that might have been expressed through an event channel similar to this, into things like digital. So our blog posts were all about the job of customer success. We started a podcast series. We do live video workshops. We’ve even done online certification process for those that are just wanting to be career certified. And we have job matching programs. Sometimes we, I think, feel like a recruiting arm too just in-

Nick Mehta: Totally we want to help our customers no matter what it is, whether it’s software or in their careers.

Anthony Kennada: That’s right.

Nick Mehta: Yeah. And on that note, one of the things I think if you’re trying to create a category, one of the big things is content and it’s really about content that’s authentic to that job. Lots of times I see people saying, “I’m creating a category, here’s my blog post.” And the blog post is like 10 things to look for in this kind of soft law.” Right? And that’s not a content marketing, that’s not authentic content, that’s just marketing, what we really focused on, what I encourage you to do as well is getting to the persona, the person in that category and think about what makes them tick. How do they get paid, how do they get promoted, how do they find new jobs? The types of stuff we write is all about the persona.

Anthony Kennada: That’s right.

Nick Mehta: And it all ends up being about really owning that your experience in creating the category is just as important as your experience in creating the product. We actually, we run our conference and we’re super obsessed just like Jason is about every detail in this event because the experience in the conference is just as important as the experience on the product. So we send a survey afterwards every time, and actually fun story our last conference afterwards I was in the hospital for unrelated reasons and I was actually just in the recovery room and I literally was going through NPS responses and writing back to customers with and thanking them for their feedback and that’s the kind of thing you really need to do is embrace that you own this community and you’re the steward of the community so you have to do a great job with it.

Nick Mehta: So summarizing this part of kind of focusing on the people and building the community. A couple of lessons to take away in this part. Number one, if you’ve ever worked in Open-source before, Open-source software, this is just like open source. You create this open source world, you don’t make any money off of it, but you have to care and feed and really genuinely care about it, but it’ll build your business. Number two, think about making the brand for your community different than the brand for your company. Number three, it’s important to show the momentum. We showed that graph of the growth of Pulse and that shows the growth of our community. So think about what that graph looks like for your business. Number four, if people want to connect to other people in your community, these meetups, these get togethers really matter. And then number five, treat this just like your product. If you’re going to create a category, treat the category creation just like you treat your product.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah, that’s right. And I think one reason this is really hard is that CFOs from investors may not get it. This is as a marketer, at least one of the folks spending a lot of the money at the company, it’s tough, right? It’s tough to justify and get incremental spend for some of these ideas. But I think the important part is ensuring that what you’re doing is actually aligning the brand with a movement you’re trying to create but also fueling your funnel. And so it has to be able to contribute to bookings and pipeline building and all these sorts of things that end up obviously mattering to the shareholder value. Now I’ve tried quoting Einstein in board meetings and not always successful and saying that not all things worth counting are countable. But at the end of the day, figuring out attribution for a lot of this stuff, it’s complicated.

Nick Mehta: It’s going to be super hard to just say that spending and category creation, how does it immediately tie to revenue? If you’re used to a model where you generate an SQL, turns into a booking or whatever terminology you use, that model is not going to work in a category creation.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah, more complex.

Nick Mehta: That’s great. So this third concept is really about the idea that you got to get out and evangelize if you want to create a category, because eventually you become the spokesperson for that category. And I think at Gainsight we’ve become some of the spokespeople for customer success. So the biggest problem with this third point is it involves a lot of flights on United Airlines, which totally sucks no matter what you’re doing, but you’re on the road and you’re the face of this movement, and if you follow our customer success, we’ve kind of become one of the faces, not the only one for this movement. And so I’d encourage you to say, how much can you lean in to getting out there? In our case, we get invited to speak at company all hands and kickoffs and conferences about customer success.

Nick Mehta: One of the things we did early on, which was great, is we hired one of our early customers to be one of our evangelists. His name’s Dan Steinman. He actually co-wrote the book with me and Lincoln Murphy on Customer Success. So Dan became kind of a voice of the customer. Allison Pickens on the bottom of that photo is our chief operating officer ran our customer success team. She became a voice of our customers. So who are those voices of your customers that are in your company that are going to get out there in front of your customers? And then eventually you get to the point where you have so much knowledge about this category that you write a book. I remember when we got an email from Wiley about writing a book, the publisher, and I was like, why should we write a book? First of all, does anyone read a business book anymore?

Nick Mehta: And isn’t that kind of dated? I got to tell you, almost nothing we’ve ever done has been better than writing a business book on customer success. It just carries you into so many different places you would have never been before, into board rooms, into investors. It’s really, really remarkable. Highly recommend it if you have something interesting to say. Great. So on this third, this area of kind of evangelism, authentically get into the mindset of your community. Don’t just focus on your product, focus on content about the community.

Nick Mehta: One thing tactically is really focused on getting the message out there. So in a traditional kind of lead context, you might be focused on gaining your content and not letting it all be free. I’d encourage you to say, get all the content out there. LinkedIn, ungated blog posts, podcasts have worked super well for us. So tactically that’s something to consider. And like I said, the book, tons of effort, but huge OMRON very much consider it. That’s right. And I think the hard thing is as you’ve seen is how do you scale this? Because you need those voices of the customer inside your company. And we’ve wrestled with that a lot.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah, totally. All right. Number four, being authentic at scale. So people really like doing business with people. They trust people, they admire people they like. And your executive team really ought to be the public expression of what the company’s purpose and what the company’s values are and marketers, and we played a pretty key role here in sort of capturing and amplifying who are executives are and what they stand for. So we’ve been pretty transparent about our purpose at Gainsight to be living proof that you can win in business while also being human first as well as our values that are listed here. It’s become the rudder of who we are and how we choose to show up and work with each other, with our customers and with our community.

Nick Mehta: It’s interesting thing is our customers all know our values now. Our values of our company are kind of the values of the community. So there’s really a huge opportunity there.

Anthony Kennada: Totally. And so I was actually reminded of a quote from Keith Krach, the former chairman at DocuSign and actually a four time category creator in his own right. And it’s that time is the only currency in business. And so my job on the marketing front and was to come up a way to really scale a lot of this authenticity to shine a light on our purpose, our values, and to the point Nick made as an expression, not just to us but about the community. And so we’ve run a number of campaigns over the years in an attempt to do this. Some ideas have been crazier than others. Like recording and filming a acapella version of Taylor swift’s Blank Space featuring our customers, chief customer officers, and we change all the words to make it about customer success.

Anthony Kennada: What is likely the only customer success, musical theater performance inspired by Broadway and Disney. A live action, last episode of friends where we finally learned that Chandler’s job all along was a customer success manager. And by the way, there’s a big difference for the marketers in the room between impersonators and actors. A terrible performance. But we’ll leave that aside. We had vanilla ice, the real Vanilla Ice.

Nick Mehta: Which had nothing to do with customer success and we just felt cool. That was awesome yeah.

Anthony Kennada: Opened up a 90s themed conference and to really kind of invest in the experience there, filmed our carpool karaoke video with Aaron Levie and Nick and we even recorded and distributed a hip hop single at Capitol Records. I am not kidding. We actually did this. And so if you go to Spotify or Apple music, you’ll find that there.

Nick Mehta: And all these things are interesting because they’re all crazy, but they resonate so much with our community. And this first point is exactly what I’m talking about, where you want to blur the lines between your company and your customers. I’ll give you the craziest example, which is we made this crazy music video about customer success, hip hop. I mean that couldn’t be more out of the Silicon Valley TV show if I came with any idea, right? But then one of our customers Slack, who we love dearly, made their own version of that same video for their customer success team. Right? And that’s when you get to the flywheel going where your community and your category and your culture all blending together. Obviously one thing that really brings it all together is conferences. So really investing in the different physical in person meetings you’ve got, be authentic to who you are and then have no shame, which is a big part of it.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah. The tough part about having no shame-

Nick Mehta: Is being vulnerable. Right? Fundamentally, you gotta be willing to put yourself out there and do some things that are kind of ridiculous because it really helps you connect with that community in that category. At least for us. I even wrote a whole blog post about this just about embracing vulnerability in a way to get closer to your customers and to your team as well. So feel free to check that out. So final thing, final thought. As you’re building a category, one of the things that happens is it just doesn’t take place overnight. It’s a really, really long-term endeavor in most category creations. Sequoia Capital is a big investor. They have a great expression. I love called being long-term greedy, not short-term greedy. So question is, are you really after that super long-term prize or you’re just focused on what you’re gonna do this quarter? If you’re focused on what you’re going to do this quarter, honestly don’t do category creation.

Nick Mehta: It’s super bumpy. It takes a very long time. But if you focus on the long-term, which we’ve tried to do, I think you can build something pretty special. You go to the next chart. This is the chart that look at all the time, which is basically the number of CSMs in the world according to Linkedin. We’re going to be publishing a report on this and we’re just like, look, this is going to be a huge category and we’re going to ride that category. We’ve become the kind of dominant player in that category. So what’s that chart that your business looks at? Right? And then the other thing we look at all the time is the influencer that keep talking about customer success. In our world it’s the McKinseys and Gartners and whatever. So now we’ve gotten to the mainstream where they’re talking about it.

Nick Mehta: So who are those influencers that are making you feel like you’re on the right path? Now one of the things you’ll run into is customer success and for us was just a start of what we thought of is our category. At some point you’ll even think about how do you redefine that category? It never ends, right? You want to create an even bigger category. We’re in that process and now we got into the product experience space. We’re thinking about a bigger category now. So category creation is a motion you can just keep using over and over again.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah, that’s right.

Nick Mehta: Yeah. And so fundamentally this fifth lesson is that you have to really be long-term greedy. But the truth is that makes short-term planning really hard. Being super vulnerable like it’s really hard to plan sales quarters and marketing leads and give people a formula of how it’s all gonna work out. You need patient investors, it’s going to be super bumpy along the way. But over in the long-term you can build something really substantial and I hope you all get that same experience as well, but if you’re in that bumpy part and you’re like, “Is it just me?” It’s not just you. I think everyone that’s going through category creation has that same experience.

Anthony Kennada: Yeah. So there you have it. We’ve chosen the red pill. We think we’re in a room potentially for others that either have chosen it or are thinking about it. And what we actually really want you to take away is that you’re not alone and it’s okay to make some mistakes. And if you remove the pressure that there are experts out there that have really figured this out, that there’s like a tried and true playbook, I think that will help us all collectively get better at figuring out how to do this. And at Gainsight we’re still learning, we’re still learning how to do it

Nick Mehta: Yeah, we’re still learning, and don’t have all the answers, I mean every day we’re like, “God, is this working? Are we thinking about the category right way? Do we need to expand it?” You might think of us, we’re 600 people in the company, you might say, “Oh, you figured it all out.” We have not figured it all out, but we are very, very long-term ambitious. We think we’re going to something big. So if you’re in the audience and you’re at some part of that journey, you’re not sure if you’re on the right path, I’d say there’s a lot of people in this same struggle right alongside you.

Nick Mehta: And if nothing else, if the category creation stuff doesn’t get you excited, if creating this big opportunity doesn’t, well hopefully something happens like what happened for us, which is Google SEO replaced that B list actor in the beginning Gregory JBarra with now Gainsight’s showing up as a hip hop musical artist when you Google Gainsight. So-

Anthony Kennada: We did it-

Nick Mehta: Kind of cool way to end the story. Thanks everyone. Really appreciate it.

Anthony Kennada: Thank you, appreciate it.

 

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