Jamie Davidson

Jamie Davidson is co-founder and CEO of Vitally, a New York City customer success platform that pulls product usage, revenue, and conversation data into one workspace. A two-time CTO, he moved into customer success almost by accident and started Vitally with Patrick Vatterott after finding the existing tools slow to set up.

From CTO to chief customer officer

At Pathgather, a startup of about 25 people that sold to enterprises such as Qualcomm and T-Mobile, Davidson moved from CTO to chief customer officer because the company needed someone who knew the product deeply to work with those accounts. “I did it to myself,” he joked on Heavybit’s Platform Builders podcast. “I’ve been a CTO a couple times, but at its core I’m a problem solver.”

Starting Vitally through Techstars

Vitally began as a product analytics layer that showed customer success teams how their customers were using a product, and it went through Techstars in New York. Early users paid nothing, and Davidson now says the company started charging too soon. “I would actually say charging customers was like a mistake. We should have done it later,” he said, because once a startup has revenue, investors start judging it on revenue growth before the product is ready.

An early break came from Segment, which picked Vitally as one of five launch partners for its integration marketplace after its own customers kept requesting a Vitally connection. That launch put Vitally in front of companies such as Zapier and Productboard, which later became customers.

Questioning the quarterly business review

One of Vitally’s company principles is to question convention, and Davidson has applied it to the quarterly business review, an hour-and-a-half meeting where a vendor tells a customer “the most polished version of the story.” Vitally promotes shorter, recurring value reviews that customers can read and comment on in their own time.

On AI, he wants it to suggest work for customer success managers more than do the work for them, because customers paying for a person notice when a reply sounds generated. The challenge, he said, is “how to organically bake in AI without removing that human element from the equation.”