Suneet Bhatt (Crazy Egg) on scaling a company to avoid revenue stagnation

Recently, I got a chance to interview Suneet Bhatt, a general manager at Crazy Egg. The company was founded in 2005 by Neil Patel and Hiten Shah, but its growth has stopped and it needed a new vision. Suneet told me how he started long-lasting change and grew the team from 6 to 29 people in less than a year.

Crazy Egg was founded by Neil Patel and Hiten Shah in 2005. Today, 300,000 websites use Crazy Egg to understand what’s working on their website (with features like Heatmaps, Scrollmaps, Referral Maps, and User Recordings), fix what isn’t (with the Editor), and test new ideas (with a robust A/B Testing tool). Crazy Egg helps anyone who’s building, launching, or monitoring something on the web make the most out of every visitor.

Suneet Bhatt:

“As the general manager at Crazy Egg, my main goal is to build the company. Here is what I did first to initiate long-lasting change.

Dance with the team that brought you.

The first step, before making any drastic changes, is to see how the current team functions against the company’s priorities, with clear goals and outcomes, clear priorities, and, ideally, with obstacles removed. How does the team perform against its goals? You end up learning a handful of things: Where you’ve set the wrong goal (customers don’t want it)? Where you’ve failed to equip your team (they don’t have all the tools, team members, or skills they need)? Where you’ve failed to communicate effectively (documentation, alignment, definitions, nomenclature can get in the way)? Lastly, if you have the wrong person in the role.

It’s important to set a structure at the company where if things go wrong, it’s your fault as the boss. If you can foster that environment, more people will feel comfortable leaning into their errors. It’s not easy. It takes a while to build up trust. But when you get it, you get a culture that’s transformative.

Start with the customer experience

Okay, but how? Keep it simple and align your teams with the customer experience. To me, teams are groups of people who have everything they need to solve a problem. They have someone who thinks about the business, someone who thinks about the experience, someone who builds it, and someone who helps determine if it’s a success. That could be two people, or it could be five; it’s not about the number of people, it’s about the functions being well covered.

If you prioritize the customer experience and set the right metrics, everyone is always focused on their own metric but also mindful of where the customer has been and where they’re going next. Each person is thoughtful about their work and about the teams around them. Everything starts with the customer. By aligning your team with the customer experience, you see what works well and what doesn’t.

Structure, goals, expectations — with those in place, you will very quickly learn where customers aren’t happy. You’ll learn what your team can or can’t do, and you’ll learn where you have the right people, tools, and strategies. We started really listening and paying attention to our customers, and they started giving us feedback and ideas. The best ideas, however, came from our best people who felt equipped in their new roles. We have had very few “new” ideas in the past 12 months; what we have done instead is put more good ideas (old and new) into play.

Pay attention to the company you want to build

I’ve spent my career talking about the idea of paying attention and being aggressively helpful to customers. We used to have a lot of outsourced knowledge but very little customer empathy. A majority of the team hadn’t used the product, let alone spent any time trying to solve a problem like our customers had.

We moved everyone in-house and focused on people using the product and talking to customers so we could build things customers want. Customer feedback and customer engagement have demonstrated that we’ve gotten this right or, at least, made a big improvement.”

To learn more about Suneet’s approach to hiring and onboarding remote employees, as well as managing a remote team, check out this article.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +424,678 people.

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