Jay and Jeff get into the weeds on two of the biggest questions in CS right now: how to build a community that doesn't devolve into spam and consultant pitches, and how the Forward Deployed Engineer role is reshaping who actually sits in front of customers. Plus what Junction is learning about building a product for agents, not just humans.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Charge for the community. Paying members self-filter out the people trying to mine the network for leads and consulting work.
• Moderation should be agentic. A moderation agent plus a content-curation agent replaces the old volunteer-mod model.
• Looping knowledge graphs compound. Balboa's "big brain" updates a markdown knowledge base after every call. That corpus gets exponentially more valuable over time.
• Uncommon Circles. After 60 days, members get matched into a group of five, deliberately diverse on industry and stage.
• The agent is your end user. If you sell a developer product, the code is being written by Claude. CLIs, MCPs, and clean API docs matter more than slick UI.
• CSM + FDE, not CSM-as-FDE. Don't commandeer "forward deployed" for CS. CSM owns relationship and commercials; FDE owns the technical solution.
• Hire FDEs engineering-first. Palantir's formula: 20% sales, 30% product, 50% engineering. Customer-facing polish is last.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 - Cold open and Omaha memories
• 01:40 - Introducing Uncommon and the May 27th Show & Tell
• 04:55 - The trap of forums and consultant lead-gen
• 06:43 - Why paying for a community actually works
• 08:50 - Moderation and curation agents
• 09:48 - Looping knowledge graphs from Karpathy to Balboa big brain
• 12:40 - Why people really join communities
• 14:15 - Uncommon Circles, matched groups of five
• 17:00 - Bespoke engagement nudges
• 20:18 - Communities for your customers
• 22:11 - The agent is your user now
• 24:07 - The translation layer between APIs and PMs
• 28:24 - Forward Deployed Engineers, Palantir-style
• 30:50 - Why FDEs alone aren't enough
• 32:14 - Hiring an FDE at Junction
• 35:00 - Reporting structure and engineering buy-in
• 37:22 - Scaling the role, engineering-first

About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it.

Your Hosts:

• Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
• Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

Jay and Jeff debrief last week's AI Show & Tell — 150 customer leaders watching four real builds in production. A custom CS platform in Claude Code. A sales reference agent. Renewal workflows that adapt to customer health.

Plus the launch of Uncommon, a new community for AI-forward customer leaders: https://www.chiefcustomerofficer.io/uncommon

Join us live for AI Demo Day on May 27 at 2pm ET: https://luma.com/i3kbo9m2

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Build, don't buy: A CS leader stood up her own CS platform in Claude Code in two weeks. Her token costs are already lower than the SaaS subscriptions she replaced.
• The data layer is the moat: Whether you centralize via a data lake or wire connectors through MCP, your data architecture is the foundation everything else stands on.
• Every department needs a builder: Instead of departmental software, every team needs an ops person — or a manager — who can build with AI.
• From soft to hard agents: Most early use cases just surface information. The real lift comes from agents that draft, schedule, and act on your behalf.
• Renewal workflows that adapt: A 90-day renewal flow that reshuffles tasks based on customer health markers beats any generic checklist.
• Skills belong at the team level: Stop emailing markdown files around. Treat skills like internal products with owners, evals, and version control.
• Company-as-code: Balboa OS lives in markdown, distributed via GitHub to OneDrive to every team member's machine. Update once, push to all.
• Humans are still a moat: Automate the prep, but human relationships and judgment are not getting commoditized any time soon.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 - Welcome and morning chaos
• 02:32 - Why we ran an AI Show & Tell
• 04:30 - A custom CS platform built in Claude Code
• 08:20 - Data security, privacy, and the engineering layer
• 12:50 - Every department needs an ops person who can build
• 14:52 - The data layer as the real foundation
• 16:50 - An AI-powered sales reference agent
• 19:17 - Jeff's Fathom-to-PlanHat task automation
• 23:54 - A renewal workflow that adapts to health markers
• 27:27 - Skills, coaching, and enterprise-wide sharing
• 30:14 - Balboa OS: turning your company into code
• 33:20 - Why evals matter as models change
• 35:00 - Launching Uncommon for AI-forward CS leaders
• 42:10 - Why "Uncommon"? Bold decisions create the advantage

About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it.

Your Hosts:

• Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
• Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io

Jay and Jeff swap real examples of building custom AI tools instead of buying software — a $1K brand video that beat $750K agency quotes, a content planner built in 35 minutes, and a renewal digest that surfaces customer context weekly with zero manual effort. Plus: why the CS platform category is stalling, and the difference between a service blueprint and a customer journey.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AI collapses the agency middle layer: A CEO got $500K–$750K quotes for a brand video, spent $1K in AI credits instead, and got 70% of what he wanted in a weekend. The agencies only offered 10–20% discounts when asked to use AI themselves.

• Fewer people = faster output: The Mythical Man-Month principle applied to AI: every person you add to a project adds communication overhead. The real superpower of these tools is reducing the number of people in the middle of a problem.

• Build your content system, not just content: Jeff built an AI-powered content planner in 35 minutes — 9 posts/week, post-type by day, 40-idea backlog, status tracking, and a draft button that fires his LinkedIn writing skill. MVP in a morning.

• CS cockpit over CS platform: The question isn't which CS tool to buy — it's whether you can build exactly what your team needs. Jeff's team built a weekly renewal digest from support tickets, emails, Slack, and call recordings in one day.

• The CS platform category is stalling: The layer of workflows that's truly common across software companies is thinner than vendors want to admit. Domain-specific, product-specific nuance is where the real work lives — and that can't be bought off the shelf.

• Service blueprint vs. customer journey: Service blueprint = what you need to do to interact with a company. Customer journey = how customers mature and get value. CEOs want to hear about the journey. CSMs need to stop confusing the two.

CHAPTERS

• 00:01 - Raleigh, end of quarter, baby incoming
• 02:43 - $750K agency quote vs. $1K AI video build
• 05:15 - Building exactly what you need: Jay's HubSpot pipeline dashboard
• 07:28 - The Mythical Man-Month and reducing communication layers with AI
• 09:15 - Paying for expertise, not pixel-pushing
• 10:24 - Jeff's AI content planner: built in 35 minutes on Cowork
• 15:56 - How the draft button and LinkedIn skill work together
• 17:46 - Hosting the planner: Cowork vs. Claude Code
• 21:12 - The CS cockpit idea: custom workflow hub for CSM teams
• 24:50 - Junction's interactive onboarding demo environment
• 25:53 - Why the CS platform category is stalling
• 31:41 - Service blueprint vs. customer journey
• 33:28 - Team AI day: CS team builds a weekly renewal digest
• 35:51 - "You just described Staircase AI" — and built it in a day
• 37:44 - Why PlanHat over HubSpot
• 40:59 - Slack account pulse bot: ping for an AI-written account summary

Your Hosts:

• Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io
• Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io