How does Arrows perceive Gainsight, the biggest public incumbent in the customer success space?

What’s your take on Gainsight, which is the biggest public incumbent in the customer success space?

When we started out, we thought a lot about success platforms. We felt early on that Arrows was going to grow from a customer-facing action plan into a new customer data platform and build all these workflows around the customer journey on that data. It was going to try to become a new customer success platform.

But if you look at the size of the customer success category, the number of customers is in the order of a few thousands across all those companies. It is likely 10,000 or so. When you look at the number of companies that buy a CRM like HubSpot and Salesforce, they are each in the hundreds of thousands. The total category has millions of customers.

On the one hand, the amount of work and time it takes to set up, configure, and buy a platform like Gainsight is very challenging. When you talk to companies that set these up, it takes months at best, and there's a lot of failed roll-outs for these sorts of products. That’s not a statement on the products, but more a reality of the complexity of the proble.

When we designed Arrows, we built it to be something that you could demo in the morning and send to a customer in the afternoon. Getting started is very quick, and you can progressively layer-on deeper integrations, workflows, and automations over time once you see what’s working. 

From a market category standpoint, we deleted the Arrows dashboard and leaned into the CRM to try to better tap into the larger market of anybody who uses a CRM to manage their internal process. We wondered, “How do you give your customers visibility into what they should do that drives the internal object through stages of the pipeline versus being a wholly managed onboarding or customer journey platform that your team has to go adopt?” If we look around at the success platforms, the size of market opportunity there is provably limited.

By removing a big chunk of our product and more clearly expressing ourselves as an extension to your CRM or customer data platforms, we saw the opportunity became much, much bigger.