Throughout my career, I've always been on the front lines of bringing my products to market. I've felt it's critical not just to build products, but to also support customers through beta, launch, and beyond.

What I saw time and time again was that I had an unfair advantage over my colleagues in Customer Success and Support. Because I could code and query DBs, I had access to data and could perform actions that they couldn't. It was completely unfair. We'd ask Support and Success to delight customers but not give them the means to do it.

This kept happening again and again with every product launch at every company I worked at. Why didn't we fix it? The answer is simple. We were driven to build against the company's mission. Customer tooling was always a P2. The only way this would change is if the company's mission was to empower customer facing teams.

The Rise of Bottoms Up

Today, the fastest growing startups (eg Twilio, Figma, Calendly, etc) have moved to a product-led go-to-market. They let customers try the product, find the value, and adopt it how they want. In this world, every customer interaction is a chance to delight. Anyone who is working with customers has the chance to improve conversion, increase growth, and reduce churn.

If product-led companies want to be successful, they need to fully empower their customer facing teams. Teams shouldn't be jumping from tool to tool with fractured views of the world. Teams should have one place where they can go to understand their customers and take intelligent action.

However, the sad reality is that companies are using existing CRMs and GTM tools that were built for a traditional outbound model. It's an awkward fit. They force their rigid model on something that's inherently fluid. They force companies to jam customer data in without respect for the user and don't make it easy to perform any meaningful action.

This needs to change. Something brand-new is needed.

Calixa is Born

Fred and I founded Calixa to solve this once and for all. We want to give superpowers to customer facing teams. No longer will teams be stuck in outdated CRMs, jump across 9 browser tabs, or struggle with SQL. No longer will teams worry about what they might be missing.

Today, we are publicly launching Calixa. It's a Customer Ops platform that connects to all your existing apps(eg Stripe, Zendesk, Segment, Salesforce, Snowflake etc) and gives you a single place to understand customers and take action. Even better, no engineering is required. Just sign up, connect your apps, and we take care of the rest.

Calixa empowers customer facing teams with four core capabilities:

• Segments → Filter and rank customers to target those with most potential. (eg rank by usage customers who signed up this month and have not upgraded) You can use data and signals from any app you connect.
  
• Customer 360 → See a unified view of all customer data (eg Stripe invoices, Zendesk Tickets, Salesforce Opportunities, Sentry errors, etc) to get instant customer context. Create custom dashboards to meet your specific needs.
  
• Automated Alerts → Set up alerts that trigger in realtime based on key events (eg failed payments) or metrics (eg usage spike). You can stay one step ahead of customers so that you can intervene at the exact moment to have a big impact.
  
• Actions → Take action (eg refund payment, start outbound sequence, extend trial, etc) directly in context with data. You can trigger processes within their own app or in the 3rd party apps they use.

The best thing about Calixa is that it's purpose-built for product-led companies.

The Road Ahead

Over the last year, we've been working with beta customers as we built Calixa. We couldn't be more thankful to all the customers who helped get us to this point. You know who you are and the deepest thanks from the entire team.

Our goal is to empower every company to delight their customers. We are excited to set the new standard for customer tools and what it means to be a product-led. Today is a big step in that journey. We can't wait to work with you.

- Team Calixa

Thomas, Fred, Noah, Pras, Krishna, Matheus, Luis