Jan-Erik Asplund
Questions
- I’d love to just get your high-level take on the market as someone who’s used a lot of these tools.
- With Klaviyo, they’re very focused on e-commerce, how do you think about them winning this different market?
- What do you make of Twilio in this space, especially given their acquisition of Segment, as a competitive threat?
- You’d mentioned before about deliverability as a commodity, can you say more about that?
- Is someone doing this well in sales? Could Klaviyo win that too?
Interview
I’d love to just get your high-level take on the market as someone who’s used a lot of these tools.
I think the way to look at these tools is to focus on the root technology, right? Like these are effectively CRMs, right? And so in the CRM space, what do you actually care about?
If you look at the technology struggles that Salesforce has, it's ease of use, it's the data models underpinning all of the actual CRM.
This is the reason why I think Klaviyo actually will do really well here and probably win the market. In a CRM you have an object called a contact, which in Customer.io is called a customer.
Can customers change over time? Have you changed over time? How easy is it to update through a variety of sources? The people object in your CRM currently, let's say right now I'm in your Customer.io. Can you change my name, and how hard is that to do? Can you do it right now by hand?
Can you do a search by my name and find all of the duplicate emails I've tried to sign up with. Can you do a search for my email with a “plus one” after and it’s smart enough to know that’s the same email?
If I upload a CSV of all my different names, can you upload it like in a second? Or does it require an API? And even in the CSV upload, how many steps does it take? What if there's malformation?
With Klaviyo, they’re very focused on e-commerce, how do you think about them winning this different market?
Currently, their technology is flexible enough such that they can sell into any market that cares about CRM.
What do you make of Twilio in this space, especially given their acquisition of Segment, as a competitive threat?
Klaviyo is growing and they're growing very fast, but if they grow fast enough, if you are Twilio, wouldn't you just buy them for $10 billion right now? Like just take them out? Yeah.
You’d mentioned before about deliverability as a commodity, can you say more about that?
For us, SendGrid just handles that. It's not interesting. Deliverability is not a hard, it's not a valuable thing. You can have deliverability with something like Amazon SES. These are not hard technical problems.
What is hard is getting marketers and product people aligning the organization around the concept that when you have an entry in your CRM, that entry should be updated over time, all the time.
Salesforce is notorious for being bad at this. Like if an object in Salesforce leaves the organization, it's almost like they're dead to Salesforce, but what if they join another company that is a customer? Like how does that work?
Is someone doing this well in sales? Could Klaviyo win that too?
No, I don't think they care about that. I think in the enterprise sales world, I think somebody will probably build this technology on top of Salesforce. I don't think anything replaces Salesforce over the next five years. Definitely. 10 years, who knows?
I think the only way Salesforce gets taken out is if somebody builds a Salesforce for the rest of the world, that's not in corporate America. So something like Zoho, maybe, there's like Chinese solutions. And FreshCRM.
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