Customer Intelligence

You have been paywalled

By
Steve Hazelton
August 1, 2024
5 min read

(The image attached to this post is not entirely accurate but read on, and I’ll explain)

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Sturdy’s brand message lately. Part of this process entails interviewing folks from various walks of life about the current state of their businesses, their teams, and the companies they invest in.

The recurring theme: Sales Leaders aren’t having a good time right now. But you knew that already. I want to talk about what you don’t know.

After one of my interviews, I received a text with a quote by the former CEO of Swedish Airlines, Jan Carlzon.

An individual without information can’t take responsibility. An individual with information can’t help but take responsibility.

There are many different “things”’ that impact revenue: bad service, confusing products, poor response times, overselling, bug reports, price, whacky renewal processes, etc. You already knew this.

You know a lot about economic conditions, because that information is widely, and publicly available. You probably know a fair amount about “Sales Things” because your team is talking about “percent to goal” in almost every meeting, and there are a lot of discussions about what’s working and what isn’t. And, you likely review almost every deal in your pipeline.

What would happen if the opportunities in your pipeline were randomly placed in your ticket systems, CRMs, and a smattering of email inboxes? Knowing what was working with sales would get more difficult, if not impossible.

Today, the issues that affect service, product, marketing, etc., are randomly smattered across every customer-facing system in your business. The only way you “know” they happen is if someone else decides they are important enough to log or forward.

How do you get the information you need to make an impact?

Where is the information your product team needs to know?

Where is the information that your pricing team needs to know?

Where is the information that your renewals team needs to know?

If your Product Marketing Manager wants to know how their new pricing plan is working, what would inform that? A pretty good source—I’d argue the best source—of that information is sitting in emails, tickets, and call transcripts. But, if you are a Product Marketing Manager, you don’t have access to tickets, call transcripts, or customer emails.

You’ve been paywalled.

If you want to know what features to fix, there’s a data point in your Support Chatbot. When your Renewals Manager needs information on an account , they need to scroll through tickets and ask a few people, “What’s going on with this account?”

As a result, every business has smart people who rely on other people to log things, categorize things, and forward things. This is why our teams have logins to systems they seldom use -  so they can find a “thing” they might need.

The irony is that the information you need to know to do your job effectively is harder to source than the information about things you can’t control.

You probably know the inflation rate. If you don’t, you can discover it in one search.

Your VP of CS probably doesn’t know “What’s the most common source of customer frustration in the last 90 days?” Why? Because that information is splashed across your business in a host of silos that VP can’t access. Imagine trying to do that job, without that answer.

Imagine if that VP could answer that question in one search, using what customers are actually saying to every person in your business.

This paywalling has made our businesses fragile and slow. The hints of the B2B slowdown were arriving at our doorsteps in emails and tickets for months. “We’re cutting costs”. “Procurement wants a discount.” Why didn’t we see this coming? Because we weren’t looking for it, and couldn’t find it.

Time to get faster, and sturdier. You have smart people who can take responsibility. Bust the paywalls and give them information they need to react and act.

Do that hard things,

Steve

Similar articles

View all
Software

STURDY.AI ANNOUNCES $6M SEED ROUND

Joel Passen
April 1, 2025
5 min read

Sturdy's Customer Intelligence Platform performs real-time revenue threat root cause analysis, and delivers cross-functional insights to the teams and systems to mitigate churn.

Portland, OR — April 1, 2025 — Sturdy.ai, a pioneer in AI-powered customer intelligence, today announced it has raised $6M in Series Seed funding. Voyager Capital led this round, with participation from Fortson VC as well as existing investor, Grotech Ventures. The funds will be used to deepen Sturdy’s AI capabilities, expand integrations with customer data silos, and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.

Modern Teams Need Actionable Intelligence to Protect and Grow Revenue

With customer expectations higher than ever and retention under pressure, the need for proactive, AI-driven revenue insights has never been more urgent. According to industry data, reducing churn by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%. Enterprises have spent millions on building silos of applications to get closer to their customers and create active communication channels in the hope of mitigating churn risk early. Yet, this has failed to provide the proactive warning signals required. Sturdy closes the gap by seeing across these silos for a unified view of customer communication.

“We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” said Steve Hazelton, CEO and co-founder of Sturdy.ai. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”

Investors Bet Big on AI-Powered Revenue Threat Detection

The funding round attracted a strong syndicate of investors aligned on Sturdy’s vision for a more innovative, AI-native approach to revenue intelligence. Voyager Capital, known for backing category-defining SaaS platforms, led the round, with General Partner Diane Fraiman joining Sturdy's board.

“Sturdy is tackling one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in enterprise software—how to extract proactive insights from the flood of daily customer interactions,” said Diane Fraiman, Managing Director of Voyager Capital. “Retention has become a critical topic in boardrooms. We believe that every business will have a system of intelligence in the next 3 years. Sturdy’s platform is positioned to become essential infrastructure for any company serious about protecting and growing revenues while truly putting their customers first.”

“Sturdy is one of the most powerful and immediate applications of AI and natural language processing we’ve seen,” said Thomas O’Keefe, CEO of Solo LLC. “At both Solo and previously at Syntrio, it has delivered instant value—surfacing proactive, actionable customer insights and driving measurable improvements in retention.”

About Voyager

Voyager Capital is a leading West Coast early-stage venture firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies for today’s modern economy. Voyager invests primarily in B2B technology companies, including AI-driven business solutions, software-driven hardware, sustainable agriculture, and supply chain. The firm's domain expertise, go-to-market, and team-building resources are proven to help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has over $550 million under management with offices and resources in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and Calgary. 

About Fortson VC

Fortson VC is a seed-stage venture firm based in the Pacific Northwest, built for exceptionally rare founders who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.  Led by Cole Younger, Fortson brings over two decades of early-stage investing experience and a disciplined approach grounded in authenticity, grit, and courage.  While driven by curiosity, our primary focus is B2B software and the technological frontier around it—the infrastructure, intelligence, and automation shaping the future of how businesses create value.

About Grotech Ventures

Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures is a leading early investor in high-potential technology companies. Grotech seeks innovative, early-stage investments across the technology landscape and continues to invest and add value throughout the life cycle of each portfolio company. The firm has a strong combination of financial backing, industry relationships, and deep domain and operational expertise to accelerate growth. With more than $1.0 billion in committed capital, Grotech supports early-stage companies through investments starting as small as $500,000. For more information, visit http://www.grotech.com.

About Sturdy

Founded in 2020, Sturdy is an AI-forward autonomous Customer Intelligence platform that proactively identifies churn risks across all customer-facing silos. Sturdy analyzes unstructured customer interactions—emails, calls, support tickets, chats, and more—discovering revenue threats, pinpointing root causes, and delivering cross-functional insights in real time. Sturdy has analyzed billions of customer interactions, giving it one of the largest proprietary datasets in the category and enabling its models to surface insights faster and more accurately than competitors. At a time when customer retention is a top priority for every business, Sturdy turns the noise of customer conversations into a strategic advantage.

For more information, visit www.sturdy.ai or reach out to Joel Passen at joel@sturdy.ai

Integrations

Product Update! Sturdy now integrates with Jira

Joel Passen
March 10, 2025
5 min read

We’re making it easier than ever to turn customer feedback into action while saving businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. With Sturdy’s new Jira Connect, any AI-powered Signal in Sturdy can be automatically logged in Jira—helping teams capture, prioritize, and resolve issues faster than ever.

Sturdy for Jira is a Game Changer

Every team needs to know more about their customers. 

Turn customer feedback into valuable Jira content automatically. Sturdy’s AI accurately detects feature requests, bug reports, and other critical product feedback. Customizable agents then deliver this context-rich intelligence to a configurable staging area in Jira with all relevant user and account details, such as segment, ARR, and more. The content is objectively summarized automatically. From there, assigning it to an epic, task, sprint, or release is just one click.

Productivity Gains that Move the Needle

Businesses are unknowingly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on something as simple as manually logging Jira issues. A single customer-facing rep wastes nearly 87 hours annually on repetitive data entry—scaling up to a staggering $354,200 per year for a team of 100 reps. By integrating Sturdy’s AI-driven automation, businesses can reclaim thousands of hours, improve productivity, and reinvest those savings into growth and innovation—all while ensuring more accurate, real-time data flows into Jira effortlessly.

Align product teams with customer reality.

By centralizing AI-powered insights in Jira, Sturdy ensures that product and engineering teams get a complete, objective picture of what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs to be built—without relying on anecdotal feedback. Customer-reported issues appear in Jira moments after they happen, ensuring your product and engineering teams stay ahead of emerging trends and critical bugs—without the lag of traditional reporting.

Effortless setup, immediate impact.

Sturdy’s turnkey integration takes minutes to configure. Once connected, your team gains instant access to context-rich, structured feedback—helping you make faster, data-driven decisions that improve customer satisfaction.

Want to get started? Click the 'Schedule Demo' button at the top of the page.

Integrations

Product Update! Sturdy Now Analyzes Customer Slack Channels

Joel Passen
March 3, 2025
5 min read

We’re making it easier than ever for teams to tap into the power of customer conversations. With this integration, Sturdy’s AI-driven insights—trained to spot key behaviors and trends unique to your business—are now right where your team works. That means more proactive decisions, better collaboration, and a serious productivity boost.

Here’s how Sturdy works with Slack.

  • Get the right insights, right in Slack. Sturdy delivers AI-powered Signals where your team already works, flagging risks, expansion opportunities, and other key moments in real-time. No more digging through conversations—just actionable insights when you need them.

  • Stay on top of every conversation. If your team works asynchronously in Slack channels, it’s easy for important feedback to get lost. Sturdy keeps you ahead by surfacing critical insights before they slip through the cracks.

  • Act fast, not after the fact. Whether it’s a service risk, a feature request, or a potential upsell, Sturdy helps teams spot and respond to what matters—without disrupting their workflow.

Seamless sync with your tools. Sturdy doesn’t just stop at Slack. Insights discovered in customer Slack channels automatically flow into Jira, CSPs, CRMs, and other systems, ensuring the right teams get the right info—without extra work.

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