Philipp Wolf

Philipp Wolf is the founder and chief executive of Custify, a customer success platform for B2B SaaS companies that pulls product usage, CRM, support and billing data into one place so teams can reduce churn. He came to the problem after nearly two decades in cybersecurity.

Learning Software by Reverse-Engineering Viruses

He got his first PC in the early 1990s for games and quickly moved into programming, according to the Custify about page. During high school he started at Avira, one of the early antivirus companies, reverse-engineering computer viruses. He was promoted to lab manager and spent 17 years at the firm building and leading teams that worked with sales, product and engineering on products used by more than 200 million customers.

Noticing the Gap Between Acquisition and Success

Across SaaS and on-premise clients he kept seeing the same waste: companies spent heavily to win new customers without a systematic way to make sure those customers succeeded with the product. Tools he tried were too complex to set up or use, so he founded Custify in 2017 to take the busywork out of customer success, as he wrote in the Custify media kit.

Building Custify Around Customer Data

Custify shows health scores, onboarding progress and usage drops so customer success managers can reach out before a renewal is at risk, and it includes automation for low-touch playbooks. In an interview with Customer Success PL, Wolf said the hardest part of the job is getting the data right so the team can judge whether someone is fully onboarded, using the product, or ready for expansion. He also stresses hiring people who understand sales, product and support at once.

Running Custify Across Europe

Custify is headquartered with a German founding story and a strong presence in Bucharest, Romania, and it sells mainly to subscription SaaS businesses that want a faster, more transparent alternative to heavyweight customer success suites.