Thena provides a platform for customer support and growth, focusing on web-based interactions.

Thena

Thena is a ticketing system that helps companies support their customers across Slack, Microsoft Teams, Email, Web, and more.

Tenacity Venture Capital

Pear VC

J Zac Stein

Mada Seghete

Michael Katz

Mike Molinet

Lightspeed Venture Partners

First Round Capital

Selling tech is harder than ever, so how do you build a GTM strategy around that if you’re a scaling startup?

First thing to acknowledge, is that it sucks to be a vendor right now.

Everyone with an MBA and CS degree thinks they can build a startup, which is leading to tons of competition with crappy vendors that undercut you to fend for their lives.

We definitely deal with some of that at Thena. So how do we stand out?

In my opinion, we stand out because we don't stick to the B2B SaaS playbook.

We implement something new every week, give it a couple more, and see if it sticks or not. Some changes work well. Some suck. 

One of those changes has been stopping the outbound automations and cutting marketing spend to $0. 

To most, that would be the worst idea ever.

Not to us.

Now, we've shifted focus to brute forcing brand awareness for Thena. 

Our brand is our product, and we the people that work at Thena... are our brand.

Here are ways we are increasing brand awareness at the moment ⬇

▶ Social presence - No one wants to buy from sales people anymore. How can we bring value to the world without pushing our product? LI posts on niche expertise so far have been the answer. Offer value before asking for anything in return.

▶ Case studies that don't suck - B2B SaaS case studies suck. 15 paragraphs? Really? Were you high when you wrote it? We're making case studies that are short, customer showcases instead (which makes it easier for customers to post on our behalf for free 😄)

▶ Meeting in person - Zoom sucks. Remote work sucks. We are doing our best to form in person relationships again to market ourselves and sell down the road.

This approach is not implemented to be a scalable system.

Too many companies think that because they are scaling themselves, every single process they implement has to be scalable as well.

I totally disagree.

You're going to have to brute force some things to make other processes scalable down the road.

By us investing manual work into brand awareness, social recognition, relationships, etc., everything down the road is 10x easier to scale.

People will know who we are, what Thena does, and who our customers are. 

At that point, selling becomes easier. 

Your brand is your product, and in today’s age of selling, if your brand sucks… your product ain't gonna sell.

DX came to Thena a year ago because they had a ton of customer slack channels, but no centralized platform to handle Customer Support.

They knew they needed something to help, but according to their Co-Founder, “The thought of buying Zendesk makes me want to throw up in my mouth” (this was a real quote 🤢).

That was a year ago.

Today, DX uses Thena to centralize all of their customer communications across Slack.

Joseph White one of DX’s support leaders, has been a power user ever since he stepped in the door at DX.

Thena is one of his everyday tools and he can’t imagine going back.

We’re happy to be one of the reasons that Joseph and his team are crushing the support game 💪

SUPPORT ORG from $0M -> $10M ARR (part 2/3) ⬇ 

Shortly after you hit $1M ARR - you'll hire your first dedicated customer-facing person. 

The day to day is also going to look different from $0-1M. Here’s what you should expect from your support motion from $1-3M ARR:
▶ Your support org is still everyone, but you have someone whose job it is to engage customers
▶ They do it all - CS, support, upselling, product management, implementation, custom solutioning
▶ The product still has plenty of gaps, so this person needs to be able to navigate those creatively
▶ You’ll start to pay attention to quantitative measures here (volume, responsiveness)
▶ Support becomes a direct feedback loop for deciding what products to build for the future

Unfortunately, this is also the stage where you as founders will start to become more disconnected from your customers. It gets tough staying in front of everyone. It’s happened to me twice now and it’s still not easy to solve. 

Pitfalls at this stage:
🔻 Becoming too disconnected - This stems from offloading too much to the customer-facing person and not staying involved. 
🔻 Losing the direct feedback loop - You need to be more proactive about engaging customers for feedback and research
🔻 Hiring too specialized - It’s easy to want to hire someone solely focused in what area, but initially you need a generalist who can wear a lot of hats. Specialization comes later. 
🔻 Copying playbooks from other companies - each company is unique, so don’t just replicate what you might’ve seen or done somewhere else.

This is also where we see companies first implement a ticketing and tracking system like Thena. At this stage, it’s lightweight, usually just for tracking, some basic metrics, and an integration or two. More complex buildouts can come later. 

This stage is still very unscalable and hands-on. 

Once you get closer to $10M though, that’s when your support motion becomes a machine... which I’ll cover next time. 

Stay tuned 👊

ClickHouse and Claire Lucas are absolutely crushing it right now 💪 

If you want to find those running an elite modern support motion, look no further than them.

Happy to be a part of their journey as they continue to provide the best customer experience possible 🤝

Your Slack workspace is the most important part of your business. It needs to be a productivity machine... not a distraction.

Why?

Slack is where your teams hang out, collaborate, build, and win (those are all pretty important).

But if your Slack workspace is a chaotic mess... your company probably is too!

We’ve teamed up with Slack app leaders at Assignly, Harmonize, and Polly to showcase the 7 biggest ROI changes you can make to supercharge your Slack.

Be in charge of your Slack. Don't let it be in charge of you.

*guide link is in comments*

Thanks Slack and Salesforce for having our Head of Sales, Jared on yesterday's panel! 

What an amazing turnout and opportunity to dive into the world of Slack + Customer Support.

Special shoutout to Zach Hawtof from Tightknit for moderating, and Sara Dillon from Bryd + George Dilthey from Clay for sharing their experiences, advice and best practices. 

Excited for the next one!

I’ve seen a lot of posts lately about the rise of AI in Customer Support and how AI is eventually going to replace people on those teams. Here’s my two cents ⬇ 

So this is my second go around here at Thena, having scaled Branch through the late 2010s and built support there as well.

In that time period, everyone was raving about mobile technology and data (I was too clearly). Now, all the talk is about AI 🤯 

Are there certain aspects of Customer Support that AI can replace? Sure. 

Are people going to be one of them? Absolutely not. 

Founders/Leaders invest in Customer Support because it's the most crucial part of an organization. If you cannot support the lifeline of your business (your customers), you have NO business!

Think about human nature too... people want to talk to other people, not 🤖s.

The best Customer Support leaders understand that. They know that the further you put your team away from customer conversations, the worse relationships you are going to have.

So where do I see AI landing in Customer Support teams? 

I think the best teams will adopt AI and build it into their Support motion to save time and effort on daily tasks, and not to replace people.

Less time spent on tickets. Less time jumping between platforms. Less effort spent digging for info in your internal docs to answer a question. You get the picture.

AI isn’t going to take these teams away. It’s going to supercharge whoever is on them ⚡  

What do you all think? Anyone on the complete opposite side?

Super proud of Thena's accomplishments over these past few months. We've released over 80 new features and aren't stopping anytime soon (wait until you see what's next).

Which one are you most excited to try? Drop a comment below and let me know! 💬

Thena just released one of our most 🔥 features yet... the ability to add an AI summary of your customer Slack/Teams conversation to the associated Company or Deal in your CRM. 

I know I've annoyed my fair share of reps the past 10 years by bugging them to explain what's going on in their Slack convos with prospects/customers (you know who you are) 😬 

This one's for you (and everyone else out there dealing with their own Mike)!

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