Interview with Guy Marion CEO of Brightback

Guy Marion

Guy Marion is CEO of Brightback , the first automated customer Retention software for subscription businesses.

He brings unique SaaS growth, product, and sales experience, from launch to $100M ARR to IPO. Prior to founding

Brightback, Guy was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Matrix Partners, Autopilot COO, Zendesk Head of Online

Sales, CollabNet VP & GM, and CEO/growth at Codesion (acq. by CollabNet, 2010)

Guy firstly thank you for participating in an interview with Business Digest Magazine we are extremely grateful and are looking forward to sharing your insights, experience, and your overall journey with our audience.

I'd like to start by asking you about the early days of your working life and how you decided to found Brightback. What brought you to where you are today?

In the early days of my SaaS/tech career, I was the co-founder and ultimately CEO of a SaaS-based collaborative project management service. I led our acquisition by the Enterprise leader in our space, then took leadership roles in popular SaaS tools in customer service (Zendesk) and marketing automation (Autopilot).

 

A key takeaway: over the past 10 years, the subscription industry has prioritized customer acquisition growth at all costs. We spend millions of dollars acquiring, converting, and onboarding new subscribers, but then struggle to keep them as customers. In fact, basically no merchants or brands have cracked how to identify and retain customers at scale, because it’s technically hard to do and not as glamorous as selling new customers..

 

Having personally spent tremendous time and resources building solutions to do just this and knowing how impactful increased customer retention is on the long-term success of a subscription business, given the snowball-like effect of recurring revenue, I knew that there was an obvious need for tools and best practices to do this quickly and with confidence. Given my scientific (I have a Ph.D. climate/ocean sciences) and online/product analytics background, my biggest learnings and successes have come from testing, evolving, and applying the scientific method to business and product challenges - which is how we have built our product at Brightback
 
I started Brightback solve this problem, building on my own experiences creating sophisticated cancel flows, as well as based on feedback from growth leaders in many of Silicon Valley well-known companies. Today we help high-volume businesses like food delivery leader Freshly, marketing software company Unbounce, or beauty and apparel company MeUndies reduce cancellations by up to 30%, while delivering critical insights needed to improve.

What drew you to this industry?

 

Initially, the game-changing benefits that hosted software (this was before the “cloud” or SaaS) like ours offered for globally distributed teams to work more productively and securely together, without the pain, cost and frustration involved with traditional, on-premise software. We were based in Australia, our servers were in the US, and our customers were all over the world - this was a massive paradigm shift, which Salesforce.com was raising huge awareness for with it’s “No Software” (only hosted services) message.

 

Fast forward the clock, and today everything is in the cloud. But customer retention is one of the few areas left that lack tools, best practices, and benchmarks. That said, consumers cancel most services for basically the same reason - price, flexibility, fear of commitment, or misunderstanding of the product/service.

 

The underlying data models and technology needed to deliver personalized digital experiences that can engage users in the right way, at the right time, for the right reason, is more easily designed and scoped when purpose-built for retention. Learnings are transferable from product, app, or service to service - and tactics and language in many cases are similar. In effect, we are a great big testing engine, with the goal of helping all our customers become fitter, move faster, and delight their customers with simplicity and valuable solutions to the problems that otherwise would result in them quitting. Yes- it’s actually fun!

 

Tell me how you are changing up customer retention.

 

If we’re honest with ourselves, most of what we know about customers comes from talking to them via call centers or email support queues. Existing customer retention software focuses on making these agents or account managers more efficient at their jobs or minimizing loss from bad or expired credit cards.

 

Brightback takes a different approach - we seek to understand, using data and user behavior, why customers cancel in the first place. Then we solve those problems in the most efficient and effective way possible, by hosted delightfully simple yet personalized cancel experiences, and making offers to keep customers instead. We learned recently from a survey of over 1,000 consumers that 80% are more likely to purchase an online subscription if they know they can easily cancel online.

                                                                                                   

Tell us how COVID has affected the subscription industry and what it has changed.

 

Big winners and struggling losers. Subscriptions that deliver to the home, make collaborative teams more productive, or provide entertainment while we’re all stir crazy trapped inside, have exploded. For example, our customer Freshly serves over a million meals a week, had to remove the signup button because they couldn’t keep up with surging demand. On the other hand, companies that serve small businesses initially were badly hurt - now we’ve seen a rebound but as they year goes on, I think we’ll see that even more subscribers adopt subscriptions for everything (news, entertainment, work, food, pets, video, gifts, and much more). 

 

What brands have you worked with and what types of industries are they in?

 

Everything from Freshly -fresh food delivery, Yoga International -home wellness, MeUndies -apparel and beauty, Unbounce -marketing software, KeepTruckin -logistics management software and more.

 

What draws companies to use a service like Brightback?

 

First, today’s Gen X, millennial and GenZ consumers are digital first - they expect control and seamless ability to sign up, try, buy and cancel online. Second, many subscription businesses experience higher churn than their Boards or investors would like to see, because for the same reason it’s easy to buy, it’s easy to quit. Finally, California passed laws in 2018 the require subscription brands to let people cancel online if they can sign up online. New York is the second state to follow (coming up in February 2021), while Visa is also requiring its credit card merchants to empower its customers to quit. Most subscription services are impacted by one of these pressures and benefit from smart, automated retention tools like Brightback offers.

 

As an entrepreneur and business owner, what has been a highlight in your journey?

 

There are few! First, we’ve been a remote-first team from day 1. The first time we physically came together as a team, we spent nearly a week living together in a rental house in Lake Tahoe … and got snowed in by a blizzard. While we ran the risk of driving each other crazy, we instead formed meaningful, long-term memories by playing games, solving difficult problems, and building the foundations of trust that carried us for months ahead while collaborating online.

 

Another highlight was when our first food delivery company, Freshly, shared incredible results from their use of Brightback. They were able to learn really why their customers left (price and flexibility), find solutions, while automatically saving millions in revenue. It opened our eyes to how big this opportunity really is for every subscription business.

 

Finally, a highlight was receiving a ‘pre-emptive offer of venture capital funding from an extremely well-regarded VC in a top Silicon Valley fund. It instantly levelled up our trajectory, enabled us to hire top-tier talent, and gave our multinational clients the confidence to invest in working with a startup. 

 

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs?

First, never stop testing and trying, particularly with pricing and target customer. If you aren’t sure if you’ve found the right customer and the right pricing, then you probably haven’t. Once you hit “product-market fit”, then everything changes - sales close faster, customers get promoted from using your products, they refer their friends and colleagues, and investors and partners start knocking to help find ways to grow. 

 

Second, as an entrepreneur, our opportunity is to figure out what’s not working - what’s causing friction, what’s blocking progress, what’s making your team unhappy - then fix those issues. Once you do, the team gets happier, the machine grows faster, and everything gets better. So #1 thing is to get as much input as you can - ask lots of questions, listen, and write down your comments in meetings and try not to give those answers or solutions unless nobody else has.

 

Third, learn to be extremely concise and efficient at communicating your vision. Your initial insight is why your company exists today, and nobody else has exactly that same perspective - you need to be 10x better at painting this picture. It’s amazing how when you know where you’re going, how others will hop along and run with you - customers, team members, partners, investors.

 

Finally, trust but verify. You are responsible for everyone’s success, and it’s true that you will win by building a team and making them successful and trusting them. That said, people make mistakes - you need to know when to step in and fix mistakes (hint: do so if a mistake cannot be reversed) and when to let people learn for themselves, even if in the short-term it feels slower than you know it could be if you just did it yourself. In the long run, you’re building team and company muscles that will vastly accelerate your or any other individuals’ impact.

 

Is it truly cheaper to retain current customers rather than acquire new ones?

Absolutely. Acquiring customers is the most expensive thing we do. Once you do, every incremental dollar you can charge or retain is almost pure profit. According to comprehensive SaaS surveys, a dollar acquired is actually 7x more expensive than a dollar retained.

Can you talk about the data you provide business owners and what that can tell them?

 

We share insights into their own customers, insights they’ve never had before. How do brand new subscribers respond to offers or experiences compared to long-term loyal customers? What will it take for your top, highest paying customers to stay with you longer, compared to low costs customers or unprofitable customers? Who is more likely to return to your service after they cancel, and how much more will they spend? Which customers are costing your business by requesting refunds, abusing promotions, or complaining about you online? We provide granular views of why people cancel, what competitive services they go to, their likelihood to return in the future, anecdotes and insights they are willing to share, and ensure this data gets into the right systems or people in our customers’ companies needed to be studied and applied.

 

What has been the most surprising thing you have found regarding this service to businesses?

 

We are all looking for silver bullets that solve are biggest challenges and pains instantly. Very few exist - and when it comes to retention, I’ve always been careful to set expectations that the results are slow to build but compound over time. In fact, a customer of mine says retention is like winning the game through 9 first downs, not Hail Mary’s. But - we now see immediately fast impacts from our new customers who go live. It’s like they are seeing and hearing for the first time, and their cancellations drop instantly (even if only a little, initially). My surprise was that once we started focusing on larger businesses with higher-volume cancellations (like over 500 per month), we started getting instantly positive feedback.

 

What is next for Brightback?

 

We are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to solve very complex problems, like using hundreds of signals to predict which users are most likely to be saved, which need to be tested, what experiences and offers will perform best, and what channels should be used to re-engage those subscribers. We are also becoming more nuanced in how we assign value to different subscribers, because not all are created equal. We can provide the insights and metrics needed by marketers to ensure they’re targeting people who are not just going to buy but will buy and stick around for years to come. 

 

We are also growing our team rapidly - all remote workers spread across the US (and eventually across the world). Teamwork makes the dream work, so our goal is to help high potential remote first self-starters join our team, work on problems that inspire them, and be comfortable and challenged enough that they pass it forward and will spoil our customers and community! 

 

What is next for you?

 

To keep growing as an entrepreneur and CEO. That means staying fit and healthy, being an ever-present husband and father of two boys and a girl, be a better son and community member, while ensuring that my team, customers, and investors are satisfied and confident in the future. To grow leaders and give people are reason to bound out of bed every morning. To not lose sight of what’s important, even when I’m in firefighting mode dealing with what’s most urgent.

 

Finally, our country and world is being tested - by Covid-19, by rapid climate change, by income inequality, by structural racism. Entrepreneurs tend to antsy and more frustrated than most do by “doing nothing” in response to clear problems. I’m trying to balance the right line between staying focused on the business (knowing my biggest impact will be building a successful company that supports hundreds or thousands of people around us) without ignoring the needs of our community. 

 

What is the best way for people to contact you directly?

 

Find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guymarion/ or by email: [email protected]