Why a key first startup hire should be customer success
Today’s advice post is by Dan Lesley, Founder of Homestar. Dan has over 20 years building, growing, and selling SaaS tech startups.
I’ve spent years building startups, and launching Homestar (my CRM for real estate agents) reinforced something I’d already learned the hard way: startup life is basically navigating in the dark, guided only by the track you’re laying ahead of yourself. Between wearing every possible hat and trying to squeeze more hours out of each day, it’s intense.
Through multiple ventures, certain patterns keep emerging. One critical insight that’s shaped my approach involves customer success - a function many founders overlook. Both at my first SaaS company and now with Homestar, getting that dedicated customer success person on board made all the difference.
Some might see customer success as premature for an early-stage startup. But my experience tells a different story. The role’s strategic value became clear pretty quickly.
In startups, customer interactions are gold mines of product intelligence. Customer success goes way beyond surface-level satisfaction - it’s about getting inside your users’ heads, spotting problems before they escalate, and connecting product capabilities to actual user needs.
This played out clearly at Homestar. Real estate agents needed immediate value from our CRM. Having someone laser-focused on their success meant catching and addressing pain points rapidly, sometimes before users even articulated them. That responsiveness kept our early users sticky in a brutally competitive SaaS market.
Startup budgets are always tight (trust me, I know those sweaty palms checking the runway). Investing in non-product, non-marketing roles can feel risky. When I launched my second SaaS venture, we held off too long on customer success. Our product was solid, but we missed crucial early feedback that could have accelerated our progress.
Here’s what makes customer success essential from day one:
- They capture and translate customer feedback into product roadmap priorities
- They boost engagement and retention through proactive support
- They reduce churn by building genuine relationships with users
- They free up technical teams to focus on building by managing the customer voice
- They identify revenue opportunities through deep customer understanding
I learned these lessons through plenty of mistakes. A dedicated customer success person keeps you connected to ground reality, catching shifts in user needs or market fit before they become existential problems.
During Homestar’s early days, we constantly balanced development speed against user needs. Our customer success focus helped us pivot effectively when needed. It gave credibility to our messaging and helped win over skeptical prospects.
Finding the right person is crucial though. You need someone who combines technical understanding with genuine empathy and communication skills. At Homestar, we specifically sought someone with deep real estate experience who could translate agent challenges into concrete product improvements.
Looking at my various startups, success always came down to solving real problems for real users. Customer success doesn’t just maintain momentum - it accelerates growth by illuminating the path forward and ensuring your product truly serves market needs.
For early-stage founders juggling countless priorities: consider customer success a strategic imperative rather than a nice-to-have. Your time is stretched thin already, but staying connected to users can’t become secondary.