Customer Intelligence

Sturdy is open

By
Joel Passen
February 10, 2021
5 min read

Sturdy has developed a BI product that analyzes customer communications, detects important signals, and empowers teams with real-time data to act on situations with speed and intelligence.  

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Sturdy, a ground-breaking business intelligence platform that leverages advanced data science in order to detect items of importance in customer-to-business communications. 

In simple terms, Sturdy helps people at B2B SaaS businesses leverage a data set that is hiding in plain sight  - data that your customers want you to use.

Trapped in communication layers, and across teams, are critical signals like, point of contact changes, potential references, churn likelihood, and competitor mentions. These signals gather digital dust in email accounts, ticketing systems, transcriptions, chat software, and CRMs - until Sturdy. 

Customer-to-business communication data is an untapped data frontier. Massive value is realized when the data is aggregated, analyzed, refined, and redeployed. Sturdy was created to empower teams to act on mission-critical situations with speed and intelligence.


If you wanted your team to capture 10 new referenceable customers, what would need to happen? Or, how many of your customers got a new Point of Contact last month?  Which customers asked for their Renewal Data this week?

As a leader you want to manage risks and capitalize on opportunities (we call them “signals”).  Signals are sitting in email accounts, videoconferencing transcripts, chat logs, and buried in ticketing systems.  They are manually captured, if at all, and then data-entered into spreadsheets and other systems.  And you have to create, enforce and constantly train people on rules that change the way your teams work.  

Not to mention, there is no analytical capacity.

The idea for Sturdy came from building, bootstrapping, and scaling successful SaaS businesses. We founded SturdyAI to empower businesses to solve problems that we faced as entrepreneurs and executives. Before SturdyAI, the capture of these signals has been inconsistent, fragile and inefficient.

We’re experienced executives and engineers. We believe that every business has revenue and earnings potential trapped inside of its communications systems.


In mid-2020, Sturdy received an investment from Super{set}, a team that has created $1.2b in exits. This accelerated our product development and commercial efforts. Partnering with Super{set} was natural. We share the belief that “data is the new oil” and that refining data defines the new basis of competition across sectors and problem spaces.

Many of us worked together at Newton Software. This is a company that we bootstrapped, scaled and sold to Paycor, one of the largest independent HCM companies in the world.  At Newton, we lived by some simple rules. We live by these rules at Sturdy. 

  1. If you make a mistake, tell someone right away. We’ll fix it. 
  2. We design technology that we want to use. 
  3. We sell software how we’d want to buy it. 
  4. We support our software the way we would want to be supported. 
  5. We do things the right way, not the easy way. 
  6. We don’t take shortcuts. 

We’re energized and ready to roll. Let’s talk. 

We’re encouraged by the feedback and results from early customers using Sturdy. And, we’re fired up to help businesses preempt customer issues before they spiral and seize revenue opportunities in time to improve this quarter’s results. 

What will you find in your data? 

Click here to get access and see for yourself.


Similar articles

View all
Customer Churn

The Most Dangerous Threat to CROs

Joel Passen
July 1, 2025
5 min read

The most dangerous threat to CROs doesn’t live in the opportunity pipeline.

It's churn.

  • It doesn’t scream like a missed quarterly pipeline goal.
  • It doesn’t show up in dashboards until it’s too late.
  • It's rarely caught by a generic 'health score'.
  • It's the board meeting killer.

Retaining and growing our customers is the only repeatable, compounding, capital-efficient growth lever left in B2B businesses.

📉 CAC is way up.

📉 Channels are saturated.

📉 Talent is expensive.

📉 Competition is fierce.

📉 Switching costs are low.

The path to $100M used to be “sell, sell, sell.”

Today? It’s “land, retain, expand.”

No matter how strong your sales motions are or how slick your product or service looks during the sales process, if your customers are churning, you’re stuck in a leaky bucket loop of doom.

Every net-new dollar you win is offset by dollars you lose. It's just math.

Yet most GTM orgs still operate like retention is someone else’s problem. "That's a CS thing."

  • The CS team might “own” the customer post-sale.
  • Account Management may own the renewal and growth number.
  • Support is in the foxhole on the front line.
  • RevOps might model churn with last quarter’s data.
  • Marketing might send an occasional newsletter via email.
  • Finance may be leaning in on the forecasting.
  • Product is building things that supposedly the customers want.

But in reality, churn is the CRO's problem. We wear it - or should.

If your go-to-market motion isn’t designed to protect and grow customers from Day 1, you’re not just leaving money on the table — you’re setting fire to it.

Retention and expansion aren’t back-end functions. They’re front-and-center revenue motions.

The most valuable work these days starts after the contract is signed — not before.

We need to stop treating post-live as a department and start treating it as the engine of durable growth.

Software

Have you heard this from your CEO?

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

"How are we using AI internally?"

The drumbeat is real. Boards are leaning in. Investors are leaning in. Yet, too many leaders hardly use it. Most CS teams? Still making excuses.

🤦🏼 "We’re not ready."Translation: We don't know where to start, so I'm waiting to run into someone who has done something with it.

🤦🏼 "We need cleaner data."Translation: We’re still hoping bad inputs from fractured processes will magically produce good outputs. Everyone's data is a sh*tshow. Trust me. 🤹🏼♂️ "We're playing with it."Translation: We have that one person messing with ChatGPT - experimenting.

😕 "Just don't have the resources right now."Translation: We're too overwhelmed manually building reports, wrangling renewals, and answering tickets forwarded by the support teams.

🫃🏼 "We've got too many tools."Translation: We’re overwhelmed by the tools we bought that created a bunch of silos and forced us into constant app-switching.

🤓 "Our IT team won't let us use AI."Translation: We’ve outsourced innovation to a risk-averse inbox.

It's time to put some cowboy under that hat 🤠 . No one’s asking you to rebuild the data warehouse or perform some sacred data ritual. You don’t need a PhD in AI.

You can start small.

Nearly every AI vendor has a way for you to try their wares without hiring a team of talking heads to perform unworldly 🧙🏼 acts of digital transformation.

Where to start.

✔️ Pick a use case that will give you a revenue boost or reveal something you didn't know about your customers.

✔️ Choose something that directs valuable work to the valuable people you've hired.

✔️ Pick something with outcomes that other teams can use.

Pro Tip: Your CEO doesn't care about chatbots, knowledgebase articles, or things that write emails to customers.

What do you have to lose? More customers? Your seat at the table?

CX Strategy

Talent gets you started. Infrastructure gets you scale.

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

We obsess over hiring A-players. But even the best GTM talent will flounder if the foundation isn’t there.

I’ve seen companies overpay for “rockstars” who quit in 6 months—not because they weren’t capable, but because they were dropped into chaos. No ICP. Bad data. No process. No enablement. No system to measure or coach.

Great GTM teams aren’t built on purple squirrels. They’re built on a strong foundation.

That foundation looks like this:

✅ A crisp, written ICP and buyer persona (not just tribal knowledge)

✅ Accurate prospect data to target the right ICP

✅ A playbook that outlines how you win—and how you lose

✅ A clear point-of-view that your team can rally around in every email, call, and deck

✅ Defined stages, handoffs, and accountability across marketing, sales, CS

✅ A baseline reporting system to see what’s working—and what’s not

When this exists, you can onboard faster, coach better, and scale smarter. It's not easy, and it’s not sexy, but it works.

Want to cut CAC and increase ramp speed? Start with your infrastructure. Hire into a structure.

How many customers will you have to lose before you try Sturdy?

Schedule Demo
A blue and gray logo with a black background
A number of different types of labels on a white backgroundA white background with a red line and a white background with a red line andA sign that says executive change and contact request
A white background with a red line and a blue lineA number of different types of logos on a white backgroundA pie chart with the percentage of customer confusion and unhappy
A number of graphs on a white background