Leveraging Customer Conversations for Growth | Alex Atkins from Sturdy

Rick Veronese: Pathmonk is the AI for website conversions. With increasing online competition, over 98 percent of website visitors don’t convert. The ability to successfully show your value proposition and support visitors in the buying journey separates you from the competition online. Pathmonk qualifies and converts leads on your website by figuring out where they are in the buying journey and influencing them in key decision moments with relevant micro experiences like case studies, intro videos, and much more. Stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50 percent by adding Pathmonk to your website in seconds, letting the artificial intelligence do all the work while you keep doing marketing as usual. Check us out on pathmonk.com.

All right, everyone. Welcome to today’s episode of Pathmonk Presents. Today we are joined by Alex, VP of Growth and Operations at Sturdy. Sturdy is a pretty interesting company. Alex, I want to welcome you to the show, but then I’ll jump right into what Sturdy is because I think it’s pretty fascinating. Welcome to the show, man. How’s it going?

Alex Atkins: I appreciate you. Thanks for having me on.

Rick: Of course. In your own words, what’s the heart of what Sturdy does and how would you describe it to someone new?

Alex: Sure. The best way to describe it, how I’ve been describing it recently, is that Sturdy is the world’s first business intelligence solution powered by your customer conversations. It’s about productivity. We feel at Sturdy that today, incomplete and inaccurate data forces us to triage symptoms rather than the actual root causes of revenue-impacting issues. We believe that to be proactive, one must harness the power of contextual data.

And we can talk about contextual data—I love talking about contextual data. We believe it’s the untapped business advantage. Simply put, it’s not just about the what, but understanding the why. A comprehensive understanding of additional context is key. Only when you can answer the why can you answer questions like: Why are our customers frustrated? Why are our teammates taking too long to respond to customers? What is confusing about our product? If people using our product are confused, is there something specific within the launch that was unclear to them?

The why is an incredibly important question to ask. It’s a powerful question to answer, especially in real time, which traditionally hasn’t been possible. But at its heart, Sturdy is pretty interesting. Basically, Sturdy ingests all of the structured and unstructured conversations happening between you and your customers. Think of unstructured data—emails, tickets, chats, calls that have been transcribed. Sturdy ingests all this information, synonymizes it, anonymizes it, and redacts all PII so our models are trained in a fully anonymized form. This ensures we remain SOC 2 compliant, GDPR compliant, and adhere to other data protection regulations, which are very important for us and our customers.

We also have what’s called entity detection. This means we take all that unstructured data—the thousands of conversations between you and your customers—and marry that data to a source of record like Salesforce or another CRM. Now, you can ask Sturdy questions like, Show me my top 100 enterprise customers with renewal risks in the next 30 days and summarize why they are at risk. Again, going back to the why—context is key.

So, it’s conversational AI search, but also an ability to summarize and surface the insights that matter. The identifying piece is really important so you can be proactive. For example, once we ingest all that data, each individual customer-facing teammate has emails and calls that get transcribed. We’re talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of silos within each individual on the team—emails that are probably read once and forgotten, filled with valuable information that Sturdy can ingest.

We eliminate all those data silos, normalize the data, and run it through our inference engine—our 30 out-of-the-box business language models. These vector-based business language models are not trained on general media like The New York Times or social media chatter. They’re trained on real business conversations between companies and their customers, becoming more intelligent over time.

Unlike traditional search models that rely on exact keyword or phrase matches, Sturdy uses vector-based contextual search, understanding semantic similarities. If someone mentions renewals, old search models would detect the keyword renewal. But Sturdy understands if someone is implying renewals, even if they don’t say the word. It proactively alerts the right team member so they can take action to retain that customer.

That’s Sturdy in a nutshell—ingestion, intelligence, and action. Identifying root causes and ensuring the right people get the information they need at the right time.

Rick: I’m so glad I said it was interesting because you actually proved me right. Thanks for that. It’s quite a complex system, but in a way, it’s simple. My background is in UX design, so when you talk about merging the why and the what, it really speaks to me. I don’t know if there’s a use case for it, but maybe a designer could go in and say, I want to understand the why, because that’s so important for designing, prototyping, and testing solutions based on qualitative data.

Alex: Absolutely.

Rick: Exactly. So, is there a specific ICP that you guys are targeting or a vertical you’re focusing on?

Alex: We haven’t been around for terribly long—just several years since Sturdy was built and trained on our models. Over time, we’ve developed more and more models tailored to specific verticals.

We’ve found that B2B tech and services companies—especially those focused on proactively boosting NRR—are the ones investing in Sturdy. Services companies, particularly marketing and advertising agencies, often operate in the dark because, unlike SaaS companies, they don’t have platforms that generate usage or engagement data. These businesses tend to have high churn rates due to flexible month-to-month contracts.

With Sturdy, they can ingest every customer conversation, identify risks and opportunities, and significantly boost retention. For example, Hawk Media, one of the most successful performance marketing agencies in the U.S., increased their month-over-month retention by 30% in just six weeks using Sturdy.

I’ll give you another cool example. A private equity firm is using Sturdy to enhance their due diligence process. Traditionally, these processes take weeks—analyzing customer health, operational efficiencies, and product performance. With Sturdy, they get all that insight instantly.

Rick: That’s a good one. Just walked in and said, Hold my beer—let’s turn weeks into seconds.

Alex: Exactly. And we keep learning new use cases from our customers. We listen, and they tell us how they’re using Sturdy in ways we never imagined. That feedback is invaluable.

Rick: I’m sure that also generates a lot of word of mouth. Are there any other ways people are finding you?

Alex: Definitely. Word of mouth and referrals have been huge for us over the past four years. More recently, we’ve gone all-in on outbound, which has significantly increased qualified opportunities.

Interestingly, we struggled with performance marketing at first. It’s an expensive test, and we weren’t seeing meaningful results. The issue? Messaging. Messaging clarity is crucial. We recently overhauled our messaging, running tests with platforms like Winter and external partners like Fletch, who helped us rewrite our homepage.

Just last month, we landed a customer through organic search—someone searched for a high-intent term, found us, and converted quickly. That’s a big win, and it’s something we want to double down on.

Rick: That’s a solid mindset—testing, learning, and iterating rather than just saying, performance marketing doesn’t work. You revamped your messaging and now can test it in paid channels.

Alex: Exactly. The website is our storefront. If the messaging isn’t clear, people bounce.

Rick: That makes sense. And speaking of the website, how do you see its role in your acquisition strategy? Are you using it mainly for education, lead generation, or something else?

Alex: Great question. The website is a mix of both education and lead generation. It needs to communicate our value proposition clearly but also be optimized for conversion. Ideally, when a visitor lands on the homepage, they should instantly understand what Sturdy does and how it can help them.

Right now, we’re refining our messaging so that people who visit the site can self-qualify quickly. We don’t want to make them scroll endlessly or dig through pages of information just to figure out if we’re relevant to them. Instead, we’re focusing on clear headlines, concise descriptions, and social proof—things that validate trust and encourage action.

For lead generation, we’re working on optimizing our CTAs and making sure that once someone is interested, they have an easy path to the next step, whether that’s booking a demo or signing up directly.

Rick: That’s smart. I imagine that’s a constant balancing act—giving enough information without overwhelming people.

Alex: Exactly. It’s a tricky balance. We’re also testing different formats for presenting use cases and customer stories. Instead of long paragraphs, we’re making them more visual and scannable. People don’t want to read a novel when they’re evaluating software—they want quick, digestible proof that it works.

Rick: Makes sense. And you mentioned earlier that you love a good tech stack. What are some tools you’re using to optimize the website experience?

Alex: We’ve got a few essentials. For analytics, we use GA4 and a CDP to track user behavior across multiple touchpoints. We also use heatmaps and session recordings to see where people drop off or hesitate. For A/B testing, we’re using tools that allow us to experiment without needing constant developer resources.

On the CRO side, we’re integrating AI-powered personalization to adapt the site experience based on visitor intent. It’s not just about who visits but why they’re there and what actions they’re likely to take.

Rick: That’s a strong approach. Have you seen any surprising insights from the data so far?

Alex: Oh yeah, plenty. One surprising one was that our visitors from outbound campaigns behave very differently from those who find us through organic search. Organic visitors tend to explore multiple pages and read more before converting. Outbound visitors, on the other hand, make faster decisions—they either book a demo quickly or bounce. That told us we needed to tailor the experience based on traffic source.

Another big learning was around CTA placement. Originally, we had one primary CTA above the fold, but we found that adding contextual CTAs in the middle of content sections improved conversion rates. Small changes like that can have a big impact.

Rick: Love that. Testing and refining based on actual user behavior rather than assumptions.

Alex: Exactly. It’s all about continuous improvement.

Rick: That ties into something else I wanted to ask—your background in growth. You’ve worked in both larger organizations and now a leaner startup. How has that shaped your approach?

Alex: It’s been a huge learning curve. At larger companies, things move slower. There are more processes, approvals, and layers. At a startup like Sturdy, speed is everything. We have to be nimble, experiment fast, and double down on what works.

That’s why I always emphasize clarity, speed, and impact. If something isn’t working, we pivot quickly. There’s no room for drawn-out decision-making.

Rick: That startup agility is a game-changer. So, shifting gears a bit, I want to wrap up with a rapid-fire round. Short, crisp answers only. Ready?

Alex: Let’s do it.

Rick: What’s the last book you read?

Alex: Human to Human by Brian Kramer.

Rick: If you could automate one daily task, what would it be?

Alex: Product marketing insights—making customer feedback instantly actionable.

Rick: If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?

Alex: Don’t try to specialize too early. Build a broad skill set first—it’ll make you more adaptable.

Rick: Love it. Alex, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thanks for sharing so much insight. Before we go, if someone forgets everything else we talked about today, what’s the one thing they should remember about Sturdy?

Alex: If you want to proactively identify churn risks and improve NRR, check out Sturdy. We help you ingest, analyze, and act on key customer insights—all in real time.

Rick: Perfect. Thanks again for joining, Alex!

Alex: Appreciate it. Thanks, man.

Rick: Take care!