Customer.io: The $400M HubSpot of Product-Led Growth

Acquisitions: The company has used M&A as an important growth tool. As per Ben Thompson’s about their Slack acquisition, “the fact that the company “buys growth” is often held up as a criticism, but the truth is

once you’ve got product-market fit with a rinse and repeatable growth strategy, spend is going to shift toward S&M away from R&D and raising equity to plug the CAC to payback gap in cash flow seems like an incredibly expensive way of achieving this when alternatives like Pipe exist. I think VCs that invested at the earlier stages are very aligned h... See more

There’s a broad spectrum of VCs and founders, the latter of whom possess differing levels of capability to maintain high growth and continually raise equity dollars at inflated valuations. For example, there are many companies who raise an angel/seed round, then a Series A, spend most of it on customer acquisition which flows right into FB and Goog... See more

-It wants to serve the broadest range of real-time engagement use cases well to appeal to the customers who need everything to just work, but faces competition from more geographically and use-case focused competitors.

-Acquires new customers

Marketo—which was purchased by Adobe for $4.75B—develops marketing automation software for businesses to market to customers. Creators and independent workers are likewise seeking to re-engage and customize experiences for their fans/customers, but lack the tools to do so. For instance, if someone subscribes to a paid podcast, trigger an email invi... See more