My Founder Journey

My Early Days at CustomerSat

"98% CustomerSat — that's off the charts. What products today have that? "

— Steve Jobs, September 2008

That was us!

And that sums up the highlight of my career. :)

I remember the responsibility of being part of CustomerSat’s C-team, overseeing product, engineering, and design.

We had a powerhouse lineup of customers— SAP, eBay, Salesforce, Oracle, BEA, Yahoo, Nokia, AMD, Business Objects, AIG, Honeywell, and Apple.

Apple relied on CustomerSat to measure customer sentiment and satisfaction, and Steve Jobs would proudly report Customer Satisfaction every time he was on stage.

We had amazing engagement from users. However, despite all the success, something didn’t feel right.

We spent hours perfecting the customer sentiment dashboards product, only to realize that the people who mattered most—the executives and decision-makers—weren’t engaging.

The Same Problem. Different Startups.

As the saying goes,

“Growth hides all sins"

The same issue arose at AtRoad, a Silicon Valley darling that grew like wildfire, becoming the fastest-growing company five years in a row.

Growth was hiding the cracks. Executives and inactive user engagement was the problem.

My Personal Aha Moment

The conventional tactic of trying to bring inactive users back into the product, failed to work, and will never work with busy executives and financial decision-makers.

Fast Forward: from csat to cast.

Fun fact:

Marie coined the term “Customer Success” and built the industry back in the 1990s at Vantive!

We have an article and pictures on our website.

I reached out to Marie Alexander, a CustomerSat board member, with a solution.

When she validated my thinking, I felt like I was finally on the right path.

If the executives won’t come to the product, take the product to them.

The idea evolved. No logging in. No forgotten passwords. No 40-page slide decks. No more coordinating calendars. No more sitting through a 45-minute presentation designed for everyone. And no more disengagement.

Present everything users, inactive users, and executives need to know and act on — individually — in five minutes or less, without wasting a minute of their time.

I mentioned CustomerSat and Cast because of the similarities.

Like CustomerSat, Cast's initial target market is high-tech businesses that sell to other businesses
Like CustomerSat, Cast will expand beyond high-tech to 5.58M companies like AIG and McKesson.
Like CustomerSat, Cast has two products—one for our customers and another for our customers to engage and influence their customers.

Engaging and Influencing a business’s customers directly — as you may have already noticed — is the critical difference between Cast and AI companies building copilots for teams.

— Dickey Singh | Dickey@cast.app | text: 415-794-6724 | CastAgent.ai