Stuart Selbst is a Customer Success and technology professional who writes on LinkedIn about customer retention, account growth, IT, and the value of listening and building trust.
Stuart Selbst is most useful for practical LinkedIn posts on customer retention, trust, and account growth.
Best for
A mid-market customer success platform planning a LinkedIn thought-leadership series on retention and NRR.
Not for
An enterprise cybersecurity vendor seeking high reach, guaranteed impressions, and deep technical proof.
Key takeaways
Selbst calls NRR a scoreboard; real work is earning trust and bringing value.
Ask what went wrong and listen; do not mistake a green health score for success.
Good selling starts with attention and ends when there is no fit.
Check first: Confirm availability because they are in an active job search, and ask for post analytics.
Main ideas
Earn the right to grow an account · Listen to customers instead of relying on signals alone · Good selling starts with attention and ends when there is no fit
Stuart Selbst writes on LinkedIn about Customer Success, technology, and how trust and attentive communication shape working relationships.
Their posts make the approach concrete: retain customers by following through, keep delivering value, and look for growth in what customers are trying to achieve.
They apply that relationship-first view to recruiting and sales outreach, too.
In one post, they contrast generic pitches with a seller who read their work, listened, gave a clear price, and accepted that there was no fit.
Readers interested in practical perspectives on customer relationships, retention, and communication can see how Selbst reasons through real situations in the posts.
Selbst turns specific interactions into usable lessons, explaining what made the difference.
In the Customer Success post, they call NRR a scoreboard; the work behind it is earning trust, understanding a customer's goals, and continuing to bring value.
They make the point tangible: ask what went wrong and listen; don't mistake a green health score for success; and begin an expansion conversation with the customer's aims, not a sales target.
The recruiting and sales posts apply the same principle beyond account management: communicate clearly, pay attention to the other person, and recognize when there is no fit.
The framework and examples reinforce each other across the five LinkedIn posts.
Stuart Selbst’s posts return to a practical idea: business results come from how people handle relationships.
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In customer success, that means earning trust and creating value before pursuing growth.
The same emphasis on listening and follow-through shapes their critiques of sales outreach and recruiting.
Their search also broadens from customer success and strategic accounts to IT and service-delivery roles.
Earn the right to grow an account
Selbst’s “Keep Them, Feed Them, Grow Them” framework puts retention and ongoing customer value before expansion.
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They argue that growth should follow from helping a customer achieve more, not from looking for another product to sell. Net revenue retention is the result to measure; relationship work produces it.
In a Thursday Thinking post, Stuart says a signed contract and a green health score do not amount to customer success. They urge teams to understand what success means to the customer, keep bringing useful ideas, and ask what the customer is trying to accomplish before discussing expansion.
Listen to customers instead of relying on signals alone
Selbst argues that dashboards and customer-success platforms can help but cannot replace direct conversation and attention to changes in a customer’s business.
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Listening, doing what was promised, and acting when something goes wrong are central to their account of trust.
Stuart describes asking a customer, “What did we do wrong?” and listening rather than filling the silence. They say a call or video meeting may not be enough; sometimes a leader should meet a customer in person.
Good selling starts with attention and ends when there is no fit
Selbst contrasts generic, persistent outreach with a conversation shaped by what the other person says.
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They value a seller who is direct about price, answers questions, listens to objections, and does not push when the offer is not right. A respectful interaction can earn credibility even without a sale.
In a Monday Morning QB post, Stuart describes a seller who had read something they wrote, asked relevant follow-up questions, stated a $6,000 price plainly, and accepted that Stuart was not a buyer. Stuart bought nothing but says they would refer the seller to someone who needed the service.
Treat candidates with the communication you would want in a customer relationship
Selbst applies their relationship-first thinking to recruiting.
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Candidates may not receive an offer, but employers should close the loop and give a clear update after an interview. How candidates are treated shapes their impression of the company.
Stuart contrasts being ghosted after a promising interview with a recruiter who explained the process and compensation, listened, and replied to a thank-you email. They wanted to recognize the recruiter’s work despite having no offer or next-round invitation.
In posts about their own search, Selbst says they are looking for meaningful problems and the right team rather than a particular title.
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Their stated interests broaden from senior customer success and strategic account roles to include IT operations, service delivery, technical account management, and technology leadership.
In one post, Stuart asks their network for introductions to customer success and strategic account roles. In a later post, they add IT roles and describe their strength as figuring out how to get things done, drawing on experience across customers, technology, and business.
The earlier job-search post centers on customer success, client success, and strategic accounts; the later one widens the search to IT and service delivery.
This is where Selbst puts the working method on paper.
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To understand how they think about retention and growth, start here.
Selbst lays out a three-part philosophy called Keep Them, Feed Them, Grow Them.
Keep them means retention starts with trust and doing what you said you would do; feed them means delivering value continuously, not checking in quarterly; grow them means starting expansion conversations by asking what else the customer is trying to accomplish, rather than what else can be sold.
They add career context: much of this work happened before Customer Success was a common job title, when there were no health scores or software platforms flagging unhappy accounts, so you talked to customers and listened for changes in their business.
They describe being hired more than once to stop client churn and argue that sometimes a call or video meeting is not enough—you need to sit across the table from the customer.
The summary line: NRR is the scoreboard, but the real work happens with people.
For brands planning a campaign
The Keep Them, Feed Them, Grow Them framework is quotable and reusable across formats, making it a natural anchor for thought-leadership content about net revenue retention, customer health or account growth. It also shows the level of specificity a brand can bring to content about retention tooling or account-management practice.
It shows how Selbst teaches a communication lesson: through one observed exchange and its exact details, not general advice.
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It is also the clearest sample of their writing voice.
Selbst opens by stepping away from job-search updates, then dissects a standard bad outreach pattern: connect with a stranger, immediately send eleven paragraphs about yourself, drop an unrequested calendar link, and follow up with "just bumping this to the top of your inbox."
They call out the line "I noticed you're passionate about Customer Success" as scraped rather than read.
By contrast, they describe one seller who had actually read something they wrote, asked a question, listened to the answer, followed up based on it, named a price of $6,000 without hedging, accepted their explanation of why there was no fit, and exited professionally.
Selbst bought nothing but says they would refer the seller because credibility was earned.
The post develops its point through paraphrase and specific quoted phrases rather than naming the seller.
For brands planning a campaign
This shows Selbst can write a practical critique of selling and outreach craft using a concrete case. A brand building content on prospecting, buyer trust or LinkedIn selling has a ready sample of their approach and tone, which mixes short lines, dry humor and a clear point.
It shows Selbst writing for a hiring and talent audience rather than a customer-facing one, and demonstrates how they bring customer-experience thinking to another discipline.
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Selbst compares two recruiting experiences.
In the first: a strong interview, a thank-you email, a follow-up, then silence.
In the second, a recruiter introduced his own background, asked thoughtful questions and listened, was transparent about compensation, remote work, company growth, the position and the interview process, and replied to the thank-you email.
Selbst notes they have no offer or next-round invitation and still want to tell that recruiter's boss the recruiter did a great job.
They argue candidate experience is employer brand, write that people talk about how they were treated, and provide short sample closing messages a recruiter could send instead of going quiet.
For brands planning a campaign
This works as a starting sample for employer-brand, recruiting-technology or HR content, and shows Selbst can write beyond Customer Success without losing their voice. A campaign about candidate experience would get the same concrete compare-and-contrast structure.
It is the most complete statement of Selbst's background, target roles and working preferences, giving a general reader the context to judge their other writing.
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Selbst writes that after applying, interviewing, being told they would be put in front of a hiring manager only to receive a rejection, being ghosted, seeing positions put on hold, and encountering recruiters who turned out to be scammers, they are asking their network for introductions.
They name companies they pursued, including ServiceNow, Gainsight, Calix, Motive, 1Password, LastPass and KnowBe4.
They are looking for senior Customer Success, Client Success or strategic account roles, from senior or principal CSM to Client Partner, CS lead or director, prefer remote work and are comfortable traveling.
In their own words, they have led Customer Success teams, managed strategic relationships, been a COO, built programs and worked across SaaS, cybersecurity, managed services, IT and startups.
They say they have saved at-risk customers, rebuilt troubled relationships and driven expansion revenue.
They also describe StuTech as a passion project that was never meant to be their final career chapter.
For brands planning a campaign
Before planning a collaboration with Selbst, note that they are in an active job search. Confirm their availability and time before assuming a standing content commitment or longer collaboration.
It shows the technical half of Selbst's background is current, not a historical footnote, and explains why they describe themselves as someone who gets problems solved rather than a specialist in one stack.
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Selbst explains that after conversations with people they trust, they decided to widen their search to include IT.
They list IT operations, service delivery, technical account management, infrastructure and support, and technology leadership roles alongside Customer Success and strategic accounts.
They say they do not need to know every command or answer off the top of their head; their strength has always been figuring out how to get things done.
They add that they were involved in managed services before most people were calling it that, have led teams, run companies, managed strategic customers, built programs and supported users.
They reiterate their preference for remote work and willingness to travel, and say that at this point they are less concerned with the perfect title than with the right team and problems worth solving.
For brands planning a campaign
This widens the brand fit beyond customer-success content to IT services, managed services, support tooling and technical account management. Campaign planners weighing Selbst for a technical audience should read this post first: it states that interest directly.
An active job search as a running public narrative3
Long first-person posts under recurring series headers3
Retention taught as Keep Them, Feed Them, Grow Them2
Net revenue retention treated as the scoreboard2
Listening and trust ahead of dashboards1
Sales and social-selling critiques1
Candidate experience framed as employer brand1
Retention taught as Keep Them, Feed Them, Grow Them
Across posts, Selbst returns to a three-part retention philosophy: keep the customer by earning trust, feed the relationship by continuing to create value, and grow it by delivering outcomes that make expansion the obvious next step.
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Growth follows from the first two steps rather than from a separate sales motion; a signed contract or green health score, they argue, is not customer success.
The framework appears in short, repeated lines before being unpacked, making the three verbs a memorable structure readers can apply to an account.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand selling customer success, retention, or account-growth software can use Selbst for content that ties product capabilities to a retention discipline customers can act on, rather than to generic customer-love messaging.
Selbst argues that health scores and customer success platforms can’t replace talking to customers and noticing when something changes.
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They describe concrete behaviors: asking what the company did wrong, then staying quiet; and traveling to sit across the table from a customer when a call isn’t enough. One post concludes that the best customer success tool is still the ear.
They don’t dismiss current tools: one post acknowledges better technology and analytics while arguing that listening remains decisive.
For brands planning a campaign
Brands focused on relationship-led success, services, or human judgment can pair with Selbst on content that connects a specific listening behavior to a specific tool or process.
Selbst calls net revenue retention a superpower and says they have been hired more than once to stop client churn.
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Their position: retention, expansion, and the resulting NRR number follow from the relationship; the number is the scoreboard, not the work itself. Earlier in their career, this work was called account management, and the method was listening to the client.
For brands planning a campaign
For brands addressing customer success leaders with revenue responsibility, this offers a concrete campaign metric and a clear position on how that metric is produced.
A post breaks poor LinkedIn outreach into a repeatable pattern: connect with a stranger, send a long self-pitch, drop an unrequested calendar link, then follow up with a bump message.
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Selbst contrasts it with a vendor who had read something they wrote, asked questions based on their answers, stated a price directly instead of deflecting to a call, and politely bowed out when there was no fit. Selbst bought nothing but says they would still refer the vendor.
The critique takes the form of a reconstructed dialogue, setting the two outreach approaches side by side so readers see the difference in behavior rather than simply being told about it.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand selling to customer success or revenue teams can use Selbst to address outreach quality, buyer trust, or social selling, where they offer a specific, repeatable position backed by worked examples.
A post compares being ghosted after a strong interview with a recruiter who introduced himself, listened, was transparent about compensation, remote work, and process, and answered a thank-you email.
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Selbst argues that closing the loop is basic courtesy, requires no lengthy explanation, and shapes the employer brand because people talk about their candidate experience.
For brands planning a campaign
Recruiting, HR technology, and employer-branding marketers can use this topic. The claim is direct and illustrated with a first-person comparison, making it suitable for a sponsored post or case-study-style placement.
An active job search as a running public narrative
Several posts document a live search: applications, interviews, enthusiastic conversations followed by rejection letters, ghosting, roles put on hold, and suspected scam recruiters.
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One post asks the network for introductions and lists senior customer success, client success, and strategic account targets. A later post broadens the search to include IT operations, service delivery, technical account management, and infrastructure support, and describes StuTech as a passion project rather than a final career destination.
The posts present a personal situation in progress, so the stated targets are a snapshot, not a settled position.
For brands planning a campaign
Career services, recruiting tools, and platforms that help job seekers are natural advertisers for this material. For thought leadership, treat the job search as context, not a stable position; ask for current career details before tying a campaign to Selbst’s employer or title.
Long first-person posts under recurring series headers
Selbst publishes long-form LinkedIn text posts under recurring headings such as Monday Morning QB, Thursday Thinking, and Follow-Up Friday.
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The writing is plain and loosely structured, with short lines, occasional lists and emoji, and a repeated three-verb refrain in the retention posts. A typical post opens with a small story—a sales pitch, a recruiter call, an interview question—and lands its argument afterward.
The series headers and recurring refrain give the material a recognizable format sponsors can use, while the story-first structure keeps the commercial point subordinate to what happened.
For brands planning a campaign
An integrated mention mid-post suits this format better than a short product announcement, while a series header offers a repeatable placement rather than a one-off. Sponsors should plan for narrative copy in Selbst’s own voice.
Stuart Selbst writes about one business relationship: StuTech, a business they built and still run alongside their job search.
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They describe StuTech as a passion project covering customer-success and IT troubleshooting work, and say it was never meant to be a final career chapter.
The same post also names ServiceNow, Gainsight, Calix, Motive, 1Password, LastPass and KnowBe4 as companies they applied to or interviewed with while looking for a senior Customer Success, Client Success or Strategic Account role.
Those are job-search targets, not clients or partners.
StuTech
Owned business
Selbst writes that they built StuTech and continue to run it as a passion project, pointing to it when describing their enjoyment of IT troubleshooting and service delivery.
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They say it was never intended to be their final career chapter, so it reads as an active side business rather than a full-time employer. Ask for details on StuTech’s clients and their number.
Original disclosure
And yes, I love what I've built with StuTech.
It's a passion project that lets me solve problems, help people and stay close to technology.
I'm proud of it, but it was never meant to be my final career chapter.
Stuart Selbst writes long, first-person LinkedIn posts about customer relationships and hiring.
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Start with the customer success material, where the recurring three-part line — keep them, feed them, grow them — explains how retention, expansion, and net revenue retention fit together and what a team should do when an account is in trouble.
Recurring headers such as Monday Morning QB, Thursday Thinking, and Follow-Up Friday make it easy to follow a series.
A second thread follows their job search, widening from customer success and strategic accounts into IT operations and service delivery.
Read the retention and outreach posts for their established positions, and the job-search posts for current context.
The three creators listed below cover adjacent parts of hiring, recruiting, and being hired.
Flesher's posts on recruiting and retention follow a structure Selbst also uses: a plain statement of what goes wrong, then a walk-through of the causes and fixes.
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Both write from personal experience rather than survey data, and both treat retention as a problem that starts well before it surfaces.
Flesher stays inside the employer's hiring process — job postings, screening criteria, interview orchestration, patterns in exit-interview data — and addresses the recruiter or HR lead. Selbst writes from the candidate's and customer's side of the same transactions, drawing most examples from customer success rather than recruiting.
Both write about how to hire when obvious candidates are not applying.
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Jain advises searching an old database, looking for adjacent experience, and contacting people directly. Selbst makes the same argument from the other direction: candidates should be closed out properly because people talk about how they were treated.
Jain writes as a vendor building recruiting software, mixing market-level observations about funding and the category's direction with product explanations. Selbst writes as a practitioner about individual conversations — one sales pitch, one recruiter call — and draws conclusions about behaviour rather than tooling.
Daly coaches job seekers on interviews and LinkedIn profiles, the same ground Selbst covers in posts about being ghosted after a strong interview and recruiters who never reply.
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Both draw on their hiring-side experience to explain what employers are looking for and offer concrete, checkable advice rather than encouragement.
Daly prepares individuals to be found and interview well — thinking through the role, framing experience with numbers, and choosing profile keywords — with examples from finance and executive recruiting. Selbst focuses on the conduct of people doing the hiring and the account work that follows a sale.
Treat this as a small, thematically focused LinkedIn placement until the creator supplies engagement and audience-composition data.
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The only measured audience figure in the posts here is 3,924 LinkedIn followers, observed 11 October 2026.
The five posts are dated 1–9 October 2026 and discuss Customer Success, net revenue retention, retention and expansion, IT and service delivery, recruiter follow-through, and LinkedIn sales outreach.
Those topics may suit a SaaS buyer targeting customer success, account management, support, or revenue teams, but they don’t establish that followers hold those jobs, work at target companies, or have purchase influence.
Ask for recent LinkedIn analytics for comparable thought-leadership posts and any audience survey or subscriber data covering job function, seniority, industry, and geography.
If employer or occupation evidence matters, ask specifically for survey results rather than inferring from follower data.
LinkedIn followers
3,924
LinkedIn profile metadata in the research · 2026-10-11
Stuart Selbst's five LinkedIn posts contain no sponsored placements, disclosed brand collaborations, affiliate arrangements, or mention of a media kit, rate card, or partnership contact.
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They describe being pitched a $6,000 marketing offer and evaluating it as a buyer, and describe StuTech as their own technology venture rather than a channel that sells placements.
No official partnership inquiry route appears in the posts, so inquiryUrl is left null and no link is shown.
A SaaS company considering Stuart for thought leadership should ask them directly about sponsorship formats and commercial terms before planning a campaign.
A mid-market customer success platform planning a four-post LinkedIn thought-leadership series on churn, retention, and net revenue retention is a good fit.
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The campaign should ask Selbst to teach a practical retention discipline, not promote a product.
That matches their strongest posts: the Keep Them, Feed Them, Grow Them framework; the argument that NRR is the scoreboard while the real work happens with people; and specific behaviors such as asking what we did wrong and then listening, travelling when a call is not enough, and treating a signed contract or a green health score as the start rather than the finish.
Selbst already publishes long first-person LinkedIn posts under recurring headings, so a sponsored series can fit an existing format rather than require a new one.
The best use is a pilot of two or three posts aimed at customer success and account-management readers.
It is not a mass-reach play: the only measured audience figure is 3,924 LinkedIn followers.
Ask for post analytics and job-title data before committing to broader reach.
Confirm availability because they are in an active job search, and negotiate terms directly; no media kit, rate card, or documented sponsorship format appears in the posts here.
When to choose a specialist
An enterprise cybersecurity vendor seeking a high-reach campaign with guaranteed impressions, a verified security-engineer audience, and deep technical proof is a poor fit based on the posts here.
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Selbst lists cybersecurity among the industries they have worked in and says they pursued roles at KnowBe4, but the available posts do not teach security architecture, threat research, incident response, or product-level technical tradeoffs.
Audience information is also thin: about 3,924 LinkedIn followers, with no engagement metrics, demographics, or confirmation that readers hold security, IT operations, or buying roles.
Before investing, ask for audience and engagement data and for technical examples that demonstrate the depth the campaign requires.
Selbst's post broadening the search into IT operations, service delivery, technical account management, and infrastructure support shows genuine interest and a managed-services background, but not demonstrated subject-matter depth in those posts.
A worked campaign example
Need: A customer success platform wants CS leaders to treat retention as a repeatable operating discipline and see the platform as support for that work.
Angle: A three-post LinkedIn series called The NRR Playbook, written in Selbst's first-person, story-first style.
Post 1, The scoreboard is not the work: open with a specific at-risk account and what listening revealed before any dashboard did; land on the argument that NRR follows trust, value, and outcomes; show the platform as a way to act on what the conversation surfaced.
Post 2, Feed the account between renewals: use the Keep Them, Feed Them, Grow Them structure; give one practical behavior a CS leader can use that week, such as replacing a generic check-in with a question about what the customer is trying to accomplish next; tie that question to the platform's ability to track commitments and outcomes, with the brand supplying exact product detail.
Post 3, What health scores still miss: concede that analytics and CS platforms have improved, then give the human check that catches a silent change; position the product as a signal and record, not a substitute for the conversation.
Each post should end with one portable takeaway and a soft next step, such as a retention-question checklist the brand hosts.
Run it as a pilot: publish two posts, review LinkedIn analytics and replies, then decide whether to add the third.
Confirm Selbst's availability first because their current posts include an active job search, and agree compensation directly because no public partnership rate appears in the posts.
Flesher is a better choice when the campaign addresses employee retention as a hiring challenge—for example, a customer success platform selling to HR leaders, or a campaign about building and keeping a CS team rather than retaining customers.
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The posts offer a structured diagnostic for why organizations struggle to attract and keep people: reviewing exit-interview patterns, checking onboarding and culture fit, fixing job postings and screening criteria, and sorting candidates into yes, maybe, and no buckets. That’s directly useful for a talent-acquisition or HR-operations audience.
Flesher's retention is employee retention, not customer retention.
The posts do not discuss NRR, customer health scores, expansion, or a customer-success philosophy.
A CS platform using Flesher would get hiring and retention operations expertise, but not the customer-retention frameworks Selbst provides.
The audience would also shift from CS leaders to HR and recruiting leaders.
Jain is a better choice for campaigns about recruiting technology, niche hiring, or AI in the hiring stack—for example, a recruiting-tech brand, or a CS platform discussing how to hire hard-to-find CS talent.
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The posts offer concrete sourcing tactics for niche roles: re-searching the old candidate database, looking for adjacent experience instead of exact keywords, mapping the companies where a skill exists, and reaching out to passive candidates directly. They also track the shift toward AI recruiting agents, naming specific raises and product evolution.
Jain focuses on recruiting workflows, not customer success, and much of their material promotes Fabric, their company. A CS platform would get recruiting-industry commentary and product-adjacent messaging, while the audience would be talent-acquisition and staffing readers rather than CS leaders.
Daly is a better choice when the campaign targets job seekers, finance professionals, or people preparing for interviews—for example, a career-services brand, or a CS platform running a candidate-focused series.
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The posts offer practical interview and profile advice: understanding the role beyond the job description, preparing examples you can discuss naturally, making your own contribution clear, and using questions to learn what the role really needs. A separate post walks through LinkedIn headline, about section, experience, and skills changes that help recruiters find you.
Daly's content is candidate-facing career coaching, not B2B customer success.
The posts do not discuss churn, retention, NRR, or customer relationships.
A CS platform would get interview and job-search guidance for professionals, but not the retention teaching that fits a customer-success audience.
The audience would be finance and executive candidates, not CS leaders.
Stuart Selbst's five LinkedIn posts cover customer success and retention, net revenue retention, sales outreach, recruiting and candidate experience, and the current job search.
The posts do not state publication dates in their text; one is written for October 1.
Selbst's LinkedIn profile showed 3,924 followers on 11 October 2026.
No video, article, book, longer-form work, engagement metrics, audience demographics, media kit, rate card, or documented sponsorship format is available.
Similar-creator comparisons use posts from Vicki Flesher, Mehul Jain, and Michaela Daly.
The profile states only what the posts show and leaves reach, buyer seniority, and paid-partnership terms as gaps.
