Dear SaaStr: How Should Founders Build Their First Customer Success Team?

Dear SaaStr: How Should Founders Build Their First Customer Success Team?

Building a Customer Success (CS) team early is critical for SaaS startups. Here’s how early-stage founders should approach it:

1. Hire Early, Even Before It Feels Necessary
   Don’t wait until churn becomes a problem. Customer Success should be a single-digit hire—ideally, your first 5-10 employees should include at least one CS hire. This ensures you’re proactively driving retention, upsells, and customer satisfaction from the start.  If nothing else, hire someone full time once you have 2 Big Customers to support.  You will run out of time to do this right as founders.

2. Start with a Passionate Generalist
   Your first CS hire doesn’t need to be a VP or a senior leader. Instead, look for someone who’s passionate about your product, loves working with customers, and has some experience in CS. A liberal arts major with the right attitude and customer empathy can do just fine in the early days.

3. Focus on Retention and Expansion
   The CS team’s primary job is to retain customers and drive expansion revenue. But expansion can wait.  Early on, your CS hire should focus on onboarding customers effectively, reducing churn, and ensuring customers are successful with your product. Happy customers lead to renewals, upsells, and referrals, which are the foundation of B2B growth.

4. Don’t Rely on Sales to Handle CS
   Sales reps are great at closing deals, but they’re not built to manage ongoing customer relationships. Avoid the mistake of expecting your sales team to handle CS responsibilities. Instead, dedicate resources to CS early to ensure customers are supported post-sale.

5. Set Clear, Measurable Goals
   Avoid “squishy” goals for your CS team. Metrics like Net Revenue Retention (NRR), churn rate, and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores should be tracked from day one. This ensures your CS team is aligned with driving measurable outcomes for your business.

6. Smother Early Customers with Love
   Your first customers are precious. They’re your early logos, references, and advocates. Overinvest in their success. Early on, you might have a lower customer-to-CSM ratio, but that’s okay. As you scale, aim for each CSM to manage $1-2M in ARR to keep the function cost-effective.

7. Hire for the Right Experience Level
   If you’re selling to mid-market or enterprise customers, hire someone who has experience managing accounts at a similar price point. Don’t hire someone who’s only worked with SMBs if your ACV is $250k+—they won’t understand your customer base.

8. Align CS with Product and Marketing
   Your CS team should work closely with product and marketing to gather feedback from customers, influence the roadmap, and set the right expectations. This alignment can drive better retention and faster expansion revenue.

In short, hire early, hire smart, and make CS a core part of your DNA from the start. It’s the foundation for long-term SaaS success.