Part 1: How to Set Yourself (and Your Customers) Up for a Successful Customer Success Journey
Founding a company is hard. Really hard. Yet most of the stories we hear come from founders who’ve already survived the early filters of startup building. By the time they’re telling their war stories, they’ve already made it through.
The reality on the ground is messier, and less glamorous. I’ve been through multiple early-stage journeys, some successful, others not, and I’ve seen the same patterns emerge again and again. No matter your market, ICP, or geography, a few truths consistently separate the startups that scale from those that stall.
Build a Painkiller, Not a Vitamin
It sounds obvious, but it’s worth stating plainly: your product must solve a problem painful enough that customers won’t ignore it.
A painkiller gets purchased. A vitamin gets cut from the budget.
If your product merely “helps” or “adds convenience,” it will command a “nice to have” price, and it will be replaced the instant that budgets tighten. On the other hand, if your product addresses an acute or chronic pain in your customer’s business, they will find the money for it.
That distinction—painkiller vs. vitamin—shapes everything that comes after, including how successful your Customer Success motion, and thus company, can ever be.
Bake ROI Transparency Into the Product
Once you’ve got a true painkiller, the next trap founders fall into is assuming “value” speaks for itself. Customers say they like your product, adoption looks decent, and you tell yourself it’s working.
But value is slippery. Ask 10 customers what “value” means, and you’ll get 12 answers. Leave it to them to define, and you’ll end up solving shallow, one-off problems that can’t scale.
Instead, force clarity by tying your product’s impact to one of two ROI categories:
Revenue contribution: How does your product accelerate deals, increase win rates, expand customer wallet share, or otherwise grow the top line?
Expense reduction/avoidance: How does your product cut fixed or variable costs in delivering your customer’s product or service?
Don’t just say it, your product MUST show it in very plain and obvious ways. Build mechanisms inside your product experience that make the ROI visible, measurable, and defensible.
Examples:
Claim your tool makes sales reps 10% more efficient? Prove how that translates into X% more revenue or deal acceleration.
Say you reduce travel costs by automatically applying discounts? Display the average dollar savings per trip and ratio of customer savings vs. your fee.
The easier you make it for customers to see ROI in their own terms, the more powerful your Customer Success engine becomes.
Why This Matters
Customer Success isn’t just about adoption and renewals, it’s about creating undeniable proof of value that scales across accounts. Nail painkiller-level relevance and embed ROI transparency, and you’re not just winning logos. You’re setting up for long-term retention, expansion, and real SaaS magic: customers growing as you grow.
That’s part one. In part two, I’ll cover how to leverage this foundation into continued revenue growth over time, turning painkillers and ROI clarity into compounding Customer Success flywheels.