How has Census's customer success operation evolved over time, and what does it look like now?

Our customer success operation is nascent -- we're still an early startup -- so there are probably some experts that might read this and would have a lot of very interesting feedback for us. I would say the biggest shift is that, when we got started, most of the people that we talked to thought we were crazy. Part of the reason was, there was a very linear idea of your data pipeline: the data gets loaded in and ends up in your data warehouse, you run some queries, and you build a chart on it. The idea of pulling data back out was a bit nonsensical. Like, we would have people say, "I'm not sure I want that. I don't really know, do I want to do it? Do I trust this as a data source?" A lot of our very early customer success efforts were explaining to people partially the modern data stack itself, but also why it is valuable, why they should think about this as a feedback loop, as opposed to a very linear start-to-finish, left-to-right pipeline.

That has changed, to a certain extent. I think we're still relatively early in the modern data stack adoption curve. Most of the people that are developing this space maybe spent some time in the DDD Slack, and they're definitely more on the early adopter end of the curve here. But even just over the last year, we've seen more enterprises talking about this. We see a lot more mid-markets. We see interesting companies that are not the leading or the hottest startups on TechCrunch adopting modern data stacks. Their version might be a little bit different. We start to see a bit more Azure as part of these conversations, MySQL, that sort of thing. Maybe we'll get into conversations about on-prem. But they're shifting. They're starting to think in this way. They may be switching to a Snowflake as part of this, and they're adopting more of a cloud mentality.

In some cases, companies that have been around for decades are realizing that they actually may have a leg up on the disruptive startup that's trying to come into their space, because they have access to huge troves of data. If they can go add a couple of data resources to their team, they can suddenly compete in a way that those startups cannot.

I'm spouting words that are just like, "Yeah, we're moving up the adoption curve." But I think that's a lot of what we see day to day in our customer success. We do a little less explaining of what the modern data stack is and why it's not crazy to do this, and a little more of, "Here are all the benefits that you can get." And we are hearing a lot more, "Aha," or even, "Oh, we know. Just help us get it done."