Customer Success Playbook Podcast Season 2 Episode 19 - Nik Mijic - Matik

In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook Podcast, hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger welcome Nik Mijic, founder of Matik, to discuss innovative solutions for automating data-driven content creation. Matik's platform simplifies the generation of personalized metrics, text, tables, and charts for presentations, enabling customer success teams to focus more on strategic initiatives and less on manual data gathering.

Nik shares his journey from LinkedIn to founding Matik, inspired by the need for tools that can scale data insights across sales and customer success teams. He explains how Matik integrates with various data sources such as Salesforce, Snowflake, and Tableau, and how it delivers significant ROI by saving time, improving productivity, and ensuring consistent, data-driven narratives.

Listeners will learn about the implementation process of Matik, the various connectors it supports, and the AI-powered features that provide actionable insights from data. Nik also highlights the success of their recent Scale+ CS Summit and shares his vision for future events.

Join us for this insightful conversation and discover how Matik is transforming the way customer success teams operate.

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You can also find the CS Playbook Podcast:
YouTube - @CustomerSuccessPlaybookPodcast
Twitter - @CS_Playbook

You can find Kevin at:
Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web site
Kevin Metzger on Linked In.

You can find Roman at:
Roman Trebon on Linked In.

Transcript

Roman Trebon: 0:31

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Customer Success Playbook Podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and expertise from top leaders in the field of customer success. I'm Roman Trebon, and with me always is my co host, Kevin Metzger. Kev, how are you doing tonight?

Kevin Metzger: 0:45

I'm doing great. I'm excited about our guest tonight.

Roman Trebon: 0:48

Yeah, we got an exciting episode lined up. We're diving into a solution, Kev, that you've been talking about that lets you add personalized metrics, text, tables, and charts into presentations and one pagers. Which for me, I spent most of my day doing today and I know it takes up so much time. So I'm excited to learn more about the solution. So why don't you tell our audience, who we have on and what solution we're going to be talking about?

Kevin Metzger: 1:12

Yeah. So we've got Nik Meach, who's the founder of Matic and Nik's got a. Talk about his company and tell us a little bit more about what, what Matic does. So Nik, can you kind of give us just some background on what Matic is and kind of your background on founding it?

Nik Mijik: 1:29

Totally. Well, first of all, thank you both for having me on the podcast. a little bit about the founding story and the problem that we're trying to solve for, prior to starting Matic, I, was at LinkedIn, where I had support. I worked on a team called insights that built out internal tools and narratives using our data that supported customer success and sales. And prior to that worked at a few startups. One that was a customer success software startup that is no longer around. But basically when I was at LinkedIn, even prior to LinkedIn, the customer success software startup that I worked at a lot of our customers are saying, Hey, We put together a lot of decks and presentations that contain a lot of data. So things like a business review, a renewal deck, an ROI deck, and, you know, we have templates in place and, you know, our reps will go to that template. They'll make a copy and there'll be instructions to say, Kevin, go to Tableau, take a screenshot, go to Nik. Nik is an analyst. I'll pull this data for you. And then you go to an ROI calculator and you put something together and then you're putting together That presentation. So when I was at LinkedIn, there was a tool that had already existed that somewhat automated that process. I had the chance to rebuild it and it was really Successful and kind of got me thinking, hey, I think there's other companies out there that have a very similar problem where they are trying to leverage data and insights in a scaled way for their sales and customer success teams, but they don't have a tool that allows them to go and do that. And so, Matt, it came to be. We started the company actually in early 2019. with my co-founder Zach, who was an early engineer at Box and really. If you know, kind of summarizing at a high level, we automate the generation of data driven content within PowerPoint, Google Slides, Docs, or even email. Right? And we work with customer success teams, some of our customers like Asana, Okta, Glassdoor, we really work with them to really automate, things like business reviews, ROI, one page, benchmarking reports, anything where you're aggregating data, putting into some sort of a story or narrative that you're presenting in front of your customers. We want to help you automate that process. And at the end of the day, data is the new currency, right? And so especially in today's macroeconomic environment, you need to be able to show your customers value and ROI. And you do that through data. And so that's kind of one of the big selling points for our product is really helping scale that content that you share with your customers.

Roman Trebon: 3:49

Nik, you must, when this solution goes in, people must come to you and say, oh my gosh, thank you so much. You know, this is all this low value work and, you know, low value in terms of just how long it takes to gather this. Like you said, you know, working with all these different teams, trying to pull this all together. And it sounds like Matik is a solution that can kind of integrate with, I guess, a plethora of kind of data sources. solutions to do this for, for a company that's bringing this on Nik, like what's sort of the, the ramp up and onboarding time look like, how long does it sort of take to get from, you know, purchase to get this thing to work and starting to see some of the value.

Nik Mijik: 4:27

Totally. So taking a step back, we have two sides of our product. We have the end user side, which is basically really straightforward. it is what a customer success manager, account manager, account executive would log in to Matic. They would see all of the templates that their admin has onboarded to Matic, select a template, and then from there provide us some inputs. And we use those inputs to then pull all the data and spit out a totally native, piece of collateral that they can share with their customer. The admin side is usually folks like CS Ops, Data Analytics, they're the ones that are connecting to the data sources and creating what we call dynamic content to templatize or add the tokens to tags, to the template. So typically what we do is, you know, most of our customers have templates already. And so, and if you don't, we have out of the box templates that we can share with you as an inspiration. but usually you'll have a template. we usually budget anywhere from. two to four weeks to onboard that first template, depending on how big that is and what the data sources are, you can move a lot quicker, right? So you have the ability to onboard something. We've built a UI that allows you to. Easily connect to these data sources and create the dynamic content. You can onboard something within a week, even a day. It really kind of depends on your readiness from a data standpoint, whether or not you can achieve that.

Kevin Metzger: 5:40

So, I guess, question about connectors, or do you connect into Salesforce, you connect into service? Now, all those,

Nik Mijik: 5:48

we have the. Connectors that we have built within our admin side, I would say, are three buckets. We've got CRMs, so things like HubSpot, Salesforce, Gainsight, right? Like, CSP. that's kind of it. Sometimes consider it a CRM, right? Then we've got the databases and data warehouses, which are usually the most common that people want to connect to. So things like Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, as well as I would then say like BI tools. So we connect with Looker, Tableau are most common. and then last but not least, we can even connect to like a Google sheet or an Excel file. Right. So the beauty of Matic is that when you onboard a template, you don't have to have all of your data in one place, meaning all of your data doesn't have to live in a data warehouse or doesn't all need to live in Salesforce. we can have, you know, three data sources tied to a template. So, you know, count level data is coming from Salesforce usage data is coming from Snowflake. Right. and then maybe ROI is coming from an ROI calculator that, ties to the usage data and there's some sort of mathematical equation that spits out ROI and we insert that into the presentation. So that's one of the things that admins really like about us is it doesn't have to all live in one place.

Roman Trebon: 7:03

Nik, in terms of, you know, an organization that's bringing MATIC in, obviously, I know a lot, most customer success teams now are asking to do more with less, right? And so, obviously, that's a great, ROI right there. How else does MATIC when companies, like, where else do companies see the ROI when they bring in MATIC? Right. Really help to help their organization.

Nik Mijik: 7:24

So I think there's really a few buckets that we talk about with our customers. I think the first one to your point is like, productivity, time savings. It's very easy to quantify, you know, typically when people raise their hands and they want requests of them, or they come to us like, Hey, our team is spending roughly. Six, seven hours a week. putting together this content, whether again, it's a business review or renewal deck, and if you quantify that over a team, it's really easy to show, Hey, this is how much time you all spend every single year. And based on the salaries, here's the ROI that you'd be getting, right? Productivity is like one bucket of ROI. I think the second, and this is something that we saw at LinkedIn and we see with a lot of our customers is the impact. You're not, you're not just doing a renewal deck or an ROI deck just for the sake of presenting to a customer. It should lead to better business outcomes being okay. Well, if I'm showing this data across the customer journey, right? So maybe I have an onboarding deck, maybe I send out monthly. Adoption reviews, maybe there's a benchmarking report, then QBR, then renewal, ideally, by sharing those insights that leads to better adoption, that leads to better renewals and better upsells and expansion. So I would say that's kind of that second bucket of, of ROI is that closed loop tying to business outcomes. And then the third that we most commonly see is going back to your do more with less. Typically, what we hear is that people are not doing this with all of their accounts, right? Like, they're like, hey, because it takes so much time to put together this content, if I'm a CSM and I'm managing 50 accounts, 60 accounts, I'm only able to do this with picking and choosing maybe 30 to 50 percent every single quarter, right? Well, if we've automated that process, ideally, you should be able to go to 100 percent account coverage. Or even better yet accounts that don't have a CSM, what are they getting? And then the last bucket, that I will say is more for the admins, right? Like this was me at LinkedIn where, you know, Kevin, you would come to me and you'd be like, Hey, look, I've got this massive renewal with, you know, Cisco next week, can you help me put together some really cool data? I would pull data. You would go and present, you would crush it. You get the glory, you get the commission. And then I would get 10 slacks on Monday. Hey, what you did for you do that for me too, right? How do you scale, as an admin or person that supports customer success? How do you scale some of this ad hoc analysis that you put together for maybe your strategic accounts? How do you scale that across your entire book of business? Because. It's working for them. Most likely it'll work for everybody else.

Kevin Metzger: 9:51

Yeah. And how easy is it to, for once you get set up and are an admin. So let's say you're going to come up now, now somebody is going to come and start asking for those new reports, right? How easy is it to add the new ones in? once you start creating.

Nik Mijik: 10:06

that's a great question. So the beauty of Matic is that. Dynamic content is basically us populating a text box, which could be a metric, us populating a chart, us populating a table, us populating an image. Once you start creating that library of dynamic content, you can reuse it from template to template. So let's say you start with a business review template, which is really common, and then you're like, Hey, Nik, you know, I would love to do like a one pager or like a QBR light that I can maybe send out via email. You're most likely reusing that dynamic content. So the level of effort to onboard that new template will go down drastically, right? And so, the other part is like, we've built a UI on the admin side that hopefully is not cumbersome for you to go and make those changes, add new templates, iterate on it. So we've invested a lot of engineering resources on that side of the equation.

Kevin Metzger: 10:58

That's cool. So in the ui, am I, do I see all of the types of data I've created that I can pull into.

Nik Mijik: 11:03

see all the dynamic content you, and then you can click on a template. You'll see all the dynamic content that's tied that template. You can see what data sources that's connected to. You can see, hey, dynamic content A, which is let's say, I don't know, weekly active users. It's the metric that is tied to eight templates, FYI. And by the way, these eight templates, here's how often they're used by your team. Make a change to it and it's gonna, it's gonna impact these eight templates that are very heavily used. So, you know, make sure that you update the correct definitions and that's also the benefit for the admin is now I have a source of truth for all customer facing collateral, including data, not just content. Let's say the definition changes. Well, now I don't have to email everybody. Hey team, you know, now when you go to tap, when you download the data, make sure that you put it into this tab in Excel and you take this, you do this formula, I abstract all of that away from my end users, I'm managing it. I can ensure that they're using the right data at the right time.

Kevin Metzger: 12:02

Yeah, that's huge. Do you, when you see who's using the data, are you able to actually see who's using it? So if I have a strategic change that's coming down to get the, is it easier for me to go say, Hey, I got these people that I know I need to go get by and from. because we're gonna make this data change or this change in how we calculate information or an SLA update or something like that. those can be critical across the business, and you really do need to make sure you've got all the right people bought in.

Nik Mijik: 12:33

So there's not like as an admin, like I said, you have the ability to make that change, directly with Matic and, it'll cascade, there's no communication that you need to do, So for example, if I make a change to the business review template within Matic, and let's say I add a chart or I update the methodology on how we calculate a certain metric, you don't even have to know about it. Right. I will go and make that change. And next time you go into Matic as an end user, you select the template, you generate the deck, it'll spit out and there's nothing that you need to do on your end. That's again, the beauty of it. you as an admin obviously have roles and permissioning. So, if you've got multiple admins in there, you can make sure that you can't edit my dynamic content, only I have edit privileges to make changes to ensure that, something is done properly.

Kevin Metzger: 13:19

But as far as usage data goes, usage is kind of anomalized,

Nik Mijik: 13:23

right? Correct, yeah. So we, you know, we obviously have usage of our products, so we can tell you, like, you know, we'll say, hey, this piece of dynamic content is tied to this template. This template has been generated a hundred times in the past 30 days, just FYI, right?

Roman Trebon: 13:35

Which is great as an admin, if you're creating these templates, you know which ones the teams are using, right? So if you're, right, it's like, hey, I should spend time more on these, because teams are using them, consuming them, there seems to be a lot of value. These other sort of templates. less value, so I'm not going to spend as much time on it. Nik, I have to imagine, this has to be such a sticky product. I can't imagine implementing this into an organization. It's like, Hey, team, we've saved you so much time doing all of this, gathering all these insights, doing all this. Oh, by the way, we're going to rip it out. Like, I can't imagine that conversation happening. I mean, it must be amazing, in terms of stickiness, it must be through the roof. I'm sure your customer feedback is in line with my train of thought here.

Nik Mijik: 14:14

Yeah. And I think, we've had customers that have been with us for a really long time. I think it's a testament to the product that we have built and the value that we are driving with our customers. usually when we do these enablement sessions, when the admins launch, I can't tell you how many screenshots I have when in the zoom chat where the end users are like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Like, why haven't we done this before? Right. And it's a great feeling. And not just As a founder, but as a company as a whole, to see that, Hey, what we have built is really resonating with our persona that we sell to, which is customer success. And that people are really finding value in the solution. That's great.

Kevin Metzger: 14:48

that's great. So Nik, I think you have a section where, you're starting to use AI within the product, right. to help show, give insights and help, people understand How to present some of the information that's coming in. Is that correct?

Nik Mijik: 15:02

Yeah. So the way that we're leveraging AI is, you know, let's say you have a slide that's in one of your templates and let's say we're populating a chart, like a time series chart of something, right, whatever it is, usage data over time, you know, we can send that data, not just to the chart, the native chart that's within Google slides or PowerPoint, but we can send it to our AI and the AI will analyze the data and we'll spit out like Three bullet points with key takeaways from that data, like, Hey, here's the trend and honestly, it's really good because it's very tailored because we not only send the data, but we also send context around the data, like, let's say, Hey, this piece of dynamic content is, active users over time. And this is how we calculate active users. And the AI will take all of that context and we'll spit out something that is usually really, really good. And it's always a starting point at the end of the day, because. What we generate is totally native within PowerPoint or Google Slides or Docs. You still have the ability to make edits, but again, we want to get you. close to the one yard line as possible. And the AI really helps us with that.

Roman Trebon: 16:05

So Nik, I'm going to pivot here a second away from the product. We talked about Matik on our show a couple of weeks ago, because you guys were doing the scale plus CS summit and you had, it was a who's who of guests lined up and the agenda was amazing. how did that event come to be? how did you guys get into that and where did, it come from?

Nik Mijik: 16:21

Yeah. So last year, we did, a summit. and that was the, CS and AI summit where we wanted to showcase basically how customer success was leveraging AI, not just within our product, but what people were doing in the industry, it was really. I've got to give a huge shout out to my head of marketing, Bex. she built a lot of these great relationships with these thought leaders within the space, as well as just people that were doing amazing things within customer success. And we thought, Hey, let's do a summit. There's not really much out there that's tied to AI and we did it. And it was amazing. Like the. We had, I mean, like I said, it was, it was a home run. and so we're like, Hey, let's try to replicate that. And one of the things that we kept hearing, not just from our customers, but from the market was, especially with the macroeconomic climate, you know, scale was really top of mind for a lot of people, right? Because again, doing more with less, I don't have as many resources. I got to stretch my resources as much as possible. And so we thought, Hey, instead of, like what we did with AI last year, Center of the summit around scale The reception was extremely positive. We got an amazing agenda of speakers and the feedback that we got again was very similar to what we saw last year with the AI summit.

Kevin Metzger: 17:32

I thought it was great. I got to attend a number of sessions and really a lot of value coming out of this. We wanted

Nik Mijik: 17:40

to make it free. There's obviously a lot of great content out there. But we wanted to do something that was free of charge that people can go ahead and, learn from the experiences from some of the people that were speaking, right? Whether it was from LinkedIn, Asana, Box, we wanted to make sure that people had that content and, if you weren't able to attend as long as you registered, we would be sending over the recordings for folks that couldn't make every single session.

Roman Trebon: 18:06

So, Nik, can we break some news here? Are we going to have a summit in 2025?

Nik Mijik: 18:09

yes, I mean, probably will. Like I said, we'll probably do another summit next year. Not sure what the topic is going to be centered around, but, definitely probably will be in the cards for us to do another summit.

Roman Trebon: 18:21

Nik, we're going to hit you with some rapid fire questions. This has been great insight on the product. these are off the cuff here. So, nothing to prep. All right. So, early bird or night owl, Nik?

Nik Mijik: 18:31

Ooh, I'm a night owl.

Roman Trebon: 18:32

place you'd want to travel that you have not already been?

Nik Mijik: 18:37

Uh, Japan. Japan.

Roman Trebon: 18:40

do you, you a sports fan at all?

Nik Mijik: 18:42

Yes.

Roman Trebon: 18:43

what team are you following here?

Nik Mijik: 18:45

Massive, massive soccer fan. I'm originally from Bosnia, Croatia area. So, Croatia is playing in the Euros, this weekend. So I'm hoping that we can bring home a trophy, but at the club level, I'm a massive, massive Arsenal fan in England. We haven't won the league in a long time. So hopefully next year, we'll, take on the trophy.

Roman Trebon: 19:05

Trending in the right direction though, I think, right. We came

Nik Mijik: 19:08

We came up second, but you know what I said? Second is just as good as last. So hopefully we can turn it around.

Roman Trebon: 19:17

do you have a book recommendation for our audience? So either a personal favorite or something in the CS space?

Nik Mijik: 19:23

I would say my favorite book, it's kind of weird. Probably not anything related to business. I love the Count of Monte Cristo. I reread that book probably every few years. I feel like there's a lot of good life lessons there on betrayal and revenge and all the above. So, the Count on Monte Krista is a good one that I just recently read.

Roman Trebon: 19:41

That's awesome. Well, Nik, I think we are keeping you from dinner. So we're going to, we thank you for joining the show. It's been a great conversation and really appreciate all the insight on Matik. And thanks again for doing the event last week. The summit was awesome. And hopefully our audience is able to attend.

Nik Mijik: 19:57

Really, really enjoyed the conversation.

Roman Trebon: 19:59

Yep. And so that's a wrap for this episode of the customer success playbook. We hope you found our conversation with Nik insightful. if you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe, comment, and share it with your friends and colleagues. You can find us on LinkedIn at Roman Trebon and at Kevin Metzger. We also have our customer success playbook, LinkedIn page. So check us out there. connect and share your feedback on the show and give us suggestions on future topics and guests we should have on. As always, thanks for listening.

Kevin Metzger: 20:28

Keep on playing.