The MVP for customer success
Where to focus, what to do, and how to start
Hi friends - Last week I shared a framework for deciding when to hire your first customer success manager. This week, let’s talk about what that person should actually focus on once they start.
When you’re the first CS hire at a startup, the list of things that need to get done can feel overwhelming. There’s no playbook, no existing processes, and probably a few fires already burning. The temptation is to try to fix everything at once—or worse, to just react to whatever’s loudest.
Don’t do that.
Instead, think about building a minimum viable product for customer success. What’s the smallest set of foundations that will have the highest impact on retention and customer experience? Get those right first, then iterate.
Here’s where to start.
The MVP for customer success
1. Understand the current state
Before you build anything, you need to know what you’re working with.
Audit existing onboarding. Walk through the current onboarding experience as if you were a new customer. What’s working? Where do people get stuck? Talk to recent customers about their onboarding experience—what confused them, what they wished they’d known sooner, what almost made them give up. Also — what can be automated or streamlined?
Talk to to the team. The founder, the CTO, the product team. What do they do today to service customers? What do they know they should be doing…but haven’t had time yet? Get as much history on the existing customer base as you can.
Analyze churn. If customers have already churned, do post-mortems. Talk to them if you can. Look for patterns: Did they fail to onboard properly? Did they lose their internal champion? Did they never really have a good use case to begin with? Understanding why people leave is the fastest way to figure out how to prevent it.
Talk to current customers. Especially the ones who are thriving. What did they do differently? What value are they getting that others might be missing? These conversations will shape everything else you build.
This discovery phase shouldn’t take months—a few weeks of focused conversations and analysis will give you what you need to prioritize.
2. Build the foundation
Once you understand the current state, start putting basic infrastructure in place.
Implement a shared inbox. Customer requests are probably scattered across founder emails, Slack DMs, and random channels. Centralize everything into a shared inbox (HubSpot if you already use that as your CRM - or Help Scout is a great alternative if not). This gives you visibility into the volume, response times, and common issues. You can’t improve what you can’t see.
Create a renewal calendar. Know exactly when every customer renews and build trigger points for outreach at 90, 60, and 30 days out. Renewals should never be a surprise—for you or for the customer.
Build a basic health score. This doesn’t need to be sophisticated. Start with a simple red/yellow/green framework based on a few signals: product usage frequency, support ticket volume, last engagement with your team, NPS response. The goal is to know who needs attention before they start looking for alternatives.
Segment your customers. Not every customer needs (or wants) the same level of service. Segment based on ACV, strategic importance, or complexity. A simple three-tier model works for most early-stage companies:
Tier 1 (high-touch): Your largest or most strategic accounts. Monthly check-ins, quarterly business reviews, dedicated attention.
Tier 2 (medium-touch): Solid mid-tier accounts. Quarterly check-ins, proactive outreach around renewals and major product updates.
Tier 3 (low-touch): Smaller accounts or those with simple use cases. Primarily self-serve with reactive support.
Your segmentation will evolve, but you need a starting point to allocate your time effectively.
3. Create leverage
As a team of one (or close to it), you need to create systems that scale beyond your personal bandwidth.
Build a public knowledge base. This is what I call a GTM multivitamin—it does multiple jobs at once:
Self-service for customers. Many customers prefer finding answers themselves rather than waiting for a response. A good knowledge base reduces support volume and improves customer experience simultaneously.
AI chatbot training. If you implement a support chatbot (or plan to), your knowledge base becomes the data that trains it. The better your documentation, the more questions AI can handle without human intervention.
SEO and AEO. Help content ranks well in search and feeds AI answer engines. Prospects researching solutions often land on help docs—and seeing clear, comprehensive documentation builds confidence that they won’t be left stranded post-purchase.
Sales enablement. Sales can point prospects to your knowledge base as proof that you take customer success seriously. “Here’s exactly how our product works” is more compelling than “trust us, we’ll take care of you.”
Start with the 10-15 questions you answer most frequently, then build from there.
Document your onboarding process. Even if onboarding requires hands-on work, document the steps, milestones, and success criteria. This helps you deliver a consistent experience, train future team members, and identify where customers commonly stall.
Define success milestones. What does “getting to value” actually look like for your product? What should a customer accomplish by day 7? Day 30? Day 60? These milestones help you spot at-risk customers early and give you something concrete to drive toward during onboarding.
4. Establish feedback loops
Customer success sits at the intersection of customer and company. Part of your job is making sure insights flow in both directions.
Implement NPS or CSAT. Pick one to start. NPS gives you a pulse on overall loyalty and likelihood to refer; CSAT gives you feedback on specific interactions. Either way, you need a systematic way to measure how customers feel—not just anecdotes.
Create a product feedback process. How does customer feedback get back to the product team? Without a clear process, valuable insights die in support tickets. This can be as simple as a shared Slack channel, a monthly summary, or a tagging system in your support tool. The format matters less than having a consistent and reliable path from customer voice to product roadmap.
5. Set the rhythm
Finally, establish the operating cadence that will govern how you engage with customers.
Meeting cadences by tier. Based on your segmentation:
Tier 1: Monthly check-ins, quarterly business reviews
Tier 2: Quarterly check-ins, annual reviews if appropriate
Tier 3: No standing meetings—outreach triggered by health score changes, renewals, or support escalations
Quarterly business reviews for top accounts. QBRs are your opportunity to step back from day-to-day support and talk about outcomes. What has the customer achieved? What’s coming up for their business? How can you help them get more value? These conversations strengthen relationships and surface expansion opportunities.
Internal reporting rhythm. Decide how you’ll report on CS metrics to leadership—weekly, monthly, or tied to board cycles. At minimum, track retention/churn, NPS, and support volume. Having a consistent reporting cadence forces you to keep your data clean and gives you a platform to advocate for resources as you grow.
Start simple, build and MVP, iterate from there
None of this requires expensive tooling or a large team. It’s about building the right foundations so you can retain customers, scale your efforts, and eventually grow the CS function as the company grows.
If you’re already using HubSpot for your CRM, I strongly recommend using HubSpot Service Hub for your CS foundation. Service Hub Pro does everything I described above: shared inbox, ticketing, knowledge base, customer feedback surveys, and basic reporting. It integrates natively with your existing customer data, which means no syncing headaches or duplicate records. And a 360 view of your customer in one shared system with sales & marketing is ideal.
Are there more sophisticated customer success platforms out there? Absolutely. But when you’re just getting started, you don’t need sophisticated—and you don’t need a sophisticated price tag.
The initial goal is to build foundational processes and understand your customers. You can always migrate to another CS platform later when your needs (and team) outgrow what Service Hub can do. For now, keep it simple and focus on execution, not tooling.
Get the MVP in place, then iterate.
With love and gratitude -
If you want to learn more about working with me directly…
For B2B startups I serve as a Fractional GTM executive or advisor. Learn more about-
When you’re ready, let’s connect to discuss your specific growth goals and challenges.
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