Ep. 168 - How Gen AI Is Rewiring B2B SaaS Feedback

Guest: Eli Portnoy, Founder & CEO at BackEngine -- 

As B2B SaaS companies scale, they often lose touch with the customers who got them there. 

In this episode, Eli Portnoy, founder and CEO of BackEngine, sits down with Ken Lempit to talk about the critical breakdown in customer feedback systems—and how generative AI can help leaders hear what really matters.

We unpack:
✅ Why customer feedback loops break as SaaS companies grow
✅ The hidden costs of misaligned feedback channels and weak ownership
✅ How AI can synthesize 100% of customer interactions—without surveys
✅ What separates elite SaaS companies from the rest when it comes to NRR and churn
✅ Why CS leaders are uniquely positioned to become strategic feedback owners

Eli also shares the story of losing his biggest customer before a major fundraise—and the moment he realized feedback was everyone’s problem, but no one’s job.

If you're a CMO, CRO, or CS leader building a feedback-driven growth engine, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CEOs and GTM leaders to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Eli Portnoy, founder and CEO of backengine, a SaaS that analyzes all customer communications, including email calls and Slack to increase visibility into customer experience and drive greater retention and revenues.

Eli, welcome to the podcast. 

Eli Portnoy: Thank you so much. So excited to be here. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah. You know, this topic we're gonna get into is near and dear to my heart, so I'm really excited to get into it. But before we do, please tell us something about backengine, what it is, who it's for, and your background as well.

Eli Portnoy: Absolutely. So, so I'll start with my background, which is I've been building SaaS businesses for the last 15 years, and one of the things that has been a real, like, painful struggle for me is that there's this evolution that you go through as a founder, as a CEO trying to build something, which is you start, and in the early days it's just you and a few other people, and you're all in one room, and you've got a small number of customers if you're lucky, and as a founder, you know those customers intimately well.

You know exactly who they are and what they care about, you know their pain points and how to solve their pain points. And as a result, you're able to build a company and a business and a product that really solves their pain points. And that's why in the early days, it's so easy to have these fanatical customers that just absolutely love you.

And it feels like this magical power that you have where you, like you can do no wrong because everything you're building is just resonating with those customers, and it's because you know them so well. And so that's easy. But then the company starts to grow and you know this is the natural progression.

You start to bring on more customers and so you start to hire more people on the team and you start to bring in more systems, and all of a sudden you now have this distance that gets created between the founder and the customer. And now instead of hearing everything directly, you're hearing it,

sort of through a game of telephone really, where the customers saying it to a CS manager and that CS manager is saying it to their leader and that leader is bringing it up to you and all of a sudden that distance starts to become a real silent killer where. This is where companies start getting like really bogged down.

They start building the wrong things, they start focusing on the wrong things. There's misalignment internally. Things start to move slower. And it's because of that customer connection that just starts getting longer and further apart and growing distance. And so what we're doing with backengine is trying to solve exactly this problem.

And the way we solve it is by automatically using generative AI to analyze every single email, every single call, every single support interaction with those customers. Analyzing, categorizing, and basically centralizing all of that feedback and then making sure that it gets to the right person at the right time and the right tool so that everyone from the CEO to the product leader, to the CS leader, to the marketing leader, to basically every seller and CS person is hearing directly from the customers exactly what they need to hear and nothing else.

Ken Lempit: You know, I, I think it's a really fascinating use case for Gen AI. You know, it's, a volume of content that, you know, no human could ever really process, and yeah. Yet there's such richness and importance In the context and the, the ability to summarize those interactions. So I think it's a really cool application of it.

there's, plenty of things that don't seem to add as much value. This seems like, no one human could ever listen to all this stuff, read all this stuff. So it's really a great scale up of, your ability to sense what customers are telling the organization. I think we should dig in here and talk about, you know, the founder perspective, the founder's seat and need for this kind of feedback.

Eli Portnoy: maybe we should start with how are founders doing this today? If they're not using backengine, how are they getting deeper insights as the startup scales and. How did you come upon this problem? how did you see it as a solvable problem? As as you have?I love that question because almost every company is doing something around this, 

I've never met a leadership team that says, well, I don't care what customers are saying, everyone cares. It's just a matter of how you collect it. there are a few ways that companies go about it. The primary way is they have the team that talks to customers most frequently, which is generally the CS team, the customer success team.

They basically have them share feedback as they get it. So they're either taking notes and putting it into a CRM or they're grabbing snippets of a video and pushing it into a Slack channel somewhere. Or they're bringing it up at a customer review meeting once a week with their leader.

But it's this very ad hoc, sort of translated way of taking feedback from customers, someone remembering to categorize it and share it. And what ends up happening is you just have like a lot of noise that's translated that's really hard to do stuff with. And that's why if you ask a product leader, do you get great insights from your CS team?

Generally they say no because they don't understand the product well enough to actually even capture the feedback I need. And oftentimes I ask them how many people have said this and they can't tell me. Or if you ask a marketing person, how easy is it for you to figure out? Who's potentially a good customer for a case study well, CS doesn't usually know every time. like There's all this distance and that distance is like, people try to collect that feedback, but it's so anecdotal and so manual that almost non-existent.

The other thing that a lot of companies do is they do surveys, which I think are a really important part of the toolkit, but If you have 300 customers, you're a big B2B business, and you can typically expect about 5% of customers to respond to a survey. So what are you talking about? You're talking about, let's say 15 surveys a month that get answered.

Like that's not all that helpful, and it's not actually giving you real customer feedback. So between surveys and trying to get stuff. A little bit more programmatically and a lot of the manual sharing of stuff. And then maybe you're also recording calls, but no one's actually listening to those recordings and likeyou just have a hotspot of things that don't actually lead or amount to anything.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean it definitely seems like most of these insights their episodically captured and some agents are better than others at taking the notes or highlighting important facts for others to kind of process further. So the idea of being able to like consistently process all of the available input, I think is one of those things about Gen AI that many people don't appreciate is that it doesn't get tired, it doesn't forget, you know, it just does what it's supposed to do every time.

And I think there's a lot of value in that. when you were talking about the surveys, I wanted to ask, and we didn't talk about this, but you know, can you, have the customer success agent almost verbally walk customers through a survey and then get that summarized like on a weekly basis? So if you did get your reps to ask these questions repeatedly, would you be able to filter all that out consistently?

Eli Portnoy: For sure, for sure. But I take it one step further, which is the reps don't even need to ask the questions because over the course of the conversations, most of the stuff you'd wanna capture in a survey is coming out. And youcan basically read it off of the things that are naturally being said, especially because if you think about the coverage you have, you're capturing this information through the LLMs at a hundred percent of the interactions. So, you're able to synthetically create answers to feedback questions even if you didn't specifically ask reps to ask them. So we have a feature and backend, and that lets you do exactly that. You can build a survey and then you can synthetically ask at your customer base, and based on everything they've told us, the sentiment of their responses, their, engagement with the platform, we can basically answer those questions back for you and tell you the confidence that we have, that those questions are how they would answer them if you asked them directly.

Ken Lempit: That's fabulous. I think that's a really neat ability then to be able to get the kind of, conversational summaries as well as trying to distill out of it the statistically meaningful insights. That's very cool. I think I'd like to just get back to the motivation for creating this company.

Was there some kind of moment or realization in your prior startups where you said, wow, this is a real problem and I don't have a solution? 

Eli Portnoy: it was a,constant frustration for me. I have a very vivid memory of, a product launch that we were doing where we have spent, I don't know, maybe a year working on this product.

We called it intelligence at my last company, and we got ready to ship it and we push it live, and then I go to the CS team. I'm like, please make sure our,users realize that we've launched this. Get their feedback, talk to them about it. Me sort of waiting to hear back like, what's the response been to this thing that I thought was so cool that we'd spend so much time and me hearing crickets, like having zero direct interaction and sort of following up with the CS team and saying like, what are customers saying?

They're like, they like it. I'm like, no, that's not helpful. I need to know so much more about what they like, what they don't like. What resonates, like, there's so many product decisions and business decisions that are going to flow from our understanding of what they really think and just feeling like.

I'm getting nothing until I basically just said, every call with a customer where we're gonna just like showcase the intelligence I wanna be a part of. And again, I went right back to the early days that doesn't scale. And I was like, man, this, this is, this is not the right way for me to be collecting feedback because this is something that I,

proactively, I'm trying to get feedback on what are about all the things that I'm not, that I don't know about. What competitors are customers talking about that I should be aware of? What market trends, what like, use cases are they trying to solve for what like bugs are like really impact them. Like we don't know anything and everything we get is translated through this one team that honestly isn't really

charged with being the collectors of feedback, like their job there to expand and, usage of the platform and to drive upsells and to make sure that customers renew. And that's when I kind of realized, like I basically thought of them as like our customer feedback loop, when that's not really their job and that's not what they're intended to do.

And then I was getting frustrated when they weren't doing it and I was like, I'm putting them in a really tough situation. So that was the impetus of it. But then the company Sense360 got acquired by Medallia. Medallia's, one of the leading voice of the customer platforms, which basically means they run surveys on behalf of major, major brands to try and understand what their customers are saying.

And that, that works really, really well in B2C, where if you're helping, I don't know how many millions of customers you have, and if you get a small response rate, you're still dealing with a massive amounts of data that you could do a lot of really interesting things with. I kind of looked at this platform and I said, wow, this is amazing.

This is how you get customer feedback at scale. This will never work in a B2B setting because surveys are just not the answer because we talked about the 5% response rate. That's when I started to put two and two together and I said, well, whoa, what if I actually, instead of asking surveys, what if I collected customer feedback based on the fact that B2B businesses talk to each other all the time?

And how about if we use LLMs to actually make it feasible to analyze every single interaction? And that sort of slowly led to the creation of backengine. 

Ken Lempit: that's a great narrative and I really appreciate it. 'cause people are in their jobs every day. You know, experiencing business problems and maybe not thinking that, they could be the ones to solve them.

especially with these new tools, making it even easier. I wanna turn to your benchmark study, is this the first year that you've done this study? 

Eli Portnoy: It's, yeah. 

Ken Lempit: So, this really great piece of work and just wanna highlight a couple of findings and let you, you know, talk through what the meaning is behind it.

we have here that 12% of the respondents at these SaaS companies feel that they deeply understand their customers, which is kind of a scary number. 'cause the, the other side of it is nearly 90% don't feel they deeply understand their customers. 40% or more say that they miss important insights altogether.

So. What's going on here? Like, first of all, how are these companies even in business, but you know, why, why are they in this position? Why is this feedback environment so immature and what's the cost? 

Eli Portnoy: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a few things that are happening all at once. So the first is we talked about how most companies collect feedback and it's a really broken process, and it's not their fault, it's just.

You're talking about a lot of interactions and a lot of very busy people, and it is just hard to grab or wrangle all of that crazy amount of information and do something meaningful with it. And so instead they have this very ad hoc process where they're just kind of like on the fly saying, oh, that's important.

I need to flag it, I need to put it somewhere. and things get lost and it doesn't happen. So I think partially it's just the structure of how we collect feedback in B2B is difficult. I think the second one is that there's no clear ownership in a B2B environment. So because it's hard to collect, basically what every B2B business has done is they've said, well, who's gonna own customer feedback?

23% of the time, they basically say, ah, no one owns it. It's like something no one's gonna have any responsibility for, which creates a loop where now it definitely doesn't get collected. And now you definitely miss insights. And now you definitely are not gonna feel like you really understand your customer.

But what most companies end up doing this is 53.7% of the time, is they say, no, the owner should be customer success because they're talking to customers anyway. So let's make them the responsible party. The problem there is, like we talked about a few seconds ago, the CS team is hired and measured on their ability to deliver happiness to customers, usage to customers, expansions, upsells, renewals.

No one is hiring, measuring, or goaling a CS rep on their ability to succinctly grab feedback and share with the rest of the organization. So even those 53% of companies that say they have an owner and it's CS, they don't really have an owner. They just have someone who defacto does it. And so when you combine 53.7% and 23.5%, you're basically talking about 77% of companies have no real clear owner for customer feedback. And as we all know, every business at least I've been a part of. If no one owns it, it doesn't happen. And so you end up in a world where you don't have feedback and you don't know your customers well, and you end up having all sorts of other issues. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean, I think that point about how people are measured and compensated is really important.

I mean, you can put it on their job description, but if you don't measure and pay them on it, most people aren't gonna do it unless the altruism is off the charts. You know? So they're gonna do the things that they get, reviewed on and compensated on, and not the things they don't. Do you have a sense of what the cost is of not taking these steps to better gain the feedback?

Are there any case studies of the cost of inaction? 

Eli Portnoy: For sure, for sure. So I mean, I would start at the highest level that the number of companies on the S&P 500. 20 years ago that are still there is about half. And so you're talking about a massive amount of turnover at the biggest level of companies and that that's accelerating.

And it's also even worse for smaller companies. and the reason is because it's just very, very hard to stay on top of markets and consumers and trends when they're changing so quickly. And to do it without even hearing from them, it's basically like trying to go to where the puck is going, but blindfolded.

Like it's just not gonna happen. And so, that's a real danger. But I think there's, a different way to look at the cost of inaction, which is, what does it look like if you do take action and what are you missing out by not taking the action? And what we did in our, study is we looked at performance metrics for companies that had

very strong feedback systems versus those that didn't. And what we found is just an over performance by those with an expert system across every dimension of customer metrics. So net revenue retention goes up if you have a better feedback system. Win rates go up if you have a better feedback system.

Churn goes down the percentage of your product releases that, end up being successes goes up, your competitive win rate goes up. Basically everything that matters to a business goes up if you put a more advanced feedback system in place and you actually capture what customers are saying.

So I would say the cost of inaction on the one extreme is like you'll die, and on the other end is you'll give up a tremendous amount of profit and growth. And so in either case, it's bad. 

Ken Lempit: That's quite a stark contrast. That's, that's awesome. And I actually met Wayne Gretzky and I imagine he would agree you can't skate to the puck blindfolded.

Probably not possible. No, I don't 

Eli Portnoy: think it's 

a good idea. 

Ken Lempit: So, um, let's dig in a little bit more when you really nail customer feedback. 'cause I think this is, this is the cool thing, right? And, you, you you sort of painted. A broad brush, like what is the outperformance? But can you dig in a little bit more on some examples of outperformance that you maybe have experienced in your customer base or in your own business?

Eli Portnoy: Yeah, so I think to do that we probably should go down a level andstart thinking about the different functions. And so I'll start with the frontline team. So right now, because the burden of collecting customer feedback is happening at the CS and AE level, they're spending a lot of their time reporting up.

they're doing customer health reviews where they're reporting on whether a customer or a prospect is healthy. They're doing pipeline reviews. They're, providing feedback to different teams on what's working, what's not working. All of that is taking up time. So, doing it well means that they can basically focus on the things that matter to them.

You go up one level and you start dealing with the CS leadership and the sales leadership. And what are they trying to do? Well, they're probably trying to coach at scale. They've got 5, 10, 15 people working for them and they wanna coach them. And right now coaching is probably based on the 5% of calls that they can join and that's probably not gonna be all that helpful, whereas.

If they're capturing feedback at scale, they can start to really start coaching, based on a hundred percent of their team's customer interactions. And they're probably trying to put playbooks in place to say, the best reps, the best CSMs, they're doing this and the worst ones are doing this. So let's put a playbook.

Let's get you moving upstream. Again, very hard to do ifyou have no visibility into what's happening across your different folks on your team, and now all of a sudden you're collecting feedback, so you're able to really put together some strong playbooks. Then you go up another, um, or you go sideways a little bit and you, talk to the product leader.

And the product leader is right now basically creating roadmaps where once a month they talk to the CS team and they're like, well, do customers want this or that? Basically just like maybe taking a little bit of input about what customers care versus with an advanced feedback system, they know exactly what features are being asked about.

They know how many people have asked. They know what revenue that represents. they understand in the words of the customer what problem they're actually trying to solve. And so now every ounce of engineering and product effort is going towards things that will actually get used and be valued by the customer.

So now you've got a better product and you've got a better experience because the CSMs and the AEs are providing a better experience. Then you go to the marketing team and you start to hear from the marketing team that they now know they have all these happy customers, but they don't know who the happy ones are, and they don't know which features they are, and they're trying to put together case studies and blog posts.

And go join, panels and like, I don't know who to go to and I don't know what messaging is responding. And so now you've got all the feedback to tell you exactly who to talk to and what they're saying, and now you're going out and getting more customers. And so it's this big feedback loop where every part of the organization gets better and you end up building just a more successful company.

Ken Lempit: That's amazing. I mean, you call these companies that have really implemented this feedback, elites, and yeah, I think you've answered the question, what separates them from the everyday companies, but is there any sort of summary you'd like to put on that? 

Eli Portnoy: Yeah, I think the way I think about the stages, like we had four stages, basic, intermediate, advanced, and experts, and the elite ones are really the expert ones.

The basic ones are not doing much. The intermediate ones are trying, but they're doing it in the,the way that we talked about before where it's very ad hoc and anecdotal and, happening just because the advanced ones start to put ownership around it, around gathering customer feedback, and they start to put some tooling around it.

So they might be recording their video calls. They might be, trying to use AI to help with some of it. The expert ones have a very clear owner, usually a VOC, like a voice of the customer person who's mandated with this, they're putting real systems in place and they're making it a cross company initiative to make sure that everyone is focused on it.

and that's it. There were no other similarities across them. So across the four stages, it wasn't like bigger companies were all experts and small companies were basic. there was no discernible pattern outside of how seriously are they taking customer feedback. And that alone was enough to correlate to, significantly increase in performances.

Ken Lempit: Is there, a way to measure return on investment in this kind of initiative? 

Eli Portnoy: Yeah, I think so. I mean, ultimately the reason we care about customer satisfaction is because it should lead to, higher net revenue retention, and you should care about customer happiness because it leads to more growth and more new customers.

And so you can very quickly see what the impact on net revenue retention is. You know, it's not a perfect science because you can a b test it. You've got one company and one outcome, but you can see what it was the year before you implemented it, and you can look at and see how it compares.

And generally what we're seeing is, on the net revenue retention side, almost a 4% increase between basic and expert. So for every $10 million of revenue that you have, you're talking about $400,000 of incremental, revenue. By implementing an advanced feedback system. And then on top of that, you have all of the increased competitive win rates and the fact that it's easier to renew folks and all of the other stuff, but just $400,000 for every $10 million of revenue 

Ken Lempit: at minimum.

Eli Portnoy: Minimum. That's 

Ken Lempit: right. That's great. Um, I wanna move away from the backengine. Justification and the company itself. And talk about your experience as a founder and what you're doing here with this business. you know, you're sort of expanding a category or maybe even creating a category here, you know, advanced feedback systems.

how hard is that for you? And, you elaborate very clearly. You know, the proposition, but when you're out there in the wild trying to, sell the proposition, you know, what are the challenges of getting people to pay attention? listen, understand, and get into a sales discussion with you.

very hard. I think creating a new market, a new category is extremely hard because, I mean, people just have enough to do a across their day. The last thing they wanna do is add anything, especially in this macro environment where there's just a lot more gravity towards consolidation than there is to adding anything.

Eli Portnoy: So it is hard. I think what makes it harder in our case is that we talked about before that there's no owner for this. It's not like if you're selling a CRM, you know that there's an owner for A CRM because the sales team exists and the sales team owns it. We talked about how customer feedback has no real ownership in an organization.

So part of what I have to do is I have to evangelize the idea that not only this customer feedback matters. Not only do you need an owner for it, not only do you need to create budget for it, and by the way, we're the best tool to do it. So there's, there's a bunch of evangelizing that needs to happen, but I think that's where the biggest opportunity is because AI is really.

Commod software. And so if you're just building something that is, you know, the slightly better version of something that exists. it's just a race to the bottom. Whereas we do think we're creating something entirely different and we think it's very hard to evangelize, but every time we evangelize another company, I think we're creating customers for life.

And, and that's very exciting. And, you know, at some point we might have competition, but for right now, the goal is to just evangelize why this matters and hope that we can build the best solution for it. 

Ken Lempit: in your experience, where do you need to go into these organizations to get a proper audience?

Eli Portnoy: Yeah. This is part of what's tricky about what we're doing is that because there's no ownership inside the company, we have to go to the CEO to make sure that they create an owner for it. And that's, you know, it's hard to get the CEOs. we have found some success going to customer success leaders.

And basically what we tell them, and I truly believe this is a CS leader, is in a very, very privileged position. They sit at the intersection between the company and its customers and being the defacto owner of customer feedback is leaving a big opportunity on the table rather than thinking of themselves as relationship managers.

If they can really advocate internally to be the owner of customer feedback, then all of a sudden they are now a strategic advisor to product, to marketing, to the executives, and that is a way more strategic place to be in the organization. And so part of what we're also evangelizing for CS leaders is this is how you should think about your role.

This is how you should look to expand the role. This is how you should look to. Advocate for your role within the, the C-suite and, and that's been effective for us as well. 

Ken Lempit: I think the lesson here is you have to find the person with an economic. Interest in what your solution can do and if they don't currently have the responsibility that your solution implies or requires, help them to justify a change in the organization.

This is a great strategy, sort of over, under, right, over with the CEO under, with what's likely a direct report or a report to the CRO. That's awesome. So now, did you have a personal experience losing a customer connection before? I mean, I think you, you might have mentioned something about that, you know, right at the top of the episode.

Is there something about that experience that was really, you know, so powerful that it became formative to this new business? 

Eli Portnoy: For sure and, and I think there are two examples of it. One was a micro example where one specific customer left us and I'll tell you a little bit about that. And then the other is just losing sight of the patterns that emerged from customer feedback.

So the first one was, our biggest customer by far. basically churned as we were heading into our series B, and so we had incredible metrics. Everything looked good for the business. It was growing just across every dimension. We looked like we were gonna be a super hot series B, and our biggest customer by far left us.

And to tell you that that was painful is a massive understatement, and I did a lot of introspection. Postmortems. Really tried to understand what happened. How did it happen? And you know, I was really blindsided and ultimately came down to the fact that they had shared feedback with us that had never found its way through the organization.

And now to be clear, that's a failure on my end. It was my organization. I had set it up that way. I had structured it so that feedback wasn't getting to me in the way it needed to be. But no matter how much I tried to fix it, I didn't feel like I was able to get to a great outcome because I didn't have the tooling

to do it. And so it was more around just like burdening the team with taking more tedious notes and doing more stuff. And at some point I just realized like, this is not something that's going to be fixed with more process and more systems. This is something that's gonna have to be solved by technology.

And I remember calling one of my largest investors and just saying, I feel like I'm gonna throw up, like, I don't know. I don't know what we're gonna do here because losing the biggest customer is hard at any point, losing it, going into a series B is pretty devastating. We're lucky we were able to come out of it, but that was a very, very impactful lesson.

The second is a little bit less, there's less of a story around it, but just I felt like with the example I gave before around intelligence and launching it, I just felt like I no longer had visibility into the patterns that were emerging. I didn't know what people cared about, what they didn't care about.

I didn't understand where they were trying to go with things. I didn't know if, when things weren't like you and, and every business you have periods where things feel great and periods where things don't feel great, and when things felt great, I didn't know why and when things didn't feel great, I also didn't know why.

So it was very hard for me to allocate resources to make sure that we were constantly getting better. That's just a painful place to be . It's just what are you as a CEO, if not a resource allocator and a driver of the strategy. And how do you do either of those things if you don't really know what your customers care about and what they like and what they don't like?

And so, yeah, I just felt like I was flying blind. 

Ken Lempit: That's, that's motivation to seek out, or in your case, create a solution.. So, almost flying in the face of all of this, you know, you said to me that CEOs who actually talk to customers more than once a month dramatically outperform.

So it seems like We need to be able to work with our heart and our mind, or our gut and our,data, that the CEOs who talk to customers more than once a month outperform. So why are these conversations at the CEO level so important when we can almost see every conversation with a tool like yours?

Eli Portnoy: Well, so if you have a tool like ours, I think it lessens the need for it, but it doesn't completely eliminate the need. And that's because there is something about being on a call and knowing the customer and hearing it in their own words. That's very powerful, even just because of the way the mind works where stories stay with us a little bit longer than data, but the data we collected was in the case where you don't have an entire feedback system and the CO isn't.

And in that case, Back to where I was at my last company where I didn't have backengine implemented as a CEO. I needed to talk to customers because otherwise I really had no idea what was happening. It was the only way for me to know what they were saying, and I think that's why you see such, such over performance by companies where the CEO was talking the customers at least weekly.

And I also think there's a little bit of a self-selecting bias, like CEOs who wanna talk to customers are also likely more focused on customer feedback and in general will be more responsive to it. And in general we'll build organizations that, do the same. And so I think it's both the product of talking to customers, but also it's the product of being a CEO who wants to talk to customers that leads to the over performance.

Ken Lempit: Fair enough. I think also if you're a CEO and you're doing this and you're finding that it's too much of your time, might also be time to take a look at how can we make that more efficient and still stay connected to the customers. If people wanna connect with you, Eli, how can they do that and how can they learn more about your company?

Eli Portnoy: Yeah, absolutely. So they can email me at, eli@backengine.ai. They can connect with me on LinkedIn. That's linkedin.com/eportnoy and they can reach us at backengine.com and super happy to talk to anyone who's interested in anything, customer feedback. I love talking about it. 

Ken Lempit: That's awesome and you know, your enthusiasm definitely comes through.

if you wanna reach me, I'm on LinkedIn/in/kenlempit. My advertising and demand generation agency for SaaS is Austin Lawrence. We're at austinlawrence.com. If you haven't subscribed to the SaaS backwards podcast, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed. Eli Portnoy, thank you so much for being on SaaS backwards today.

Eli Portnoy: Thank you. This was really fun.