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Josh Schachter:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to this special episode of UnChurned. Why is it special? Well, it’s special for a couple reasons. The first reason is that I don’t have John and Christy as my cohosts. Like, I’ve I’m I feel free and and unfettered, from them, my my besties here.

Jenny Calvert:
The second reason is we got Jenny Calvert, who is leading the charge in post sales at UpdateAI. Was actually our first customer over a year ago, and she’s awesome. So she is she’s kind of, like, hip check them out of the picture. And for today, Jenny is my cohost. And then the third reason is that we have one of our favorite startups, also well, I’m in New York. Jenny is not. But also in New York City, which is Ciena AI. And so we have the cofounder and CEO, Andre Andre Negrau.

Jenny Calvert:
Didn’t pronounce that properly entirely, but close enough, so we’ll keep going. And Chad Hornfeld, the VP of customer success, and a major player in the customer success community in New York City, one of the most well liked people that I know in the entire CS community. So kudos to that, Chad, for for accomplishing that. I think it’s you’re a nice, jolly Canadian, with good morals and principles.

Josh Schachter:
For sure.

Jenny Calvert:
Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know I don’t know how you follow that, Chad, that introduction. So, but, Andre, tell us a little bit about tell tell the audience. Jenny and I know don’t know Ciena very well. But for others that are are new, listening to the podcast, tell everybody a little bit about Ciena.

Josh Schachter:
Absolutely. Ciena AI is the first AI agent built specifically for commerce. And we’ve done this, I think, a little bit ahead of the game, I’d say. My the story here is, it’s fun, but it’s also, it’s not that straightforward, but I’m trying to compress it. So my cofounder and I, Lisa, Lisa and I, we we’ve been part of the ecommerce and the consumer space for more than a decade. We started actually businesses back in Romania where, it was the Shopify boom time. Everyone was building Shopify businesses, but no one was really doing it at Romania. So we jumped, and we saw an opportunity to do something very special back then and there.

Josh Schachter:
And all the businesses all we we built a few brands, like, among the, along the years. And one of the true lines of those brands was customer experience because we didn’t have a budget to compete with with other brands that we’re investing millions in ads. We thought we said we’d set ourselves, like, if we provide a really good experience and we have a good product, customers are gonna come back. And then we took that as our bible in every single brand that we build along our journey.

Jenny Calvert:
Yep. So, like, you just roll up the sleeves. Hey. We may not have the thousand different features, but we’re gonna just crush it with just rolled up sleeves, customer experience, making the building the relationships, giving them what they want.

Josh Schachter:
To contrast what we were doing, some of our competitors at that point, they were not even answering emails. They had backlogs for, like, weeks and months. We were texting with our customers. I was texting. I was reaching out to them. So it was a very different relationship that we were building versus what they were doing. And then that led to us building our first SaaS company, first SaaS startup that was in this customer experience space. Space.

Josh Schachter:
It was a converse it was a text marketing platform. And, from there, we started learning a lot about what, customer experience means, how to use customer experience as a way to grow the company. That all led to 2022.

Jenny Calvert:
Is that because you were you were texting? Was it, like, your first, that was your first practice in in in or approach channel or whatever to to giving better customer experience was texting, and so you decided to start that?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Texting texting was rather new. So think about 2038, ’20 ’20 texting was a was, like texting used for consumer communication was new ish. It was done in the past, but not as a channel to convert and to communicate with customers at at on a one to one level. And so we saw that, we saw that working really well both from a conversion standpoint. We were we were able to convert customers that we were texting with. Like, imagine, you know, asking you, why did you why did you, you know, look at the product but didn’t buy? And then, you know, you tell us, oh, you know, shipping was expensive. And I would say, no worries, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Here’s a discount. You you now have, like, free shipping. So you just go and finalize your purchase. So we we were seeing crazy conversion rates. We’re talking about 80% conversion rates on these texts, which was insane. And then we took that idea that we we initially kind of planted it through our experience in consumer businesses, and we built a, a a SaaS company based on that. And it was partially automated, those interactions, but it was also partially powered by humans. And so at some at a point in time, we were thinking how do

Jenny Calvert:
we The mechanical turked.

Josh Schachter:
The mechanical turked. Yeah. How do we how do we scale from here? And AI was naturally part of our everyday conversations back then. However, there were no LMs in 20 I mean, there were LMs, but they were just emerging. And fast forward in 2022, there’s a series of things that led to myself and my cofounder to write these thesis around the future of ecommerce the future of customer experience for ecommerce, where we looked at what Shopify did. So we’re simplifying. Shopify disrupted what historically has been developers or companies investing millions in developer time and and resources to build the website. And their Shopify just paid them $30 per month, and if you have a website in, like, a few minutes.

Josh Schachter:
So we said that’s gonna be the next thing that’s gonna happen with customer experience. We don’t know how we’re gonna do it, but we know that that’s coming because that was kinda, like, the last standing. Like, an long long story short, we found out about something really cool that was called, g p it was called GPT three at that time, and I thought that was pretty fascinating that you can have for the first time a contextual conversation with an AI. It was, here’s a question, here’s what you might wanna say, and then here’s what the user says. And we would see contextual responses. And for that was that was the initial that that was the inception point for what we call empathic AI. We saw that, hey. For the first time, it’s not a script.

Josh Schachter:
It’s not a follow through script, but it’s actually something contextual. So from there on, we kept on building CNN, built towards what it is today.

Jenny Calvert:
Empathic AI. I mean, Jenny, you’re a huge empath. So for your sake, I wanna know what empathic AI you’re welcome. For your sake, I wanna know what empathic AI is because it sounds like you know, did did somebody say, like, category creation? Is this what we’re doing here? Is this you guys are or is this something that’s already, kind of established in Pathik AI?

Josh Schachter:
I like to think so. I like to think so. Empathik AI, I think we’ve seen a lot of companies really liking this this name, this

Jenny Calvert:
It’s a nice ringtone.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yes. And and so we see competitors. We see a lot of people using this term. And and I think a lot of companies don’t really, digest what it really means. For us, it was always focusing on the customer first, Sienna as a product focusing on the customer experience. And then from there, when you when you build product, having that mindset, having that framework, everything that you do internally, the features you put together, the way Sienna looks, the way Sienna talks, everything is funneled back into this product principles, building building an empathic AI. And in in in fact, what’s interesting is for a product like Ciena, there’s on one hand, you have the external experience, which is the which is the customer experience, which is the interaction with Ciena.

Josh Schachter:
But we have actually another customer, which sometimes uses the product I mean, in most cases, uses the product more than the actual end customer, and that is the AI manager. That’s the person who’s configuring Ciena, that’s training Ciena, that’s giving feedback. And when we’re building, we’re also building a product that’s empathic towards them. It’s not just empathic towards the end consumer, the the the chatter, but it’s also towards them. So it’s a it’s a very interesting dynamic. It’s a it’s a it’s a phenomenal space to be in because we’re we’re leading the market, and there’s so many there’s so many interesting problems to solve when when you have to factor in that. It’s a I like to say, CNN, it’s a it’s a multiplayer game. You have to we have to consider the customer experience, but we also have to consider how do we translate a business’s needs into those experiences in a way that aligns with what they want.

Josh Schachter:
So at this stage, I think Chad has already, in the last few months, has accelerated, and he he’s gained, at this point, probably more knowledge than I have in terms of how to translate customer needs into building AI strategies for for our customers.

Chad Hornfeld:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one example just to to kind of make this more real is, I saw one recent example where, customer was really angry and wrote in just like, I want, you know, I want my money back. I’m really unhappy. And and, at the end of the conversation, because of this empathic agent and and just the way that we have programmed Ciena, the customer was apologizing to the AI agent and just say, listen. I’m really sorry. I’m just having a bad day. I really appreciate all the help that you did.

Chad Hornfeld:
You solved my problem. And it was just it was just so interesting to see. And, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I’m here.

Jenny Calvert:
Wait. Did the customer know that the customer didn’t know that it was a bot.

Chad Hornfeld:
Customer did not know. And because that would be even

Jenny Calvert:
more interesting if the customer already knew it was a bot still.

Chad Hornfeld:
Yeah. And and, I mean, this is this is interesting. We had another customer, and they, had just put something in place where it gave someone the ability to opt out. It’s like, it it just telling them, hey. You know, do you wanna speak to a real person? And so the majority of people actually opted out because they didn’t wanna speak to AI. But what happened was that their CSAT actually went down, and so their their customer satisfaction score went down. And so and this is another thing that we see, and it kind of just proves out this empathic side is that CSAT, with, Ciena as compared to the rest of their agents is typically higher. And it makes sense.

Chad Hornfeld:
Right? Because you have consistency. You’ve got someone who’s always gonna be empathetic, and they’re going to provide that answer. And so, unfortunately, with, you know, human nature, I mean, we we make mistakes, and we may not we may have be having a bad day. So it’s it’s just a a testament as to where we are right now, which is in an amazing kind of new space.

Andre Negrau:
Yeah. So Picturing the old school, like, speak to an agent, speak to an agent. Like, we’re we’re trending out of that phase where this, you know, emphatic AI can can really do what I think we’ve all wanted it to do forever. It’s tremendous.

Jenny Calvert:
Yes. Holding holding the the pound sign or the zero the zero number for, like, just yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Alright. Jenny, you’re you’re also a, a career and executive coach, so I wanna I wanna put you on the spot to put Chad on the spot to talk about Chad’s recent career, you know, growth. Chad, I’ve known you for a few years now since you were a leading CS customer. Customer was acquired by Meta.

Jenny Calvert:
You were working at a large company. Now you’re back to a smaller team that’s growing fast. I’m gonna let Jenny ask the question. I don’t know what the question is, but, Jenny, you ask it around that.

Andre Negrau:
Now it’s now it’s on me to ask the question. Big hot seat. Yeah. I I wanna know, you know, what that experience is really like. I mean, when you go from customer meta back to early stage, you know, I’m hearing building something really exciting, so I’m gonna guess the the excitement and motivation is there. But what’s that been like?

Chad Hornfeld:
Yeah. I mean, this isn’t the first time I’ve done that either. I mean, I started, you know, and and I started in a really small company just building custom web apps and then, went to a startup, Eloqua, and I was there for for eight plus years. And then that went public and got bought by Oracle. And so kind of gone through these these stages. And then How big

Jenny Calvert:
was Eloqua when you started?

Chad Hornfeld:
How big was it? Yeah. It was about 3,000,000 in ARR. So Oh,

Jenny Calvert:
wow. That’s really, because that’s a big company. Yeah.

Chad Hornfeld:
Yeah. It went from 3,000,000 to about a hundred million in ARR when it went public and and it was bought. So, it was a really fun ride. But, yeah, I think, you know, what I’ve found is where I find like, kind of the most exciting part is where I have direction, which is where I have room to move, and room to influence and, you know, just the ability to influence strategy and and also to help. I mean, if you know your own personal values, like, one of one of mine is and my purpose is around helping others. And so in in Sienna, I saw a really great opportunity to partner with Andre. And I don’t know, Josh. Like, you tell me, but how many, you know, CEOs and VP of CSs have been on your podcast at the same time? So I think it’s really unique.

Chad Hornfeld:
So, you know, we see it really as a partnership, and, you know, I’ve really enjoyed having that opportunity and, had a really some good advice from, previous chief, revenue officer who said, hey. Like, you have this other opportunity over here, larger company, this other opportunity. You’d probably be better positioned, going that route. And, yeah, it’s been really enjoyable. Definitely a lot. I mean, it’s early stage startup. You would know you both would know very well. But you have to kind of know going in what it’s gonna be like and, what that potential, you know, path will be and and the rewards of it.

Chad Hornfeld:
And it’s been a lot of fun building out the team and and just helping the organization grow.

Andre Negrau:
I hear that Chad has a superpower in identifying, you know, true rocket ships. So if anyone out there is listening, you join early, you scale with it, you do it again. You’ve got a great track record of success. But I love It’s loud. I love, like, your leading indicator of being, like, values driven. So for me, like, I empath and coach over here, you know, leading with values and also working in a product that that makes a true impact. I’m sure that’s really exciting to see the impact day in, day out that the product’s making at Ciena.

Chad Hornfeld:
Yeah. I mean, we have our customers that are literally thanking us for helping them just save time, provide a really great experience. And the biggest challenge, and this is I’ve been in this industry in the CX space, specifically with ecommerce and brands for a for a fair amount of time. And the biggest challenge is, like, you need to have something that represents your brand, represents the voice of your company, and is a huge trust issue. And to, you know, turn something over, you know, how you’re gonna respond to your customers to AI is very difficult, and it’s not an easy thing. And so, not only are you dealing with a new technology, but you’re also taking your customers on this change management path of really changing the industry because it’s not just the technology. You’re restructuring teams. You’re rethinking about different processes and how you’re gonna go about things, and you’re getting into, like, AI technology that everyone hears about and talks about it.

Chad Hornfeld:
But how do you actually leverage it in the right way that’s going to produce results for the business? So it it’s not an easy thing both for us here internally in CS, as well as for the customer. And one of the things that I made very clear very early on, for the vision, for the team, is that we wanna be experts in AI when it comes to ecommerce CX. And so really see ourselves as that expert. And so everything that we’re doing will help towards that goal. And if we’re experts and then we can educate our customers and and, you know, beyond, prospects, the market. But we really need to start with ourselves and make sure that we’re fully enabled.

Jenny Calvert:
Okay. So in my view here of our podcast recording apparatus, Riverside, it’s like a split screen. I’ve got Jenny and myself on the bottom, split right and left, and then Chad and Andre on the top, split right and left. I don’t know. It might be different for you guys. But so my mind now is working in, like, tennis for whatever reason, and I wanna serve right down the middle. And I wanna see who answers this question, and maybe it’s maybe it’s a tag team. Right? So we’re gonna role play.

Jenny Calvert:
And so we’re you guys are series a esque, right, company, and, and we’re gonna role play here. So, it’s a board meeting, q one board meeting. This is your new VC. Okay, guys. What’s your twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty five plan for your own customer experience and customer success? What are your top three, it could be less, priorities, and playbook for this coming year as the company is growing?

Chad Hornfeld:
Yeah. I mean, I can I can jump in? But we You’re

Jenny Calvert:
jumping in on the CEO. He’s right here. Okay. That is a really good relationship. I like their trust.

Josh Schachter:
About this.

Chad Hornfeld:
Yeah. We we literally just had a meeting about this. So Perfect.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t even know that. Okay.

Chad Hornfeld:
I mean, beyond the three, let’s just talk about one. So let’s talk about net dollar retention. So net dollar retention is the number one focus, and just as an overall objective. And it’s not just from a, like, yes. Like, we need to grow and we need to increase our revenue. It’s also providing value for customers. And so, you know, by that, like, we are gonna be focusing on how we can improve how our customers are using our products. So for them, it’s increasing the number of automations.

Chad Hornfeld:
And so these are, like, responses that our product will provide. So the more that we do that, the more it saves time, effort, cost for our customers. They don’t have to go and hire out other agents. We had many people over the holiday season just say, hey. We didn’t have to go and get, like, additional agents like we usually do, like our CECL staff. So that’s part of it. I think the other part of it is adding additional products. And so we need to make sure that our team is fully up to speed and knows how to position those products.

Chad Hornfeld:
But these products are gonna be phenomenal, and they’re gonna provide tons more value to our customers, and they’re gonna definitely differentiate us. So that’s what I’ll say is the number one thing. And then, you know, cascading down from that, we focused on automation. We focused on growing our team. We’ve structured our team. We’ve carved out an onboarding component of our team. We have CSMs. We have support.

Chad Hornfeld:
We we have really good technology that we’ve put in place. We use Update as one of those. But I’d say that we’re focused on process. And, specifically, we started, what we call audits we do for our customers, but we’ll do business reviews. And the ultimate goal is defining the outcomes of our clients, and then scaling that. So starting at the highest segments and then going down in the lower segments, leveraging technology to do that and making sure that our customers achieve those. And then again, all it the the end goal is on the NRR and and providing value.

Jenny Calvert:
Andre, anything to add? No can be no is a perfectly fine answer. If if Chad covered it, that’s why you hired him.

Josh Schachter:
I’ll just say that for us, the number one metric is an NR NDR. And the way we’re thinking about most of the discussions is always value, like how can we add value? Ultimately, when when you’re when you’re building and selling and scaling an agent, it’s all going to be it all traces back to the value that the agent produces for the company. It’s very different from a traditional SaaS company that maybe has a seat based pricing or it has a more of a user based pricing with an with an agent. Companies are just assessing what is the value that I’m getting from this agent. And so, like, absolutely, it’s something that Chad and I and the whole team always thinks too is how do we not just create more value, but also how do we show that value? And that’s that’s a very hard problem to solve because it’s not a unique it’s not a unidimensional thing where you just, you know, have a, you know, just have a touch point or, like, show some metrics. It’s truly understand truly, explaining in plain words to a broader audience, which can be non which can be nontechnical. In most cases, it’s nontechnical people. How how does this AI agent changes the way you run the business, and what are those metrics? So it’s it’s very, very interesting.

Josh Schachter:
Honestly, it’s one of those things that really drive me. It’s the fact that it’s like a puzzle. It’s never easy. It’s never like a straightforward answer to how do we show more value. It’s really, really complex. And each company has and and I think Chad agrees with this. Each company has a different lens through which they see customer experience. Some companies are very efficiency driven.

Josh Schachter:
They they just wanna make sure that they have all the right KPIs in place. They they keep driving first response time, first resolution time, and all those metrics down. There’s other companies that care a little bit less about that, but they care more about CSUN. They care more about the experience. So and and having Sienna, a tool that can achieve both, it’s really interesting because then you have to understand, as as Chad said, what are the outcomes? What are we optimizing here for? And, of course, over time, you wanna have an AI agent that understands and can work with both, actually, even more outcomes. We even we even see Ciena helping customers or our our brands that achieve revenue goals. We see revenue lift by implementing Sienna. As as you can imagine, there’s side benefits for having a twenty four seven agent.

Josh Schachter:
But it’s it is it is always gonna be tracing back, to everything that we’re doing, be it product, customer success, or marketing. Can we show can we generate more value for our customers?

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. That’s the thing I love about agentic workflows now and consumption based pricing is that that’s the ultimate testament of value. It’s measured right there. Can’t get away from it. Zapier is doing a wonderful job at it, the way that they do their pricing and add ons and those sorts of things, and there’s a whole slate of companies that are are following that path. So, Andre, you have a shirt on said that says trust your intuition.

Andre Negrau:
And I want it. I want that, by the way. Send me one.

Jenny Calvert:
I was just about to tell him that it’s antithetical to UpdateAI in many ways. I I, as a product owner for the first half of my career, was trusting my intuition because, you know, I knew best. Just, you know, I’m Steve Jobs. I’m Henry Ford, all that jazz. Are you? No. I’m not. But I thought I was at some point. We we can talk about that offline, Jenny.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah.

Andre Negrau:
Let’s see. And,

Jenny Calvert:
but now

Chad Hornfeld:
Wish Christy was here for that one.

Jenny Calvert:
Oh, Christy was

Andre Negrau:
I’m doing my best. Like, I I I want to just do her good, and I’m sorry, Christy. I’m failing at at taking your seat today.

Jenny Calvert:
You know, the zinger is when you think that you’ve gone over the line, that’s when you’ve just approached the line. So let’s just bear that in mind for the remainder of the episode. So we’re all about trusting the voice of the customer. And, of course, there’s intuition. Actually, I once wrote an article a couple years ago about, like, it’s really a Venn diagram of your intuition plus cost voice of the customer plus market research. Alright. Jenny, go. Talk to Chad.

Jenny Calvert:
This is not how I generally talk with my coworkers, by the way. But may you please begin talking with Chad and Andre about their experience with UpdateAI. I do wanna be promotional on this because I think that they’ve actually had a good experience, and, it can elucidate some cool things about how to listen to the voice of your customer. So with that

Andre Negrau:
Yeah. What I think is really cool, and, obviously, Chad, we’ve gotten to hang out a little bit, is that your all of the things you’re talking about and the ways that you’re running Sienna, we’re seeing and the ways you’re engaging in UpdateAI. Thinking about, like, how do we ensure that we’re listening and understanding our customers and their experience? And so, you know, seeing you really tap into and push the envelope as to what Update can do and the insights that you’re getting out of it, you know, is fascinating. I think, Josh, I’m gonna say it, but, like, there are times they keep us on our toes a little bit.

Jenny Calvert:
Like, every day. Chad keeps us on every freaking day. Are you kidding me?

Andre Negrau:
No. We loved it because it’s always, again, that kind of value delivery and outcome centric. So, you know, I think the first thing is when you were working in frameworks and you’ve got this this survey, Tell everybody about, like, kind of your survey and how you were using UpdateAI frameworks to get kind of insights into the Ciena kind of experience survey.

Chad Hornfeld:
Yeah. I I think this is something that that Lisa and Andre came up with, which is I think it’s really, really good in the sense that, you know, when we’re assessing our customers, we might look at, oh, okay. Well, what’s the ROI, and and how are they performing? And and use that as, like, okay. Well, you know, they’ve generated x amount more revenue, or they’ve saved an an, you know, amount. And the way Andre and Lisa looked at it is like, okay. That’s great. But a lot of times when you purchase products and you stay with products, it’s there’s an emotional component of it. Like, what’s your perception of value? And so the question that we ask customers is that if Sienna was an agent on your team, how would you rate her from one to 10? So we we look at Sienna, you know, as as this real person.

Chad Hornfeld:
And it’s a great question. It’s it’s almost like you it’s kind of like an NPS question in some ways. But it’s it’s really this emotional thing. Like, how do you perceive Ciena? And so, I was tasked to get that information from our customers and from a specific segment. And I think in many ways, like, this one, you know, answer question is is passe. I think you can leverage AI to do that. So just for fun, I was like, okay. Let let me put this question in, frameworks.

Chad Hornfeld:
And and what frameworks is, it’s you know, you can put a particular question, and as your call, you know, gets recorded and gets kind of fed back to you, you can kind of go back and see, like, what are the answers to these questions. So I think, you know, primarily, you were using this for, like, MEDDIC. Like, you know, what are the goals? Like, what are outcomes and things like that? And and we use that too. I was like, okay. Well, what if I put that question in there? And and then the second question is, well, how can we get that score higher? And so I I started looking at the results, and I was comparing them to their health score that we you know, we use software to check health scores. And and just, like, from, you know, Tangential, like, just, you know, what’s what our perception of the customer. And it’s extremely accurate, and to the point now where, like, I literally I’m running it on every call. And, I don’t necessarily, like, look at the the notes from the call.

Chad Hornfeld:
I look at I look at the framework and see what the score is. And then it alerts us to say, okay. Something happened on this particular call. Let’s dive in. Let’s try to understand why that score was a bit lower, or why was that score higher. And then we look at the advocacy statements that we have an update, and we grab those advocacy statements, and we pass them on to sales and marketing. So it’s just it’s really, really interesting to me where from the information from those calls, you can start to score, get that assessment, and then leverage that into your kind of overall approach to your customers and as well as your health to your customers.

Andre Negrau:
So cool. By the way, I seeing as getting a a performance review. That’s what I’m here. Like, the scoring is like, hey, if you were an actual human being, how are you doing? Right? How are you doing at your at your job? So love it.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah.

Andre Negrau:
Really unique. Talk to me a little bit about when you’re sharing those insights with marketing and sales. Right? Like, what is what is that unlocked for them? What have they been able to accomplish? Like, how does that also, I think, fuel cross functional collaboration? Like, do you all have as good of a relationship as I see here today? Like, is everybody on the team that close knit? We hear a lot of, you know, friction between sales and CS at times or CS and product. So, you know, how has that helped kind of unlock the value cross functionally for y’all?

Chad Hornfeld:
Yeah. Well, first of all, I think there has to be friction. I mean, we were just in a meeting yesterday. We were talking about our go to market, for, you know, for for q one or fiscal q one. And there was, like, good fighting in the room, which is good. That’s what you really want. But I think what what really is important is being aligned across the team on your goals and and where the problem areas are and how do you actually align around that and help each other. So one of the things that I’m sure Andre, you could speak to is, like, the ways that that we grew because we grew really quickly.

Chad Hornfeld:
And it was positive word-of-mouth from our customers. So our customers are bringing in other other other customers, and this is all, like, advocacy. And so I think one of the things that Update does really, really well is besides just giving you a summary of the call, like, it tells you the advocacy statements and specifically what that person said. And I was like, holy crap. Like, this is amazing stuff. We can leverage that, and we can get that over to our marketing team, over to our sales team, and they can start to insert that into their calls. They can start to use that to reach out to particular customers to get testimonials, to get case studies. And so it became really, really powerful.

Chad Hornfeld:
And a tool that Andre, turned me onto is this thing called Gecko Board. It’s like a dashboard, and you can just pump all sorts of stuff into it and then throw it out through Slack, and so everybody sees your metrics. And so I was using one for support, and I was using one for customer success or implementation. And so I was like, okay. I could probably take the advocacy statements from Update, put it and create a an RSS feed, and then feed it into this Gecko board so we have this, like, constant dashboard of advocacy that just keeps kind of rotating, and just keep feeding it in there. And so that’s what we did. Like and it’s been really, really impactful to see just new things that will pop up there from recent customers and some of the things that they’re saying. And it helps everybody.

Chad Hornfeld:
It’s not just marketing and sales. It’s also product. And because product can see when we talk about a new feature and how they enjoy the new feature, we will put that into that feed. So it’s it’s just a very powerful way, and I can do it in a fairly automated way. Hopefully, more automated soon, Josh. It’s one of my, one of those messages, like, my

Jenny Calvert:
In the roadmap in the backlog. Hey. We we launched yesterday for Andre. You’re watching the video at 2.5 x. Right? Increase the the the speed limit on, for your sake. So I’ll watch out. There you go.

Chad Hornfeld:
Andre is gonna be more efficient.

Andre Negrau:
Yep. Possible. Cool.

Jenny Calvert:
Okay. Well, listen. I think we’ll leave it at that. Guys, thank you so much for for being on this episode. Love what you’re doing. Love seeing your growth. Love seeing more, you know, more New York City Start Up Founders and and, you know, thriving companies that are out there from one New York City founder to another. And, yeah, thank you for sharing how you’re using Update.

Jenny Calvert:
Jenny, you were an amazing cohost as I knew you Was I? You would be. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Hey. You’re great. Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
We’ll take a poll.

Chad Hornfeld:
Ask harder questions, though. You gotta come at come at us.

Andre Negrau:
I gotta channel my inner Christie. I gotta spend some more time with her and and and work on that. It’s a development opportunity for me, but thank you. It was great to have both of you.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. Thanks, guys. Have a great day.

Andre Negrau:
Bye.