Early-stage founders who are looking to improve net retention rate for their customers can create a funding advantage. As venture capital firms drive their focus on revenue, retention has become more important than ever.

I recently chatted with Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, founder of CS Angel, an angel investing group whose portfolio includes early-stage technology companies building products designed to improve customer retention. Cipriani-Espineira, who is a SaaS executive and operator, got into customer success while working at a startup whose investment boards started asking for better results on a churn problem. She tackled the problem by upgrading to niche software for the customer-success and post-sales teams. Soon after, she decided she wanted to invest in tools for the broader customer-success community, a business proposition that piqued my interest and was unique in its motivation.

When companies focus on customer-success processes, they can improve the way customer-success teams work. When companies focus on improving the way customer-success teams work, net revenue retention can grow and drive long-term business success. Customer success is a business advantage that drives customer advocacy and revenue retention.

If you’re an early-stage founder considering a customer-success focus, here are three tips to consider to address customer success in your offerings:

1. Aim to improve net revenue retention: Does your product have an ROI metric focused on growing revenue? Consider broadening your impact to expansion revenue as well. Expansion revenue is a metric that can deliver more results across the revenue lifecycle for longer than the sales cycle.
2. Focus on cross-functional alignment: Encourage behaviors in your user base that drive cross-collaboration and allow for better prioritization. If you can solve the way teams engage backstage, you can solve for how they engage better onstage with their customers.
3. Drive better customer experiences: Ensure your tool engages with customers in a way they want to be met. Maybe you are creating new experiences for customers — that’s OK, but measure your results towards that goal.

Growing a company in 2024 and beyond is about going further than the typical funding strategies. Finding ways to solve problems for key verticals like customer success managers can pay off if you know where to look.